Riddle of America, The - Waldorf Research Institute

the fire of holiest affections, man’s “reason” becomes flaming sword, instrumentof the artist, of the uplifting, uniting creator.Preceding the necessity of the active soul to “realize the world,” totake up the world into himself, is the need of the faculties of the soul to actin relation to each other. It is not enough to be a thinker, understanding.One’s thinking must be imbued with the warmth of affections, of imagination,must be engaged in the action of raising pre-existing ideas from theunconscious into consciousness. In his address, “The American Scholar,” in1837, Emerson asserts more clearly that man cannot afford to fall into particularfaculties or functions. Then “the priest becomes a form, the attorneya statue-book; the mechanic a machine. …” Man must sustain his faculties,his latent functions that his whole soul be engaged, that he be man thinking,not ”a mere thinker, or still worse, the parrot of other men’s thinking.” Thefaculties of the soul, thinking, affections, action, only compose the whole,which he suggests in the word “character.” “Character is higher than intellect.Thinking is the function. Living is the functionary. … This is a total act.Thinking is a partial act.”Yet throughout this early period of Emerson’s adult life, the stronglyasserted images of the whole man and the marriage of man and nature faceto-facemomentarily tremble like a prematurely open rose at the piercing,winter-like sound of the keynote. The keynote declares that man cannot reston the vision of the rose, of wholeness, of marriage, but must remain afloat,suspended between the opposite poles, “between which, as walls, his beingis swung.” In May 1838 he writes in his journal,I complain in my own experience of the feeble influence of thoughton life, a ray as pale and ineffectual as that of the sun in our cold andbleak spring. They seem to lie—the actual life and the intellectualintervals—in parallel lines and never meet. Yet we doubt not thatthey act and react ever. … How slowly the highest raptures of theintellect break through the trivial forms of habit. Yet imperceptiblythey do. Gradually, in long years, we bend our living toward ouridea, but we serve seven years and twice seven for Rachel.The path toward wholeness is one of undulation. In 1834 he writes,“Love compels love; hatred, hatred; action and reaction are always equal.”In Nature two years later, he writes on the one hand that “nature is the organthrough which the universal spirit speaks to the individual, and strives tolead back the individual to it.” Then he says on the other hand that “the164