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Chapters (42)
  1. Cover Page
  2. Title Page
  3. Foreword by Robert D. Richardson Jr.
  4. NATURE (1836)
  5. Introduction
  6. CHAPTER I
  7. CHAPTER II
  8. CHAPTER III
  9. CHAPTER IV
  10. CHAPTER V
  11. CHAPTER VI
  12. CHAPTER VII
  13. CHAPTER VIII
  14. EARLY ESSAYS AND LECTURES
  15. Pray Without Ceasing (1826)
  16. Ethics (1837)
  17. The American Scholar (1837)
  18. Cherokee Letter (1838)
  19. The Divinity School Address (1838)
  20. From ESSAYS, FIRST SERIES (1841)
  21. History
  22. Self-Reliance
  23. The Over-Soul
  24. Circles
  25. From ESSAYS, SECOND SERIES (1844)
  26. The Poet
  27. Experience
  28. Politics
  29. From REPRESENTATIVE MEN (1850)
  30. Uses of Great Men
  31. Montaigne; or, the Skeptic
  32. LATER ESSAYS AND LECTURES
  33. Emancipation in the British West Indies (1844)
  34. Woman (1855)
  35. Thoreau (1862)
  36. POEMS
  37. Concord Hymn
  38. Additional Reading
  39. Note on the Text
  40. Ask Your Bookseller for these Bantam Classics
  41. About the Author
  42. Copyright

Thus inevitably does the universe wear our color, and every object fall successively into the subject itself. The subject exists, the subject enlarges; all things sooner or later fall into place. As I am, so I see; use what language we will, we can never say anything but what we are; Hermes, Cadmus, Columbus, Newton, Bonaparte, are the mind’s ministers. Instead of feeling a poverty when we encounter a great man, let us treat the new comer like a travelling geologist who passes through our estate and shows us good slate, or limestone, or anthracite, in our brush pasture. The partial action of each strong mind in one direction is a telescope for the objects on which it is pointed. But every other part of knowledge is to be pushed to the same extravagance, ere the soul attains her due sphericity. Do you see that kitten chasing so prettily her own tail? If you could look with her eyes you might see her surrounded with hundreds of figures performing complex dramas, with tragic and comic issues, long conversations, many characters, many ups and downs of fate,—and meantime it is only puss and her tail. How long before our masquerade will end its noise of tambourines, laughter, and shouting, and we shall find it was a solitary performance? A subject and an object,—it takes so much to make the galvanic circuit complete, but magnitude adds nothing. What imports it whether it is Kepler and the sphere, Columbus and America, a reader and his book, or puss with her tail?