What does “The eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loath to disappoint them.” mean?

See a translation

@Critical_Thinker your question appeared at the top of my feed again 😬

this passage basically means, “people judge us for what we have done (in the past), and that scares us.”

if i remember the whole quote correctly, emerson here is talking about how we are hesitant to trust ourselves because we make mistakes, and we seem to make these mistakes randomly. this leads us to not trust ourselves, because we know people will make judgements about who we are based on those errors. the problem is made worse by the fact that we make these mistakes with no real pattern — we are inconsistently prone to doing things wrong.