Emblems

Therefore science always goes abreast with the just elevation of the man, keeping step with religion and metaphysics or, the state of science is an order of our self-knowledge. Since every thing in nature answers to a moral power If any phenomenon remains brute and dark, it is because the corresponding faculty in the observer is not yet active.

From The Poet, Essays, Second Series by Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Was it during this time that nature and science and metaphysics and religion kept abreast of one another? That is quite a thing then since now it seems religion stands still – it is not keeping with nature or science or metaphysics – indeed it is fixed in a distant past.

His answer:

If any phenomenon remains brute and dark, it is because the corresponding faculty in the observer is not yet active.

So it can be remedied – but how can a corresponding faculty become “activated”? What motivates us? What action or vision can “activate” the shining of a light in the darkness?

Emerson goes on to explain symbols.

It is nature the symbol, nature certifying the supernatural, body overflowed by it, which he worships, with coarse but sincere rights.

Perhaps current symbolism hijacks ancient symbols which originally represented something in nature – is what is going on in the form of meme culture.

The inwardness and mystery of this attachment drive men of every class to the use of emblems. The schools of poets and philosophers are not more intoxicated with their symbols than the populace with theirs. In our political parties, compute the power of badge and emblems. See the great ball which they roll from Baltimore to Bunker Hill. In the political processions, Howell goes with a loom, Lynn in a shoe, and Salem in a ship. Witness the cider-barrel, the log cabin, the hickory stick, the palmetto, and all the cognizances of party. See the power of national emblems. See stars, lilies, leopards, a crescent, a lion, an eagle, or other figure, which came into credit God knows how, on an old rag of bunting, blowing in the wind, on a fort, at the ends of the earth, shall make the blood tingle under the rudest or most conventional exterior. The people fancy they hate poetry, and they are all poets and mystics!

What symbols move you? Which symbols do you think have been "perverted" in a way not corresponding to it's original intent? I think about this a lot as it relates to personal branding.