God is there or he is not there." So saying, he assimilates virtue to grace, in effect. The gift of the gods, "virtuous emotion" becomes another term for the "obedience" that follows "revelation." "The individual feels himself invaded by it," so that it warms all his "associations" and "makes society possible." The "true fire" shines "through every one of its million disguises" and reflects something of the vitality and creative force from which it derives. Because it derives from the "aboriginal abyss of real Being," "essence, or God"—from the "vast affirmative" that negates negation—it alone escapes the law of compensation.

"There is no tax on the good of virtue, for that is the incoming of God himself, or absolute existence, without any comparative." For this reason, virtue is the only thing that brings something new into the world, instead of redistributing goods and evils already in circulation. "In a virtuous action I properly am; in a virtuous act I add to the world." Here and elsewhere, Emerson resorts to the homely imagery of commercial exchange to drive home his point, and it therefore does no violence either to the spirit or the substance of his thought to see in this exalted conception of a life-giving force that "invades" and overpowers the will—the culmination of Emerson's consideration of virtue—another indication of his indebtedness to the political theory of producerism. The power to create new wealth belongs to producers alone, according to populist ideology; banking, credit, and commercial speculation merely recycle goods already in existence. We have seen that Emerson endows the producing classes with virtue in the more conventional senses of the term; but the association persists even at the highest reaches of his philosophy in the idea that virtue alone escapes nemesis, the fatal tax collector. "Material good has its tax, ... but all the good of nature ... may be had if paid for in nature's lawful coin, that is, by labor which the heart and head allow." Armed with virtue, "I no longer wish to meet a good I do not earn, for example to find a pot of buried gold, knowing that it brings with it new burdens."

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