Emerson, Ralph Waldo.  Representative Men.  Boston:  Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1850/1885. 

Uses of Great Men

There is a power in love to divine another’s destiny better than that other can, and, by heroic encouragements, hold him to his task.  (20)

Foremost among these activities are the summersaults, spells and resurrections wrought by the imagination.  When this wakes, a man seems to multiply ten times or a thousand times his force.  It opens the delicious sense of indeterminate size and inspires an audacious mental habit.  We are as elastic as the gas of gunpowder, and a sentence in a book, or a word dropped in conversation, sets free our fancy, and instantly our heads are bathed with galaxies, and our feet tread the floor of the Pit.  And this benefit is real because we are entitled to these enlargements, and once having passed the bounds shall never again be quite the miserable pedants we were. (22)

But true genius seeks to defend us from itself.  True genius will not impoverish, but will liberate, and add new senses.  If a wise man should appear in our village he would create, in those who conversed with him, a new consciousness of wealth, by opening their eyes to unobserved advantages; he would establish a sense of immovable equality, calm us with assurances that we could not be cheated; as every one would discern the checks and guaranties of condition.  The rich would see their mistakes and poverty, the poor their escapes and their resources.  (23)

We seem to want but one, but we want one.  We love to associate with heroic persons, since our receptivity is unlimited; and, with the great, our thoughts and manners easily become great.  We are all wise in capacity, though so few in energy.  There needs but one wise man in a company and all are wise, so rapid is the contagion.  (29)

We cloy of the honey of each peculiar greatness.  (31)

Plato; or, the Philosopher (39

In short, a balanced soul was born, perceptive of two elements.(54)

...a man who could see two sides of a thing was born.  (55)

The balanced soul came.  (55) 

He cannot forgive himself a partiality, but is resolved that the two poles of thought shall appear in his statement.  His argument and his sentence are self-poised and spherical.  The poles appear; yes; and become two hands, to grasp and appropriate their own.  (55-56)

[Analysis of Plato]

The sciences, even the best, - mathematics and astronomy, - are like sportsmen, who seize whatever prey offers, even without being able to make any use of it.  Dialectic must teach the use of them.  (62-63)

The misery of man is to be baulked of the sight of essence and to be stuffed with conjectures; but the supreme good is reality; the supreme beauty is reality; and all virtue and all felicity depend on this science of the real: for courage is nothing else than knowledge; the fairest fortune that can befall man is to be guided by his dæmon to that which is truly his own.  (63)

It is almost the sole deduction from the merit of Plato that his writings have not, - what is no doubt incident to this regnancy of intellect in his work, - the vital authority which the screams of prophets and the sermons of unlettered Arabs and Jews possess.  There is an interval; and to cohesion, contact is necessary. (75)

Swedenborg; or, the Mystic
 

Among eminent persons, those who are most dear to men are not of the class which the economist calls producers: they have nothing in their hands; they have not cultivated corn, nor made bread; they have not led out a colony, nor invented a loom.  A higher class, in the estimation and love of this city-building market-going race of mankind, are the poets, who, from the intellectual kingdom, feed the thought and imagination with ideas and pictures which raise men out of the world of corn and money, and console them for the short-comings of the day and the meanness of labor and traffic.  (91)

The atmosphere of moral sentiment is a region of grandeur which reduces all material magnificence to toys, yet open to every wretch that has reason the doors of the universe.  (92)

This path is difficult, secret and beset with terror.  The ancients called it ecstasy or absence, - a getting out of their bodies to think.  All religious history contains traces of the trance of saints, - a beatitude, but without any sign of joy; earnest, solitary, even sad; "the flight," Plotinus called it, "of the alone to the alone;" [ancient Greek omitted] the closing of the eyes, - whence our word, Mystic.  The trances of Socrates, Plotinus, Porphyry, Behmen, Bunyan, Fox, Pascal, Guyon, Swedenborg, will readily come to mind.  (95)

But what as readily comes to mind is the accompaniment of disease.  This beatitude comes in terror, and with shocks to the mind of the receiver.

    "It o'erinforms the tenement of clay,"

and drives the man mad; or gives a certain violent bias which taints his judgment.  In the chief examples of religious illumination somewhat morbid has mingled, in spite of the unquestionable increase of mental power.  Must the highest good drag after it a quality which neutralizes and discredits it? (95)

Shall we say, that the economical mother disburses so much earth and so much fire, by weight and meter, to make a man, and will not add a penny-weight though a nation is perishing for a leader?  (95)