Chapters (42)
- Cover Page
- Title Page
- Foreword by Robert D. Richardson Jr.
- NATURE (1836)
- Introduction
- CHAPTER I
- CHAPTER II
- CHAPTER III
- CHAPTER IV
- CHAPTER V
- CHAPTER VI
- CHAPTER VII
- CHAPTER VIII
- EARLY ESSAYS AND LECTURES
- Pray Without Ceasing (1826)
- Ethics (1837)
- The American Scholar (1837)
- Cherokee Letter (1838)
- The Divinity School Address (1838)
- From ESSAYS, FIRST SERIES (1841)
- History
- Self-Reliance
- The Over-Soul
- Circles
- From ESSAYS, SECOND SERIES (1844)
- The Poet
- Experience
- Politics
- From REPRESENTATIVE MEN (1850)
- Uses of Great Men
- Montaigne; or, the Skeptic
- LATER ESSAYS AND LECTURES
- Emancipation in the British West Indies (1844)
- Woman (1855)
- Thoreau (1862)
- POEMS
- Concord Hymn
- Additional Reading
- Note on the Text
- Ask Your Bookseller for these Bantam Classics
- About the Author
- Copyright
Temperament also enters fully into the system of illusions and shuts us in a prison of glass which we cannot see. There is an optical illusion about every person we meet. In truth they are all creatures of given temperament, which will appear in a given character, whose boundaries they will never pass; but we look at them, they seem alive, and we presume there is impulse in them. In the moment it seems impulse; in the year, in the lifetime, it turns out to be a certain uniform tune which the revolving barrel of the music-box must play. Men resist the conclusion in the morning, but adopt it as the evening wears on, that temper prevails over everything of time, place, and condition, and is inconsumable in the flames of religion. Some modifications the moral sentiment avails to impose, but the individual texture holds its dominion, if not to bias the moral judgments, yet to fix the measure of activity and of enjoyment.