a vicarious immortality by its allegiance with literary beauty, is not entitled to the mystic degree. The hall of philosophy at Harvard is named after Emerson, and that is a good sign. Perhaps the words of "The American Scholar" may in time be understood even in Cambridge. Emerson is one of the few men in the nineteenth century whose discourses on philosophic subjects remain inspiring through many changes of belief; moreover it is Emerson who, with Goethe and Carlyle, distilled the quintessential value of some modes of Greek and German thought which in their original system have fallen to the ground. He was a humanist. He restored philosophy to the uses of life. He borrowed Plato from the schoolmen long enough to prove that Socrates was a human being. Emerson's failure to systematize may be due in part to his sane perception that system does not ensure truth, that this perplexing world will not contract itself and comfortably revolve within the geometric sphere of any logical scheme of thought. Emerson is like Plato, whose dialogues, though they may be systematized by critics, ✔ are not in themselves systematic, but are conversational and suggestive discourses. This modern lyceum lecturer talks about one broad general subject at a time, fills each theme with compressed (but not dried) matter drawn from all manner of sources, leaves his auditor with the net results of many philosophies, and passes on without a formal conclusion. Like Bacon he is an all-inquiring tourist in the region of other minds. He reads for his private uses and is far from what he calls a sycophantic and mendicant reader. It is because he dips from so many streams of thought, because he condenses an essay into a paragraph and then inserts the paragraph into any theme that will hold it conveniently, that he is charged with being disconnected and deficient in organic structure. The truth is, his work is singularly unified, not only section for section, essay for essay, but regarded as a whole from his first lecture to his last. Matter so homogeneous as his may break up into globules like spilt mercury, but only contact is required to make instant adherence and fluid reassemblage. For forty years he preached the same sermon - character, conduct, spiritual energy, courageous will, resilient belief and confident illusion. Erroneous vitality is better than dead accuracy. "We have a certain instinct that where there is a great amount of life, though gross and peccant, it has its own checks and purifications, and will be found at last in harmony with moral laws." His laudation of the will to live is a reaction against the old theological idea that will is a deplorable fact, that it is the cause of the individual's sinful unfitness in a universe perfect except for the unique vileness of man and so the explanation (which does not explain) of our inharmoniousness with an omniscient and beneficent god. Seen in the light of the philosophies that developed after him, Emerson, a gentle country parson, is not unlike a Nietzsche to the Calvanistic Schopenhauers. But necessarily the terms in which he expresses his revolt against the degrading humilities and soul sickness of theology are the terms of the religion which he has outgrown. “In spite of our imbecility and terror and 'the universal decay of religion, etc. etc.' the moral sense re X appears to-day with the same morning newness that has been from of old the fountain of beauty and strength." The source and master of the universe is still the God of Jacob, a force for righteousness fighting on our side of the battle, though he appears under the frigidly impersonal designation: "Oversoul." Emerson falls into confusions of thought; his incurable optimism simply cannot dispose of the problem of evil; yet these failings are only the inherent weakness of the entire idealistic philosophy of his time and of the revised Christianity known as Unitarianism. None of the orderly exponents of idealistic monism ever got round the stump of vice and misery. Evil is the germ of decay which eats through all their systems. The main difference between Emerson's confession of faith and the elaborate reasonings of Spinoza, of Fichte, of Hegel, is that they, creating and defending systems which pretend to completeness, must explain inconsistencies away, whereas Emerson blandly accepts inconsistencies. "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen, and philosophers and divines." The greater inconsistencies, too terrible to be foolish, Emerson ignores. "Omit the negative propositions," he says - an injunction which is abhorrent to an honest, intrepid mind, and which, of course, he vigorously disobeyed himself! It is doubtful if he compared his essay on "Fate" with his chapter on "Idealism," pared them down to their issues so that their essential contradiction might be seen. "Idealism sees the world in God. It beholds the whole circle of persons and things, of actions and events, of country and religion, not as painfully accumulated, atom after atom, in an aged creeping past, but as one vast picture which God paints on the instant eternity for the contemplation of the soul." And in the essay on "Worship” he says: "Strong men believe in cause and effect. The man was born to do it, and his father was born to be the father of him and of his deed; and by looking narrowly you shall see there was no luck in the matter; but it was all a problem in arithmetic or an experiment in chemistry. The curve of the flight of the moth is preordained, and all things go by number, rule and weight." An entire everlastingly finished universe, painted once for all on eternity, precludes the possibility that man can will anything or introduce a particle of novelty into the world by desiring one thing more than another. Yet the essay on "Fate" is a bold problem-cutting declaration that the world is continuously remaking, that the human will, however small, is the very treasure of life, "gallantly contending against the universe of chemistry"; and the eloquent peroration addressed to Blessed Unity and Beautiful Necessity magnificently begs the question. The Emersonian paradoxes: "Fate has its lord, limitation its limits," "Power attends and antagonizes Fate," "the hero masters destiny by believing in it;" "Fate involves melioration" - these are no verbal quips, but a sincere account of the matter; for the matter itself, the Free-will-determinism problem, is a paradox foisted on life by technical philosophy and by the baseless dogmas of religion. Emerson is inconsistent because life is inconsistent, and a fair attempt to describe it from one point of observation, assumed to-day, will challenge to-morrow's statement of another aspect. The disciplines of life instruct us that "good thoughts are no better than good dreams unless they be executed." Yet the end of the essay on "Success," a sermon to chide hasty activity and that spirit in American life which is condensed in the abominable motto, "Do it now," concludes with this approval of the static contemplative ideal: "The inner life sits at home, and does not learn to do things nor value these facts at all. 'Tis a quiet, wise perception. It loves truth because it is itself real; it loves right, it knows nothing else; but it makes no progress it lies in the sun and broods on the world." Emerson does not say that this is the only good ideal, but he phrases it strongly enough to show that there, for the day, for the purposes of that essay, his heart is at home. Emerson gives the antidote to each moral or immoral overdose; his inconsistencies show violently when single sentences are confronted with other sentences from distant parts of his work. Inherently he is as consistent as the human being ever is who tries to tell how God made the world and is managing it at the present difficult hour. Emerson would have us grasp the metaphysical nettle and rob it of its sting. It is life we are bent on, not problems. Whatever the ultimate constitution of the world, we know what plain human virtues are necessary to go bravely and profitably through life. We cannot dispel evil by wishing it away, as Emerson seems to say in some of his healthful, high-noon wedcings with the sun, but we can see what may be made of evil, how much of it may be disregarded, evaded and overcome. This page from Emerson and Carlyle and Fichte was written centuries |