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Emerson – The Over soul

The influence of the senses has, in most men, overpowered the mind to that degree, that the walls of time and space have come to look solid, real and insurmountable and to speak with levity of these limits is, in a world, the sign of insanity.  Yet time and space are but inverse measures of the force of the  soul.  A man is capable of abolishing them both

The spirit  sports with time:
Can crowd eternity into an hour
Or stretch an hour into eternity

The least activity of the intellectual powers redeems us in a degree from the influences of time … see how the deep, divine thought demolishes centuries and milleniums and makes itself present through all ages …. The emphasis of facts and persons to my soul has nothing to do with time.

And so, always, the soul's scale is one; the scale of the senses and the understanding is another.  Before the great revelations of the soul, Time, Space and Nature shrink away.

The things we now esteem fixed shall, one by one, detach themselves, like ripe fruit, from our experience and fall.  The wind shall blow them none knows whither.  The landscape the figures, Boston, London are facts as fugitive as any institution past, or any whiff of mist or smoke, and so is society and so is the world.

The soul looketh steadily forwards, creating a world always before her, and leaving worlds always behind her.  She has no date, nor rites, nor persons, nor specialities, nor men.  The soul knows only the soul.  All else is idle weeds for her wearing.