| I. HISTORY |
| II. SELF-RELIANCE |
| III. COMPENSATION |
| IV. SPIRITUAL LAWS |
| V. LOVE |
| VI. FRIENDSHIP |
| VII. PRUDENCE |
| VIII. HEROISM |
| IX. THE OVER-SOUL |
| X. CIRCLES |
| XI. INTELLECT |
| XII. ART |
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There is no great and no small
To the Soul that maketh all:
And where it cometh, all things are
And it cometh everywhere.
I am owner of the sphere,
Of the seven stars and the solar year,
Of Cæsar’s hand, and Plato’s brain,
Of Lord Christ’s heart, and Shakspeare’s strain.
There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to thesame and to all of the same. He that is once admitted to the right of reason ismade a freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has thought, he may think; whata saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has befallen any man, he canunderstand. Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is orcan be done, for this is the only and sovereign agent.
Of the works of this mind history is the record. Its genius is illustrated bythe entire series of days. Man is explicable by nothing less than all hishistory. Without hurry, without rest, the human spirit goes forth from thebeginning to embody every faculty, every thought, every emotion, which belongsto it, in appropriate events. But the thought is always prior to the fact; allthe facts of history preexist in the mind as laws. Each law in turn is made bycircumstances predominant, and the limits of nature give power to but one at atime. A man is the whole encyclopaedia of facts. The creation of a thousandforests is in one acorn, and Egypt, Greece, Rome, Gaul, Britain, America, liefolded already in the first man. Epoch after epoch, camp, kingdom, empire,republic, democracy, are merely the application of his manifold spirit to themanifold world.
This human mind wrote history, and this must read it. The Sphinx must solve herown riddle. If the whole of history is in one man, it is all to be explainedfrom individual experience. There is a relation between the hours of our lifeand the centuries of time. As the air I breathe is drawn from the greatrepositories of nature, as the light on my book is yielded by a star a hundredmillions of miles distant, as the poise of my body depends on the equilibriumof centrifugal and centripetal forces, so the hours should be instructed by theages and the ages explained by the hours. Of the universal mind each individualman is one