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39

part of "the great, the universal mind," which is "common to all men” and which "constitutes them men."

The fourth is Progress, which means that man is the "result" as well as the "interpreter" of nature. Here the individual emerges, asserting his claim to independence; and he does so by "losing hold" of this centrality. He evolves on a tangent, so to speak, and knows nature from which he came, but not God, who caused it.

And last there is the Moral Law, which underlies all these, and which shows that after all it is God at work, who must educate man through freedom. By this law, all nature exists for the education or "discipline" of man. Finally he returns, through self-surrender, to the great spirit from which he deviated.

One uses native as

Spirit

commodity, beauty, language, ultimately a.

that is surral isitar

from center suniverse, into everything & relation

CHAPTER IV.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF EMERSON (continued): THE THEORIES OF EvoLUTION AND EMANATION.

In spite of the patronizing tolerance in which it is usually held, the course of Emerson's thought, as we have just outlined it, would seem to one studying it sympathetically a fairly adequate putting together of various phases of Idealism, and a reasonably consistent reading of them as the main elements of a connected philosophy, if it were not for the central contradiction which has been reserved for discussion in this chapter. This seems a modest claim enough to make for it; for the contradiction is as fatal as one could very well be. Let us state once more, in Emerson's own words, this fundamental difficulty, and then proceed at once to his answer. "In the divine order, Intellect is primary, Nature secondary; it is the memory of the mind. That which once existed in the intellect as pure law has now taken body as Nature" (I, 188). But Nature "will not remain orbed in a thought, but rushes into persons" (III, 225), and "When we break the laws, we lose our hold on the central reality" (VI, 305). The question is at once before us: How does that which is "never a cause but a perpetual effect" produce those "persons" who have the fatal ability to lose hold of the central reality?

One who reads Emerson with the least care can hardly fail to notice that this contradiction, like so many others in the history of philosophy, is due primarily to a careless and inconsistent use of terms. We must therefore pause at the very outset to make a fundamental distinction in Emerson's use of the term "Nature."

In the introduction to his little book on Nature Emerson says: "I shall use the word in both senses;-in its common and in its philosophical import. In inquiries so general as the present one, the inaccuracy is not material; no confusion of thought will occur” (I, 11). In the "philosophical" sense Emerson considers Nature as meaning "all that is separate from us, all which Philosophy distinguishes as the Not Me,—all other men and my own body," but he still means to distinguish it from Soul. But while he does distinguish it from the individual soul which interprets this great reality as nature, he is not always careful to distinguish between this interpretation of ours, and the great unknown reality of which it is the interpretation; and so, in one breath he may

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41

speak of Nature as illusion, phenomenon, a "perpetual effect," whose laws are therefore wholly dependent on the laws of mind, and in the next moment, by a simple metonymy, he may continue to speak of "Nature" while he is clearly referring to the cause behind it.80

The confusion in Emerson's mind seems to have arisen from his endeavor to equate an inherited idealism, to which his adherence was largely emotional, with a theory of evolution which more and more forced itself upon him in his attempt to take account of an individual whose impulses proceed from within himself. Though he never wholly relinquished his belief that "nature proceeds from above," a growing belief in evolution may be traced throughout his work,—a belief so hostile to his earlier idealism that it finally forced him unconsciously to himself completely away from his earlier position. Let us trace briefly the growth of Emerson's belief in evolution, and see how it affected his answer to the problem of how a real individual may exist in a world of universal spirit. For it is his answer to this problem, which even Hegel sought in vain to solve, which gives to Emerson his real significance. In his book, Nature, in 1836,-in spite of the many times that the claim has been made for it, there is no suggestion of evolution beyond a "somewhat progressive"; nature is merely a "symbol" or "shadow" of spirit, a remoter and inferior incarnation of God, because an incarnation "in the unconscious"; it is nothing of itself, and does not work back to higher things; "a fact is merely the end or last issue of spirit” (I, 40). The famous verse ending,

"And striving to be man, the worm

Mounts through all the spires of form,"

prefixed to the essay as we now have it, did not appear till the second edition, in 1849; the motto which was prefixed to the edition of 1836 was from Plotinus, and merely to the effect that "Nature is but an image or imitation of wisdom,"-a more appropriate text for the book which follows. In this earliest work of Emerson's there is suggested by the fields and woods only "an occult relation between man and the vegetable" (I, 16); his later problem is, How is this occult relation to be accounted for?

It is on account of a certain instinctive anticipation of his later thinking, however, that Emerson, in Nature, is not wholly satisfied with Idealism as he finds it. It answers the question "What is matter?" but

80 It would have been a great gain to clearness if Emerson had capitalized the word "Nature" when he meant to use it in this latter sense; but his use of capitals is wholly indiscriminate, not only as regards the word "Nature," but even in his use of the words "Spirit," "Soul," and "Mind."

not "Whence is it?" nor "Whereto?" (I, 66), "This theory makes nature foreign to me, and does not account for that consanguinity which we acknowledge to it"; he would leave it, therefore, "merely as a useful introductory hypothesis, serving to apprise us of the eternal distinction between the soul and the world" (I, 67).

We may fairly say, then, that Nature marks the first stage of Emerson's thinking, in which the individual is "part and parcel of God," God is pure spirit in the real sense of the term, having a definite purpose and hence a certain infinite intelligence and will, and the world, so far as we are concerned, is an illusion which God is using for the education of those individuals who after all are not individuals at all.

The assertion of the claims of the individual self against this overpowering reality was a necessity of Emerson's New England training, as it was of all western civilization. In philosophy, Emerson undoubtedly found it first in Plato. But it was almost immediately after his publishing of Nature, that is, toward the close of the year 1836, that he seems to have come under the influence of Lamarck, and we find his first advance beyond that "occult relation between animals and man" which he felt as early as 1832 (Cabot, vol. II, p. 710), and which was as far as he had gone up to this time. I quote from Emerson's lecture on "The Humanity of Science," abstracted "as nearly as possible in his own words," by Mr. Cabot:

"Lamarck finds a monad of organic life common to every animal, and becoming a worm, a mastiff, or a man, according to circumstances. He says to the caterpillar, How dost thou, brother? Please God, you shall yet be a philosopher. And the instinct finds no obstacle in the objects. . . . Step by step we are apprised of another fact, namely, the humanity of that spirit in which Nature works; that all proceeds from a mind congenial with ours." (A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. II, p. 725.)

But we must know nature in its very essence, or else there is something in the universe essentially apart from us. So Emerson's next step is the establishment of the actuality of the kinship of man to external nature. Again I quote from Mr. Cabot's careful analysis, and this time from the lectures on "Human Culture" given during the following winter (1837-38):

"Man drinks-of that nature whose property it is to be Cause. With the first surge of that ocean he affirms, I am. Only Cause can say I.

But as soon as he has uttered this word he transfers this me from that which it really is to the frontier region of effects, to his body and its appurtenances, to place and time. Yet is he continually wooed to abstract himself from effects and dwell with causes: to ascend into the region of law. Few men enter it, but all men belong there" (Ib., vol. II, p. 734).

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This is the most impossible of compromises, and some sort of explanation was an immediate necessity. Man cannot "belong" in one kind of existence and "be" in another. And so Emerson makes the distinction the following year that "man is related by his form to the world about him; by his soul to the universe,-passing through what a scale, from reptile sympathies to enthusiasm and ecstasy" (Ib., p. 737). This is certainly not explanation, for it leaves an impossible dualism in the nature of man.

Emerson does little to solve this difficulty in his next series (183940): "Nothing but God is self-dependent. Man is powerful only by the multitude of his affinities. Our being is a reproduction of all the past.

The great Cause is alive, is life itself" (Ib., p. 743). But this Hegelian attitude of mind was out of Emerson's range, and he falls back with a certain sense of security, as he does all through his life, on his older and surer "intuitions"; "What are we all but the instant manifestation of the Divine energy? . . . A man is not a man who does not yet draw on the universal and eternal soul" (Ib., p. 746).

This brings us to the year 1841, in which appeared the remarkable address on the "Method of Nature," and the First Series of the Essays, in which are contained some of Emerson's most final suggestions of theory; so that we may consider from this point on, in what form the problem now appealed to him, and what was the logical if not the chronological development of his answer.

81

By idealism pure and simple, as the dilemma now appeared to the mind of Emerson, we must remain mere “ideas," whereas if we were a

81 The Journals give us little to add and nothing to subtract from this statement of the development of Emerson's thinking through these critical years. The very language of the lectures may be found under dates closely corresponding, and I find nothing of real significance which is not stated or implied in the lectures. In 1836 Emerson is saying, "Man is the point wherein matter and spirit meet and marry" (Journals, IV, p. 78). He is of course more natural and explicit in wrestling with his problem in the soliloquy of the Journal than in his public utterances, though no more sincere and direct. In the Journal from which I have just quoted he writes (page 247): "I see my being imbedded in Universal Mind. . . . I believe in Unity but behold two." It is thus that the problem appeared to him before the principle of evolution became a vital thing with him. He feels a "sympathy with nature" but finds "little access." At certain moments he knows that he exists “directly from God," and then he becomes "a surprised spectator"; and he asks pathetically, "Can't I see the universe without a contradiction?" Next he finds that beasts are "wholly immersed in the apparent," that a "common soul broods over them, they are never individual as man is" (Journals, IV, p. 381). Beyond this evidence that Emerson was reasoning and not simply grappling with mystical intuitions, the Journals for the years 1836-1841 give us nothing that need detain us.