EMERSON: THE MIND ON FIRE by Robert D. Richardson, Jr. (U.
of California Press, Berkeley: 1995), p.16-17
“In August of 1821,
during the same month that saw Missouri admitted as a state and revolution in
Europe and just a few days before [Ralph Waldo] Emerson graduated, a young
master’s candidate named Sampson Reed delivered his “Oration on Genius” at Harvard…Reed
made a strong impression on hat Emerson that August day. Years later…he still
remembered the speech as his first—and still standing—benchmark for true genius
or original force. ‘The human heart has always had love of some kind,’ Reed
began. ‘There has always been fire on the earth… Every man has a form of mind
peculiar to himself.’ But what he had come to say was not that genius is the
apotheosis of individual talent but the opposite, that geniuses are the means
by which general truths are revealed to the rest of us. ‘The intellectual eye
of man is formed to see the light, not to make it, Reed says. ‘When the power
of divine truth begins to dispel the darkness, ‘ he goes on, ‘the first thing
we see are the geniuses, so called, the people of strong understanding and deep
learning.’ Completing this wonderful cosmological metaphor, Reed said that when
truth begins to get through to us is when ‘Luther , Shakespeare, Milton, Newton,
stand with their bright side towards us.’
“Reed’s vision is religious, but it is not narrow or
sectarian. ‘Know, then,’ he says, ‘that genius is divine, not when man thinks
he is God, but when he acknowledges that his powers are from God.’ He then
looks to science and scientists, to the study of nature, for new truth.’ He
shows no interest at all in the church. ‘It needs no uncommon eye to see,’ he
observes, ‘that the finger of death has rested on the church.”
