Emerson in The Master Key System: Quotes and Sources

Ralph Waldo Emerson is the author Charles Haanel quotes most often in The Master Key System. Four of the short quotations that close the 24 parts are credited to him, more than to any other writer, and Haanel names him four more times in the course itself. We traced each quotation back to Emerson's own published work. One matches word for word. The other three are close paraphrases, and in one case a single changed word shifts the meaning. This page lists every reference, names the essay it came from, and notes where Haanel's version differs.

The Master Key quotations below come from the standard text of the course. The Emerson passages were checked against public domain editions of his books on Project Gutenberg.

Who Emerson was, briefly

Emerson (1803 to 1882) was an American essayist, lecturer and poet, born in Boston, who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-nineteenth century. He was known as a champion of individualism and a critic of conformity. The mental healing movements that grew into New Thought drew on him directly. William James, in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), listed "Emersonianism or New England transcendentalism" among the doctrinal sources of what he called the mind-cure movement.

The four closing quotations

Each part of the course ends with a short quotation set apart from the text. Writers from James Allen to Confucius appear there. Emerson appears four times.

Part Five: "Relation and connection"

Part Five, on the creative mind, closes with: "Relation and connection are not somewhere and some time, but everywhere and always." The source is Emerson's essay "Fate," the first chapter of The Conduct of Life (1860), where the line reads "not somewhere and sometimes, but everywhere and always." Emerson repeats the idea later in the same book, in "Worship." In "Fate" he is criticizing people who believe in Providence at home but think a malignant force rules in a war or an epidemic. Haanel uses the line to support his own point: one law governs everything, so nothing happens by chance.

Part Ten: "A vivid thought"

Part Ten ends: "A vivid thought brings the power to paint it; and in proportion to the depth of its source is the force of its projection." This one is exact. It comes from Emerson's lecture "The Preacher," collected in Lectures and Biographical Sketches (1883). Emerson was writing about preaching, and the paragraph opens with the claim that the ground of a new sermon is a new spirit. Haanel moves the sentence from the pulpit to the mind in general, where it supports his claim that a clear thought tends to produce its object.

Part Seventeen: "Thought is the property"

Part Seventeen, on symbols and reality, closes with: "Thought is the property of those only who can entertain it." Emerson's sentence, from "Shakspeare; or, the Poet" in Representative Men (1850), is longer: "Thought is the property of him who can entertain it; and of him who can adequately place it." The context matters. Emerson is discussing how Chaucer and Shakespeare borrowed freely from earlier writers, and he argues that an idea belongs to whoever uses it best. Haanel's version drops the half about placing a thought well and adds "only," which turns a remark on literary borrowing into a statement about mental capacity.

Part Eighteen: "There is no thought in my mind"

Part Eighteen ends: "There is no thought in my mind but it quickly tends to convert itself into a power and organizes a huge instrumentality of means." The source is "Plato; or, the Philosopher," also in Representative Men, where Emerson wrote "There is no thought in any mind." One word makes a difference. Emerson was making a general observation, in a passage about Plato, that ideas tend to turn into action. Haanel's text makes it a first-person claim. Readers who meet this line in collections of Master Key System quotes should know the original says "any mind."

Where Haanel names Emerson in the text

Beyond the closing quotations, Emerson's name comes up four times.

• Part Eight, introduction. Haanel contrasts Emerson with Thomas Carlyle. "Emerson loved the good and his life was a symphony of peace and harmony. Carlyle hated the bad, and his life was a record of perpetual discord and inharmony." He uses the pair to argue that we should hate nothing, because hatred is destructive thought.
• Part Thirteen. Answering the objection that some knowledge is forbidden, he notes that every new idea met ridicule, "whether a Columbus, a Darwin, a Galileo, a Fulton, or an Emerson."
• Part Twenty-Four, introduction. He tells readers that the law works for every temperament: "If you are inclined to be philosophical, Plato or Emerson may be your teacher."
• The closing Questions and Answers. A reader asks about "Carlyle's attitude of hatred of the bad," which shows students had absorbed the Part Eight contrast. Haanel replies that tearing down is never necessary: turn on the light and the darkness goes.

Haanel's sketch of the two men is his own moral reading of their lives. The two writers were in fact close friends, and their letters to each other from 1834 to 1872 were later published in two volumes.

Echoes without quotation marks

Some of Haanel's central ideas resemble Emerson's even where he does not cite him. These are parallels. The text does not say Haanel took them from Emerson, and many writers of the period shared them.

One mind. Emerson's essay "History" opens: "There is one mind common to all individual men." Haanel's Part One argues that since only one consciousness in the universe can think, "all mind is one mind. There is no dodging this conclusion." Haanel builds his whole idea of Universal Mind on that step.

Compensation. Emerson's "Compensation" (1841) holds that every act rewards or punishes itself: "Cause and effect, means and ends, seed and fruit, cannot be severed; for the effect already blooms in the cause." Haanel speaks of a "law of compensation" in Part Fifteen, where he concludes "we can get only what we give," and again in Part Twenty-Three, where the dishonest man "cannot cheat the Infinite." Emerson had written that it is "impossible for a man to be cheated by any one but himself."

Thought as the real power. Emerson's "Fate," the essay Haanel drew on for Part Five, says: "Intellect annuls Fate. So far as a man thinks, he is free." Haanel's course takes that idea much further, into a method for changing health, wealth and circumstance through trained thought.

What Haanel took and what he left

Emerson's essays are full of tension. "Fate" spends many pages on the limits that heredity, temperament and nature place on a person before it turns to freedom. Haanel's quotations come mostly from the hopeful side of that argument. Emerson offered no exercises, no weekly program and no promise of results. Haanel supplies all three, from the sitting exercise in Part One onward. Emerson lends the course a famous voice. The system itself is Haanel's.

Emerson's prestige also carried into the money books of the period. Wallace D. Wattles, in the preface to The Science of Getting Rich (1910), advised readers who wanted the philosophy behind his method to read Hegel and Emerson.

Reading the quotations in context

All the Emerson works named here are in the public domain and easy to find. Reading the surrounding paragraphs is worth the time. Two of the four closing lines were written about other subjects, preaching and literary borrowing, and two were reworded. Taken alone, they read as support for Haanel's teaching. In context, they show a writer Haanel admired, adapted to his own purpose. Loose quotation was common in books of the period, and it is a good reason to check any famous line before repeating it.