108 Ancient Ideals
Yet the thinker is continually drawn to books. How does one read
them creatively? “One must be an inventor to read well,” Emerson
says (59). One must apply one’s intelligence and imagination with
creative force, dismissing all that is false or ephemeral and grasping
onto only that which is true— and true for oneself in par tic u lar.
“Books are the best of things, well used; abused among the worst.
What is the right use? What is the one end, which all means go to
eff ect? They are for nothing but to inspire. I had better never seen
a book, than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit,
and made a satellite instead of a system. The one thing in the world,
of value, is the active soul” (57). Emerson thinks of meek young men
working in libraries awed into silence by the grandeurs of Cicero
and Bacon and Locke. What those young men forget is that Cicero,
Locke, and Bacon were once nothing more than young men reading
and writing in libraries. (Though there was nothing meek about
them.)
Another great resource for the thinker, according to Emerson,
is Nature. The young scholar starting out is to experiment with
the hypothesis that he and Nature have the same essence. He
can imagine that the truths of his soul may be mirrored in the
truths of Nature. At the moment of the most intense vision, Em-
erson says, Nature’s “beauty is the beauty of his own mind. Its
laws are the laws of his own mind” (56). With Words worth,
and Coleridge in his earliest phase (before he wrote the disillu-
sioned “Dejection, an Ode”), Emerson shares the belief that
there is ultimate knowledge to be discovered in the natu ral world,
so that studying it intensely pays back over and over again. In
Nature, we can fi nd spiritual inspiration and perhaps moral
laws.
We rarely doubt our Darwinian view of the universe. We believe
we have the key to the natu ral world, and that is that. Our cocksure
knowledge can make the spiritual aspirations of Emerson, Thoreau,