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ground on which religions and philosophies are erected. Emerson, poet, mystic, ethical enthusiast, is an alert critic of his own intellectual processes, a keen judge of contemporary modes of thought and of the general motives of human conduct. Whoever tries to account for his genius, to rearrange it in the intellectual landscape, to complete it here and depress it there by later standards and by right of historical knowledge, will find that Emerson has estimated his leading ideas and his place in a certain moment of human thought with astonishing insight.

The chapter on "Idealism" in "Nature" is a compact and lucid summary of the type of philosophy then prevalent; you will look in vain for a better statement of it in any latter-day history of philosophic development. Emerson's "Lecture on the Times," read when he was thirty-eight years old, and his lecture on the "New England Reformers," delivered three years later, place local events and ideas then dominant in the position that they occupy as seen from our perspective. His intellectual horizon often seems to be at the same distance from him as from us. Much that we would say of him he has said of the forces that influenced him and included him.

Between Emerson's time and ours intervenes a revolution that came to its crisis about the year 1860, the complete triumph of the scientific spirit in all minds that are abreast of their age and in fullest possession of current culture. This revolution has entirely reordered philosophic and economic theory and has made transcendental idealism as obsolete as scholastic theology - though, to be sure, there are multitudes of men who still live in antique faiths and ignore the forefront of human thought. To see Emerson clearly we must pass back through this revolution and emerge on his side of it; without that act of the historical imagination we shall misunderstand our differences from him.

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Before Emerson's time Kant's laborious and honest Kritik, ( based on the revolutionary rationalism of Hume, had laid the foundations for a scientific study of mind. But the world was not ready to carry its implications out to their disconcerting conclusion, which is the destruction of religious and philosophic myth. In a sense Kant himself was not ready; he hedged a little, and his followers hedged still more. The age was romantic, and philosophy had to make concessions to religion. In the solid structure which Kant so cautiously and courageously erected, he left a breach opened toward vague unknowables. Ethical and political philosophy, called upon by the practical powers of Church and State to assume some of the intellectual police functions which liberalism had wrested from religion, entered through the breach and took the Kantian stronghold. Post-Kantian philosophy became a wonder-wander world of conventional ethics in poetic motley and learned garb, a solemn masquerade in which kaiser, pope, banker, and landlord were honoured guests. An unknowable Absolute and the Christian deity merged in a god too indistinct for any one to be sceptical about and too impersonal to be held responsible for the world of fact.

The world of fact was a very dismal place. Emerson, confirmed optimist, describes it with a bold hostility that no recent indictment could exceed. "In the law courts," he says, "crimes of fraud have taken the place of crimes of force.

The stockholder has stepped into the place of the warlike baron. The nobles shall not any longer, as feudal lords, have power of life and death over the churls, but now in another shape as capitalists, shall in all love and peace eat them up as before. Nay, government itself becomes the resort of those whom government was invented to restrain."

In Boston, where Emerson is now a respectable local hero, the barons are stronger than ever, and their vassals, disguised as State Militia, are defending the Castle of Seven-per-Cent. in the name of government, law and order. Emerson had remarkable flashes of insight into the motives of a social period which has not yet terminated. His way of saying what he saw was seldom so plain as the foregoing passage; it usually took a symbolic metaphorical shape. "Things are in the saddle and ride mankind." In England and America, conservatism, that is, the interests of those in comfortable circumstances of property, was in complete control. "Its fingers clutch the fact," says Emerson, " and it will not open its eyes to see a better fact." Commercial authority permitted liberalism and humanitarianism so long as they did not threaten to upset the existing régime of plutonic tyranny. Authority encouraged philosophy so long as philosophy remained too difficult or too unworldly to be dangerous. In Germany the philosopher was taught to utter discreetly and in innocuously abstract terms any conclusion of his metaphysic which might seem to question the authority of king and priest. It was Hegel's glorification of monarchy, the friendliness to political reaction which is inherent in his philosophy, that made him in due time the official voice of Prussian wisdom. In France the failure of the Revolution and the monstrous Napoleonic drama had left thought depressed, cynical and factional. In New England the austerity of Puritan ethics was a cloak for commercial trickery which even our brutal times cannot regard with moral satisfaction, and which we have therefore agreed, out of timid tenderness for old families, to forget or deny. The Boston merchant was a strong supporter of slavery; radical philosophy was either impotent or insincere; and education, nominally popular, was in the hands of ministers, lawyers and the well-to-do. In "The American Scholar," which tells what education ought to be, Emerson has revealed the poverty and narrowness of the schools of his time; and in the lecture called "The Conservative" he has summed up with marvellous power the influence of commercial interest upon thought:

"The conservative assumes sickness as a necessity, and his social frame is a hospital; his total legislation is for the present distress, a universe in slippers and flannels, with bib and papspoon, swallowing pills and herb-tea. Sickness gets organized as well as health, and vice as well as virtue. Now that a vicious system of trade has existed so long, it has stereotyped itself in the human generation, and misers are born. And now that sickness has got such a foothold, leprosy has grown cunning, has got into the ballot-box; the lepers outvote the clean; society has resolved itself into a Hospital Committee, and all its laws are quarantine. If any man resist and set up a foolish hope he has entertained as good against the general despair, Society frowns on him, shuts him out of her opportunities, her granaries, her refectories, her water and bread, and will serve him a sexton's turn. Con✔ servatism takes as low a view of every part of human action and passion. Its religion is just as bad; a lozenge for the sick; a dolorous tune to beguile the distemper; mitigations of pain by pillows and remedies; pardons for sin, funeral honours never self-help, renovation and virtue. Its social and political action has no better aim; to keep out wind and weather, to bring the week and the year about, and make the world last our day; not to sit on the world and steer it; not to sink the memory of the past in the glory of a new and more excellent creation; a timid cobbler and patcher, it degrades whatever it touches. The cause of education is urged in this country with the utmost earnestness - on what ground? Why on this, that the people have the power, and if they are not instructed to sympathize with the intelligent, reading, trading, and governing class, inspired with a taste for the same competitions and prizes, they will upset the fair pageant of Judicature, and perhaps lay a hand on the sacred muniments of wealth itself, and new-distribute the land. Religion is taught in the same spirit. The contractors who were building a road out of Baltimore, some years ago, found the Irish labourers quarrelsome and refractory to a degree that embarrassed the agents and seriously interrupted the progress of the work. The corporation were advised to call off the police and build a Catholic chapel, which they did; the priest presently restored order, and the work went on prosperously. Such hints, be sure, are too valuable to be lost. If you do not value the Sabbath, or other religious institutions, give yourself no concern about maintaining them.

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