[MD] Emerson

[X Acto]

Our native love of reality joins with this experience 
to teach us a little reserve, and to dissuade a too 
sudden surrender to the brilliant qualities of persons. 
Young people admire talents or particular excellences; 
as we grow older, we value total powers and effects, 
as, the impression, the quality, the spirit of men 
and things. The genius is all. The man, — it is his 
system: we do not try a solitary word or act, but his 
habit. The acts which you praise, I praise not, since 
they are departures from his faith, and are mere 
compliances. The magnetism which arranges tribes 
and races in one polarity, is alone to be respected; 
the men are steel-filings. Yet we unjustly select a 
particle, and say, 'O steel-filing number one! what 
heart-drawings I feel to thee! what prodigious virtues
 are these of thine! how constitutional to thee, and 
incommunicable.' Whilst we speak, the loadstone is 
withdrawn; down falls our filing in a heap with the 
rest, and we continue our mummery to the wretched 
shaving. Let us go for universals; for the magnetism,
 not for the needles. Human life and its persons are
 poor empirical pretensions. A personal influence is
 an ignis fatuus. If they say, it is great, it is great;
 if they say, it is small, it is small; you see it,
 and you see it not, by turns; it borrows all its size 
from the momentary estimation of the speakers: the 
Will-of-the-wisp vanishes, if you go too near, vanishes 
if you go too far, and only blazes at one angle. Who
 can tell if Washington be a great man, or no? Who can
 tell if Franklin be? Yes, or any but the twelve, or 
six, or three great gods of fame? And they, too, loom 
and fade before the eternal.