crisis or judgment anywhere in visible nature." We long for a "stunning confutation" of evil acts, which never comes.

Emerson nevertheless argues that no one who transgresses the laws of nature escapes retribution. "All infractions of love and equity in our social relations are speedily punished" by fear. Whoever cheats his neighbor forfeits his neighbor's trust, imprisons himself behind a wall of enmity and suspicion, and thus cuts himself off from his fellows. He can no longer meet them on the old ground of simplicity and mutual confidence. Often misunderstood as a radical individualist, Emerson considers the loss of human fellowship a grievous affliction, as did his contemporary Hawthorne. His understanding of the importance of socialbility is one of the many things that mark his superiority to Thoreau, often ranked more highly than Emerson both as a writer and as a tough-minded thinker. Emerson wants men and women to become more "self-reliant" precisely so that they can meet each other as equals, without deference or condescension. In "Society and Solitude," one of his last essays, he condemns solitude as a condition "against nature" and notes that sociability, though it should be "taken in very small doses," confers "immense" benefits. "A man must be clothed with society, or we shall feel a certain bareness and poverty" of spirit. Without "children, events, a social state and history," he writes in "Culture" (1860), we lack "body or basis." Alienation from easy intercourse with the world is no trifling matter, then, especially when it springs from fear, the "obscene bird" that hovers over "government and property," feasting on "rottenness" and calling attention by its presence to "great wrongs which must be revised." This gnawing uneasiness never leaves those who prey on their neighbors or rise to power at others' expense. Vultures themselves, they find their peace of mind devoured by the knowledge of their neighbors' envy and resentment. ^*

Everything exacts its price: "this is that ancient doctrine of Nemesis,

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Nietzsche, a writer seldom accused of sentimentality, took a very similar view of the punishment visited on the high and mighty in the form of envy, hate, and fear. An "armed peace," he observed—the only peace possible among predators—conferred no "peace of mind." "One trusts neither oneself nor one's neighbor and, half from hatred, half from fear, does not lay down arms. Rather perish than hate and fear, and twice rather perish than make oneself hated and feared—this must someday become the highest maxim for every single commonwealth too."

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