We may now see that Emerson's early statement, that the understanding is fallen,-does not comprehend, but that "our reason is not to be distinguished from the Divine Essence" (Cabot, p. 246), is conventional, and is really no more than he may easily have found (and undoubtedly did find) in Coleridge. It is quite in Coleridge's manner, and lacks all sign of first-hand discovery. It has no philosophical influence upon his original work immediately following; and yet this sentence expresses the very utmost of his philosophical reach. Later, the rapt, inspirational tone in which he speaks shows that he is no longer attempting to solve problems, but that he is telling of things which to him are sacred. Knowing that he is foredoomed to failure in his attempt to utter that which is by its very nature unutterable, Emerson still attempts to say what this Reality is; and this seems to me his deepest thought concerning the great Problem:

"Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE. And this deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one. We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are shining parts, is the soul. . I dare not speak for it. . . . All goes to show that the soul in man is not an organ, but animates and exercises all the organs; is not a function is not a faculty, but a light; is not the intellect or the will, but the master of the intellect and the will; is the background of our being, in which they lie,-an immensity not possessed and that cannot be possessed. . . . When it breathes through his intellect it is genius; when it breathes through his will, it is virtue; when it flows through his affection it is love. . . . It contradicts all experience. . . . It abolishes time and space. The soul knows only the soul; the web of events is the flowing robe in which she is clothed" (II, 253-257).

And so that brilliant but mystical essay on the "Over-Soul" proceeds, suggesting wonderful reaches of truth to those who have had experiences like Emerson's own,-suggesting nothing at all to the mass of men or the mere thinkers. But at the point of its approach to real originality and greatness, Emerson's thought rises out of the realm of Philosophy altogether and dwells in the pure region of Religion. At this point, therefore, we must leave our attempt to trace his philosophical development, and concern ourselves with that faculty, or rather condition of mind in which the New England Transcendentalists thought the "pure practical reason" asserted its claims:-"that blessed mood," as Wordsworth calls it in his "Tintern Abbey,"

1

IDENTITY OF SUBJECT AND OBJECT

"In which the burden of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world

Is lightened: that serene and blessed mood
In which the affections gently lead us on,—
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame,
And even the motion of our human blood,
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things."

5.5

Our problem now becomes more technical and perhaps more tangible, though still dealing with elements forever somewhat vague, than the unraveling of Emerson's metaphysics has been-the chronicling of those glimmering suggestions of theory which were and were not his. What is really the meaning and significance of this belief in intuition? If it was a purely religious experience, superinduced by a certain exalted state of mind, is it to be dealt with as merely a pathological condition, and is that to negate wholly the religious implications which are derived from it?

CHAPTER VI.

THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL BASIS OF EMERSON'S PHILOSOPHY: THE THEORY OF INTUITION.

Having attempted a general analysis of what we may term Emerson's metaphysics, we are in some position to consider that element of his system which, with even greater apologies, we must call his epistem.ology.

Emerson's belief in intuition was a logical deduction from his theory of identity. But it must be remembered that while the identity theory was a gradual growth in his mind, a belief in intuition was always at the very center of his system; that therefore the meaning he attaches to his faith in intuition will vary according to the stage he has arrived at philosophically in his theory of identity. I confess that this statement would have met with surprise and probably also with denial from Emerson himself, but I think it is true nevertheless.

The usual opinion regarding Emerson's belief in intuition is that it is simply the unexplained and unphilosophical assumption of all Mysticism, namely, that the soul perceives because it is a part of the great allknowing Reality; or, as Emerson himself puts it, that the intellect's vision is "not like the vision of the eye, but is a union with the things known" (II, 304). This, so far as it goes, is a correct statement of Emerson's theory in every stage of its development, and, stated thus broadly, it is one which he never denies or contradicts. But again, stated thus broadly, nothing could be more hopeless of explanation than such a theory. By this "union," the Over-Soul not only fills but is the individual soul, just as the ocean tide fills and floods for a time the shallow brook flowing into it, and becomes one with it, and then retreats again, leaving the "brook," the individual mind, with only "a far-off memory." But this "influx of the Divine mind into our mind” (II, 263), is a “possession" which leaves no room for anything but itself, so that to say we perceive in these great moments is only another way of saying that "the Maker . . . casts his dread omniscience through us over things (Ib.); and yet, again, the individual mind must be something quite other than this universal spirit, for we are told that "we need only obey," that we have the power to "surrender" our wills, to "place" ourselves in the "stream of power and wisdom which animates all it floats," that we may "allow" the currents of the universal soul to flow unimpeded through our

being; indeed we may recognize its presence as a "joy and exultation"; and to receive it is an act of "piety."

But Emerson's "intuition" continued to tell him that these things were so, however unaccountable they might be. That intuition was not to be explained by this first general statement of it he fully recognized; and through the year 1841, when his First Series of Essays was published, he continues to state the hopelessness of any attempt at explanation. In his address on "The Method of Nature" in that year, he writes: "But at last what has he to recite but the fact that there is a Life not to be described or known otherwise than by possession? What account has he to give of his essence more than so it was to be? . . . There is the incoming or the receding of God: that is all we can affirm; and we can show neither how nor why" (I, 195). And again, in the essay on "SelfReliance," though recognizing the common origin of ourselves and of nature, he does not yet see how intuition is to be explained: "We denote this primary wisdom as Intuition, whilst all later teachings are tuitions. In that deep force, the last fact behind which analysis cannot go, all things find their common origin. For the sense of being which in calm hours rises, we know not how, in the soul, is not diverse from things, from space, from light, from time, from man, but one with them and proceeds obviously from the same source whence their life and being also proceed." For a moment we seem on the verge of an explanation. “We first share the life by which things exist and afterwards see them as appearances in nature and forget that we have shared their cause." But "if we ask whence this comes, if we seek to pry into the soul that causes, all philosophy is at fault. Its presence or its absence is all we can affirm" (II, 64, 65).

Because of Emerson's so constant insistence upon this merely mystical point of view, especially in his better known and more purely philosophical essays, it is commonly felt that he makes no advance upon it. Intuition remains a "pious reception," or at best a "glad and conspiring reception," an openness "of one side of our nature" to receive new truth; and farther than this, even Cabot says, "he did not attempt to go in the way of doctrine." 87 But though Mr. Cabot knew Emerson's writings so intimately, and his work under Emerson's own eye was always so wholly satisfactory to his master, yet there does seem to be more to say for Emerson's intuition theory than just this. In the Essays of the Second Series and in all his writings after 1844, the thought of an explanation was in Emerson's mind,—the growing desire to write a "Natural History of Intellect," which at last he tried-and failed to do.

87 A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. I, p. 235.

It was not, it seems to me, the impossibility of explaining intuition so much as the very assurance it claimed for itself that led in Emerson's mind to the demand for a deeper account of it. Indeed, this positiveness of the intuition is its own negation; for if it may ever know wrongly, so that a later intuition may contradict or transcend it, then it may always know wrongly, and there is no test for it. Though Emerson will not admit this directly, yet we find him in his later essays becoming less assertive and more inquisitive regarding the ultimate nature of this perception of actuality; and as soon as he does this the conclusion becomes inevitable that the self-consciousness of the reason is a relative matter; that while indeed the soul could not perceive falsely, yet there must be certain conditions which clog and hinder its perfect vision; that it must not be separated too completely from the understanding, and from the processes of nature by which it is derived.

When Emerson came to consider that a deeper cause than spirit must be postulated as the ground of being, the explanation of intuition was at once possible though it seems not to have been immediately apparent to himself. If he could have accepted this new solution frankly and fully, and not have bound himself down (though of course with entire honesty) to a continued adherence to those earlier "intuitions" which he had unconsciously outgrown, there would be no confusion in following out his system to its close. But the religious, the supernatural side of intuition impressed him so deeply that he no sooner made a new "generalization" than he felt the need of stating, side by side with it, his belief in the old. It is this that makes his essays so baffling, that has led so many to feel the utter hopelessness of trying to find in them any order or consistency whatever.

From the very start Emerson taught that "Nature is the present expositor of the Divine mind," and can be wholly known to man since "its laws are laws of his own mind;" and hence he could say that "the ancient precept, 'Know thyself,' and the modern precept, 'Study nature,' become at last one maxim" (I, 88). But so long as he gave even a nominal adherence to the purely idealistic theory of the dependence of nature upon spirit, every door to a possible explanation of intuition was closed to him. That he felt this, and was about to make a new “generalization" appears plainly from his essay on "Circles," in what is perhaps the most significant sentence in his whole philosophy. "Fear not the new generalization. Does the fact look crass and material, threatening to degrade thy theory of spirit? Resist it not; it goes to refine and raise thy theory of matter just as much" (II, 285). Yet nowhere in the Second Series of Essays, where he is most concerned with giving the causes of things