The Over-Soul

Randy Dible

12.2008

Emerson begins The Over-Soul with the denial of the comprehensiveness of

our attempts at systematic and exhaustive accounts of reality, in favor of an original

reality which remains ineffable and holy. “The philosophy of six thousand years has

not searched the chambers and magazines of the soul. In its experiments there has

always remained, in the last analysis, a residuum it could not resolve. Man is a

stream whose source is hidden. … I am constrained every moment to acknowledge

a higher origin for events than the will I call mine.”1 Emerson wastes no time and

immediately we follow his acknowledgement of this higher and ultimate reality

which we intuit to be our spiritual source, however ineffable, more than familiar,

(and often overlooked by the grossly-attuned society) which he calls the Over-Soul,

that Unity, sole prophet, and ‘great nature,’ “the eternal ONE.”2 And furthermore,

this eternal ONE operates at every level, akin to the dependent origination of

Buddhism, but only in the omnipresence of the principle (we mustn’t confuse a

principle of emptiness with a principle of oneness), at every level of reality; from the

phenomena and the seer, to the subject and the object, and everything else too.

Given a duality, you are given a level (by having two poles, you have a segment),

and here you find a ONE, in the case of levels, a line, or a plane. His point is that

subject and object are one, two sides of the same coin.

“I dare not speak for it. My words do not carry its august [venerable]sense;

they fall short and cold. Only itself can inspire whom it will, and behold! their

1
The Portable Emerson, pp. 210
2
Ibidem, pp. 211
speech shall be lyrical, and sweet, and universal as the rising of the wind.” Here

Emerson speaks of the unspeakable, which is called apophasis, the way of alluding

to the transcendental. The transcendental, ultimate truth or reality cannot be

expressed in the same way conventional meanings are conveyed by virtue of its

position outside words and their meanings. When It chooses to manifest, It will do

so only in a sublime way, as in the highest poetry. Emerson continues to describe

the traces of the Immortal in our experience. He calls them hints and he calls it

“the secret of nature.” The Over-Soul is behind the masquerade, behind the scenes,

backstage, and It is the omnivident audience, “the background of our being,”3 but it

is also the actor, the agent, oneself, but to be clear, not the gross subjective form,

such as the ego, but the ONE. He goes into such distinctions then, regarding the

Soul’s distinction from the body, intellect, will and organ. He tells us its location,

within or behind: “…a light shines through us upon things and makes us aware that

we are nothing, but the light is all.”4 And furthermore, man misrepresents himself,

does not respect himself, insofar as he does not know his true identity [the Over-

Soul], but can manifest the spirit, and when that happens, and word gets out, it is

called Genius and Virtue and Love. This can happen when we obey the Soul, and let

it have its way. We are in the way, we are in our way, and have to let.

“It is undefinable, unmeasurable; but we know that it pervades and contains

us. We know that all spiritual being is in man. A wise old proverb says, “God comes

to see us without bell;” that is, as there is no screen or ceiling between our heads

and the infinite heavens, so is there no bar or wall in the soul, where man, the

3
Ibid.
4
Ibid.
effect, ceases, and God, the cause, begins. The walls are taken away.”5 The

semantic explosion of the connotative language of the poetic genius in Emerson

here tells us that we are one with God, and illustrates it with a metaphor that is also

a literal scene: the walls are taken away. We are cosmic, not just from our origins,

but presently we are as profound as any other star in the night sky, but we take

ourselves for granted, more than anything else. Ultimate reality is outer-most and

inner-most, and even the boundary is taken away.

“The soul circumscribes all things. As I have said, it contradicts all

experience. In like manner it abolishes space and time. The influence of the senses

has in most men overpowered mind to that degree that the walls of space and time

have come to look real and insurmountable; and to speak with levity of these limits

is, in the world, the sign of insanity. Yet space and time are but inverse measures of

the force of the soul….”6 This could very well have been a quote from

Schopenhauer. The Kantian influence is clear. We know that Emerson was familiar

with Kant, but these revelations regarding the nature of space and time were

obviously the products of the genius of the spirit we find in Emerson. Kant’s

Transcendental Aesthetic was an exposition of the nature of space and time,

reasoning from first principles of extension and necessary conditions for

mathematical and physical possibilities. But Emerson wasn’t reasoning from set-

ups, but from let-ups. He allowed the poetic genius to speak through his undefiled

mind about the nature of space and time. In contrast to Kant, Emerson here got to

the same metaphysical insights from the nature of limitation and of the soul. This is

close to Schopenhauer’s route to the nature of space and time, but in Emerson we

5
Ibid., pp. 212
6
Ibid., pp. 213
also receive a new principle of inverse relation. There is a more obscure

transcendental philosopher named Franklin Merrell-Wolffwhose 1936 awakening

yielded a very similar principle inspired by Kant: “Ponderability is in inverse relation

to substantiality” (Pathways Through To Space.) Emerson let the Over-Soul onto the

page, to explain the nature of the metaphysical forces of dimension.

“The things we now esteem fixed shall, one by one, detach themselves like

ripe fruit from our experience, and fall. The wind shall blow them none knows

whither.”7 The stars, so permanent to us, are flowers, flowing with fruition or

production from the same process, and these fruits rot, die, and are forgotten, but

not before they are dispersed, or consumed by God-knows-what form of the same.

All false fronts fall. Beauty is but a flower, which wrinkles will devour. “With each

divine impulse the mind rends the thin rinds of the visible and finite and comes out

into eternity, and inspires and expires its air.”8

The poet is a conduit through which flows the spirit of the inspiration, leaving

its traces, leaving letters, magic spells, hints of that source. The young who have

not learned proper spelling, and cannot letters trace, so are freer to trace truer

marks, experiencing the presence face-to-face. I have always known this, so tried

to recall, where I stand before I fall, stood I where I now stand, as I now scrawl, to

understand, bugger all. You’re smarter than you think and more ignorant than you’ll

ever know. “The soul requires purity, but purity is not it… To the well-born child all

virtues are natural and not painfully acquired. Speak to his heart and the man

becomes suddenly virtuous.”9 “They all become wiser than they were.”10 “We know
7
Ibid.
8
Ibid., pp. 214
9
Ibid., pp. 214
10
Ibid., pp. 215
better than we do. … I feel the same truth how often in my trivial conversation

with my neighbors, that somewhat higher in each of us overlooks this by-play, and

Jove nods to Jove from behind each of us.”11 By Jove we are all one! There is only

one one, this one. The purest are our connection and subtile correction. “As it is

present in all persons, so it is in every period of life. It is adult already in the infant

man. In my dealings with my child, my Latin and Greek, my accomplishments and

my money stead me nothing; but as much soul as I have avails. If I am willful, he

sets his will against mine, one for one, and leaves me, if I please, the degradation of

beating him by my superiority of strength. But if I renounce my will and act for the

soul, setting that up as umpire between us two, out of his young eyes looks the

same soul: he reveres and loves with me.”12 Emerson continues along these lines,

“We know truth when we see it…. We are wiser than we know.”

“The nature of these revelations is the same; they are perceptions of the

absolute law. They are solutions of the soul’s own questions. They do not answer

the questions which the understanding asks. The soul answers never by words, but

by the thing itself which s inquired after.”13 Emerson learned from Coolridge a

distinction from Kant between Reason or Intuition on the one side, and

Understanding or Tuition on the other. The Over-Soul is nearest to pure reason, pure

intuition, and deals not with the later forms of understanding nor tuitional

investments in the world or word. The Over-Soul cannot be systematized, cannot be

pinned down, cannot be penned down, for the words which express it are poetic, not

like ordinary language, “An answer in words is delusive; it is really no answer to the

11
Ibid.
12
Ibid., pp. 217
13
Ibid., pp.219
questions you ask.” You can’t put it in words, it can only be indicated through

ostentation, never directly defined. “These questions which we lust to ask about

the future are a confession of sin. God has no answer for them.”14

It’s no wonder the American Transcendentalists took The Over-Soulas the

Bible of their movement. Emerson tells us that the transmission of the highest

teaching happens everywhere among characters without words, a tonic

communication. Being “on the wavelength” is a certain disposition and perspective,

a certain tone. He tells us that talent is a disease, and genius is religious. Such

bold declarative sentences must be true! But of course they are. “The simplest

utterances are worthiest to be written.”15 Emerson’s utterances are utterly simple,

and yet prophetic. “Ineffable is the union of man and God in every act of the soul”16

And his metaphors are incredible! “…not a valve, not a wall, not an intersection is

there anywhere in nature, but one blood rolls uninterruptedly an endless circulation

through all men, as the water of this globe is all one sea, and, truly seen, its tide is

one.” This blood flows through one heart, and Emerson lets his readers get in touch

with that. Emerson’s vision is so high that it seems at times he speaks for the

Divine to humanity about a world there could be if we all become conduits for the

Divine. “The soul gives itself, alone, original and pure, to the Lonely, Original and

Pure, who, on that condition, gladly inhabits, leads and speaks through it. Then it is

glad, young and nimble. It is not wise, but it sees through all things. It is not called

religious, but it is called innocent. It calls the light its own, and feels that the grass

grows and the stone falls by a law inferior to, and dependent upon, its nature.

14
Ibid.
15
Ibid, pp. 223
16
Ibid., pp. 224
Behold, it saith, I am born into the great, the universal mind. I, the imperfect, adore

my own Perfect. I am somehow receptive of the great soul, and thereby I do

overlook the sun and the stars and feel them to be the fair accidents and effects

which change and pass. More and more the surges of everlasting nature enter into

me, and I become public and human in my regards and actions. So come I to live in

thoughts and act with energies which are immortal…. He will weave no longer a

spotted life of shreds and patches, but he will live with a divine unity. He will cease

from what is base and frivolous in his life and be content with all places and any

services he can render. He will calmly confront the morrow in the negligency of that

trust which carries God with it and so hath already the whole future in the bottom of

the heart.”17 Thus concludes The Over-Soul, with so much left unsaid, as it began so

beautifully abruptly, as we find ourselves in the midst of the world, and yet having

left us with a greater sense, not a determinate word of thought, but a tone of the

Divine.

17
Ibid., pp. 227