The Conduct of Life

Fate is everything that limits a person from outside their choosing: climate, body, temperament, ancestry, the pressure of nature on whatever stands in its way. Emerson calls it circumstance, or negative power, and says we once thought positive power was everything and now learn that circumstance is half. But he also defines it as unpenetrated causes, which means it shrinks wherever understanding reaches.

It is Emerson's name for living with two natures at once, a private one that thinks and chooses and a public one bound by body, history and society. Neither can be dropped. He pictures it as a circus rider leaping from horse to horse, and treats the skill of moving between them, rather than escaping either, as the practical solution to the problem of fate.

Because success in one direction narrows a person. A man is the prisoner of his power, Emerson writes: a good memory makes him an almanac, a talent for debate a disputant. Culture, in this book, means the widening that sets a strong talent among other powers and interests, so that it serves the whole person instead of running them in a circle around one gift.

He means that nothing is beautiful by ornament alone. The line of beauty is the result of perfect economy, he writes: the bee's cell is built at the angle that gives the most strength with the least wax, and a bird's bone the most lift with the least weight. Beauty is the form the intellect prefers for studying the world, and what it shows is fitness, a thing exactly shaped to what it must do.

A church founded on moral science rather than on miracle or creed. Emerson expects it to begin cold and naked, like a babe in a manger again, the algebra and mathematics of ethical law. The old faiths, he thinks, have worn out among the educated, but the moral sentiment they carried has not, and worship survives as reverence for the laws a person cannot bribe or bend.