XXIV.

FATE AND FREEDOM.

THICS have their foundation in intuition, according to Emerson. With Kant, he does not distinguish between morality and religion, but makes them one and the same, the product of man's natural, universal inspiration. He describes the moral sentiment in the very same words with which he describes the workings of religious intuition. Morality results from the direct presence of God in all things, from his delegating divine power to every atom and man. It is everywhere the same life that is manifest, the life of the great Indwelling God; so that it is the same fact existing in man and atom. "There is no difference of quality, but only of more or less." The immanent presence of God gives to all things the law of his nature, the direction of his thought. This obedience of all things to the attractions of the Indwelling God is law in nature, morality in man. This fatal necessity of obedience to the law of God is the basis of thought, but there it is made alive with moral power. "In us it is inspiration; out there in Nature we see its fatal strength. We call it the moral sentiment." 1 To the objector, he emphasizes this necessity of law and obedience:

"Let me show him that the dice are loaded; that the colors are fast, because they are the native colors of the fleece; that the globe is a battery, because every atom is a magnet; and that the police and sincerity of the universe are secured by God's delegating his divinity to every particle; that there is no room for hypocrisy, no margin for choice." 2

Emerson is not a fatalist, though he uses the word fate so often. He uses the words law, necessity, fate, in

1 Conduct of Life, p. 192.

2 Ibid., , p.

193.

a sense quite other than that usually given them. He means by them the invincible order and unity of the world of spirit, that its methods are perfect and invariable; that justice can never be violated; that the truth is always the same, and always faithful to itself. The moral sentiment speaks to us the law of God, which never changes, which can not be broken. So he says,

"The lessons of the moral sentiment are, once for all, an emancipation from that anxiety which takes the joy out of all life. It teaches a great peace. It comes itself from the highest place. It is that, which, being in all sound natures, and strongest in the best and most gifted men, we know to be implanted by the Creator of men. It is a commandment at every moment, and in every condition in life, to do the duty of that moment, and to abstain from doing the wrong. And it is so near and inward and constitutional to each, that no commandment can compare with it in authority. All wise men regard it as the voice of the Creator himself." 1

It is thus he regards the moral sentiment, as the direct voice of God to the soul of man, through intuition. His doctrine of necessity and fate is in entire agreement with it. He recognizes man's relations to nature and the force of the environment, he gives full credit to circumstances, the laws of heredity he fully recognizes. In his essay on Fate, as well as elsewhere, he has written of their influence. All conditions within which the free spirit acts, he knows under the one word, fate. By it he means the limiting, circumscribing conditions of material existence, the limits which nature sets for the action of the soul. In the following paragraphs his meaning may be fully seen:

"An expense of ends to means is fate, organization tyrannizing over character. The menagerie, or forms and powers of the spine, is a book of fate; the bill of the bird, the skull of the snake, determines tyrannically its limits. So is the scale of races, of temperaments; so is sex; so is climate; so is the re-action of talents, imprisoning the vital power in certain directions. Every spirit makes its house, but afterwards the house confines the spirit.'

"Nature is, what you may do. There is much you may not. We have two things, the circumstance and the life. Once we

1 The Preacher, p. 8.

thought positive power was all. Now we learn that negative power, or circumstance, is half. Nature is the tyrannous circumstance; the thick skull; the sheathed snake; the ponderous, rocklike jaw; necessitated activity; violent direction; the conditions of a tool, like the locomotive, strong enough on its track, but which can do nothing but mischief off of it; or skates, which are wings on the ice, but fetters on the ground. The book of Nature is the book Ji Fat:."

The

"A man's power is hooped in by necessity, which, by many experimen he touches on every side, until he learns its arc. limitations renne as the soul purifies, but the ring of necessity is always perched at the top. If we give it the high sense in which the poets use it, even thought itself is not above Fate; that, too, must act according to eternal laws; and all that is willful and fantastic in it is in opposition to its fundamental essence. Last of all, high over thought, in the world of morals, Fate appears as vindicator, leveling the high, lifting the low, requiring justice in man, and always striking soon or late, when justice is not done. What is useful will last; what is hurtful will sink."1

In morals and religion fate becomes the polar opposite of spontaneity and the laws or conditions of intuition. So frequent is Emerson's use of the word fate, many of his readers are led astray by it, and forget that his primary idea is that of spontaneity, or intuition; while fate is only the term to indicate its limits, that intuition is only for those who obey its laws. Emerson accepts both spontaneity and fate, intuition and law; but he does not attempt to reconcile them by any philosophical explanation:

"If there be irresistible dictation, he says, this dictation understands itself. If we must accept fate, we are not less compelled to affirm liberty, the significance of the individual, the grandeur of duty, the power of character. This is true, and that other is true. But our geometry can not span these extreme points, and reconcile them. What to do? By obeying each thought frankly, by harping, or, if you will, pounding on each string, we learn at last its power. By the same obedience to other thoughts, we learn theirs; and then comes some reasonable hope of harmonizing them. We are sure, that, though we know not how, necessity does comport with liberty, the individual with the world, my polarity with the spirit of the times." 2

There is fate everywhere, in matter, mind, and morals. as bound or limitation; but fate also has its lord, its 1 Conduct of Life, pp. 6, 11, 16, 17. 2 Ibid., p. 2.

limits. In man there is free will, and freedom itself becomes then a necessity. There is always choosing and acting in the soul, and intellect annuls fate. The condition of freedom Emerson puts into these words: "So far as a man thinks, he is free." 1 When a man renounces his own whims and guesses, takes the divine directions, learns and obeys the laws of God, then he conquers, and becomes the master of fate. The first step to the mastering of fate is, that we shall recognize the invariable will of God, the absolute order and unity of the universe. The second is, self-renunciation and obedience, perfect acceptance of that will and those laws, Wherever there are any facts whose law is not known and obeyed, there is fate. On the other hand, freedom is knowledge of the infinite law, and obedience to it. There is organization behind, liberty before, because intellect is constantly discovering the laws of the world, and by obeying masters them. "Liberation of the will from the sheaths and clogs of organization which he has outgrown, is the end and aim of this world." 2 All experience, all thought, leads to this blessed result:

He

"Just as much intellect as you add, so much organic power. who sees through the design, presides over it, and must will that which must be. Our thought, though it were only an hour old, affirms an oldest necessity, not to be separated from thought, and not to be separated from will. They must always have co-existed. It apprises us of its sovereignty and godhead, which refuse to be severed from it. It is not mine or thine, but the will of all mind. It is poured into the wills of all men, as the soul itself which constitutes them men. I know not whether there be, as is alleged, in the upper region of our atmosphere, a permanent westerly current, which carries with it all atoms which rise to that height; but I see, that, when souls reach a certain clearness of perception, they accept a knowledge and motive above selfishness. A breath of will blows eternally through the universe of souls in the direction of the right and necessary. It is the air which all intellects inhale and exhale, and it is the wind which blows the worlds into order and orbit." 8

Freedom within bonds, necessitated freedom, is what Emerson teaches. Here especially he recognizes the law of antinomy as developed by Kant and Hegel, by

1 Ibid., p. 19.

2 Ibid., p. 30.

8 Ibid., p. 22.

which we rise through contrasts and opposition to a higher point of view, to a higher truth, which absorbs, and holds within itself, the two oppositions. Fate and freedom are alike true, though they antagonize each other. They are the same truth seen from opposite directions, and neither phase of this truth can be spared. If, however, an explicit affirmation of free will is desired, Emerson has given it:

He

“Morals implies freedom and will, he says. The will constitutes the man. He has his life in Nature, like a beast; but choice is born in him; here is he that chooses; here is the Declaration of Independence, the July Fourth of zoology and astronomy. chooses, - as the rest of the creation does not. But will, pure and perceiving, is not willfulness. When a man, through stubbornness, insists to do this or that, something absurd or whimsical, only because he will, he is weak; he blows with his lips against the tempest, he dams the incoming ocean with his cane. It were an

unspeakable calamity if any one should think he had the right to impose a private will on others. That is the part of a striker, an assassin. All violence, all that is dreary and repels, is not power, but the absence of power. Morals is the direction of the will on universal ends." 1

The world is a unity, under the direction of perfect order; that is, it obeys invariable law. Man can elect to obey or disobey this order, to keep the laws or to break them. When he keeps them, rising to that point where he understands them as the workings of the perfect methods of God, then he gladly, of his own free will, accepts them, and finds they impose no restraints, that they are one with the highest spirit of free intelligence. When we yield up the attempt to guide ourselves, and accept the guidance of that great Soul in whom we live, then do we for the first time discover what it is to have freedom of will, to have, not the impulse and license of the disorderly soul, but the perfect liberty of those who know and joyously follow the true and the right. To this thought Emerson constantly returns, and urges the vital need of overcoming all private, selfish desires, all individual purposes and motives, all wishes which separate from the great order 1 Character, p. 356.