'Tis a short sight to limit our faith in laws to those of gravity, of chemistry, of botany, and so forth. Those laws do not stop where our eyes lose them, but push the same geometry and chemistry up into the invisible plane of social and rational life, so that, look where we will, in a boy's game, or in the strifes of races, a perfect reaction, a perpetual judgment keeps watch and ward.
Interpretation
Emerson encourages expanding our understanding of laws beyond the physical sciences to include social and moral principles.
In this quote, Emerson emphasizes the importance of recognizing that the laws governing nature and science are not separate from the laws that govern human behavior and society. He suggests that just as gravity and chemistry operate in the physical world, similar principles can be applied to moral and social interactions, highlighting that they are interconnected and influence our lives continuously.
In practice
In a philosophical discussion about the nature of reality, one might use this quote to illustrate the interconnectedness of different laws of life.
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?
Winter is on my head, but eternal spring is in my heart; I breathe at this hour the fragrance of the lilacs, the violets, and the roses, as at twenty years ago.
We are part of a symbiotic relationship with something which disguises itself as an extra-terrestrial invasion so as not to alarm us.
I was raised as an Orthodox Jew in a major neighborhood specializing in that, in Brooklyn. And somewhere when I was about 14, something changed. And that change probably involved updating every molecule in my body, in that I sort of realized: this is nonsense, there's no God, there's no free will, there is no purpose.
Man is a part of the world, and his spirit is part of the spirit of the world. We are merely a peculiar mode of Being, a living atom within it, or, rather, a cell that, if sufficiently open to itself and its own mystery, can also experience the mystery, the will, the pain, and the hope of the world.
The essential point here is that all people with small, insecure incomes are in the same boat and ought to be fighting on the same side. Probably we could do with a little less talk about' capitalist' and 'proletarian' and a little more about the robbers and the robbed.
I have an idea heaven will be both absolutely happy and absolutely dark, to protect us from the blaze of God.
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