Self-Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson
On the Duty of Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau
On Woman in the Nineteenth Century by Margaret Fuller
SELF-RELIANCE
by Ralph Waldo Emerson
. . . Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that
iron string. Accept the place the divine
providence has found for you, the society of your
contemporaries, the connection of events. Great
men have always done so, and confided
themselves childlike to the genius of their age,
betraying their perception that the absolutely
trustworthy was seated at their heart, working
through their hands, predominating in all their
being. And we are now men, and must accept in
the highest mind the same transcendent
destiny; and not minors and invalids in a
protected corner, not cowards fleeing before a
revolution, but guides, redeemers, and
benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort, and
advancing on Chaos and the Dark.
What pretty oracles nature yields us on this
text, in the face and behavior of children, babes,
and even brutes! That divided and rebel mind,
that distrust of a sentiment because our
arithmetic has computed the strength and
means opposed to our purpose, these have not.
Their mind being whole, their eye is as yet
unconquered, and when we look in their faces
we are disconcerted. Infancy conforms to
nobody: all conform to it, so that one babe
commonly makes four or five out of the adults
who prattle and play to it. So God has armed
youth and puberty and manhood no less with its
own piquancy and charm, and made it enviable
and gracious and its claims not to be put by, if it
will stand by itself. Do not think the youth has
no force, because he cannot speak to you and
me. Hark! in the next room his voice is
sufficiently clear and emphatic. It seems he
knows how to speak to his contemporaries.
Bashful or bold, then, he will know how to make
us seniors very unnecessary . . .
These are the voices which we hear in solitude,
but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter
into the world. Society everywhere is in
conspiracy against the manhood of every one of
its members. Society is a joint-stock company,
in which the members agree, for the better
securing of his bread to each shareholder, to
surrender the liberty and culture of the eater.
The virtue in most request is conformity. Selfreliance
is its aversion. It loves not realities and
creators, but names and customs.
Whoso would be a man must be a
nonconformist. He who would gather immortal
palms must not be hindered by the name of
goodness, but must explore if it be goodness.
Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of
your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you
shall have the suffrage of the world. I remember
an answer which when quite young I was
prompted to make to a valued adviser, who was
wont to importune me with the dear old
doctrines of the church. On my saying, What
have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if
I live wholly from within? My friend suggested:
“But these impulses may be from below, not
from above.” I replied: “They do not seem to me
to be such; but if I am the Devil’s child, I will
live then from the Devil.” No law can be sacred
to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are
but names very readily transferable to that or
this; the only right is what is after my
constitution, the only wrong what is against it.
A man is to carry himself in the presence of all
opposition, as if everything were titular and
ephemeral but he. I am ashamed to think how
easily we capitulate to badges and names, to
large societies and dead institutions. Every
decent and well-spoken individual affects and
sways me more than is right. I ought to go
upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in
all ways. If malice and vanity wear the coat of
philanthropy, shall that pass? If an angry bigot
assumes this bountiful cause of Abolition, and
comes to me with his last news from Barbados,
why should I not say to him: “Go love thy infant;
love thy wood-chopper: be good-natured and
modest: have that grace; and never varnish
your hard, uncharitable ambition with this
incredible tenderness for black folk a thousand
miles off. Thy love afar is spite at home.” Rough
and graceless would be such greeting, but truth
is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your
goodness must have some edge to it,—else it is
none. The doctrine of hatred must be preached
as the counteraction of the doctrine of love
when that pulls and whines. I shun father and
mother and wife and brother, when my genius
calls me . . .
What I must do is all that concerns me, not
what the people think. This rule, equally
arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may
serve for the whole distinction between
greatness and meanness. It is the harder,
because you will always find those who think
they know what is your duty better than you
know it. It is easy in the world to live after the
world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after
our own; but the great man is he who in the
midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness
the independence of solitude . . .
For nonconformity the world whips you with its
displeasure. And therefore a man must know
how to estimate a sour face. The bystanders
look askance on him in the public street or in
the friend’s parlor. If this aversation had its
origin in contempt and resistance like his own,
he might well go home with a sad countenance;
but the sour faces of the multitude, like their
sweet faces, have no deep cause, but are put on
and off as the wind blows and a newspaper
directs. Yet is the discontent of the multitude
more formidable than that of the senate and the
college. It is easy enough for a firm man who
knows the world to brook the rage of the
cultivated classes. Their rage is decorous and
prudent, for they are timid as being very
vulnerable themselves. But when to their
feminine rage the indignation of the people is
added, when the ignorant and the poor are
aroused, when the unintelligent brute force
that lies at the bottom of society is made to
growl and mow, it needs the habit of
magnanimity and religion to treat it godlike as
a trifle of no concernment.
The other terror that scares us from self-trust is
our consistency; a reverence for our past act or
word, because the eyes of others have no other
data for computing our orbit than our past acts,
and we are loath to disappoint them.
But why should you keep your head over your
shoulder? Why drag about this corpse of your
memory, lest you contradict somewhat you have
stated in this or that public place? Suppose you
should contradict yourself; what then? It seems
to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on your
memory alone, scarcely even in acts of pure
memory, but to bring the past for judgment into
the thousand-eyed present, and live ever in a
new day . . .
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little
minds, adored by little statesmen and
philosophers and divines. With consistency a
great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as
well concern himself with the shadow on the
wall. Speak what you think now in hard words,
and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in
hard words again, though it contradict
everything you said to-day.—“Ah, so you shall
be sure to be misunderstood.”—Is it so bad,
then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was
misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and
Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and
Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that
ever took flesh. To be great is to be
misunderstood.
1. Read the following sentence from the passage and select, from below, the word closest in
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1. Read the following sentence from the passage and select, from below, the word closest in
meaning to the word in bold-faced type.
And we are now men, and must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny . . .
a. supernatural
b. routine
c. vigorous
d. extravagant
2. Read the following sentence and select, from the choices below, the word closest in meaning
to the word in bold-faced type.
So God has armed youth and puberty and manhood no less with its own piquancy and
charm . . .
a. selfishness
b. adoration
c. stubbornness
d. zest
3. Interpret the following quote:
Infancy conforms to nobody: all conform to it, so that one babe commonly makes four or five
out of the adults who prattle and play to it.
What does Emerson mean? Do you agree?
4. Discuss the differences between a conformist and a nonconformist. Which are you? Why?
5. What did Emerson mean when he said, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,
adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines”?
6. “To be great is to be misunderstood.” To whom was Emerson specifically referring when he
said this? What did his statement suggest?
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ON THE DUTY OF
CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE
by Henry David Thoreau
Original title, 1849:
“Resistance to Civil Government”
I heartily accept the motto, “That government is
best which governs least”; and I should like to
see it acted up to more rapidly and
systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts
to this, which also I believe— “That government
is best which governs not at all”; and when men
are prepared for it, that will be the kind of
government which they will have. Government
is at best but an expedient; but most
governments are usually, and all governments
are sometimes, inexpedient. The objections
which have been brought against a standing
army, and they are many and weighty, and
deserve to prevail, may also at last be brought
against a standing government. The standing
army is only an arm of the standing
government. The government itself, which is
only the mode which the people have chosen to
execute their will, is equally liable to be abused
and perverted before the people can act through
it. Witness the present Mexican war, the work
of comparatively a few individuals using the
standing government as their tool; for in the
outset, the people would not have consented to
this measure.
This American government—what is it but a
tradition, though a recent one, endeavoring to
transmit itself unimpaired to posterity, but
each instant losing some of its integrity? It has
not the vitality and force of a single living man;
for a single man can bend it to his will. It is a
sort of wooden gun to the people themselves.
But it is not the less necessary for this; for the
people must have some complicated machinery
or other, and hear its din, to satisfy that idea of
government which they have. Governments
show thus how successfully men can be imposed
upon, even impose on themselves, for their own
advantage. It is excellent, we must all allow.
Yet this government never of itself furthered
any enterprise, but by the alacrity with which it
got out of its way. It does not keep the country
free. It does not settle the West. It does not
educate. The character inherent in the
American people has done all that has been
accomplished; and it would have done
somewhat more, if the government had not
sometimes got in its way. For government is an
expedient, by which men would fain succeed in
letting one another alone; and, as has been said,
when it is most expedient, the governed are
most let alone by it. Trade and commerce, if
they were not made of india-rubber, would
never manage to bounce over obstacles which
legislators are continually putting in their way;
and if one were to judge these men wholly by
the effects of their actions and not partly by
their intentions, they would deserve to be
classed and punished with those mischievious
persons who put obstructions on the railroads.
But, to speak practically and as a citizen, unlike
those who call themselves no-government men,
I ask for, not at once no government, but at once
a better government. Let every man make
known what kind of government would
command his respect, and that will be one step
toward obtaining it.
After all, the practical reason why, when the
power is once in the hands of the people, a
majority are permitted, and for a long period
continue, to rule is not because they are most
likely to be in the right, nor because this seems
fairest to the minority, but because they are
physically the strongest. But a government in
which the majority rule in all cases can not be
based on justice, even as far as men understand
it. Can there not be a government in which the
majorities do not virtually decide right and
wrong, but conscience?—in which majorities
decide only those to which the rule of
expediency is applicable? Must the citizen ever
for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his
conscience to the legislator? Why has every
man a conscience then? I think that we should
be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not
desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so
much as for the right. The only obligation
which I have a right to assume is to do at any
time what I think right. It is truly enough said
that a corporation has no conscience; but a
corporation of conscientious men is a
© 2006 Queue, Inc. All rights reserved. Do not duplicate. 98
corporation with a conscience. Law never made
men a whit more just; and, by means of their
respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily
made the agents on injustice. A common and
natural result of an undue respect for the law
is, that you may see a file of soldiers, colonel,
captain, corporal, privates, powder-monkeys,
and all, marching in admirable order over hill
and dale to the wars, against their wills, ay,
against their common sense and consciences,
which makes it very steep marching indeed,
and produces a palpitation of the heart. They
have no doubt that it is a damnable business in
which they are concerned; they are all
peaceably inclined. Now, what are they? Men
at all? or small movable forts and magazines,
at the service of some unscrupulous man in
power? Visit the Navy Yard, and behold a
marine, such a man as an American
government can make, or such as it can make a
man with its black arts—a mere shadow and
reminiscence of humanity, a man laid out alive
and standing, and already, as one may say,
buried under arms with funeral
accompaniment, though it may be,
“Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note,
As his corse to the rampart we hurried;
Not a soldier discharged his farewell shot
O’er the grave where our hero was buried.”
The mass of men serve the state thus, not as
men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies.
They are the standing army, and the militia,
jailers, constables, posse comitatus, etc. In most
cases there is no free exercise whatever of the
judgment or of the moral sense; but they put
themselves on a level with wood and earth and
stones; and wooden men can perhaps be
manufactured that will serve the purpose as
well. Such command no more respect than men
of straw or a lump of dirt. They have the same
sort of worth only as horses and dogs. Yet such
as these even are commonly esteemed good
citizens. Others—as most legislators,
politicians, lawyers, ministers, and officeholders—
serve the state chiefly with their
heads; and, as they rarely make any moral
distinctions, they are as likely to serve the
devil, without intending it, as God. A very few—
as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the
great sense, and men—serve the state with
their consciences also, and so necessarily resist
it for the most part; and they are commonly
treated as enemies by it. A wise man will only
be useful as a man, and will not submit to be
“clay,” and “stop a hole to keep the wind away,”
but leave that office to his dust at least:
“I am too high born to be propertied, To be a
second at control, Or useful serving-man and
instrument To any sovereign state throughout
the world.”
He who gives himself entirely to his fellow men
appears to them useless and selfish; but he who
gives himself partially to them in pronounced a
benefactor and philanthropist.
How does it become a man to behave toward the
American government today? I answer, that he
cannot without disgrace be associated with it. I
cannot for an instant recognize that political
organization as my government which is the
slave’s government also.
All men recognize the right of revolution; that is,
the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist,
the government, when its tyranny or its
inefficiency are great and unendurable. But
almost all say that such is not the case now. But
such was the case, they think, in the Revolution
of ‘75. If one were to tell me that this was a bad
government because it taxed certain foreign
commodities brought to its ports, it is most
probable that I should not make an ado about it,
for I can do without them. All machines have
their friction; and possibly this does enough
good to counter-balance the evil. At any rate, it
is a great evil to make a stir about it. But when
the friction comes to have its machine, and
oppression and robbery are organized, I say, let
us not have such a machine any longer. In other
words, when a sixth of the population of a nation
which has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty
are slaves, and a whole country is unjustly
overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and
subjected to military law, I think that it is not
too soon for honest men to rebel and
revolutionize. What makes this duty the more
urgent is that fact that the country so overrun is
not our own, but ours is the invading army.
1. Fill in the blank:
Government is at best but an ____________________; but most governments are usually, and
all governments are sometimes, inexpedient.
2. Fill in the blank:
According to Thoreau, the ____________________ is only the mode that the people have chosen
to execute their will.
3. Thoreau believed that the reason why a certain majority was permitted to rule was
essentially because they
a. were the most capable.
b. had been chosen by their constituents.
c. were physically the strongest.
d. refused to step down.
4. Thoreau suggested that a common result of an undue respect for the law was often
manifested as
a. war.
b. fanaticism.
c. blind obsession with legalities.
d. revelation.
5. How does Thoreau feel about the government? For what failings does he hold it accountable?
6. Reread the closing paragraph of the passage and summarize Thoreau’s thoughts on the U.S.
government. Focus on his feelings about attitudes surrounding the American Revolution in
contrast to the attitudes among which he was living. What was his overall message?
© 2006 Queue, Inc. All rights reserved. Do not duplicate.
ON WOMAN IN THE
NINETEENTH CENTURY
by Margaret Fuller
. . . Where this thought of equality begins to
diffuse itself, it is shown in four ways.
First;—The household partnership. In our
country, the woman looks for a “smart but kind”
husband; the man for a “capable, sweettempered”
wife. The man furnishes the house;
the woman regulates it. Their relation is one of
mutual esteem, mutual dependence. Their talk
is of business; their affection shows itself by
practical kindness. each for the other’s aid; they
are grateful and content. The wife praises her
husband as a “good provider;” the husband, in
return, compliments her as a “capital
housekeeper.” This relation is good so far as it
goes.
Next comes a closer tie, which takes the form
either of mutual idolatry or of intellectual
companionship. The first, we suppose, is to no
one a pleasing subject of contemplation. The
parties weaken and narrow one another; they
lock the gate against all the glories of the
universe, that they may live in a cell together.
To themselves they seem the only wise; to all
others, steeped in infatuation; the gods smile as
they look forward to the crisis of cure; to men,
the woman seems an unlovely syren; to women,
the man an effeminate boy.
The other form, of intellectual companionship,
has become more and more frequent. Men
engaged in public life, literary men, and
artists, have often found in their wives
companions and confidants in thought no less
than in feeling. And, as the intellectual
development of Woman has spread wider and
risen higher, they have, not unfrequently,
shared the same employment . . .
This is one of the best instances of a marriage of
friendship. It was only friendship, whose basis
was esteem; probably neither party knew love,
except by name . . .
A little while since I was at one of the most
fashionable places of public resort. I saw there
many women, dressed without regard to the
season or the demands of the place, in apery, or,
as it looked, in mockery, of European fashions. I
saw their eyes restlessly courting attention. I
saw the way in which it was paid; the style of
devotion, almost an open sneer, which it pleased
those ladies to receive from men whose
expression marked their own low position in the
moral and intellectual world. Those women
went to their pillows with their heads full of
folly, their hearts of jealousy, or gratified vanity;
those men, with the low opinion they already
entertained of Woman confirmed. These were
American ladies; that is, they were of that class
who have wealth and leisure to make full use of
the day, and confer benefits on others. They
were of that class whom the possession of
external advantages makes of pernicious
example to many, if these advantages be
misused.
Soon after, I met a circle of women, stamped by
society as among the most degraded of their
sex. “How,” it was asked of them, “did you come
here?” for by the society that I saw in the former
place they were shut up in a prison. The causes
were not difficult to trace: love of dress, love of
flattery, love of excitement. They had not
dresses like the other ladies, so they stole them;
they could not pay for flattery by distinctions,
and the dower of a worldly marriage, so they
paid by the profanation of their persons. In
excitement, more and more madly sought from
day to day, they drowned the voice of
conscience.
Now I ask you, my sisters, if the women at the
fashionable house be not answerable for those
women being in the prison?
As to position in the world of souls, we may
suppose the women of the prison stood fairest,
both because they had misused less light, and
because loneliness and sorrow had brought
some of them to feel the need of better life,
nearer truth and good. This was no merit in
them, being an effect of circumstance, but it
was hopeful. But you, my friends (and some of
you I have already met), consecrate yourselves
without waiting for reproof, in free love and
unbroken energy, to win and to diffuse a better
life. Offer beauty, talents, riches, on the altar;
thus shall ye keep spotless your own hearts,
and be visibly or invisibly the angels to others.
I would urge upon those women who have not
yet considered this subject, to do so. Do not
forget the unfortunates who dare not cross your
guarded way. If it do not suit you to act with
those who have organized measures of reform,
then hold not yourself excused from acting in
private. Seek out these degraded women, give
them tender sympathy, counsel, employment.
Take the place of mothers, such as might have
saved them originally.
If you can do little for those already under the
ban of the world,—and the best-considered
efforts have often failed, from a want of
strength in those unhappy ones to bear up
against the sting of shame and the prejudices of
the world, which makes them seek oblivion
again in their old excitements,—you will at
least leave a sense of love and justice in their
hearts, that will prevent their becoming utterly
embittered and corrupt. And you may learn the
means of prevention for those yet uninjured.
These will be found in a diffusion of mental
culture, simple tastes, best taught by your
example, a genuine self-respect, and, above all,
what the influence of Man tends to hide from
Woman, the love and fear of a divine, in
preference to a human tribunal.
But suppose you save many who would have
lost their bodily innocence (for as to mental, the
loss of that is incalculably more general),
through mere vanity and folly; there still
remain many, the prey and spoil of the brute
passions of Man; for the stories frequent in our
newspapers outshame antiquity, and vie with
the horrors of war.
As to this, it must be considered that, as the
vanity and proneness to seduction of the
imprisoned women represented a general
degradation in their sex; so do these acts a still
more general and worse in the male. Where so
many are weak, it is natural there should be
many lost; where legislators admit that ten
thousand prostitutes are a fair proportion to
one city, and husbands tell their wives that it is
folly to expect chastity from men, it is inevitable
that there should be many monsters of vice . . .
1. Fill in the blank:
The “household partnership” is described as one of mutual esteem and mutual
____________________.
2. Read the following sentence and select, from the choice below, the word closet in meaning to
the word in bold-faced type.
They were of that class whom the possession of external advantages makes of pernicious
example to many, if these advantages be misused.
a. exemplary
b. benign
c. deadly
d. ignorant
3. According to Margaret Fuller, what is the concept of mutual idolatry? Does she believe it to
be a positive or negative situation?
4. What did Margaret Fuller mean when she said that a certain group of women “drowned the
voice of conscience”?e.
5. What is Margaret Fuller’s overall message to women? Do you agree with her stance? Why or
why not?
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