and merges the individual with the over-soul. By books, he writes in his journal in 1824 at the age of twenty-one, "my memory goes back to a past immortality, and I almost realize the perfection of a spiritual intercourse which gains all the good, and lacks all the inconvenience and disgust of close society of imperfect beings. We are then likest to the image of God, for in this grateful rapidity of thought a thousand years become one day."

A mind thus stored and sensitized will respond now and then to an apparently slight stimulus with an extraordinary excitement and something in the nature of "vision" and "illumination." The young man reads in quiet solitude one of the more poetical dialogues of Plato, or he walks in flowering fields communing with his thoughts, or he lifts his head from his sick-bed at sunrise and beholds "the spotless orange light of the morning streaming up from the dark hills into the wide Universe." Suddenly, to him unaccountably, there is a profound stirring of his emotional deeps. A sense of sublimity fills his consciousness. His will appears to him godlike, invincible. He is elate with benign resolution. In a delighted ecstasy he feels streaming through his being eternal forces, all the wisdom and all the virtues that have ever been in the world. However we may attempt to explain, or to explain away, his sensations, he himself is incontrovertibly convinced that he has been visited and breathed upon by a power-not-himself. He has been but a passive vessel filled to the brim by an inrush of energy from the Över-Soul, from the circumfluent seas of moral power,

Such inspiration, Emerson holds, is natural to man. It is probably open to everyone who will subject himself to the requisite preliminary discipline-who will live steadily with such thoughts as Emerson entertained. Record of these visitations one may find here and there in the Journals in such statements as this: "I am surrounded by messengers of God who send me credentials day by day" — statements which an intelligent reader may accept as substantially true and essentially verifiable by the method just indicated.

This personal and direct relationship which he cultivated with the Over-Soul had a two-fold effect. On the one hand,

it quite indisposed him to render allegiance to intermediate powers. Thus he declares in a poem of 1833, "Self-Reliance":

Henceforth, please God, forever I forego
The yoke of men's opinions. I will be
Light-hearted as a bird, and live with God.
I find him in the bottom of my heart,
I hear continually his voice therein.

On the other hand, this direct relationship with the source of moral power made him joyfully obedient to the impulses of what he at various times designated as the heavenly vision, the divine necessity, or the overlord of his soul) A certain levity, almost a frivolity, which he exhibits now and then in the presence of creeds, churches, pious organizations, is actually the consequence of his entire reverence in the presence of every unmistakable manifestation of spiritual life. Like his friend Carlyle, he feels that the religious edifices of the day are become uninhabitable; the religious spirit is seeking a new house. "Religion," he remarks, "does not seem to me to tend now to a cultus as heretofore but to a heroic life. We find extreme difficulty in conceiving any church, any liturgy, any rite that would be genuine."

This sounds like a radical utterance. It is radical with the root and branch thoroughness of Emerson's inherited Puritanism, a vital Puritanism urgent with fresh power, impatient of a corrupted tradition and a conformity that withholds one from the living truth. The tendency of the traditional religious culture, he criticizes as indifferent to aesthetic development; as narrowly and incompletely moral; and as averse from the wide reaches of living truth which are open to the modern mind in the domains of science. He holds that the founder of the faith in which most of his countrymen were bred was indeed a "pure beam of truth," whose ethical utterances cannot be overprized, yet that he exhibited a "very exclusive and partial development of the moral element. . . . A perfect man should exhibit all the traits of humanity, and should expressly recognize intel

lectual nature. [Italics mine.] Socrates I call a complete, universal man."

That Emerson's is the radicalism of a conservative, bent upon holding fast that which is good, is indicated by many other references to the character and teaching of Jesus, to whom he returns again and again with perceptions quickened and sharpened by his secular culture. "How strange," he exclaims, "that Jesus should stand at the head of history, the first character of the world without doubt, but the unlikeliest of all men, one would say, to take such a rank in the world." Approaching the subject from a quite different quarter, he says, "I think the true poetry which mankind craves is that Moral Poem of which Jesus chanted to the ages stanzas so celestial, yet only stanzas." And finally from still another angle: "The heart of Christianity is the heart of all philosophy."

IV

Much has been written of Emerson's philosophical indebtedness to Kant and his German followers, and to Coleridge and Carlyle and Madame de Staël, who were intermediaries between the German and the New England transcendentalists. It is not in my power, happily it is not much to our purpose, to enter into the details of this discussion. Briefly speaking, it may be said that the German thinkers and their interpreters by their combined influence did undoubtedly strengthen Emerson's instinctive reaction against the dry and incomplete rationalism of the eighteenth century and against the Utilitarians of the nineteenth century, who to his nostrils brought a peculiarly repugnant odor of "profit and loss." But Emerson was no systematic student of metaphysics, and most of such general impulses as he was capable of receiving from the German system-makers, he had perhaps encountered in Plato and Berkeley and the seventeenth century divines before he had much cultivated his German. He ultimately made his way through Goethe, but he never became intimately attached to him or even quite reconciled to him, finding him and his aesthetic friends, deficient in "moral life."

What is still more to the point, the vital features of Emerson's philosophy are due less immediately to his reading than to that religious illumination of which we have already spoken. He arrived at the center of his beliefs by intuition. From the mechanical conception of the universe which reduced Carlyle almost to despair, Emerson emancipated himself, or rather he perfected his emancipation, by a critical examination of his own experience. This scrutiny disclosed a real world, the world of things, moved by physical energies in accordance with the laws of things. But it disclosed also an equally real world; the world of ideas, moved by moral energies in accordance with the laws, perhaps less clearly understood, of ideas. One world is associated with the other as the eye is associated with seeing; yet seeing, not the instrument of sight, is the sovereign matter. An important continuator of the Emersonian influence in our times, Professor Irving Babbitt, takes as the point of departure for his own developments these lines from Emerson's Ode to W. H. Channing:

Law for man, and law for thing;

The last builds town and fleet,

But it runs wild, and doth the man unking.

As philosopher, Emerson conceives it his chief business to explore the "law for man," to formulate it, and to obtain recognition of it as the supreme authority in human relationships. His entire effort aims at establishing human independence and a human mastership. Man liberates himself and exchanges servitude for mastery in proportion as he obeys the "law for man" and learns to make the "law for things" serve him. In thus firmly insisting upon a radical distinction between the two parallel planes of experience, Emerson is in accord with the wisdom of the ages and at variance with the folly of the times, which tended to obliterate distinctions and, surrendering to a physical fatalism, to accept the law for things as also the law for man. Those who still contend for the identity of the two laws, like to speak of their view as "realistic." It is a word to conjure

with. Emerson's view will prevail against theirs only when it is finally established as more realistic than theirs, as more accurately and adequately descripitive of the facts of nature, the experience of men.

It is important to note that what Emerson contends for as the realistic view is the "twoness" of the universe. He does not oppose a physical monism with a spiritual monism but with a fairly clean-cut dualism. It is a man asserting the equal realness but radical dissimilarity of things and ideas who remarks in his Journal, "Realist seems the true name for the movement party among our Scholars here. I at least endeavor to make the exchange evermore of a reality for a name." When the "solid men" of his day complain that his way of thinking neglects the fundamental facts, he replies that their way of thinking neglects the hypaethral facts, but that his way of thinking takes due cognizance of both: "Turnpike is one thing and blue sky another." "The poet complains that the solid men leave out the sky." This is the sunny mockery of one who was both a poet and a solid man. Emerson wove a net for casting in fathomless seas and brought home his catches by ways unknown to the fishermen; but this did not prevent his raising good apples in his Concord orchard and taking the customary road to market.

His philosophical emphasis is, however, of course upon the order of facts most likely to be ignored by the "solid men"; and because of his emphasis upon this order of facts we speak of him as an idealist and as a great fountain of American idealism. What idealism meant to him is expressed in his Journal in words which Molière's cook might have understood: "We are idealists whenever we prefer an idea to a sensation. . The physical sciences are only well studied when they are explored for ideas. . . . The book is always dear which has made us for moments idealists. That which can dissipate this block of earth into shining ether is genius. I have no hatred to the round earth and its grey mountains. I see well enough the sandhill opposite my window. Their phenomenal being I no more dispute than I do my own. . . . Religion makes us idealists.