Circles: The Endless Expansion of Human Possibility — Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Emerson continues Circles where Prudence left off: Greek sculpture melts like ice in June, Greek letters tumble into the pit new thought opens, and new arts destroy the old. Aqueducts fall to hydraulics, fortifications to gunpowder, steam to electricity. You admire granite until you learn a waving hand built the wall; thought that built is nimbler than what is built. Everything looks permanent until its secret is known. Permanence is a word of degrees; moons are no more bounds to spiritual power than bat-balls.

The key to every man is his thought. The life of man is a self-evolving circle rushing outward to new and larger circles without end, limited only by the force of the individual soul. Every ultimate fact is the first of a new series; every general law a particular fact waiting to be included in a bolder one. The man who finishes his story is answered by another man drawing a circle around his circle. Step by step we scale the ladder; the new statement is hated by the old until the eye gets wonted to it. Fear not the new generalization.

Our moods do not believe in each other. The only sin is limitation: once you find a man's shores, the sea shrinks to a pond. Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet; then all things are at risk. Valor is self-recovery, preferring truth to yesterday's apprehension of truth. Conversation is a game of circles; literature gives a platform outside today's circle; the poet breaks habit and opens possibility. Cause and effect are two sides of one fact; no virtue is final.

Emerson unsettles all things and calls himself an experimenter with no Past at his back, yet the eternal generator abides while circles proceed. People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there hope. Nature abhors the old; while we converse with what is above us we grow young. Character makes a new road rather than adroitly keeping the old round. Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm; the way of life is by abandonment. Draw a new circle. The essay closes the First Series as Emerson turns to footnotes, the apparatus of scholarship itself another circle about to be outgrown.