Another favorite source of imagery for Emerson is light and fire. While water images often evoke a sense of time and a calm, blissful union with the universal, images of light and fire are associated with emotional warmth, vigor, and strong, manly feelings. In "The Over-Soul," Emerson describes what it is like to experience a unity with the Over-Soul. His comparison combines a homely household hearth and a more mystical, visionary enlightenment: "The character and duration of this enthusiasm vary with the state of the individual, from an ecstasy and trance and prophetic inspiration, — which is its rarer appearance, — to the faintest glow of virtuous emotion, in which form it warms, like our household fires, all the families and associations of men, and makes society possible. A certain tendency to insanity has always attended the opening of the religious sense in men, as if they had been 'blasted with excess light.' " In the same essay, he offers an image of light and fire in conjunction with an image of water to depict the union of individuals with each other, and within the embrace of the universal: "By the same fire, vital, consecrating, celestial, which burns until it shall dissolve all things into the waves and surges of an ocean of light, we see and know each other and what spirit each is of."
Emerson uses the figure of light to de-emphasize the importance of individual human characteristics and to focus on a transcendent, mystical illumination, as in this passage from 'The Over-Soul": "But the soul that ascends to worship the great God is plain and true; has no rose-color, no fine friends, no chivalry, no adventures; does not want admiration; dwells in the hour that now is, in the earnest experience of the common day, — by reason of the present moment and the mere trifle having become porous to thought and bilulous of the sea of light." Sentiments such as these reinforce his private, ecstatic communion with the divine; they connect the spiritual experience with the responsibilities of moral behavior and independent thought advocated in pieces such as "Self-Reliance" and his more political essays and speeches. The soul's relationship with God becomes, literally, the "guiding light," in contrast to the directives of society, law, tradition, and other mundane and superficial authorities.
