Resumo de Self-reliance - Ralph Waldo Emerson

.Acceptthe place the divine providence has found for you, the society of yourcontemporaries, the connection of events. Society is a joint-stock company, inwhich the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to eachshareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. Absolve you toyourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world. The doctrine of hatredmust be preached as the counteraction of the doctrine of love when that pulesand whines. Virtuesare, in the popular estimate, rather the exception than the rule. There is theman and his virtues. Yet is the discontent of the multitude moreformidable than that of the senate and the college. All the sallies of his willare rounded in by the law of his being, as the inequalities of Andes and Himmalehare insignificant in the curve of the sphere. The voyage of the best ship is azigzag line of a hundred tacks. Greatness appeals to the future. The force ofcharacter is cumulative. What makes the majesty of the heroes of the senate andthe field, which so fills the imagination? The consciousness of a train ofgreat days and victories behind. An institution is the lengthened shadow of oneman; as, Monachism, of the Hermit Antony; the Reformation, of Luther;Quakerism, of Fox; Methodism, of Wesley; Abolition, of Clarkson. Here is thefountain of action and of thought. Therelations of the soul to the divine spirit are so pure, that it is profane toseek to interpose helps. Is the acorn better than the oak which is its fulnessand completion? Is the parent better than the child into whom he has cast hisripened being? Whence, then, this worship of the past? The centuries are conspiratorsagainst the sanity and authority of the soul. He is ashamed before the blade ofgrass or the blowing rose. When a man lives with God, his voice shall be assweet as the murmur of the brook and the rustle of the corn. Power ceases inthe instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to anew state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim. Self-existenceis the attribute of the Supreme Cause, and it constitutes the measure of goodby the degree in which it enters into all lower forms. The genesis andmaturation of a planet, its poise and orbit, the bended tree recovering itselffrom the strong wind, the vital resources of every animal and vegetable, aredemonstrations of the self-sufficing, and therefore self-relying soul. Let usstun and astonish the intruding rabble of men and books and institutions, by asimple declaration of the divine fact. But the law of consciousness abides. Prayeris the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view. It isthe soliloquy of a beholding and jubilant soul. Discontent is the want ofself-reliance: it is infirmity of will. In proportion to the depth of thethought, and so to the number of the objects it touches and brings within reachof the pupil, is his complacency. But in all unbalanced minds, theclassification is idolized, passes for the end, and not for a speedilyexhaustible means, so that the walls of the system blend to their eye in theremote horizon with the walls of the universe; the luminaries of heaven seem tothem hung on the arch their master built. I seek the Vatican, and the palaces. Theharm of the improved machinery may compensate its good. The same particle doesnot rise from the valley to the ridge. And sothe reliance on Property, including the reliance on governments which protectit, is the want of self-reliance.

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