Mysticism is the mistake of an accidental and individual symbol for an universal one.
Interpretation
Mysticism can lead to misunderstanding, mistaking personal symbols for universal truths.
In this quote, Emerson suggests that mysticism, which often relies on individual experiences and interpretations, can result in confusion when personal symbols are misidentified as universally applicable. This reflects a deeper philosophical discourse on perception, meaning, and the nature of reality, emphasizing the importance of recognizing the difference between subjective experiences and objective truths.
In practice
In a philosophy class, when discussing perception, I quoted Emerson to illustrate the difference between personal and universal interpretations.
It is plain that there is no separate essence called courage, no cup or cell in the brain, no vessel in the heart containing drops or atoms that make or give this virtue; but it is the right or healthy state of every man, when he is free to do that which is constitutional to him to do.
Few people have any next, they live from hand to mouth without a plan, and are always at the end of their line.
Men cease to interest us when we find their limitations
Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakeably meant for his ear.
The world belongs to the energetic.
Hast thou named all the birds without a gun?
The least strained and most natural ways of the soul are the most beautiful; the best occupations are the least forced.
Her own contempt for any forms of pressure society might put on her was so profound and instinctive that she as instinctively despised anyone who paid tribute to them.
Ideas are inherently conservative. They yield not to the attack of other ideas but to the massive onslaught of circumstance with which they cannot contend.
Let men learn that a legislature is not 'our God upon earth,' though, by the authority they ascribe to it, and the things they expect from it, they would seem to think it is. Let them learn rather that it is an institution serving a purely temporary purpose, whose power, when not stolen, is at the best borrowed.
One can say of language that it is potentially the only human home, the only dwelling place that cannot be hostile to man.
For a great many years, as a soldier, I had a suspicion that war was a racket; not until I retired to civil life did I fully realize it.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.