oversoul essay emerson

Texts : Essays: First Series : THE OVER-SOUL from Essays: First Series (1841) Ralph Waldo Emerson But souls that of his own good life partake, He loves as his own self; dear as his eye They are to Him: He'll never them forsake: When they shall die, then God himself shall die: They live, they live in blest eternity.                                               Henry More Space is ample, east and west, But two cannot go abreast, Cannot travel in it two: Yonder masterful cuckoo Crowds every egg out of the nest, Quick or dead, except its own; A spell is laid on sod and stone, Night and Day 've been tampered with, Every quality and pith Surcharged and sultry with a power That works its will on age and hour. ESSAY IX The Over-Soul There is a difference between one and another hour of life, in their authority and subsequent effect. Our faith comes in moments; our vice is habitual. Yet there is a depth in those brief moments which constrains us to ascribe more reality to them than to all other experiences. For this reason, the argument which is always forthcoming to silence those who conceive extraordinary hopes of man, namely, the appeal to experience, is for ever invalid and vain. We give up the past to the objector, and yet we hope. He must explain this hope. We grant that human life is mean; but how did we find out that it was mean? What is the ground of this uneasiness of ours; of this old discontent? What is the universal sense of want and ignorance, but the fine inuendo by which the soul makes its enormous claim? Why do men feel that the natural history of man has never been written, but he is always leaving behind what you have said of him, and it becomes old, and books of metaphysics worthless? The philosophy of six thousand years has not searched the chambers and magazines of the soul. In its experiments there has always remained, in the last analysis, a residuum.
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The Over Soul, an Essay of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Audiobook, Classic.
Introduction “The Over-Soul” was published in 1841 in Essays: First Series. The essay elaborates upon the relationship between the soul and God that he first explored in Nature. Unsurprisingly, scholars consider the essay as the classical statement of his religious ideas. Emerson prefaces his essay with two poetic epigraphs: Psychozoia, or, the Life of Soul by Henry More and a selection by Emerson (later published as “Unity”). The selection from More’s poem raises the idea of not only the soul of the individual, but also the intimate relationship of all souls to God. They are bound to one another. Emerson’s selection builds on this idea, drawing attention to both the constitutive relationship between opposite pairs (e.g., “east and west” and “Night and Day”) – like the relationship between the individual soul and God – and the unifying “power / That works its will on age and hour” and infuses “Every quality and pith” (i.e., God, or the “Over-Soul”). While Emerson does not explicitly do so, his essay can be divided into four sections as a guide: 1) defining the Over-Soul (paragraphs 1-10), 2) the relationship between the Over-Soul and society (paragraphs 11-15), 3) revelation of the Over-Soul (paragraphs 16-21), and 4) the relationship between the Over-Soul and individuals (paragraphs 22-30). Defining the Over-Soul (paragraphs 1-10) Why, asks Emerson, do we have such extraordinary hopes for human life? Where does our “universal sense of want and ignorance” stem from? Emerson argues they derive from our connection to the Over-Soul. The Over-Soul contains and unites all individual souls, and acts as the animating force behind each individual. “When it breathes through his intellect, it is genius; when it breathes through his will, it is virtue; when it flows through his affection, it is love. If such a description sounds opaque, Emerson admits to describe the Over-Soul.