The essay begins in the middle of a thought about ruin. Greek sculpture has melted away like statues of ice, with only a few figures left, like flecks of snow in the cold dells in June. The Greek letters are tumbling into the pit that new thought opens for everything old. Emerson then points at a tower of granite that has weathered many ages and says a little waving hand built it, and the thing that builds is better than the thing built. Behind each coarse effect lies a finer cause, which is itself the effect of a finer one. Everything looks permanent until its secret is known. The key to every man, he says, is his thought, and the life of man is a self-evolving circle that rushes outward from a ring too small to see. Every ultimate fact is only the first of a new series. A man finishes his story and fills the sky, and then another rises on the other side and draws a circle around his circle. Each new statement is hated by the old, and then the eye grows wonted to it. Fear not the new generalisation.
He turns the same law on himself. Our moods do not believe in each other. Today I can write what I please, yesterday I saw a dreary vacuum where I now see so much, and a month hence I shall wonder who wrote these pages. I am God in nature, he says, and a weed by the wall. We thirst for the approval of friends and cannot forgive them for giving it. A man's growth shows in the successive choirs of his friends. The only sin is limitation: once you come up with a man's limits, it is all over with him. Each step back in thought reconciles twenty discordant facts, and Aristotle, he says, platonises. Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet, for then all things are at risk, as when a fire breaks out in a great city. Valour is the power of self-recovery, preferring truth to your past idea of truth.
The circle turns toward people and books. Conversation is a game of circles, and we pluck up the boundary posts of the common of silence, and tomorrow we are back under the old pack-saddles. Literature is a point outside our circle through which a new one may be drawn. We learn Greek only to see our own houses better. The poet is valued because all the wisdom is not in the encyclopaedia but in a sonnet or a play, and some Petrarch or Ariosto breaks up my whole chain of habits and I open my eye on my own possibilities. Christianity cannot be seen from the catechism. The same law puts out each virtue in the light of a better, and one man's justice is another man's injustice. Emerson takes the objection head on. A reader will say he has arrived at an indifference of all actions, so that crimes can become the stones of a temple. He answers that he is only an experimenter, and that he is not careful to justify himself. Yet the eternal generator abides while the circles go on. Life is a series of surprises. The difference between talents and character is the difference between keeping the trodden round and having the courage to make a new road. What we want most is to forget ourselves and draw a new circle. Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm, and the way of life is by abandonment. A man, says Cromwell, never rises so high as when he knows not whither he is going.
