Five Essays on Man and Nature

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every spirit makes its house; but afterwards the house confines the spirit.

These are pebbles from the mountain, hints of the terms by which our life is walled up, and which show a kind of mechanical exactness, as of a loom or mill in what we call casual or fortuitous events.

So soft and so stanch is the ring of Fate. Neither brandy, nor nectar, nor sulphuric ether, nor hellfire, nor ichor, nor poetry, nor genius, can get rid of this limp band.

'T is the best use of Fate to teach a fatal courage. Go face the fire at sea, or the cholera in your friend's house, or the burglar in your own, or what danger lies in the way of duty,--knowing you are guarded by the cherubim of Destiny. If you believe in Fate to your harm, believe it at least for your good.

Very odious, I confess, are the lessons of Fate. Who likes to have a dapper phrenologist pronouncing on his fortunes? Who likes to believe that he has, hidden in his skull, spine, and pelvis, all the vices of a Saxon or Celtic race, which will be sure to pull him down,--with what grandeur of hope and resolve he is fired,--into a selfish, huckstering, servile, dodging animal? A learned physician tells us the fact is invariable with the Neopolitan, that when mature he assumes the forms of the unmistakable scoundrel. That is a little overstated--but may pass.

If Fate is ore and quarry, if evil is good in the making, if limitation is power that shall be, if calamities, oppositions and weights are wings and means,--we are reconciled.

One wonders what Emerson thought of Hope? It seems to me that there can be few entities so diametrically opposed as Fate and Hope. What does the fated man have to hope for? What does the man of hope have to fear from his fate?