power was all," he retracted that view in a phrase reminiscent of Machiavelli, who said (it will be recalled) that fortune ruled "half our actions," leaving the other half to be "governed by us." Having evidently changed his own mind about this, Emerson writes, "Now we learn that negative power, or circumstance, is half." The natural world evoked so lyrically in Nature, Emerson's first book, presents itself in The Conduct of Life as the "book of Fate," to which our counterforce seems ridiculously inadequate. ^* "What is must be." As a man lives out his appointed time, so it is with nations, perhaps even with the human race as a whole. "When a race has lived its term, it comes no more again."

Subject to the limitations laid down by nature, man also dreams of defying them. His own nature is badly flawed and divided. Man is a "stupendous antagonism," the child but also the would-be master of nature. His destiny is to "use and command, not to cringe" before this "element running through entire nature, which we popularly call Fate" but experience as "limitation." This defiance of limitations, if it is ultimately to be condemned, is not to be lightly condemned. "Great men, great nations, have not been boasters and buffoons, but perceivers of the terror of life, and have manned themselves to face it." In language that once again recalls Machiavelli, Emerson praises the courage and resolution men bring to the struggle against fate. Machiavelli called these qualities "virtue," and Emerson uses the term—one of his favorites—in the same way (though not, as it happens, in the present essay). "Every brave youth is in training to ride and rule this dragon."

Nature, however, will not be ruled; she yields very grudgingly to human command, and then only for a time. "The limitation is impassable

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This vigorous passage, worth quoting in full, conveys both the vast power that dwarfs human effort and the inexorability of natural processes, especially in their temporal dimension. "The book of Nature is the book of Fate. She turns the gigantic pages,—leaf after leaf,—never re-turning one. One leaf she lays down, a floor of granite ; then a thousand ages, and a bed of slate; a thousand ages, and a measure of coal; a thousand ages, and a layer of marl and mud: vegetable forms appear: her first misshapen animals, zoophyte, trilobium, fish; then, saurians,—rude forms, in which she has only blocked her future statue, concealing under these unwieldy monsters the fine type of her coming king. The face of the planet cools and dries, the races meliorate, and man is born. But when a race has lived its term, it comes no more again."

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