Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson - History
History
Quote
"There is one mind common to all individual men ... He that is once admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has thought, he may think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has befallen any man, he can understand. Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done."
Notes
Every human being contains the whole of humankind and its potential within him/herself. In the same way that "the creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn ... Egypt, Greece, Rome, Gaul, Britain, America, lie folded already in the first man."
Our connection exists within the "one mind" which we all participate in and share. "Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind, and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era." Our individual lives are like little microcosms that contain the movements and forces that have shaped and animated all of human history.
To study history, then, is to study ourselves. All the eras and events of history are only the varying manifestations of the source that is within us. "There is, at the surface, infinite variety, at the centre there is simplicity of cause." What we find in biography, history, poetry, sculpture, architecture, and elsewhere are these different forms and past products of the universal mind.
Time, as recorded in history, collapses within the theatre of our one mind. When you look at a gathering storm in the sky and see "a chain of summer lightning," it is the same as the Greeks saw and drew from "when they painted the thunderbolt in the hand of Jove (ie Zeus)."
Antiquity is not old. It exists here and now. "When a thought of Plato becomes a thought to me — when a truth that fired the soul of Pindar fires mine, time is no more." Our own secret biography is written in the poetry, literature, and history from ancient times.
History should be read and written "in the light of these two facts, namely, that the mind is One, and nature is its correlative."
"History no longer shall be a dull book. It shall walk incarnate in every just and wise man."
Key Takeaways
Maybe the reason we say that history repeats is because humans across time all share the same nature and the same "universal" mind. Emerson's perspective is more mystical than most historians, but there is something to this idea. It's actually pretty similar to Thucydides' case for saying the events he witnessed in the Peloponnesian War will happen again. Time may pass and our environments may change, but our human nature, and all the history-shaping forces within it, stays the same.
If we do contain all of history within ourselves, then that includes the Hitlers and the Gengis Khans as well as the Platos and the Gandhis. If everything we observe throughout recorded history exists as potential within us as individuals, that includes both the good and the bad. It's easy to look back in judgment at people who became Nazis or joined in with the racist mob, but that same potential exists in us, too.
History also includes the ordinary as well as the extraordinary, and human history is only a fragment of life on Earth. History tends to focus on heroes and extraordinary events. But just as valid are the quiet, ordinary lives that receive no attention or acclaim whatever: "Broader and deeper we must write our annals ... if we would trulier express our central and wide-related nature, instead of this old chronology of selfishness and pride to which we have long lent our eyes."