Emerson: Fate

This is what we have been reading at the Emerson Reading Circle.

http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/transcendentalism
/authors/emerson/essays/fate.html

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Men are what their mothers made them.

'Tis weak and vicious people who cast the blame on Fate.

But Fate has its lord; limitation its limits; is different seen from above and from below; from within and from without. For, though Fate is immense, so is power, which is the other fact in the dual world, immense. If Fate follows and limits power, power attends and antagonizes Fate.

If you please to plant yourself on the side of Fate, and say, Fate is all; then we say, a part of Fate is the freedom of man. Forever wells up the impulse of choosing and acting in the soul. Intellect annuls Fate. So far as a man thinks, he is free.
One key, one solution to the mysteries of human condition, one solution to the old knots of fate, freedom, and foreknowledge, exists, the propounding, namely, of the double consciousness