It is easy enough for a firm man who knows the world to
brook the rage of the cultivated classes. Their rage is decorous and
prudent, for they are timid, as being very vulnerable themselves. But
when to their feminine rage the indignation of the people is added, when
the ignorant and the poor are aroused, when the unintelligent brute
force that lies at the bottom of society is made to growl and mow, it
needs the habit of magnanimity and religion to treat it godlike as a
trifle of no concernment.

The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency; a
reverence for our past act or word because the eyes of others have no
other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loath
to disappoint them.

But why should you keep your head over your shoulder? Why drag about
this monstrous corpse of your memory, lest you contradict somewhat you
have stated in this or that public place? Suppose you should contradict
yourself; what then? It seems to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on
your memory alone, scarcely even in acts of pure memory, but to bring
the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed present, and live ever in a
new day. Trust your emotion. In your metaphysics you have denied
personality to the Deity, yet when the devout motions of the soul come,
yield to them heart and life, though they should clothe God with shape
and color. Leave your theory, as Joseph his coat in the hand of the
harlot, and flee.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by
little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great
soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his
shadow on the wall. Out upon your guarded lips! Sew them up with
packthread, do. Else if you would be a man speak what you think to-day
in words as hard as cannon balls, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow
thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said
to-day. Ah, then, exclaim the aged ladies, you shall be sure to be
misunderstood! Misunderstood! It is a right fool's word. Is it so bad
then to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates,
and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and
every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be
misunderstood.

I suppose no man can violate his nature. All the sallies of his will are
rounded in by the law of his being, as the inequalities of Andes and
Himmaleh are in