which before he had merely assumed, does he quite come to the point of the explanation of his chief difficulty. In the last essay on Nature, though here we find the balance wholly in favor of evolution and the identity of the soul with nature, he has only the tone of explanation, with no real advance, so far as intuition is concerned, beyond his first position:

"This guiding identity runs through all the surprises and contrasts of the piece, and characterizes every law. Man carried the world in his head, the whole astronomy and chemistry suspended in a thought. Because the history of nature is charactered in his brain, therefore is he the prophet and discoverer of her secrets" (III, 176).

In like manner, in the "Experience" essay, in the "Nominalist and Realist," and in the less frequent philosophical passages in the other essays of this series, he contents himself with proclaiming again the unlimited "extent" and "validity" of intuition, while he makes no clear statement as to the "origin" of our knowledge of things. But in the introductory essay to his next book, Representative Men, Emerson no longer hesitates to draw the inevitable conclusion:

"The possibility of interpretation lies in the identity of the observer with the observed. Each material thing has its celestial side; has its translation, through humanity, into the spiritual and necessary sphere where it plays a part as indestructible as any other. And to these, their ends, all things continually ascend. The gases gather to the solid firmament; the chemic lump arrives at the plant, and grows; arrives at the quadruped, and walks; arrives at the man, and thinks. But also the constituency determines the vote of the representative. He is not only representative, but participant. Like can be known only by like. The reason why he knows about them is that he is of them; he has just come out of nature, or from being a part of that thing" (IV, 16).

Now if there is indeed a final consistency in Emerson's thought, an underlying synthesis possible for even the main elements of it, it must lie in his final belief that the intuition is due not only to the spiritual essence of the "Reason," but also to the fact that the self-consciousness of the Reason is itself the result of the evolution of "Nature." In Emerson's first period the perception of the individual "reason" is due to some inexplicable union with the universal "Reason," followed by an even more incomprehensible severance from it; but by the coming in of the evolution theory a seemingly rational explanation of intuition becomes possible.

And yet, stripping it of its transcendental coloring, what is this but the merest realism? Nominally, intuition remains to the end an “angelwhispering, which discomfits the conclusions of nations and of years" (III, 69); but in cold actuality “We define Genius to be a sensibility to

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all the impressions of the outer world" (X, 78), and genius, be it remembered, is the action of the soul when it "sees absolute truth" (I, 91).

According to Emerson, then, the common background of being rises in the lower animals to the point of instinct, which is "nature when it first becomes intelligent" (XII, 33), and "Inspiration," which is the visible working of intuition in man, "is only this power excited, breaking its silence" (XII, 32). Thus the instinct of animals, which is the same in kind as intuition in man, though lower in the stage of its development, is still "higher than the understanding” (I, 319). But this sharing of the common nature is all there is to the plant or animal, for only the Intellect "emancipates the individual, for infinite good and also for infinite ill” (quoted by Cabot, vol. II, p. 734) As mere products of nature, men are not true individuals at all. But the development of the intellectual faculties in man produces an individual in the true sense of the term, one who can transcend the common nature and impose his personality upon it, so that under this inhibitory effect the underlying nature becomes "dormant." "As the reflective faculties open, this subsides" (X, 75). It is because he ceases to share in the immediate possession of the common essence of all things, and develops into a separate entity, that "the individual is always mistaken," and therefore our prime duty is to "surrender" our will, that is, to remove the inhibitory effect of the understanding upon the divinity within us; in other words, to go into a perpetual state of "ecstasy." When we do so, the Soul lives through us, and is genius or is virtue or is love in a man, according as it "breathes through" his intellect or his will or his affection (II, 255). Later, his realization that "all nature is ecstatic" led Emerson to feel that the animal also must yield to nature in order to realize “his highest point;" that the difference in intelligence and even in morality is "only of less and more” (X, 178); but this line of thought came to him too late in life, and he stops short with it before going very far.

But though Emerson considered that "ecstasy" is a state in which the activity of the understanding is partially or totally suspended, and a deeper, instinctive nature asserts itself, yet the difficulty of this for psychology is fundamental. Since this divinity or "reason" is "complete and perfect in every man," is "adult already in the infant man," it follows that the suspension of our ordinary thinking faculties would make deities of us all. Leaving aside all equally obvious objections, this theory leaves a complete dualism in the mind of man. In so far as it has any further interest for us, therefore, Emerson's intuition theory relates itself not to his philosophical but to his religious insights, and as such we must take our final account of it.

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CHAPTER VII.

THE RELIGIOUS IMPLICATIONS OF EMERSON'S PHILOSOPHY: THE NATURE OF GOD; HUMAN RESPONSIBILITY; IMMORTALITY.

The state which Emerson describes as "ecstasy" was in his own case one of religious enthusiasm, superinduced largely, as with all mystics, by the strain of a lofty contemplation, but of course without any of the vulgar features which attended the ecstasies of those mystics whose condition was brought about by abnormal or unhealthy processes. His natural sanity and normal habits of life contributed to make his "subliminal self" well balanced, with none of the fetid and disordered dreams so common in this condition. Presumably his moments of profound ecstasy were very occasional, for of this he himself complains; and his later. attempts at philosophical construction, such as the Natural History of Intellect, contain no more of the old fervor than would naturally be due to previous habit. In his admirable essay on Emerson, Mr. John Jay Chapman notes that the mystical mood comes to us all, even in health, but is then only momentary, while with Emerson it was a prevailing habit; and this is true. But Emerson himself tells us that the "mood" varies from the slightest thrill of virtuous emotion to enthusiasm and ecstasy. Only his occasional and deepest moments, therefore, can justly be considered as being due to an abnormal condition.

What seems actually to have led Emerson to his belief in intuition is the peculiar emotional experience which seems to have attended it; he was "strangely affected" by any unusual experience, by "seeing the shore from a moving ship" and the like. "The least change in our point of view gives the whole world a pictorial air;" that is to say, it introduces a feeling of unreality (I, 55). Even as late as 1844, when this condition must have been passing away, he writes, "Life wears to me a visionary face." Implicitly he argues from his psychological state to the reality of what he believes causes that state. The experience, as Mr. Chapman says, is one common to all. There is a feeling of "otherness" which attends the discovery or reception of such a large and new idea as is related somehow to the soul's growth. Even when one is working over a problem in Mathematics, bewildered and blinded by the mere figures, and suddenly the whole large solution of it comes over him, then he seems to himself to see with other eyes; let the new discovery have a life sig

nificance and it is perfectly natural to attribute it to a divine revelation.88 There are two ways in which a belief in intuition may be interpreted. It is possible for one to accept his own intuitions, asserting their infallibility without proof; or he may lack confidence in himself and his own intuitions, but recognize their possibility in other and holier men. than he, and accept unquestioningly what those claiming to be so inspired have said. In the former class were the great majority of the lesser members of the Transcendental group; in the latter class were those who, puzzled with the multifarious problems of the period we are studying, found peace and rest in the authority of the church of Rome. And not only in the Catholic reaction, but in the development of such conservatism as Goethe's the tendency of the believer in intuitions is often away from the individualism of his own perceptions to the acceptance of what is universal,-the result of the intuition of all men; so that it is not uncommon to find the Transcendentalist a defender of prevailing institutions. Emerson's attitude shows something of a compromise between these two extremes. On the one side was his constant preaching of self-reliance, the necessary result of the belief that "not I speak but the Father speaketh through me;" on the other side that eager, expectant attitude with which he listened,-"hungrily" it is said,-to the opinions of all about him. His faith in persons, said Bronson Alcott, amounted almost to superstition.89 The seeming inconsistency of this is resolvable in Emerson's gradual inclining toward the second belief, that any other might have a finer insight, a loftier imagination than his own. It is doubtful if he would have taught his great principle of self-reliance so insistently and incessantly if he had not been by nature self-distrustful. Intuitions, he felt, must be tested by their conformity to the moral law; they are to be got, not by an effort of will, but by self-renunciation; they are to be prepared for by purity in life and thought, and to be worked out in character and action.

88 If it was this experience of exaltation that led Emerson to his belief in himself and his religious reverence for his own intuitions, the reason for his taking seriously the inspirational claims of his associates could easily be found, I think, in his interpreting in the light of his own emotion the difference between their ordinary and their serious conversation. Margaret Fuller and Bronson Alcott, for example, in their published writings have little of philosophical value, for here they wrote in propria persona, so to speak; yet their personal impression on such men as Emerson was very great. An "inspirational lecturer" who seemed to me somewhat left over from Transcendental days, betrayed in a private conversation a difference almost incredible between his attitude of mind when concerned with the petty and annoying affairs of every-day life, and when talking about the deeper things of life.

89 Life of Emerson, p. 46.

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And thus it was, with these Transcendentalists, that no faith or phase of faith, even if it had been "revealed" by a previous "intuition," could stand before a new flood of light. Brownson, one of the most typical of the Transcendentalists, went from creed to creed, each time knowing that at last he was right, and the last time (or two) knowing that he "could not be wrong." It is this assurance in the face of the obvious impossibility of confirmation that makes mysticism essentially a matter of faith, and that makes all faith, to the extent that it is faith merely, a matter of mysticism. Thus faith must always have its psychological explanation, and must be essentially super-rational or it is not faith at all. It can never allow for doubt on the one hand, or for proof on the other.

Before considering what were the religious implications of Emerson's philosophy, we must take account of one other element essential to a correct understanding of his attitude. Beyond what I have called his habit of lofty contemplation and his sense of the unreality of things, there was in Emerson a certain childlike simplicity of mind which made him feel himself, as he seemed to others, to belong to the very scheme of things, a certain sublime naturalness which led Theodore Parker to say that he thanked God in his prayers for the sun, moon, and Emerson. This feeling of kinship to nature and to God seems to be essential to the true mystic, and to be the very foundation of his faith, whether it take the form of the profound philosophic speculations of a Spinoza or the sweet childish babblings of a William Blake. The occult relation which in 1832 Emerson felt in the Jardin des Plantes to exist between the animals and man,90 and which still appeared occult to him after forty years of philosophizing (X, 20), joined with his sense of the immanence of God and the transitoriness of the "surfaces" amid which we live, was itself, and without any special psychological condition, sufficient basis for a mystical philosophy.

91

It has been said, upon how complete data of evidence I do not know, that no crime is possible to the "subjective mind" which would not be possible to the subject in his waking state. However this may be, it would seem that one's sub-conscious nature is largely (if not wholly) what he has made it. Emerson's remarkable purity of heart, his elevation of thought, the beauty and serenity of his life, led him to recognize the deity within him as of that large and passive make which we find smiling so blandly through his pages. For as "the poor Indian whose untutored mind" coins a deity after his own pattern, when in a moment

90 Cabot, vol. II, p. 710.

91 Thomas Jay Hudson: Law of Psychic Phenomena.