Emerson focuses on the elements of chance and spontaneity in his discussion of man's recognition of the divine force working in our lives. Human design and intention have limited effect. Only intuition allows us to transcend constraining factors in the way we process experience. And God's agency on our lives as comprehended through intuition leads to unpredictable results:
. . . I can see nothing at last, in success or failure, than more or less of vital force supplied from the Eternal. The results of life are uncalculated and uncalculable. The years teach much which the days never know. The persons who compose our company, converse, and come and go, and design and execute many things, and somewhat comes of it all, but an unlooked-for result. The individual is always mistaken. He designed many things, and drew in other persons as coadjutors, quarrelled with some or all, blundered much, and something is done; all are a little advanced, but the individual is always mistaken. It turns out somewhat new, and very unlike what he promised himself.
The unpredictable expression of the divine mind in human life is both paralleled by and understood through spontaneous intuition, which alone allows us to find unity and meaning in the particulars of our experience. Although the divine force behind human life is perceived sporadically, the absolutes that it expresses are permanent and unchangeable.
Toward the end of "Experience," Emerson explores subjectivity as an immutable condition affecting perspective, a given from which insight is, in the end, inseparable. He reminds us that "it is the eye which makes the horizon, and the rounding mind's eye which makes this or that man a type or representative of humanity. . . ." We can only see and evaluate things in relation to ourselves. We look for that which confirms the divinity within us, measuring one thing against another by what we need to see as well as by what we are capable of seeing. (Emerson thus develops a theme that he earlier expressed in Nature, particularly in his discussion of the way in which the poet picks and chooses subjectively among the objects of his consideration to create a unified whole in his work.) Man is the "receiver of Godhead," who feels "at every comparison . . . his being enhanced by the cryptic might," and requires what he perceives to reinforce his sense of his elevated position. Because subjectivity based on our intimate connection with God is part of the human constitution, intuition is all the more necessary to help us sort out the temporal from the absolute. We see everything — including moral issues — in relation to our own importance. Emerson contrasts our innate personal tendency to see morality in relative terms with the insistence of institutionalized religion on presenting it in absolute terms. Because the truly absolute emanates from a higher sphere, he thus indirectly underscores how unproductive it is to look for absolutes in the human scheme of things.
