Emerson says he has wanted to write on Compensation since boyhood, because on this subject life seemed to him ahead of theology and ordinary people knew more than the preachers taught. A sermon on the Last Judgment gives him his opening. The preacher, esteemed for his orthodoxy, assumed that justice is not done in this world, that the bad prosper now and the good pay later. Emerson finds the flaw in the concession itself. The preacher had accepted the market's estimate of what counts as success. A disciple who hears that virtue pays only in the next life learns that sin pays now.
From there Emerson turns to the facts. Polarity runs through nature: darkness and light, heat and cold, the ebb and flow of the sea, the breath going in and out. The same split runs through people, so that every excess causes a defect and every sweet has its sour. The farmer admires power and place, but the President has paid dearly for his White House. A man too strong and fierce for society finds nature sending him a troop of sons and daughters whose love smooths his scowl. Laws are written by the same balance, and things refuse to be mismanaged for long. Every act rewards itself twice, in the thing and in the circumstance, though we keep trying to sever the pleasure from its price.
Emerson then calls his witnesses. The old doctrine of Nemesis says the Furies keep watch so that no offence goes unpunished. Proverbs from every nation say the same in the flat voice of reason: tit for tat, measure for measure, give and it shall be given you. Then come the practical cases. A man cannot speak without judging himself. You cannot do wrong without suffering wrong. Fear follows every breach of love and equity, and a borrower runs into his own debt. Emerson's advice is blunt: always pay, because persons and events may stand between you and justice, but that is only a postponement. The same law holds for right action. Love, and you shall be loved. Strength grows out of weakness, and the history of persecution is a history of trying to make water run uphill.
Then he turns the doctrine on itself. If compensation were everything, the sum would be a cold indifference to circumstance. There is a deeper fact in the soul: it is not a compensation but a life. The soul is. There is no penalty on virtue, because a right act adds being to the world, and Emerson quotes St Bernard that nothing can work him damage except himself. Calamity is read as a notice that the soul must grow, and we cling to the friend we lose, as if archangels could not come in once our angels go out. The chapter closes on verses about a man who is his own star, and on the bantling cast out on the rocks to be wintered with the hawk and the fox.
Coming Up in Chapter 3
Next comes Self-Reliance. Emerson says the highest praise we give Moses, Plato and Milton is that they spoke not what others thought but what they thought themselves. He asks why we trust another person's genius so readily, and the gleam of light that crosses our own minds so little.
