Riddle of America, The - Waldorf Research Institute

it was made.” As Nature’s beauty heralds an inward beauty, so Nature’sethical character seems its raison d’etre.Every natural process is a version of a moral sentence. The morallaw lies at the center of nature and radiates to the circumference. …The laws of moral nature answer to those of matter as face to face ina glass. The axioms of physics translate the laws of ethics.So with nature as beneficent catalyst for the opening of the soul, “theexercise of the will is taught in every event.” Emerson only hints of any weaknessin man’s capacity to “‘build his own world” when stating that “withthe prevalence of … secondary desires—the desire of riches, of pleasure, ofpower, of praise … the power over nature as an interpreter of the will is ina degree lost.” But the wise man pierces these secondary desires. For thewise man, Nature is not at all a mastering Fate. “Nature … is made to serve… as the ass on which the Saviour rode … one after another his victoriousthought comes up with and reduces all things, until the world becomes atlast only a realized will—the double of man.”But privately Emerson continues to recognize a tension. In May of1837 he pleads, recognizing society’s deterioration, “Let me begin anew.Let me teach the finite to know its master. Let me ascend above my fateand work down upon my world.” In early October he acknowledges thepull of some force greater than his own will. “We are carried by destinyalong our life’s course, looking as grave and knowing as little as the infantwho is carried in his wicker coach through the street.” Yet within the samemonth he asserts his own push against the pull: “There ought to be, therecan be nothing to which the soul is called, to which the soul is not equal.”From this sincere impulse rises the exhortation in the 1838 Harvard DivinitySchool address that “the remedy to the deformity of the forms alreadyexisting is first, soul, second, soul, and evermore, soul … a whole popedomof forms one pulsation of virtue can uplift and vivify.” Virtue is an attributeof will or action. Deeds for Emerson are not the glories of war or the fightingof forest fires. “The preamble of thought, the transition through whichit passes from unconscious to the conscious, is action.” Emerson means notoutwardly directed action, but inward action, action intimately related tothought. Through thought the world becomes a realized will—the doubleof man. At this stage Emerson focuses on the two polar faculties of man’ssoul, less concerned with the mediating feeling realm.162