The privates of man’s heart
They speken and sound in his ear
As though they loud winds were.
If you would not be known to do anything never do it. A man may play the fool in the drifts of a desert, but every grain of sand shall seem to see. He may be a solitary eater but he cannot keep his foolish counsel; a broken complexion, a swinish look, ungenerous acts, and the want of due knowledge—all blab. Can a cook, a Chiffinch, an Iachimo be mistaken for a Seneca? Confucius exclaimed, “How can a man be concealed? How can a man be concealed?”
And as you cannot read in the same book what your friend reads there; as you cannot see anything that you have not within; as you cannot be in a company where you do not belong; as you cannot conceal anything; so the relation which you sustain to other men is not to be determined by the will; but the mind of your companion and your own determine the character of the connexion by their intrinsic nature. They refuse to abide by any covenant: day by day they make their own. That mood into which a friend can bring us is his dominion over us. To all the thoughts of that state of mind, he has a right. All the secrets of that state of mind he can compel. There is no need of professions: there is no need of promises: you know what impression you have made on any man by considering how superficial or how sincere communications he has made to you.
Thus in all ways the human soul goes forth to make its law and refuses to accept any influence than spiritual. Foolish men encumber life with artificial forms and weave evermore the web of pretension and hypocrisy. The soul substitutes always being for seeming, as in petrifaction a particle of stone replaces a particle of wood. But all the art of the plausible is vain. Manner never did the work of matter. “What hath he done?” is the divine question which searches men and transpierces the paper shield of every false reputation. A fop may sit in any chair of the world nor be distinguished for his hour from Homer and Washington; but there can never be any doubt concerning the respective ability of human beings when we seek the truth. Pretension may sit still, but cannot act. Pretension never feigned an act of real greatness. Pretension never wrote an Iliad; nor drove back Xerxes; nor Christianized the world; nor abolished slavery.
The obvious inference from these laws is the one maxim which makes the whole Ethics of the Mind, Self-Trust. Self-Trust, that is, not a faith in a man’s own whim or conceit as if he were quite severed from all other beings and acted on his own private account, but a perception that the mind common to the Universe is disclosed to the individual through his own nature. Ascend a mile where you will and the barometer indicates the same levity of air. Rise to a certain height of thought and you behold and predict that which is true for all men in all times. Nothing is sacred but the integrity of one’s own mind. Absolve you to yourself and you shall have the suffrage of the world. Stick by yourself and mankind shall leap and run to be of your opinion. Speak your privatest thought and it shall be the universal sentiment for always the inmost becomes the outmost, and our first thought the Last Judgment. That statement only is fit to be made public which you have got at in attempting to satisfy your own curiosity. The place where you are is your workyard. The work you can do is your office. The friend you love is your ordained yokefellow. Insist on yourself; never imitate. For your own gift you can present every moment with all the force of a lifetime’s cultivation but can sustain it on the basis of the world; but of the adopted talent of another you have only an extemporaneous half possession.