Essays: First Series

You read about someone who lived two thousand years ago — a general's panic, a philosopher's sudden clarity — and something in you says: yes, I know that. Emerson builds his first essay on that small shock of recognition.

His claim is blunt. There is one mind common to all people, and each of us is an inlet to the whole of it. What Plato thought, you can think. What a saint felt, you can feel. Whatever has happened to any human being, you are equipped to understand from the inside.

So history is not a record of other, grander people. It is the record of what this shared mind has done when it took the shape of Egypt, or Rome, or one stubborn reformer. Every page of it is made of the same stuff you are.

Emerson then turns the usual order around. We tend to assume that events happen first and ideas follow as commentary. For him the thought always comes before the fact.

Every revolution, he says, was first a thought in one person's mind. Every reform was once a private opinion. An empire is what an inner possibility looks like when circumstances let it spread across a continent.

This is why history can be read at all. If its facts were only external — accidents, weather, dates — they would stay foreign to you forever. Because they began as states of mind, every era has a door in you. When the thought that made an age occurs to you, you are holding the key to that age.

"The Sphinx must solve her own riddle." The human mind wrote history, Emerson argues, so only the human mind can read it — and the only human mind you can open from the inside is your own.

That changes what reading is. A fact from the past has to correspond to something in you, or it stays a list of names. What befell Cæsar Borgia shows the mind's powers and its depravities exactly as much as what has befallen you, and you understand him only as far as you find him in yourself.

So he gives the student a rule: read actively, never passively. Take your own life as the text and books as the commentary. The chronicles are notes in the margin; the primary document is the life you are living today.

Emerson says a fact from history must do one thing before it can be credible or intelligible to you. What is it?

• It must correspond to something in your own experience✓Correct answer
• It must be confirmed by several independent historians
• It must record the deeds of a truly great person
• It must come from an age wiser than your own

His words: “The fact narrated must correspond to something in me to be credible or intelligible.” Evidence and greatness are beside his point — without that inner correspondence even a well-documented fact stays a dead word.

Here is the part that stops this from being flattering. Emerson does not let you identify only with the heroes. As we read, he says, we must become priest and king, martyr and executioner.

He means it as a working method. Stand before the Reign of Terror, or a Salem witch hanging, and assume that you, under the same influences, would have been moved the same way. Then trace the steps until you could reach the same height — or the same degradation — as the person you are reading about.

That is uncomfortable, and it is meant to be. Someone who reads about the witch trials certain she would have been the lone voice of reason has learned nothing about how they happened. The one who finds the frightened, righteous crowd inside herself has understood them.

For Emerson, reading history rightly means assuming you could have done its worst deeds, not only its best.

True✓Correct answer

True. He asks the reader to become “martyr and executioner” and to reach, in imagination, the same height or the same degradation as the people in the story. Seeing only your heroes in history is the flattering misreading of this essay.