The Whole of the Soul - Ralph Waldo Emerson

...We live in succession, in division, in parts and particles.
Meantime, within man is the soul of the whole; the wise
silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is
equally related; the eternal one.  And this deep power in which
we exist, and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only
animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are shining parts,
is the soul...

...All goes to show, that the soul of man is not an organ, but animates
and exercises all the organs; is not a function, like the power of
memory, of calculation, of comparison, but uses these as hands and
feet; is not a faculty, but a light; is not the intellect or the will, but the
master of the intellect and the will; is the background of our being, in
self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and 
the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object
are one.  We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the
which they lie - an immensity not possessed and that cannot be
possessed.  From within or from behind, a light shines through us
upon things, and makes us aware that we are nothing,
but the light is all...

A man is a facade of a temple wherein all wisdom and good abide.
What we commonly call man, the eating, drinking, planting, counting
man, does not, as we know him, represent himself, but misrepresents
himself.  Him we do not respect, but the soul, whose organ he is,
would he let it appear through his action, would make your knees bend.
When it breathes through his intellect, it is genius; when it breathes
through his will, it is virtue; when it flows through his affection,
it is love...

...The soul circumscribes all things.  As I have said, it contradicts all
experience.  In like manner it abolishes time and space.  The influence
of the senses has, in most men, overpowered the mind to that degree,
that the walls of time and space have come to look real and
insurmountable; and to speak with levity of these limits is, in the world,
a sign of insanity.  Yet time and space are but inverse measures of the
force of the soul...

Ralph Waldo Emerson
From: Essay IX The Over-Soul
1841

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