product of the evolving reality itself the unity of this great reality would be imperiled. Was there any compromise possible? Could there be any bridge between these two positions? The first reconciliation which presented itself was the Emanation theory as he found it in Neo-Platonism. But on this he was forced to put a highly spiritualistic interpretation of his own. For Emerson was still striving to hold to the spiritual actuality of the source of things and to a certain independent finality in the individuals produced by this eternal process. Naturally he could find in Plotinus little encouragement beyond the mere idea of a perpetual emanation and return. But would it not be a sufficient account alike of the individual and the universal, if the world were conceived as an efflux of spirit, which, embodied for a time as nature, finally works back to spirit again? Emerson's statement of this is of course highly symbolic: "It is a steep stair down from the essence of Intellect pure to thoughts and intellections. As the sun is conceived to have made our system by hurling out from itself the outer rings of diffuse ether which slowly condensed into earths and moons, by a higher force of the same law the mind detaches minds, and a mind detaches thoughts or intellections. These again all mimic in their sphericity the first mind, and share its power" (XII, 16). Now it is impossible from the very nature of things that these “emanations,” if they are of the same nature as God, could ever become "detached." Indeed, the very word "detach" is meaningless when applied to mind. Furthermore, if these minds are like the original mind and "share its power," they should be able to give to their "thoughts or intellections" another independent existence, which it is obvious we can not do; nor would we speak in the language of space and time if the original mind did not. If we are of the same nature as God, we cannot receive the impressions he gives us and body them forth as a physical universe, unless he himself does so; and what becomes of Transcendentalism if space and time are the same to God as they seem to us ? When Emerson says, "Nature is the incarnation of a thought and turns to thought again" (III, 187), he still knows very well that a thought cannot be incarnated; that if it were the thought of anyone, even of God, it could have no separate existence, could by no means evolve or turn to anything. We cannot conceive of God as sowing ideas and reaping from them a spiritual substance. If nature were no more than the thought of spirit, we would be likewise no more than parts of speechso many nouns in the grammar of God-and our subjective independence would be as hopelessly lost as ever. THEORIES OF EVOLUTION AND EMANATION 45 Time and again Emerson's Idealism does drive him to confess this very point of view, at least so far as the lower orders of nature are concerned. Thus he says boldly, "These metals and animals . . are words ... of God and as fugitive as other words" (II, 293). But while it is well enough to say that all the rest of creation is the thinking of God, Emerson cannot seriously consider himself as the mere thought of some Being. How could he become so far separate from the Eternal One as to put an interpretation upon him or upon his other "ideas"? This drives him. to the impossible explanation: "Whilst we converse with truths as thoughts, they exist also as plastic forces; as the soul of a man, the soul of a plant, the genius or constitution of any part of nature, which makes it what it is. The thought which was in the world, part and parcel of the world, has disengaged itself and taken an independent existence" (XII, 5). But in feeling this need for thoughts which are more than thoughts, which in being "plastic forces" are not thoughts at all,— Emerson was driven from his theory of emanation to a theory of evolution which precluded the emanation idea. Upon this he was still able to put a thoroughly idealistic interpretation; but that his gradual formation and acceptance of this theory did modify the type of idealism with which he started, there can be no doubt. In his first book, Nature, in 1836, Emerson feels that the evidence of our own being is "perfect" but that the world "is a divine dream, from which we may presently awake to the glories and certainties of day" (I, 66); in the essay on "Illusions," published in the Conduct of Life, in 1860, he speaks of our pretension of selfhood as "fading with the rest," and finds "that in the endless striving and ascents, the metamorphosis is entire" (VI, 303). This is the main change, from a purely idealistic interpretation of the world as illusion to an attempt to account for the presence of the individual by an evolution where "the metamorphosis is entire." Much has been said of Emerson's belief in evolution, as being an anticipation of the work of Darwin. Nothing could be further from the obvious facts than this. Except that he stood nearer to the day of scientific demonstration and had in consequence a slight leaning at times toward the scientific manner, there is nothing in Emerson which advances beyond the conclusions reached by Herder,-not to remark again that the belief in evolution is as old as recorded thought.82 Though he probably had not read the writings of Herder or Oken, Emerson had some 82 "The waters contained a germ from which everything else sprang forth" says the Rig-Veda, and with many such suggestions as this Emerson was unquestionably familiar. preparation for the reception of ideas similar to theirs.88 But no direct influence or indebtedness is necessary here. Such ideas as these are always in the air for some time before the actual Darwin verifies them, and as Emerson himself remarks, the poet is always the first to feel them, though any man might easily anticipate the discovery. "Because the history of nature is charactered in his brain, therefore is he the prophet and discoverer of her secrets. Every known fact in natural science was divined by the presentiment of somebody, before it was actually verified" (III, 176). Emerson's remained a poetic or at best a purely metaphysical anticipation of the fact of evolution, and so he stands wholly apart from all that constitutes the real significance of Darwin. Even after the theory had been established, it is in the same attitude that he looks back upon it. "Science was false by being unpoetical. It assumed to explain a reptile or mollusk, and isolated it, which is hunting for life in graveyards. Reptile or mollusk or man or angel only exist in system, in relation. The metaphysician, the poet, only sees each animal form as an inevitable step in the path of the creating mind" (VIII, 15). 83 See Dr. Edward Waldo Emerson's Biographical Sketch in the Centenary Edition (vol. I, pp. xxvi-xxx). IDENTITY OF SUBJECT AND OBJECT 47 CHAPTER V. THE PHILOSOPHY OF EMERSON (continued): THE IDENTITY OF SUBJECT AND OBJECT. It would seem that in accepting the doctrine of evolution Emerson would scarcely have been able to remain a mystic; and indeed it is often said that he wrote sometimes as a mystic and sometimes not. I think this is a mistake. In the fundamental principles of mysticism he never wavered.84 However much he wrestled with his problem, and arrived stage by stage at his conclusions through definite processes of the "understanding," he still felt a religious exaltation in the moments of his deepest insights, and this kept him firm in his belief in intuition and hence in the first-hand or original character of his perceptions. "When we are exalted by ideas," he says boldly, "we do not owe this to Plato, but to the idea, to which also Plato was debter" (IV, 24).85 In like manner, however much Emerson may have been led either directly or through Coleridge toward the "Identitäts" system of Schelling, which he is now about to offer as his final solution of the central problem of metaphysics, he arrived at his results from an entirely different point of approach, and it is this, rather than the actual results which he announces, that gives to his thinking its peculiar interest and value. "Do not teach me out of Schelling," he exclaims in his Journal, "and I shall find it all out for myself." Let us see, therefore, by what process Emerson seems to have gone forward in his thinking from the point at which we left it in the last chapter to the "Identity" theory toward which he was constantly inclining. Omitting the starting-point of the existence of spirit before its expression of itself as nature, since this expression was always a necessity of 84 To state the four propositions of mystical faith as given by Mr. Inge in his Christian Mysticism (pages 6, 7), is to state four of the most fundamental tenets in Emerson's philosophy. These are: (1) The soul (as well as the body) can see and perceive; (2) Man in order to know God must be a partaker of the divine nature; (3) "Without holiness no man may see the Lord"; and (4) The true hierophant of the mysteries of God, is love. Besides these there are many minor tenets in Mysticism as Mr. Inge explains it which are fundamental facts with Emerson, as that "Evil has no separate existence" (page 25). 85 Mysticism has no genealogy," says Vaughan in his Hours with the Mystics, but "grows spontaneously in a certain temperament of mind." Spirit (expressing stuff in) Nature Nexture then as it evolves shoare us spirit 48 its existence and could never have had an actual beginning in time, we have a logical priority which does not interfere with an ontological explanation more in accord with the obvious facts of the great evolution. We have the universal spirit as a developing or evolving reality, whose expression of itself in the successive states a, b, c, we interpret as inorganic matter, the plant creation, the animal creation; we have no longer a mere Being, self-sufficient and passive, whose "thoughts" take body as nature and then of their own initiative turn to thought again. This becomes at once a mere figure of speech by which the priority of mind stands only for the reality of spirit; and nature, in being the perpetual and neccessary and to us explanatory effect, is no more than our interpretation of the very essence of spirit. To know the Universal spirit, therefore, we must study nature in its long progress from inorganic matter up to man; and thus we shall be able to write, at least in part, a "Natural History of Intellect." This is what Emerson means when he says, "I believe in the existence of the material world as the expression of the spiritual or real, and in the impenetrable mystery which hides (and hides through absolute transparency) the mental nature, I await the insight which our advancing knowledge of material laws shall furnish" (XII, 5; and X, 74).86 Nature, as we come to know it in our study of Geology, is a "manifestation of God in the unconscious," or, as we must now interpret it, a manifestation of God before he attained to consciousness. But in his very nature, in the atoms, so to speak, of his original existence was an "outward impulse" (to borrow the word of Alexander Bain),—a “desire” to be other,—and of this desire in its constant realization, all nature and all human history is the continuous record. "We can point nowhere to anything final, but tendency appears on all hands; planet, system, constellation, total nature is growing like a field of maize in July; is becoming somewhat else; is in rapid metamorphosis. The embryo does not more strive to be man, than yonder burr of light we call a nebula tends to be a ring, a comet, a globe, and parent of new stars" (I, 194). But having made, in his own mind, a start in this direction, it seems to me that Emerson felt a great danger ahead of him. If consciousness was after all only a late step in the evolution of God, what is to save us from the terrible clutches of Materialism?-for until God attained to consciousness, he could not be Spirit at all in any proper sense of the term. I think this half-realized dread is the psychological explanation of Emerson's constant insistence upon his extreme statements of Idealism even 86 The statement is identical in both passages. |