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THE RELIGIOUS IMPLICATIONS OF EMERSON'S PHILOSOPHY

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not preclude the possibility, as surely it does not; to prove human freedom and responsibility is to prove what in the heart of us we all know, however hardened determinists we may claim to be; to prove immortality would be only, at best, the deifying of Paley, the putting of a prudential motive on all our conduct. In applying his "philosophy of intuition" to the great postulates of religion, Emerson was only proving again the final negative answer to the Transcendental Dialectic.

We have tested Emerson by the highest standards. May we not conclude that he failed to do, in the great guesses of philosophy and religion, only what the greatest philosophers themselves have failed to do, namely, to give a definite answer to our fundamental problems? Before he meets his final failure he comes, it seems to me, very far along the road of a consistent idealism; and in the account that he does take of the nature and workings of intuition he comes as close as anyone has yet come to the making of Mysticism a philosophy; and he makes the one definite contribution of showing why, if Mysticism be true, it cannot be explained in philosophical terms. The acceptance of Emerson's philosophy is, like that philosophy itself, a piece of pure mysticism. It may be recognition but it is never conviction. However sober and well ordered his argument may be for a time, it is always the religious instinct that is_speaking, and only he who hath ears to hear can receive the message. In Emerson's own poetic language, "Jove nods to Jove from behind each of us."

It is in this very fact that his greatness lies. If he had made a more philosophical appeal, I doubt if his importance would be half so great. For as it is the religious instinct that receives such truths, so religious men are always the discoverers and prophets,-never philosophers, or those whose appeal is to the intellect primarily. It is on account of its religious nature that the appeal of mysticism, either at first or second hand, is so overpowering when it comes.

CHAPTER VIII.

EMERSON'S ETHICS: THE MORAL LAW; ORIGIN OF THE VIRTUES; OPTIMISM.

I have attempted to show that Emerson in his own peculiar and original way worked through the central problem of metaphysics till he came to the Dark Tower itself. At least I am not aware that any thinker has actually gone farther with pure philosophic theory than did Emerson in his deepest insights; though of course when the masters have broken the way the mere learner may easily come as far. Emerson's philosophy is negative not only in that it goes sufficiently far and with sufficient consistency to show that a rational explanation of the universe is impossible along Transcendental lines, but more positively negative, so to speak, in that it leads inevitably to the conclusion that the final and highest result of such philosophizing is the giving up of philosophy for questions of more practical value. And so Transcendentalism, as I said at the beginning of this essay, means little or nothing apart from its practical application.

Emerson's thinking along the lines of ethics is not to be taken as the mere talk of a cultured gentleman. It is a consistent part of his idealism. Blandly superficial as he is so often and as he seems so habitually, he still has sufficient depth to make us return again and again with increased respect for the calm majesty of his thought and the high consistency of his purpose:-the purpose of bringing to the average thinking man a vital concern with these subjects, of these subjects so sterile and unprofitable in the hands of our technical theorists. But here Emerson's work commands our greater respect, since in his thinking along these lines he was more of an anticipator of later writers than in his philosophy he was an unconscious follower of the thinkers before him.

But the same things which have led men to pass by Emerson's philosophy so lightly have prevented their giving to his ethics the attention it deserves. Since Emerson's day we have mortgaged to our scholars the entire estate of learning; we have become trespassers if we dare to think outside the schools. Emerson dared; and the makers of our scholastic caste have snubbed him roundly for it. On the other hand, to those who would gladly accept him as a writer on ethics, even while denying him the rank of a philosopher, his manner of stating his principles offers the

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same obstacles. His method is still statement and restatement of his central point of view, always the same though seen in many different aspects, never bolstered up by deduction or burdened by logical proof-impertinent to one who sees the fact as fact." We should now have, in consequence, an equal task in educing his theory from his poetic form were it not that his ethical teachings are an obvious corollary of his idealism. There is no more in Emerson's ethics than the translation and elaboration of his philosophical dicta in ethical terms; indeed the ethics implies the philosophy just as much as the philosophy entails the ethics.

The coming to the plane of consciousness, it will be remembered, is regarded by Emerson as the "fall of man" (III, 77). Spirit no longer works according to its own perfect laws. "And the blindness of the intellect begins when it would be something of itself. The weakness of the will begins when the individual would be something of himself" (II, 255). This doctrine of the "lapse," which Bronson Alcott had absorbed probably from his reading of Plotinus and had poured forth in his solemn manner into Emerson's credulous ears, was applied by the latter unflinchingly to his newly formulated theory of evolution, and thus formed the basis of his ethics. We have the attainment of a moral will at the expense of innocence. And the law applies not only to us but to all creation. “The men, though young, having tasted the first drop from the cup of thought, are already dissipated; the maples and ferns are still uncorrupt; yet no doubt when they come to consciousness they too will curse and swear" (III, 174).

But back of individual freedom are the fast laws of fate, as we call all operation of law in the outer world (VI, 211). Of these laws, as I have already noted, the highest and all-inclusive is the moral law. The moral law, which in us is the moral sentiment (Ib.), is the very groundwork of our being, and thus not only we but in a deep sense total nature is moral. "For though the new element of freedom and an individual has been admitted, yet the primordial atoms are prefigured and predestined to moral issues, are in search of justice, and ultimate right is done" (VI, 209).

In remembering these two complementary principles, the whole ethics of Emerson becomes apparent at a glance. Since the universe is essentially moral, “Virtue is the adherence in action to the nature of things" (II, 151); which is only another way of saying that a man possesses all virtues when he is possessed by the great Source of all. “If he have found his centre, the Deity will shine through him" (II, 269). By this we are raised "not into a particular virtue, but into the region of

97 Compare W. T. Harris in the Atlantic Monthly, vol. L, pp. 238 ff.

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all the virtues so there is a kind of descent and accommodation felt when we leave speaking of moral nature to urge a virtue which it enjoins. . . . The heart which abandons itself to the Supreme Mind finds itself related to all its works, and will travel a royal road to particular knowledges and powers" (II, 258).

The means to the attainment of this great end, this summum bonum, so far as it requires volitional and hence moral action on our part, is obedience. "We need only obey" (II, 132). Obedience is, therefore, in a sense, the only virtue, and even it is not so much a virtue as an “act of piety." While an uncompromising self-surrender is the one condition to this Emersonian "self-realization," yet there is no scourging of the flesh, or triumphant rising of the spirit from victory to victory. It is here that Emerson's Unitarianism asserts itself in opposition to the earlier Congregationalism. "To the well-born child all the virtues are natural and not painfully acquired" (II, 259). Like the later teachers of the "gospel of relaxation," Emerson would have us yield ourselves naturally and with perfect trust and rest, to the great power within us which sustains us and which "constitutes us men."

"In like manner our moral nature is vitiated by any interference of our will. People represent virtue as a struggle, and take to themselves great airs upon their attainments, and the question is everywhere vexed when a noble nature is commended, whether the man is not better who strives with temptation. But there is no merit in the matter. Either God is there or he is not there. .

"Not less conspicuous is the preponderance of nature over will in all practical life. . . . That which externally seemed will and immovableness was willingness and self-annihilation.

"The lesson is forcibly taught by these observations that our life might be much easier and simpler than we make it; that the world might be a happier place than it is; that there is no need of struggles, convulsions, and despairs, of the wringing of the hands and the gnashing of the teeth; that we miscreate our own evils. We interfere with the optimism of nature" (II, 127-129).

But this is only one aspect of the matter. Emerson's main contention in his first little book, Nature, is that Discipline—the moral education of man-may be "The Final Cause of the Universe." On this seemingly contradictory point of view he insists again, thirty years later, in a second essay on "Character": "On the perpetual conflict between the dictate of this universal mind and the wishes and interests of the individual, the moral discipline of life is built. The one craves a private benefit, which the other requires him to renounce out of respect to the absolute good" (X, 96). And with a psychological insight as remarkable in

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ORIGIN OF THE VIRTUES

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Emerson as it is rare, he tells how this morality dependent upon freedom is produced. "But insight is not will, nor is affection will. . . . There must be a fusion of these two to generate the energy of will" (VI, 33). I might well have paused over the metaphysical and psychological significance of this sentence; but I have chosen to give it only its ethical bearing, since it is not an integral part of Emerson's Transcendentalism.

Of the origin of conscience, Emerson has therefore this account to offer: "I see the unity of thought and of morals running through all animated nature; there is no difference of quality, but only of more and less. . . . The man down in nature occupies himself in guarding, in feeding, in warming and multiplying his body, and, as long as he knows no more, we justify him; but presently a mystic change is wrought, a new perception opens, and he is made a citizen of the world of souls; he feels what is called duty; he is aware that he owes a higher allegiance to do and live as a good member of this universe. In the measure in which he has this sense he is a man, rises to the universal life. The high intellect is absolutely at one with moral nature" (X, 178).

From this account of the origin of the virtues, their classification becomes an easy matter. "There is no virtue which is final” (II, 295). "The same law of eternal procession ranges all that we call the virtues, and extinguishes each in the light of a better" (II, 293). There is, then, a hierarchy in the virtues, the lower and simpler, of course, being the earliest produced. We pass from the individual virtue of physical courage, which is the mere "affection" of love joined with the "insight"of its universal value in opposition to and triumph over the self-conserving instinct of fear; to the personal virtues of chastity and temperance, by which we improve our own natures and make them more effective to universal ends at the expense of and triumph over our natural appetites and inclinations; to the third and final type of virtue, exemplified in justice and love, which are the public virtues, and show the active operation of virtue where it exists at its fullest—in our relation to others. The public virtue, justice, will of course have its own stages of development in the history of civilization. "The civil history of men might be traced by the successive ameliorations as marked in higher moral generalizations; virtue meaning physical courage, then chastity and temperance, then justice and love;-bargains of kings with peoples of certain rights to certain classes, then of rights to masses,-then at last came the day when, as historians rightly tell, the nerves of the world were electrified by the proclamation that all men are born free and equal" (X, 181).

But if the one condition to the attainment of virtue is personal freedom, its prime essential is a certain austerity of manner. To the highest

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