We lie in the lap of immense intelligence, which makes us receivers of its truth and organ of its activity. When we discern justice, when we discern truth, we do nothing by ourselves, but allow a passage to its beams. If we ask whence this comes, if we seek to pry into the soul that causes, all philosophy is at fault. Its presence or its absence is all we can affirm.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that we are all part of a greater intelligence that reveals truth and justice to us, and our understanding is a conduit for these concepts.
Ralph Waldo Emerson's quote reflects the idea that humanity is intertwined with a larger, intelligent force that imparts truth and justice. Rather than claiming independent knowledge or understanding, we are merely recipients of deeper truths that flow through us. This perspective challenges the pursuit of philosophical answers by emphasizing that the essence of these virtues cannot be fully understood or captured, but rather experienced as they manifest in our lives.
In practice
In a discussion about the nature of truth in a philosophy class.
It is plain that there is no separate essence called courage, no cup or cell in the brain, no vessel in the heart containing drops or atoms that make or give this virtue; but it is the right or healthy state of every man, when he is free to do that which is constitutional to him to do.
Few people have any next, they live from hand to mouth without a plan, and are always at the end of their line.
Men cease to interest us when we find their limitations
Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakeably meant for his ear.
The world belongs to the energetic.
Hast thou named all the birds without a gun?
It is intolerable that the world's religions - founded on the values of love and compassion - should provide a pretext for the expression of hatred and violence.
The word 'tolerance' once meant we all have the right to argue rationally for our deepest convictions in the public arena. Now it means those convictions are not even subject to rational debate.
Can a man of perception respect himself at all?
The court is the bureaucracy of the law. If you bureaucratise popular justice then you give it the form of a court.
Already, he was dreaming of a refined solitude, a comfortable desert, a motionless ark in which to seek refuge from the unending deluge of human stupidity.
For a time it seemed inevitable that the surging tide of agnosticism and materialism would sweep all before it. There were those who did not dare utter what they thought. Many thought the case hopeless and the cause of religion lost once and for ever. But the tide has turned and to the rescue has come - what? The study of comparative religions. By the study of different religions we find that in essence they are one.
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