Emerson opens with a plain claim: the world of the senses is a world of shows. It has a symbolic character, and a true prudence knows that its own office is humble, surface and not centre. He sorts people into three kinds. One class lives for the use of the symbol and counts health and wealth as the final good. A second lives for its beauty, like the poet and the scientist. A third looks past the beauty to the thing it signifies, and these are the wise. They have common sense, taste and spiritual perception. Base prudence, which makes the senses final, is the god of sots and cowards and the subject of all comedy. True prudence takes space, time, climate, hunger and debt as they are, and reads its first lessons from them.
Those lessons are ordinary, and they work. Hard soil and four months of snow make the northerner wiser and abler than the islander, who sleeps on a mat under the moon beside a date-tree that has set his breakfast table. The northerner must brew, bake, salt his food and pile his wood, and every stroke of labour brings a new acquaintance with nature. Nature also punishes neglect. Dr Johnson would whip the child who said he looked out of this window when he looked out of that. Unpunctuality and muddled facts are holes and dens, and if the hive is disturbed by rash hands, it yields bees instead of honey. The whetstone of a mower is a gay sound in the mornings of June, and the loneliest sound in the season when it comes too late to make hay.
Then Emerson turns on the people who should know better. The scholar shames us by his bifold life, admirable while something higher than prudence is at work and an encumbrance when common sense is wanted. Yesterday he was greater than Caesar, today he is more wretched than Job, like the opium-eaters of the Constantinople bazaars, ragged drivellers by day and glorious and great at night. Poetry and prudence should be coincident, but now the two seem irreconcilably parted. His answer is a prudence of a higher strain. Take nature's first pains as hints. Make the night night and the day day. Read the laws of the world on every coin. Keep your promises so that your words are words of fate. Front what you fear, because in battles the eye is first overcome. You are afraid of Grim, but Grim also is afraid of you. Love is not a hood but an eye-water. Meet an opponent on whatever common ground remains. Do not hold back from those near you while you wait for better company, because life wastes itself whilst we are preparing to live, and these old shoes are easy to the feet.
All the virtues, he ends, range themselves on the side of prudence, since the world of manners and actions is wrought of one stuff. The last page opens a new essay. The eye is the first circle, the horizon is the second, and around every circle another can be drawn.
Coming Up in Chapter 10
In Circles, Emerson says cities and institutions rise and vanish with the ideas behind them. Greek sculpture has melted away like statues of ice, and only flecks of snow are left in the cold dells. What does that say about everything we think is permanent?
