The complete works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Society and solitude [Vol. 7]

"Each man has facts I am looking for, and, though I talk with him, I cannot get at them, for want of the clew. I do not know enough to ask the right question. It seems to me he does not know what to do with his facts. It seems to me that I know, if I could only have them. But I cannot have society on my own terms. If I want his facts, I must use his keys,—his keys, that is, his arrangements and ends. I want his facts for quite another use than he does. He uses them in his affairs, for profit, for power; I want them only to see how they fortify views and plans of mine. I have thoughts, which, wanting these examples, have no body. As the Indian said, 'I have no land to put my words on. Yet my words are true.' Here is all Boston, all railroads, all manufactures and commerce, in the head of this merchant. What would I not give for a peep at his rows and files and systems of facts? Here is a philologist who knows all languages. Here is the king of chemists. Here is all anatomy, fossil and contemporary, in the mind of this zoölogist. All electro-magnetism in the next man; all geology in the third; all mechanism in the fourth; all American history in a fifth; and I cannot, with all my avarice of these facts, come at any fragment of all their experience. I would fain see their picture-books, as they see them.—This was the very promise which mesmerism made to the imagination of mankind. Now, said the adept, if I could cast a spell on this man, and see his pictures, by myself, without his intervention,—I see them, and not he report them;—and having learned that lesson, turn the spell on another, lift the cover of another hive, see the cells, and suck the honey;—then another; and so without limit;—they were not the poorer, and I were rich indeed. This was the expedient of mesmerism, by way of suction-pump, to draw the most unwilling and valuable mass of experience from

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Title: The complete works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Society and solitude [Vol. 7]
Author: Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 1803-1882.
Canvas: Page 420
Publication: Boston ; New York :: Houghton, Mifflin,; [1903-1904].

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Collection: The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson
Link to this Item: https://name.umdl.umich.edu/4957107.0007.001
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Full citation: "The complete works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Society and solitude [Vol. 7]." In the digital collection The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. https://name.umdl.umich.edu/4957107.0007.001. University of Michigan Library Digital Collections. Accessed June 12, 2025.

The complete works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Society and solitude [Vol. 7]

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