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The Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson ... Fireside Edition
The Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson Fireside Edition Author:Ralph Waldo Emerson Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ART. All departments of life at the present day,, — Trade, Politics, Letters, Science, or Religion,— seem to feel, and to labor to express, the identity of th... more »eir law. They are rays of one sun; they translate each into a new language the sense of the other. They are sublime when seen as emanations tf a Necessity contradistinguished from the vulgar Fate by being instant and alive, and dissolving man as well as his works in its flowing beneficence. This influence is conspicuously visible in the principles and history of Art. On one side in primary communication with absolute truth through thought and instinct, the human mind on the other side tends, by an equal necessity, to the publication and embodiment of its thought, modified and dwarfed by the impurity and untruth which in all our experience injure the individuality through which it passes. The child not only suffers, but cries; not only hungers, but eats. The man not only thinks, but speaks and acts. Every thought that arises in the mind, in its rising aims to pass out of the mind into act;just as every plant, in the moment of germination, struggles up to light. Thought is the seed of action ; but action is as much its second form as thought is its first. It rises in thought, to the end that it may be uttered and acted. The more profound the thought, the more burdensome. Always in proportion to the depth of its sense does it knock importunately at the gates of the soul, to be spoken, to be done. What is in, will out. It struggles to the birth. Speech is a great pleasure, and action a great pleasure; they cannot be foreborne. The utterance of thought and emotion in speech and action may be conscious or unconscious. The sucking child is an unconscious actor. The man in an ecstasy of fear or anger is an unconscious actor....« less