The essay opens on a quiet complaint. In every work of genius we recognise our own rejected thoughts, and they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. The highest praise we give Moses, Plato and Milton is that they set books and traditions at naught and spoke what they thought, not what other men thought. Yet each of us dismisses the gleam of light that crosses his own mind, simply because it is his. There comes a time in every man's education, Emerson says, when he sees that envy is ignorance and imitation is suicide, and that no kernel of nourishing corn can reach him except through the plot of ground he was given to till. Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Children show how it looks. Infancy conforms to nobody and all conform to it. A boy in the parlour is like the pit in the playhouse, trying and sentencing the people who pass in the swift, summary way of boys, never troubling about consequences. Those voices grow faint when we enter the world, because society is a joint-stock company in which the members give up the liberty and culture of the eater to make sure of his bread. The virtue most in request is conformity, and self-reliance is its aversion. Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.
Emerson then tells a story against himself. A valued adviser warned him that his impulses might come from below, not from above. If I am the Devil's child, he answered, I will live then from the Devil. No law can be sacred to him but that of his own nature. If malice and vanity wear the coat of philanthropy, shall that pass? Men do a good action as they would pay a fine for missing parade, and their virtues are penances. He does not wish to expiate, but to live. What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think, and that rule marks the whole distance between greatness and meanness. It is easy to live by the world's opinion in the world, and easy to live by our own in solitude, but the great man keeps the independence of solitude in the middle of the crowd. A man who keeps a dead church and votes with a great party hides the precise man he is. For nonconformity the world whips you with its displeasure, but the sour faces of the multitude are put on and off as the wind blows and a newspaper directs.
The other terror is consistency. We drag the corpse of our memory around because other eyes have only our past acts to compute our orbit by. Emerson asks what happens if you contradict yourself, and answers that a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. Speak what you think now in hard words, and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks, though it contradict everything you said today. Is it so bad to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton. The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag of a hundred tacks, and seen from far enough off, it straightens into one line. Then he asks who the Trustee is, the aboriginal Self on which all this reliance rests, and answers that it is the source of genius, virtue and life. The soul needs no go-between. The rose under his window makes no reference to former roses. It exists with God today. Man postpones or remembers, and so he dares not say I think or I am, but quotes some saint or sage. Life only avails, not the having lived, and the one fact the world hates is that the soul becomes.
From there he turns on his readers. We are a mob, he says, going abroad to beg a cup of water from the urns of other men, when we should sit at home with the cause. If we cannot rise at once to faith, let us at least wake Thor and Woden, courage and constancy, by speaking the truth. He tells parents, wife, brother and friend that henceforward he is the truth's. The populace will call this antinomianism, but there are two confessionals, and we must be shriven in one or the other. Society has become timorous. A young man who fails once loses all heart, while a sturdy lad from New Hampshire tries every trade and, like a cat, falls on his feet. He does not postpone his life, for he lives already.
The last pages apply the rule. Prayer that asks for a private end is meanness, and the farmer kneeling in his field to weed it prays truly. Regret and cheap sympathy are failures of the will. Travelling is a fool's paradise: I pack my trunk and wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the sad self I fled. Insist on yourself, never imitate. Society never advances, since for everything given something is taken. The civilised man has a coach and has lost the use of his feet, and society is a wave whose water does not move with it. Reliance on property is want of self-reliance. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself, and nothing but the triumph of principles. The next page begins an essay on Friendship, and it starts with the claim that we have more kindness than is ever spoken.
