especially to Fichte and Schelling, "I had reason to believe that he had no first-hand acquaintance with the books."

Hedge's own knowledge of German philosophy was by no means systematic or profound, and his influence would not have been so great if it had been. "This atmosphere, rather than any form and understanding merely, of German thought," says the editor of the Unitarian Review, "rather than any formal teaching of philosophy,—which he disbelieved in and kept aloof from,-made his characteristic service to our so-called 'Transcendental' movement." 52 For Cabot's invaluable Memoir of Emerson, Hedge wrote an account of the origin of the "Transcendental Club," which shows how the influence of German philosophy was first brought to bear upon American Unitarianism:

"In September, 1836, on the day of the second centennial anniversary of Harvard College, Mr. Emerson, George Ripley, and myself, with one other,53 chanced to confer together on the state of current opinion in theology and philosophy, which we agreed in thinking very unsatisfactory. . . . What we strongly felt was dissatisfaction with the reigning sensuous philosophy, dating from Locke, on which our Unitarian theology was based. The writings of Coleridge, recently edited by Marsh, and some of Carlyle's earlier essays, especially the 'Characteristics' and 'Signs of the Times,' had created a ferment in the minds of some of the young clergy of that day. We four concluded to call a few like-minded seekers together on the following week. Some dozen of us met in Boston, in the house, I believe, of Mr. Ripley. . . . These were the earliest of a series of meetings held from time to time, as occasion prompted, for seven or eight years.'

52 "A Memory of Dr. Hedge" [By J. H. Allen], Unitar. R., XXXIV, 269.

53 This was George Putnam. But he was not fully in sympathy with the movement, and did not attend after the first meeting.

EMERSON: HIS PHILOSOPHICAL ATTITUDE AND METHOD.

The life of Emerson has been so often told that it needs no restating. One hesitates to say again that "the blood of eight generations of ministers flowed in his veins." But this is a most important thing to notice in any study of his philosophy. Emerson approached philosophy with a religious attitude. If one hesitates also to say again that after being ordained as a Unitarian minister in Boston in 1829, Emerson resigned his charge four years later because of his unwillingness to administer the ordinance of the Lord's Supper, and continued thenceforth, with the beauty and serenity of a great character, to announce from the lecture platform his inspiring spiritual perceptions, still it must not be forgotten that this was the other side of the same matter,-Emerson approached religion with the attitude of a philosopher. No philosophy was possible to him without its having a basis in religious instinct; no religious faith or form could be accepted that had not its justification in the light of reason. In his mind the two were neither separate nor separable.

If his attitude toward religion is the first thing to note in gaining a correct point of view for estimating Emerson's philosophy, his attitude toward practical conduct has also its importance in enabling us to read him with that sympathy which is essential to any sort of justice. Not philosophy for its own sake, but philosophy for its bearing on the life of men was ever in his eye, and it is on this account that he can be read without previous philosophical training. His "practical idealism" was reflected most remarkably in his life. We could not think of Emerson as living in stateliness and ease, for his teachings of heroism, of prudence, of the homely virtues, would make this ridiculous; nor yet as surrounded by scenes of embittering and debasing poverty, for his wholesome, ever-smiling optimism would then have been impossible, even to him. It is evident enough, also, that he could not have entered into the Brook Farm or Fruitlands experiments, for his shrewd Yankee sense glints forth at every turn; nor yet could he have turned away coldly from such noble dreams of world regeneration, for his humor was ever more kindly than keen, his hopes always above his expectations. And so, again, Emerson could never join in the excited tumult of the Aboli

tionists, for his soul was calm and his faith mighty; yet the murder of Lovejoy and the desertion of Webster roused him to indignation. In all this we note a certain aloofness caused by his serenity, or his optimism, or that chilliness of temperament of which Margaret Fuller complained and to which he dolefully but blandly confessed; and side by side with this we find a philosophy of which one of the main essentials was the dependence of pure thought upon practical conduct.

It is not, however, its religious or its pragmatic aspects that have caused Emerson's philosophy to be charged with a fundamental amateurishness—if I may so say—a lack of system, of philosophical consistency, indeed of that logical soundness which is essential to an original thinker worthy of any serious consideration. There is no need to remind the philosophic world that Emerson was primarily a poet. Even, indeed especially, in his prose, it is ever the poet who is speaking. We have here just the reverse of those ancient philosophers who reasoned out their systems in the form of verse; we have the appearance of philosophy but the soul of poetry. The characteristic of the poet is enthusiasm, which leads him, in his great delight over the discovery of any new truth to state it with the exaggeration which his high emotion leads him to assume. "Language overstates," says Emerson (I, 190); and the freedom of his own prose form leads him to extreme overstatement. "I would put myself in the attitude to look in the eye of abstract truth, and I cannot. I blench and withdraw on this side and on that" (II, 309). The question must inevitably occur, Does Emerson remain a man of letters, merely, who dabbled in philosophy, or is he a philosopher who chose, as the mighty Plato himself had chosen, to reformulate the thoughts of his predecessors and give them an artistic rendering?

No one who wished well by Emerson would press an analogy to Plato, whose greatness as a philosopher so easily transcended whatever limitations he may have had. But that Emerson had a right conception of philosophy, and worked at it not as a literary dilettante but with the seriousness of one deeply concerned with the problems themselves, must be recognized fully if we are to secure for our subject a fair hearing. So widespread is the belief that Emerson's inconsistencies are fundamental, his want of logic and system a congenital defect, and hence his contribution to philosophy merely an imaginative restatement with some sort of mystical interpretation of various suggestive thinkers whom he had read at haphazard, that I may be pardoned for adding to my own conviction to the contrary the authority of some whose names cannot fail to give pause to those who have too hastily assumed the truth of these singular impeachments.

Not wholly singular, one must admit, since Emerson himself in certain famous phrases has encouraged the belief. The "infinitely repellent particles" to which in playful modesty he compared his sentences in an often quoted letter to Carlyle, at once caught the popular imagination and comforted some who have found themselves on a first reading puzzled and annoyed. "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds" (II, 58) is usually quoted without the word "foolish," and I have now and again heard this splendid manifesto of the truth-seeker turned against the philosopher. But it may be said that Emerson expressly denied his ability to use "that systematic form which is reckoned essential in treating the science of the mind" (XII, 11), and that indeed he goes so far as to say, "The moment it [Logic] would appear as propositions and have a separate value, it is worthless" (II, 507); and how can one claim standing as a system-maker who says naïvely, "I know better than to claim any completeness for the picture. I am a fragment, and this is a fragment of me" (III, 83),—“I simply experiment, an endless seeker with no Past at my back” (II, 297)? But all this, so far as it was not mere modesty, came from a wise caution, and an almost morbid horror of stifling truth by forcing it into set and definite terms.54 It was on this account that he could say so blandly to a doubting follower, "Very well; I do not wish disciples"; 55 for I believe that Emerson would have felt the founding of a school an impeachment on his honesty —a closing of the windows that looked toward heaven. With all deference to the mighty Kant, no phrase would have given him a keener pain than "Aber Emerson sagt." It should be evident to anyone who feels competent to criticize Emerson's want of consistency and system that his own confession of it comes to no more than a perpetual openness of mind to receive new truth, coupled with a skeptical attitude toward the acquiring of definite results by too formal a method. But Emerson was no cheap radical, no mere iconoclast in his unsystematic method. "I would gladly be moral," he comments by the way, "and keep due metes and bounds, which I dearly love, and allow the most to the will of man; but I have set my heart on honesty in this chapter" (III, 71). And on honesty his heart was set no less in every chapter he wrote.

But it soon became a tradition to consider Emerson from the point of view to which his confessions, or rather boasts, of inconsistency and

54 In this he anticipated Ibsen, who felt that a particularly vital truth might live for perhaps twenty years before becoming false! See An Enemy of the People.

55 Charles J. Woodbury's Talks with Ralph Waldo Emerson, p. 60.

1957

formlessness so easily laid him open. Lowell, whose picturesqueness of phrase often makes his merest witticism memorable, wrote in his essay on "Emerson the Lecturer" 56 of "a chaos full of shooting stars, a jumble of creative forces"; and the poets and men of letters who have followed Lowell in judging Emerson have usually been impressed, as Lowell was, by the greatness of his mind and the imperfection of his sense of form, which latter they have rather assumed than proven kept Emerson from taking any place in the ranks of the real philosophers. Thus Holmes, in that delightful book on Emerson which has been called "the biography of a wood thrush by a canary bird," when the moment comes in which he should state the value of Emerson's thought contents himself with saying, "He was a man of intuition, of insight, a seer, a poet, with a tendency to mysticism.' And Woodberry, who disclaiming intellectual sympathy with Emerson can still say, “I feel in his work the presence of a great mind. His is the only great mind that America has produced in literature," 58 still has it as his final verdict that Emerson is to be regarded only as a poet. More outspoken, indeed overtly denunciatory, is Richard Garnett: "He could see, but he could not prove; he could announce, but he could not argue. His intuitions were his sole guide; what they revealed appeared to him self-evident; the ordinary paths by which men arrive at conclusions were closed to him. To those in spiritual sympathy with himself he is not only fascinating, but authoritative; his words authenticate themselves by the response they awake in the breast. But the reader who will have reasons gets none, save reason to believe that the oracle is an imposition." 59 Thus we see that the tradition of Emerson's inability to reason in the manner of even an ordinary thinker is well established among his literary followers; the same sort of criticism may still be found in such writers as Mr. Paul Elmore More (Shelbourne Essays) and Mr. Van Wyck Brooks (America's Coming of Age).

True, statements to this effect by more philosophic writers are not wanting, from the tirade evoked by the First Series of Essays in the Biblical Repository and Princeton Review 60 to the dissertation of Mr.

56 Works, I, 353.

57 American Men of Letters: Emerson, p. 390.

58 English Men of Letters: Emerson, p. 176.

59 Great Writers: Emerson, p. 93.

60 Vol. XIII, p. 539. The anonymous reviewer says that Emerson's is "the obscurity not of a deep but of a muddy stream, and the brilliancy of the surface is little else than the iridescence on a bowl of soap-bubbles. . . . From beginning to end there is a total absence of coherence and unity."