we praise the style; or the common sense; or arithmetic; we speak as boys, and much of our impatient criticism of the dialectic, I suspect, is no better. The criticism is like our impatience of miles, when we are in a hurry; but it is still best that a mile should have seventeen hundred and sixty yards. The great-eyed Plato proportioned the lights and shades after the genius of our life."
Ever does Emerson propound the doctrine of self-reliance. He believes in action, not supplication. "Prayer that craves a particular commodity—anything less than all good—is vicious." With Emerson "prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view." It is "the soliloquy of a beholding and jubilant soul;" but "prayer as a means to effect a private end is meanness and theft. It supposes dualism and not unity in Nature and consciousness." When a man "is at one with God, he will not beg. He will then see prayer in all action." To Emerson, Effort is prayer: "The prayer of the farmer kneeling in his field to weed it, the prayer of the rower kneeling with the stroke of the oar, are true prayers, heard throughout Nature."
"Another sort of false prayers," writes Emerson, "are our regrets. Discontent is the want of self-reliance; it is the infirmity of will. Regret calamities, if you can thereby help the sufferer; if not, attend to your own work, and already the evil begins to be repaired. Our sympathy is just as base. We come to them who weep foolishly, and sit down and cry for company, instead of imparting to them truth
