Over-Soul

The Over-Soul is the title of an essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson, published in his first series of Essays in 1841, and his name for the universal mind or soul in which every individual participates. Each person, he argued, is an opening through which this one soul can speak; it is the source of wisdom, of virtue and of every moment of genuine insight.

Emerson describes revelation as the influx of the Over-Soul into the individual mind, and calls on readers to trust it rather than the authority of tradition. In it, the distinctions between persons and between the knower and the known fall away: the seer and the seen become one. This is the ground of his doctrine of self-reliance: to trust oneself is to trust the divine within.

Emerson drew on Plato and Plotinus, on Coleridge and the German idealists, and on the Indian texts he read in translation. His idea of a universal soul present in each has been compared with the Upaniṣadic identity of ātman and Brahman and with the world-soul of the Platonists, though it is shaped by a distinctively American emphasis on the individual.