benefit, which the other requires him to renounce out of respect to the absolute good. Every hour puts the individual in a position where his wishes aim at something which the sentiment of duty forbids him to seek. He that speaks the truth executes no private function of an individual will, but the world utters a sound by his lips. He who doth a just action seeth therein nothing of his own; but an inconceivable nobleness attaches to it, because it is a dictate of the general mind. We have no idea of power so simple and so entire as this. It is the basis of thought, it is the basis of being. Compare all that we call ourselves, all our private and personal venture in the world, with this deep of moral nature in which we lie, and our private good becomes an impertinence, and we take part with hasty shame against ourselves." 1. Above the individual man, then, is this Over-soul, "within which every man's particular being is contained and made one with all others." It is a "Unity," "the eternal One;" and "man is the façade of this temple wherein all wisdom and all good abide."2 Each individual man is an incarnation of this universal man, and in him are all its properties expressed. There is but one Reason, which is the mind of the world; and every man is an inlet to all of it. The Over-soul descends into man; and he is a pensioner on its bounty, helpless without it. On this side of our natures Emerson sees no separation of man from God; but as this is true only on one side, he does not regard man as a mere manifestation of God. "As there is no screen or ceiling, he says, between our heads and the infinite heavens, so is there no bar or wall in the soul where man, the effect, ceases, and God, the cause, begins. The walls are taken away. We lie open on one side to the deeps of spiritual nature, to the attributes of God." 4 This unity of man and God he finds to be so intimate, that he says to us, "Draw, if thou canst, the mystic line, Severing rightly his from thine, When man is perfectly obedient to the workings of the Over-soul, and becomes just at heart, "then in so far 1 Essay on Character, in the North American Review for April, 1866. 3 Society and Solitude, p. 45. 5 Conduct of Life, p. 173. ? is he God; the safety of God, the immortality of God, the majesty of God, do enter into that man with justice" and obedience.1 "Ineffable is the union of man and God in every act of the soul. The simplest person, who in his integrity worships God, becomes God; yet for ever and ever the influx of this better and universal self is new and unsearchable." 2 In such words as these Emerson is thoroughly a mystic. Eckhart has the same meaning, when he says, “God and I are one in knowing, God's essence is his knowing, and God's knowing makes me to know him. Therefore is his knowing my knowing. The eye whereby I see God is the same eye whereby he seeth me; mine eye and the eye of God are one eye, one vision, one knowledge, and one love." The idea of Eckhart and Emerson, as it is of Boehme, Schelling, Coleridge, and all others who accept the conclusions of mysticism, is that of the absolute oneness of the Universal Spirit, that there is but one essential being and life, that this life is present in all things, that man has his life in the Universal Spirit, that all his thinking is its expression through him. Eckhart says the soul is in God, and God in her; and what she doeth she doeth in God, and God doeth in her. Tauler tells us that "the spirit becomes the very truth which it apprehends. God is apprehended by God. We become one with the same light with which we see, and which is both the medium and object of our vision." He says again, He says again, "God is a Spirit; and our created spirit must be united to and lost in the uncreated, even as it existed in God before creation. Every moment in which the soul re-enters into God a complete restoration takes place. This is when the 1 Miscellanies, p. 178. 2 Essays, first series, p. 265. 8 Fichte, in his Characteristics of the Present Age, says the in-lividual is but a "single ray of the one universal and necessary Thought' "There is but One Life, he says, but one animating power, one Living Reason, which is the only possible independent and self-sustaining Existence and Life, of which all that seems to us to exist and live is but a modification, definition, variety, and form." He again says that "it is only by and to mere earthly and finite perception, that this one and homogeneous Life of Reason is broken up and divided into separate individual persons." inmost of the spirit is sunk and dissolved in the inmost of the divine nature, and is thus new-made and transformed. God thus pours himself out into our spirit, as the sun rays forth its material light, and fills the air with sunshine, so that no eye can tell the difference between the sunshine and the air." In the godly man "God lives, forms, ordains, and works." Then hath "the created spirit lost itself in the Spirit of God; yea, is drowned in the bottomless sea of Godhead." Emerson not only sees God immanent in nature, so that its life and laws are actual expressions of his being and nature, but he is immanent in man, so that all his thoughts and his very life are God's thoughts and life. Man is an inlet from the ocean of Being, a spark from off the Infinite Altar, a needle that conducts the Magnetic Power of the universe. The Soul of the world pours its truth into him, and he is what it makes him to become. The Over-soul is that Infinite Life, in which all souls find their common origin and continued existence. It is the banyan-tree of Eternity, which sends down a multitude of shoots to grow as separate trees, but above are all united in one common life. So the Over-soul sends down into Nature its growing branches of truth, and these take root as human beings; but above they are united in the Universal Spirit. They have a life of their own, but they are nothing unless constantly sustained by that Life from which they proceed. In writing of the doctrine of compensation, Emerson says men who can not accept it do not see "that He, that It, is there, next and within ; the thought of the thought; the affair of affairs; that he is existence, and take him from them, and they would not be." 1 There is, then, but one Soul, the Soul that is over and within all things. All souls stand in like relations to the Over-soul, receive from it their life, have in them its nature, and so have like endowments and capacities. This leads Emerson to the conclusion that "the differences 1 The Sovereignty of Ethics, p. 409; North American Review, April, 1866. between men in natural endowment are insignificant in comparison with their common wealth." He goes so far as to say that everybody knows as much as the savant, because all stand in like relations to the Oversoul. This is the idea which lies at the foundation of his interpretation of history, that "there is one mind common to all individual men." As nature is a revelation of God in the unconscious, so is history a revelation of God in the conscious domain of freedom. The whole of history is necessary to realize the whole of the Soul, as each man expresses but a part of it. Yet we can best understand history by our own life, and each individual reads all history in his own person. This is true, because history is a revelation of the Over-soul, its expression in time; and each person has the key to it in himself, for he has his life also in the Over-soul. History is a repetition on a large scale of what each person experiences and knows. "Of the Universal Mind each individual man is one more incarnation. All its properties consist in him. Each new fact in his private experience flashes a light on what great bodies of men have done, and the crises of his life refer to national crises." 1 1 Essays, first series, p. 4. XXIII. INTUITION. AS like can only be known by like, as man knows follows that all knowing is a direct perception or an intuition. All the mystics, from Plotinus to Emerson find in man a supersensuous faetor, or faculty, through which we know the things of God and the spiritual world. Schelling calls it an intellectual intuition, and Coleridge knows it as reason; but it necessarily follows as a consequence of the primary ideas of mysticism. Eckhart said, "I have a power in my soul which enables me to perceive God." "I know something higher than science, says Schelling, a beholding of that which is in God." "The mortal eye, he says, closes only in the highest science when it is no longer the man who sees, but the Eternal Beholding which has now become seeing in him." How fully Schelling anticipated Emerson's theory of intuition may be seen from this statement of his teachings on the subject, "Schelling asserts that there is a capacity of knowledge above or behind consciousness, and higher than the understanding, and that this knowledge is competent to human reason, because this Reason itself is identical with the Absolute. In this act of knowledge, which he calls the intellectual intuition, as distinguished from the intuitions of sense, there exists no distinction of subject and object, no contrast of knowledge with existence; all difference is lost in mere indifference, all plurality in simple unity. The Absolute is identical with the reason which apprehends it. Because man is himself a manifestation of the Absolute, he can know the source and essence of his being only by falling back behind the limits and conditions of his phenomenal existence, and knowing himself as he really is, - God. All things are God; in him we live and move and have our being. Of course, the act is ineffable, it is the vision and the faculty divine. He who is incapable of it |