The Soul...

That Unity, that Over-soul, within which every man's particular being is con
tained and made one with all other ; that common heart,
of which all sincere conversation is the worship, to
which all right action is submission ; that overpowering
reality which confutes our tricks and talents, and con
strains every one to pass for what he is, and to speak
from his character, and not from his tongue, and which
evermore tends to pass into our thought and hand, and
become wisdom, and virtue, and power, and beauty.
We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles.
Meantime within man is the soul of the whole ; the wise
silence ; the universal beauty, to which every part and
particle is equally related ; the eternal ONE. And this
deep power in which we exist, and whose beatitude is all
accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in
every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the
seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are
one. We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the
moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which
these are the shining parts, is the soul..........Ralph Waldo Emerson