cording to God's laws the second. He saw in man the epitome of nature; and he strenuously maintained the theory of the unity of the mind, that all its powers must work in common. He saw in the believing man the true worker, and he measured the intellect by the moral life.1 The universe is to him "but one vast symbol of God," while "through every star, through every grass-blade, and most through every living soul, the glory of a present God beams." All religions, he asserts, are but symbols and outward expressions of infinite truths within. "The one end, essence, and use of all religion, past, present, and to come, is this only; to keep the moral conscience, or inner light, of ours alive and shining." Hence, historic religions lost their old value to him, as they did to Lessing; and this spirit was communicated to Emerson Indeed, with this whole movement, represented by all the great Germans from Lessing to Novalis, and by Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Carlyle in England, Emerson has been in sympathy. Those ideas which became to them the universal truths lying at the basis of all thinking, he has accepted in the same spirit./ His readings of the Oriental mystics, especially those of Persia and India, have had their effect on Emerson's writings. He has found there a wide affinity with his own speculations, and a presentation of all his leading ideas. The intensity with which these ideas are there presented, the imaginative power of these writings, and the absoluteness of the soul-trust which they indicate, has attracted and deeply interested him. The teachings of his predecessors Emerson has accepted rather as the basis for a social and moral reformation of life than as a philosophy. The philosophy has been incidental, merely a ground-work of faith and conviction, not a speculative system. He has presented a theosophy rather than a philosophy in his writings, a spiritual rather than an intellectual theory of the universe. For this reason, doubtless, his real place in the` stream of philosophic speculation has so often been mistaken. Yet that place is a clearly defined one; and a 1 Crozier's Religion of the Future. comparison of his theories with those of the men already named, will show how intimate his relations with them. He has given expression to his philosophic attitude by saying it was his desire to put away all discussions and disputes for a discovery of moral laws. In a conversation with Brownson, he once said, "I find myself in the midst of a truth which I do not understand. I do not find that any one understands it. I only wish to make a clean transcript of my own mind." That is, he saw no hope of arriving at the truth, by any methods of reasoning, but would take instead that transcript of truth given to the mind by intuition. His attitude towards all dialectical and scientific methods he well expressed when he said, "A person seeking truth is like a man going out in a dark night with a lantern in search of something." So poor does he find the lantern of the understanding in comparison with the sun of intuition! It is idle, useless, to seek truth, to go in search for it; as it is a revelation, an act of God's grace in the soul. The outward world, helpful as it is, can teach us nothing but through its affinity to what is given in us by the Infinite Reason; all the methods of understanding and induction are like a lantern in a dark night. Even in his study of nature, and in his use of the conclusions of science, he constantly indicates his affinity of thought to Boehme and Schelling. In his pages will not be found. the science of either as science; but their method of looking at nature, their acceptance of it as an expression of the divine, and their theory of its exact correspondence to the moral and spiritual world, will be found everywhere through his writings. Emerson is not only an idealist, but a mystic. Individual as his mysticism may be in many of its features, he is only to be understood when placed in the company of the great mystics of all ages, and his teachings compared with theirs. That he is something more than a mystic does not make this statement any the less true. He is not a skeptic or a rationalist, in the philosophic sense; and he has no real affinity with either of these schools of thought. His mysticism has broken away from all sectarian and historic limits, and accepted the ground of universal religion. It has planted itself deeply and strongly on an ethical basis, has rejected mere feeling, and has displayed great practical wisdom. As a result, his mysticism is more in sympathy with the tendencies of modern life than that of any of his predecessors. Yet the tendencies and sympathies of his mind are clearly shown by his interest in the occult, and in the significance he attaches to dreams. As a genuine mystic, he dwells on the prophetic powers of the soul; and though he repudiates modern spiritualism, he maintains with continued emphasis his faith in the mind's supersensuous functions. NOTE. Essential aid to the comprehension of Emerson's writings will be found in Vaughan's Hours with the Mystics and Hunt's Essay on Pantheism. Though neither of these authors fully understands or appreciates his subject, yet each furnishes valuable aid to the general student of the history of opinions. The careful reader of these books will not longer doubt where Emerson belongs as a thinker. Ullmann's Reformers before the Reformation furnishes valuable aid to an understanding of the German mystics; while Professor Lasson, in Ueberweg's History of Philosophy, presents an able summary of the speculations of Eckhart and his successors. Overton's William Law, Nonjuror and Mystic, has some good chapters on mysticism, and a fair account of Boehme. Tulloch's work on The Cambridge Platonists, being the second volume of his Rational Theology and Christian Philosophy in England in the Seventeenth Century, will give a few hints of Emerson's debt to the Elizabethan thinkers. Hillebrand's Lectures on German Thought indicate to how large an extent many of Emerson's ideas were common property among the German writers of the time of Lessing and Goethe. Crozier's Religion of the Future gives the best statement yet made of Emerson's relations to Carlyle. Eucken's Fundamental Concepts of Modern Philosophic Thought traces the origin and development and present value of several of those ideas Emerson has made fundamental in his philosophy. Among other works consulted in the writing of this chapter, are the essays of Martineau and Shairp, Thompson's lectures on Plato, and the histories of philosophy by Bowen, Lewes, Maurice, Schwegler, Morell, Ueberweg, and Chalybäus. 1 See essay on Demonology in North American Review for March, 1877. XX. UNIVERSAL SPIRIT. CKHART says that God "has the substance of all creatures in himself," that "he is a Being who has all being in himself," and that "all things are in God and all things are God." This is the fundamental postulate alike of transcendentalism and mysticism. Emerson accepts it by saying there is in all things a unity so supreme that the ultimate fact we reach, 66 on every topic, is the resolution of all into the everblessed One." 1 "Under all this running sea of circumstance, whose waters ebb and flow with perfect balance, lies the aboriginal abyss of real Being. Essence, or God, is not a relation, or a part, but the whole. Being is the vast affirmative, excluding negation, selfbalanced, and swallowing up all relations, parts, and times within itself." 2 This is his fundamental proposition, the existence of Being, or God, as the substans, life, or essence of all things. He makes Being an absolute unity, outside of which nothing whatever exists. God is All in all. All things proceed from this center, and can never depart from their relations to it. All things are manifestations or revelations of God; all help to show forth his nature. "God is the all-fair," he says. He is more than that; "Truth, goodness, and beauty are but different faces of the same All." "God is, and all things are but shadows of him." 4 3 God is the life in all things, not only, but in each thing he is present with all his attributes; "so that all the laws of nature may be read in each fact." 1 Essays, first series, p. 61. 8 Miscellanies, p. 22. 2 Ibid., p. 108. 4 Essays, first series, p. 281. "The 1 true doctrine of omnipresence is, that God re-appears with all his parts in every moss and cobweb. The value of the universe contrives to throw itself into every point." When we try to define God, however, we can not; he is beyond all definition, because he includes all definitions. 66 Of that ineffable essence which we call Spirit, says Emerson, he that thinks most will say least. 2 “We can foresee God in the coarse, and, as it were, distant phenomena of matter; but when we try to define and describe himself, both language and thought desert us, and we are as helpless as fools and savages. That essence refuses to be recorded in propositions; but when man has worshiped him intellectually, the noblest ministry of nature is to stand as the apparition of God. It is the organ through which the universal spirit speaks to the individual, and strives to lead back the individual to it." 8 In Wood-notes he has written these words concerning the pervasive and immanent character of the Universal Spirit: "Thou meetest him by centuries, And lo! he passes like the breeze; He is the sparkle of the spar; He is the heart of every creature; He is the meaning of each feature; And his mind is the sky, Than all it holds more deep, more high." Emerson teaches that God is the substance of the universe, the material out of which all things are formed, and the life which animates all which exists. Not only the substance of the universe, so that all things whatsoever partake of his nature and being, but also the fountain in man, that we call the soul. He says with Fichte, "that all existence in time has its root in a higher existence above time; that, strictly speaking, there is but 2 Miscellanies, p. 59. 8 Ibid., p. 60. 1 Ibid., p. 91. |