Perspective and Insight
Emerson explores the subject of perspective in detail throughout "Experience." We need somehow to find higher unity behind the mass of confusing detail that we encounter on a daily basis.
Emerson employs the image of the rapidly spinning, multicolored wheel to suggest that it takes the proper perspective on a great many particulars to provide a sense of the whole: "Of course, it needs the whole society, to give the symmetry we seek. The parti-colored wheel must revolve very fast to appear white." He discusses the various forces that hinder our maintaining a sufficiently large vision, that diminish our receptivity to intuitive insight into universal truth. While engaged in living, Emerson points out, it is difficult for us to gauge exactly where we stand, to make out the broader meaning and the true value of our thoughts and actions. Certain inherent human traits impede our ability to see beyond the material and temporal.
Mood and temperament, for example, may prevent even the most thoughtful and gifted from realizing the divine power that flows into them. Emerson writes of "young men who owe us a new world, so readily and lavishly they promise, but they never acquit the debt; they die young and dodge the account; or if they live, they lose themselves in the crowd." Because we see only what we are inclined to see, temperament affects insight. The undersensitive are insufficiently receptive to intuition, and the overly sensitive are too overwhelmed by it to properly assimilate the vision it offers.
Furthermore, the human mind is so constructed that men need to consider objects and ideas separately and in succession, rather than all at once. But the universal perspective that we inwardly require demands comprehensive vision. Thus, there is a certain tension between how we are made up and the ultimate insight toward which we are drawn. And if we cannot apply our minds to individual objects and ideas except in succession, neither do we express our characters through action, nor perceive the characters of other men, except particular trait by particular trait, focusing at any given time on one quality to the exclusion of the others that make up the full range of human characteristics. In the course of a single lifetime, the intellect by itself has difficulty processing enough particulate manifestations of God in us and in our lives to allow the deepest kind of comprehension. Moreover, because divine power expresses itself through individuals sporadically, not continuously, the machinery of the intellect — which regards things sequentially and consequently may miss the opportunity to perceive the divine when it makes itself apparent — is somewhat at odds with the way God acts upon us. We need to look at things over a period of time and to receive impressions of them all at once, and this is beyond the capacity of the intellect. Revelatory intuition is therefore essential to the process of insight.
