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WorkRalph Waldo Emerson

Essays: First Series

Twelve essays, "Self-Reliance" among them, that make the case for trusting one's own mind over church, party and custom.

by Ralph Waldo Emerson305 passages held

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First published
(aged 38)
Original language
English

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Overview

Friedrich Nietzsche, who read no English, met Emerson in German: Versuche, Gustava Fabricius's translation of 1858, published in Hanover, which joined this book to the Second Series. Scholars trace part of his thinking about the great individual to that reading. The book had appeared in Boston seventeen years earlier, published by James Munroe in 1841 under the plain title Essays. Emerson wrote most of his essays as lectures first, and here he rebuilt that material into prose that moves sentence by sentence rather than step by step. The most famous of them, "Self-Reliance," states the book's argument most plainly: what a person sees to be true in private, when they trust it fully, turns out to be true for everyone, and the pressure to conform — to a church, a party, a neighbor's opinion, even to one's own earlier statements — is what keeps most people from knowing what they know. The other essays press the same claim from other sides. "History" holds that all of the past can be read out of a single mind. "Compensation" holds that no act escapes its return. "The Over-Soul" names the one mind that every person shares, which is why private conviction can carry public authority, and "Circles" holds that every truth is outgrown by a wider one, including the truths of this book. The opponent is not a single writer but every institution that asks to be believed on its own word. Thomas Carlyle, the Scottish historian and Emerson's friend, arranged a London edition the same year, with a preface of his own: 750 copies, published by Fraser on half profits.

Key concepts

What is the Over-Soul?

The Over-Soul is Emerson's name for the one mind that every person's particular being is contained in and shares. It is not a separate god above people but the common heart beneath them. It explains why a thought found in private solitude can speak for everyone, and why great writers seem to tell us what we already half knew: we and they draw on the same source.

What does Emerson mean by compensation?

Compensation is the law that every act carries its own return, here and now. Emerson takes it from the polarity he sees everywhere in nature, action and reaction, light and dark. In human life it means no gain comes without a cost and no cheating pays: the thief steals from himself, because the real price of work is the skill and character it builds. In his Greek proverb, the dice of God are always loaded.

What does Emerson call genius in Self-Reliance?

Genius, in this book, is believing that what is true for you in your private heart is true for everyone. It is not a rare talent but an act of trust open to anyone. Speak your latent conviction, Emerson writes, and it shall be the universal sense, because the inmost in due time becomes the outmost.

Why does Emerson call prudence the virtue of the senses?

Because it deals with the world as it appears: health, money, weather, timing. Emerson does not despise it. He separates a base prudence, devoted to matter as if people had only palates, from a true one that obeys the physical laws of things in the service of something higher. Heroism, in the next essay, laughs at the false kind that dotes on health and wealth.

What are Emerson's spiritual laws?

They are the soul's own laws, which work without our anxious management. Emerson draws the lesson from nature, which always works by short ways: when the fruit is ripe, it falls. So each person has a vocation, a direction in which their talent calls them, and no one can learn what they are not prepared to learn. Life, he concludes, could be much easier and simpler than people make it.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Trusting one's own mind

Why should a private conviction outweigh a church, a party or a neighbour's opinion? Emerson's answer is that the inmost thought, trusted fully, turns out to be everyone's.

Self-reliance, in these essays, is not stubbornness. Emerson's ground for it is the Over-Soul, the one mind every person shares, so that what is true in a private heart is true for all, and speaking it is what he calls genius. Conformity is the enemy, and so is loyalty to one's own past words: a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. The same confidence shapes his reading of the past, which holds that there is no history, only biography, since every age can be read out of one mind.

  • self-reliance
  • authenticity
  • individualism
  • individuality
  • social conformity
  • intuition
  • soul
  • self-knowledge
  • truth
  • knowledge
  • history
  • religion
  • genius
  • transcendence

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What every act brings back

Is justice deferred to another life, or already at work in this one? Emerson finds a law of return in every act and a wider circle around every settled truth.

A sermon promising that the wicked would be paid back after death provoked Emerson's essay on compensation. Against it he holds that every act rewards or punishes itself here, as surely as action meets reaction in nature: the thief steals from himself. The same law runs through the other essays. Spiritual laws work without our meddling, prudence is the virtue of the senses, heroism acts without reasoning, and in the essay on circles no truth is final, because every end is a beginning and the thinker who sees further puts all things at risk.

  • compensation
  • justice
  • virtue
  • prudence
  • heroism
  • courage
  • change
  • character
  • human nature
  • experience
  • action

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Love and friendship

What do people actually want from those they love most? Emerson asks for more than warmth: a sincerity that most affection cannot bear.

A friend, for Emerson, is someone in whose presence a person may be sincere and think aloud, and friendship rests on two things seldom given together, truth and tenderness. He asks that a friend be kept at the distance of a beautiful enemy, revered and never reduced to a convenience. The essay on love begins in the glances of a youth and a maiden, but holds that even love, which deifies persons, must grow more impersonal every day, until it is a love of the qualities a person only stood for.

  • friendship
  • love
  • romantic love
  • communication
  • beauty
  • perception

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Within this work

passages held
305
distinct concepts
491
by passages held, corpus-wide
#243

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “aesthetics” and “nature”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 18 pairings. 91 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
aestheticsnature6
authenticityfriendship3
authenticityself-reliance3
authenticityvirtue3
friendshipvirtue3
naturereligion3
aestheticscreativity2
authenticitycreativity2
creativitynature2
creativityself-reliance2
friendshipself-reliance2
self-reliancevirtue2
aestheticsreligion1
authenticitynature1
authenticityreligion1
creativityfriendship1
natureself-reliance1
religionself-reliance1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1836 Nature

    Emerson's first book, and the seed of nearly everything he wrote afterward. He signed his name to it only when it was reprinted in 1849, in a volume alongside his addresses and lectures.

     EN
  2. 1841 Essays: First Series you are here EN
  3. 1844 Essays: Second Series

    Darker than its predecessor of 1841, and the book of "Experience" and "The Poet". It closes what is usually counted Emerson's most fertile decade, which had begun with Nature.

     EN
  4. 1849 Addresses and Lectures

    Emerson's public speeches of 1837 to 1844, given to college societies and Boston lecture audiences. The two Harvard addresses here are the best-known occasions of his early career.

     EN
  5. 1850 Representative Men

    Emerson's one book built of portraits of other minds, published after his lecture tour of England in 1847–48 — the journey that later produced English Traits (1856).

     EN
  6. 1860 The Conduct of Life

    One of Emerson's most successful books in its day, and the last collection he published for ten years.

     EN
  7. 1870 Society and Solitude

    Ten years after The Conduct of Life, and continuing its turn toward practical life. It appeared in the same year that Harvard asked Emerson to lecture on philosophy.

     EN
  8. 1875 Letters and Social Aims

    Begun to forestall an unauthorized London edition, and the last essay collection published in Emerson's lifetime. Its pieces range from essays of the early 1840s to lectures of his last working years.

     EN
  9. 1883 Lectures and Biographical Sketches

    Added to Emerson's collected works in the years just after his death; a later volume, Natural History of Intellect, followed in 1893.

     EN
  10. 1893 Natural History of Intellect, and Other Papers

    The closest Emerson came to a treatise on the mind, published from his papers after his death and bound with essays from the start of his career.

     EN
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