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They have already acquired a market value as conservators of property; and if priest and church-member should fail, the chambers of commerce and the presidents of the banks, the very innholders and landlords of the county, would muster with fury to their support."

By Emerson's time a few thinkers in America and else-proto where had discovered that the high phrases of the American Marxist Revolution had been but catch-words to enlist the of support Analys

of the people in a war to transfer the ownership

from British landlords and traders to American landlords and traders; school, church, and politics conspired to keep the

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people worshipping mythically noble forefathers and cheering Stussy loudly for the shadow of rights whose substance they had puted

never embraced.

From these conditions philosophy and such religious aspi-ha,

ration as had broken free from the oldest conventions took refuge in an idealistic account of life which left much of life out and created for itself a stronghold amid the clouds. The romantic spirit absorbed the best minds of the time, for only in romance was man free or at least unconscious of his chains. Most of the eloquent expression of the day in England and America and Germany is wholly in romantic terms. At the opening of the nineteenth century Fichte, a romantic in scientific guise, was the leading figure in German philosophy. Hegelism was to follow but was not yet ripe for its holy Metternichian alliances with the Kaiser and the Fatherland (that is, banker and landlord) against the revolutionary spirit.

Fichte had had his quarrels with the clergy and had been

routed from his position in the University of Jena. In Berlin he joined the literary romantics, toned down his atheism, and by his patriotic eloquence at the time of the Napoleonic invasion he became a national hero; thus this ethical idealism achieved popularity. It was carried to England by Coleridge and Carlyle, and came to America by way of Carlyle's writings and James Marsh's American edition of Coleridge's "Aids to Reflection." These works are not pure Fichtean, but a medley of various German post-Kantians. In them, however, Fichte is dominant, and his influence is the most clearly discernible of the various philosophies that underlie New England Transcendentalism and the work of Emerson.

In the sentimentally ethical universe which it pleased Fichte to create, high souls could escape from the world of fact and find at least two yearnings of human nature well satisfied, the desire to contemplate the universe as an æsthetically admirable whole and the heroic wish to be held morally responsible. This ethical and æsthetic transcendentalism drew up into itself the moral enthusiasms of the leading imaginations; though they now and again descended to the earth to attack a specific abuse like black slavery they were in the main aloof, serenely self-centred and ineffectual. They were wont, as Emerson said of them (and in his letters to Carlyle he frankly and with sadly smiling regret includes himself among the fruitless flowers of speculation) - they were wont to make severe moral demands on every one and yet were not good fighters in the common battles of life.

Every philosopher's beliefs are in part a construction of his

own temperament; he assimilates current ideas and is the product of his time, but he selects from what is about him the thing that most fits his nature. Emerson could not have composed a lifeless philosophy even from the most inhuman development of post-Kantian metaphysics. He had little sympathy, in his most vigorous moments, with such a view as a British Hegelian expresses, that the special work of philosophy "is to comprehend the world, not to try to make it better." It is, however, significant, perhaps fortunate, that the kind of idealism which came to him and his neighbours most powerfully, reinforced by the early health of Carlyle's ethical intensity, was the moral universe of Fichte. According to this philosophy the real world is a limitless arena in which the soul can realize its duties by conflict. Struggle is the source of morality. Virtue means good action, the overcoming of something in external nature or human nature. Duty is the only true thing in the world of phenomena. Emerson's phrase reflecting this idea is "the sovereignty of ethics." Things are what we ought to make them, and that is the only sense in which they really exist. Such is Fichte's simplest message, and it is central in Emerson's thought, whether or not he knew or cared for Fichte's complete works. The idea was in the air and it was so well adapted to Emerson's genius that it shows no more signs of having been transplanted from alien soils than the New England apple.

For Emerson philosophy retained its old meaning, love of wisdom. If it have no influence on conduct it is worthless; if it have a bad influence on conduct it is bad philosophy. He treats academic metaphysicians with mild irony: "Who has not looked into a metaphysical book, but what sensible man ever looked twice?" "Ask what is best in our experience, and we shall say a few pieces of plain dealing with wise people. Our conversation once and again has apprised us that we belong to better circles than we have yet beheld; that a mental power invites us whose generalizations are more worth for joy and effect than anything that is now called philosophy or literature." That phrase holds his own value. His generalizations are more worth for joy and effect than much that is now called philosophy and literature. Matthew Arnold tells us that Emerson is a great teacher of life but not a great man of letters, and not a philosopher because he made no system. These distinctions are clear and just if we grant the definitions of the terms used. But Emerson, like every man of genius, strains academic definitions; and instead of holding to their tarnished uses, we find that to learn what he is demands a new understanding of terms, that academic corrosions must be scoured off and the true colour of the metal revealed.

What is philosophy? At the present time it seems to be the study of dead men's thoughts, pursued by small groups of teachers (in those institutions which, Emerson held, are "ludicrously" called universities), and not participated in to any great extent except by students who intend in turn to become teachers. But what historically is philosophy? The answer may be found in a posthumous book by William James (a true successor of Emerson in that he also was a lover of wisdom in the old humane sense, and relieved us of much accumulated metaphysic by athletically pitching it out the window): "A view of anything is termed philosophic just in proportion as it is broad and connected with | other views, and as it uses principles not proximate or intermediate but ultimate and all embracing, to justify itself. Any very sweeping view of the world is a philosophy in this an intellectualized attitude toward life. Professor Dewey well describes the constitution of all the philosophies that actually exist when he says that philosophy expresses a certain attitude, purpose, and temper of conjoined will and intellect, rather than a discipline whose boundaries can be neatly marked off."

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In a German historic handbook of philosophy we find much space given to Xenophanes, a satirist, a Greek Alexander Pope, and much space given to Parmenides, a didactic poet. These amateur thinkers of an elder age hold a place in philosophy; but the poetic preacher who wrote "The Conduct of Life" is a footnote person in the same handbook. Jonathan Edwards, who erected his superstitions into a magnitudinous if not an architectural pile, is an admitted philosopher; but Emerson whose essay on "Fate" is alive and inspiring after half a century of disputation on the freewill puzzle, is but reluctantly acknowledged as a philosopher. In the official rolls of learning, then, a poetic fragment that is very old and not read by anybody but professors is philosophy; and a system, though it be a tissue of superstition and bad reasoning, especially if it be written obscurely, is philosophy: but a modern poetic preacher, whose writings are drenched with philosophy and whose philosophy has secured

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