Once accustomed to Emerson’s larger formulae we can to a certain extent project from our own minds his treatment of special subjects.  But we cannot anticipate the daring imagination, the subtle wit, the curious illustrations, the felicitous language, which make the Lecture or the Essay captivating as read, and almost entrancing as listened to by the teachable disciple.  The reader must be prepared for occasional extravagances.  Take the Essay on History, in the first series of Essays, for instance.  “Let it suffice that in the light of these two facts, namely, that the mind is One, and that nature is its correlative, history is to be read and written.”  When we come to the application, in the same Essay, almost on the same page, what can we make of such discourse as this?  The sentences I quote do not follow immediately, one upon the other, but their sense is continuous.

“I hold an actual knowledge very cheap.  Hear the rats in the wall, see the lizard on the fence, the fungus under foot, the lichen on the log.  What do I know sympathetically, morally, of either of these worlds of life?—­How many times we must say Rome and Paris, and Constantinople!  What does Rome know of rat and lizard?  What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being?  Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the Esquimau seal-hunter, for the Kamchatcan in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?”

The connection of ideas is not obvious.  One can hardly help being reminded of a certain great man’s Rochester speech as commonly reported by the story-teller.  “Rome in her proudest days never had a waterfall a hundred and fifty feet high!  Greece in her palmiest days never had a waterfall a hundred and fifty feet high!  Men of Rochester, go on!  No people ever lost their liberty who had a waterfall a hundred and fifty feet high!”

We cannot help smiling, perhaps laughing, at the odd mixture of Rome and rats, of Olympiads and Esquimaux.  But the underlying idea of the interdependence of all that exists in nature is far from ridiculous.  Emerson says, not absurdly or extravagantly, that “every history should be written in a wisdom which divined the range of our affinities and looked at facts as symbols.”

We have become familiar with his doctrine of “Self-Reliance,” which is the subject of the second lecture of the series.  We know that he always and everywhere recognized that the divine voice which speaks authoritatively in the soul of man is the source of all our wisdom.  It is a man’s true self, so that it follows that absolute, supreme self-reliance is the law of his being.  But see how he guards his proclamation of self-reliance as the guide of mankind.