E

XIX.

PLACE AMONG THINKERS.

MERSON belongs in the succession of the Idealists. That company he loves wherever its members are found, whether among Buddhists or Christian mystics, whether Transcendentalist or Sufi, whether Saadi, Boehme, Fichte, or Carlyle. These are the writers he studies, these the men he quotes, these the thinkers who come nearest his own thought. He is in the succession of minds who have followed in the wake of Plato, who is regarded by him as the world's greatest thinker. More directly still, Emerson is in that succession of thinkers represented by Plotinus, Eckhart, and Schelling, who have interpreted idealism in the form of mysticism.

The person who lays a stress on the worth of ideas, who regards the mind as existing before the body, and as giving form to it, is an idealist. Idealism looks upon the world of ideas or of mind as original and causative; it beholds the world of matter as proceeding from mind and as shaped by it. Spirit creates, it says; mind is primal. Matter is but a garment of spirit, the material world is phenomenal. As a true idealist, Emerson said, "Mind is the only reality, of which men and all other natures are better or worse reflectors."1 "Our soul," says Bartol, Emerson's friend and an enthusiastic believer in idealism, "is older than our organism. It precedes its clothing. It is the cause, not the consequence." Idealism says there is a Universal Spirit, of which nature and man are alike manifestations, a Spirit which is not only the original, but the immanent and sustaining cause of all things. Man is a spark from the Universal Spirit, a torch lighted at

1 Lecture on Transcendentalism, Miscellanies, p. 323.

this altar, and manifests in miniature all the characteristics of his original. Nature proceeds from the same source, and embodies on a lower plane the thoughts of God; its laws are his ideas. All that nature contains was first in God as types, ideas, thoughts; and its sole purpose is to serve as an outward expression of these. Idealism asserts the unity and perfect correspondence of thought and being or of ideas and things, that the material world is the image or symbol of the ideal or spiritual world. Emerson states this doctrine in saying that "every sensible object subsists not for itself, nor finally to a material end, but as a picture-language to tell another story, of beings and duties."

Strictly speaking, Emerson is not a philosopher. Several philosophic problems have deeply interested him, and he has found for them a solution. His writings constantly touch upon these problems, while these solutions of them are the occasion for many of his best essays and poems. Yet he does not see life and its questions from the purely philosophic outlook, and he is not a reasoner or a dialectician. He trusts to intuition more than to reason, is in sympathy with the moral and theosophic rather than with the metaphysical writers. He prefers Boehme, Schelling, and Coleridge to Descartes, Kant, and Hegel. He is more a seer than a thinker, less a philosopher than a poet. With speculative philosophy, in the strict sense of the word, he has had nothing to do, has probably never made himself familiar with it, and has had little interest in its methods. Its great teachers, with the exception of Plato, he has not studied.

"His intellect is intuitive, says Whipple, contemplative, but not reflective. It contains no considerable portion of the element which is essential to the philosopher. His ideas proceed from the light of genius and from wise observation of Nature; they come in flashes of inspiration and ecstasy; his pure gold is found in places near the surface, not brought out laboriously from the depths of the mine in the bowels of the earth. He has no taste for the apparently arid abstractions of philosophy. His mind is not organized for the comprehension of its sharp distinctions. Its acute reasonings present no charm to his fancy, and its lucid

deductions are to him as destitute of fruit as an empty nest of boxes. In the sphere of pure reflection he has shown neither originality nor depth. He has thrown no light on the great topics of speculation. He has never fairly grappled with the metaphysical problems which have called forth the noblest efforts of the mind in every age, and which, not yet reduced to positive science, have not ceased to enlist the clearest and strongest intellects in the work of their solution. On all questions of this kind the writings of Emerson are wholly unsatisfactory. He looks at them only in the light of the imagination. He frequently offers brave hints, pregnant suggestions, cheering encouragements, but no exposition of abstract truth has ever fallen from his keen "" 1

pen."

With a few qualifications this opinion may be accepted as substantially correct. Emerson belongs to that class of literary geniuses, such as Rousseau, Herder, Lessing, and Coleridge, who are the intellectual awakeners and stimulators of their age; not the thinkers of a generation, but its inspirers. They are moved by feeling, imagination, and intuition; but they open the way to new possibilities of life, action, and thought. Each of these men has produced a great impression on the succeeding generations, which is not at all to be measured by his clearness of thought or by the permanent character of his writings. These men have been the re-constructors of the modern world, the re-builders of life, art, literature, and religion. Emerson belongs to that company of illuminated souls who have done for the modern world what the sages, prophets, and seers did for the ancient world. The revival of Greek literature, science, philosophy, the French Revolution, Voltaire, destroyed the world of the Middle Ages, and left men amidst the ruins in doubt and darkness. From amid the ruins thus produced, these men have been the creators of the modern world, in which man, nature, and progress are the words which represent its leading characteristics.

Emerson is an idealist of the intuitional school; but as he has not been a system-builder, so he has ranged widely for the materials of his thought, finds everywhere aids to the elaboration of his ideas. Emile

1 The Independent, 1867,

Montégut says he has the traits of the modern sage, absence of the dogmatic spirit, and a tendency to criticism of principles. The sage follows his own nature, trusts to spontaneity.

"Emerson belongs to this class of philosophers, says Montégut. He has all the qualities of the sage, originality, spontaneity, sagacious observation, delicate analysis, criticism, absence of dogmatism. He collects all the materials of a philosophy, without reducing it to a system; he thinks a little at random, and often meditates without finding definite limits at which this meditation ceases. His books are very remarkable, not only for the philosophy which they contain, but also for the criticism of our times. He is full of justice towards the doctrines and the society he criticises; he finds that the conservatives have legitimate principles; he thinks that the transcendentalists are probably right; he does not look with scorn upon our socialistic doctrines. He searches for his authorities through the entire history of philosophy; and thus, after having listened to all the modern doctrines with complaisance and patience, he breaks silence to give us maxims that might have issued now from the school of the Portico, and now from the gardens of the Academy. . . . All the names of ancient and modern philosophers are cited together, as if they expressed the same opinion... Skeptics and mystics, rationalists and pantheists, are side by side. Schelling, Oken, Spinoza, Plato, Kant, Swedenborg, Coleridge, meet on the same page. In this country of democracy, all thinkers seem brothers; distance effaces the differences, and blends them all into the same light. Emerson sees the works of our philosophers marked simply with the seal of truth and human genius, and not bearing the stamp of the genius loci.” 1

It is this remarkable capacity for drinking from many fountains, culling his sweets from every variety of flower, which justifies Noah Porter in calling him "the wide-minded Emerson." 2 It is this same characteristic which has led to his being called a philosopher, poet, seer, critic, moral diagnoser, literary creator, by different persons. He has been compared with Carlyle, Goethe, Herder, Rousseau, Spinoza, Marcus Aurelius; and yet how different is he from each and all! He writes now like a Puritan moralist, or a Montaigne, or an Epictetus; but anon how like he is to Schelling,

1 An American Thinker and Poet, Revue des Deux Mondes, Aug. 1, 1847. 2 Books and Reading, p. 70.

Boehme, or Plotinus! On one page he is a grim believer in fate and nature; the next shows how strong his faith in divine grace, that we are nothing but by the will of God; and only a page or two beyond, he asserts the absolute spontaneity of the mystic; before the essay ends, he is a sober moralist teaching the plainest lessons of duty. That he seizes something of truth from all these many and antagonistic sources is not the most striking characteristic of his mind, but that he blends them into a united and consistent whole. He does this by the aid of insight, not by reason. He does not cull at random the ingredients of his essays; intuition discovers relations and a unity where reason halts and the dialectical method sees only antagonism.

Though Emerson has ranged somewhat widely for the materials of his thought, yet his philosophic affinity has been with a special and a very limited school of thinkers. His manner of thinking was early and very deeply affected by Plato. [That great thinker believed in a supersensible world, where all things are in the form of ideas. The material world is but a crude image or reflection of this spiritual world. Man once dwelt in the supersensible world, but his desires brought him into the world of sense. His reason is

even yet a direct organ of knowledge of the supersensible, and by its aid he can know its truths with absolute certainty. Mind precedes the body; while the soul is an active, creative principle. Plato dwells much on the powers and eternity of the soul, and from him Emerson learned his own soul-faith. From him, also, Emerson caught his optimism, his trust in the good, and his conviction that evil is but a shadow. Plato strongly insists on the necessity of a moral interpretation of the universe, and he makes perfect truth and perfect virtue to be synonymous. Vice is ignorance, he says, and goodness is a true source of knowledge. In his "new readings" of Plato, in Representative Men, in enumerating the several doctrines taught by him, Emerson gives clear indication whence many of his own leading ideas came. He mentions the law of con