the above extracts. They are good reasons, but they are not the best.
They do not touch the deeper secret of power. That secret lies in the
writer's pure and perfect idealism, in his absolute and perpetual faith
in thoughts, his supreme confidence in the spiritual laws. He lives in
the region of serene ideas; lives there all the day and all the year;
not visiting the mount of vision occasionally, but setting up his
tabernacle there, and passing the night among the stars that he may be
up and dressed for the eternal sunrise. To such a spirit there is no
night: "the darkness shineth as the day; the darkness and the light are
both alike." There are no cloudy days. Tyndall's expression "in his case
Poetry, with the joy of a bacchanal, takes her graver brother science by
the hand, and cheers him with immortal laughter"--is singularly
infelicitous in phrase, for it is as easy to associate night orgies with
the dawn as the bacchanalian spirit with Emerson, who never riots and
never laughs, but is radiant with a placid buoyancy that diffuses itself
over his countenance and person. Mr. Emerson's characteristic trait is
serenity. He is faithful to his own counsel, "Shun the negative side.
Never wrong people with your contritions, nor with dismal views of
politics or society. Never name sickness; even if you could trust
yourself on that perilous topic, beware of unmuzzling a valetudinarian
who will soon give you your fill of it." He seems to be perpetually
saying "Good Morning."
This is not wholly a result of philosophy; it is rather a gift of
nature. He is the descendant of eight generations of Puritan
clergymen,--the inheritor of their thoughtfulness and contemplation,
their spirit of inward and outward communion. The dogmatism fell away;
the peaceful fruits of discipline remained, and flowered beautifully in
his richly favored spirit. An elder brother William, whom it was a
privilege to know, though lacking the genius of Waldo, was a natural
idealist and wise saint. Charles, another brother, who died young and
greatly lamented had the saintliness and the genius both. The "Dial"
contained contributions from this young man, entitled "Notes from the
Journal of a Scholar" that strongly suggest the genius of his eminent
brother; a few passages from them may be interesting as throwing light
on the secret of Emerson's inspiration.
"This afternoon we read Shakspeare. The verse so sank into me, that
as I toiled my way home under the cloud of night, with the gusty
music of the storm around and overhead, I doubted that it was all
a remembered scene; that humanity was indeed one, a spirit
continually reproduced, accomplishing a vast orbit, whilst
individual men are but the points through which it passes.
We each of us furnish to the angel who stands in the sun, a single
observation. The reason why Homer is to me like dewy morning, is
because I too lived while Troy was, and sailed in the hollow ships
of the Grecians to sack the devoted town. The rosy-fingered dawn as
it crimsoned the tops of Ida, the broad sea shore covered with
tents, the Trojan hosts in their painted armor, and the rushing
chariots of Diomed and Idomeneus,--all these I too saw: my ghost
animated the frame of some nameless Argive; and Shakspeare, in King
John, does but recall to me myself in the dress of another age, the
sport of new accidents. I who am Charles, was sometime Romeo. In
Hamlet I pondered and doubted. We forget what we have been, drugged
by the sleepy bowl of the Present. But when a lively chord in the
soul is struck, when the windows for a moment are unbarred, the
long and varied past is recovered. We recognize it all; we are no
more brief, ignoble creatures; we seize our immortality and bind
together the related parts of our secular being."
From the second record of thoughts a passage may be taken, so precisely
like paragraphs in the essays that they might have proceeded from the
same mind:
"Let us not vail our bonnets to circumstance. If we act so, because
we are so; if we sin from strong bias of temper and constitution,
at least we have in ourselves the measure and the curb of our
aberration. But if they who are around us sway us; if we think
ourselves incapable of resisting the cords by which fathers and
mothers and a host of unsuitable expectations and duties, falsely
so called, seek to bind us,--into what helpless discord shall we
not fall."
"I hate whatever is imitative in states of mind as well as in
action. The moment I say to myself, 'I ought to feel thus and so,'
life loses its sweetness, the soul her vigor and truth. I can only
recover my genuine self by stopping short, refraining from every
effort to shape my thought after a form, and giving it boundless
freedom and horizon. Then, after oscillation more or less
protracted, as the mind has been more or less forcibly pushed from
its place, I fall again into my orbit and recognize myself, and
find with gratitude that something there is in the spirit which
changes not, neither is weary, but ever returns into itself, and
partakes of the eternity of God."
Idealism is native to this temperament, the proper expression of its
feeling. Emerson was preordained an idealist; he is one of the eternal
men, bearing about him the atmosphere of immortal youth. He is now
seventy-three years old, having been born in Boston May 25th, 1803; but
his last volume, "Letters and Social Aims," shows the freshness of his
first essays. The opening chapter, "Poetry and Imagination," has the
emphasis and soaring confidence of undimmed years; and the closing one,
"Immortality," sustains an unwearied flight among the agitations of this
most hotly-debated of beliefs. The address before the Phi Beta Kappa
Society at Cambridge, in 1867, equals in moral grandeur and earnestness
of appeal, in faithfulness to ideas and trust in principles, the
addresses that made so famous the prime of his career. There is
absolutely no abatement of heart or hope; if anything, the tone is
richer and more assured than ever it was. During the season of his
popularity as a lyceum lecturer, the necessity of making his discourse
attractive and entertaining, brought into the foreground the play of his
wit, and forced the graver qualities of his mind into partial
concealment; but in later years, in the solitude of his study, the
undertone of high purpose is heard again, in solemn reverberations,
reminding us that the unseen realities are present still; that no
opening into the eternal has ever been closed.
"Shall we study the mathematics of the sphere," he says to the
Cambridge scholars, "and not its causal essence also? Nature is a
fable, whose moral blazes through it. There is no use in
Copernicus, if the robust periodicity of the solar system does not
show its equal perfection in the mental sphere--the periodicity,
the compensating errors, the grand reactions. I shall never believe
that centrifugence and centripetence balance, unless mind heats and
meliorates, as well as the surface and soil of the globe."
"On this power, this all-dissolving unity, the emphasis of heaven
and earth is laid. Nature is brute, but as this soul quickens it;
nature always the effect, mind the flowing cause. Mind carries the
law; history is the slow and atomic unfolding."
"All vigor is contagious, and when we see creation, we also begin
to create. Depth of character, height of genius, can only find
nourishment in this soil. The miracles of genius always rest on
profound convictions which refuse to be analyzed. Enthusiasm is the
leaping lightning, not to be measured by the horse-power of the
understanding. Hope never spreads her golden wings but on
unfathomable seas."
"We wish to put the ideal rules into practice, to offer liberty
instead of chains, and see whether liberty will not disclose its
proper checks; believing that a free press will prove safer than
the censorship; to ordain free trade, and believe that it will not
bankrupt us; universal suffrage, believing that it will not carry
us to mobs or back to kings again."
"Every inch of the mountains is scarred by unimaginable
convulsions, yet the new day is purple with the bloom of youth and
love. Look out into the July night, and see the broad belt of
silver flame which flashes up the half of heaven, fresh and
delicate as the bonfires of the meadow flies. Yet the powers of
numbers cannot compute its enormous age--lasting as time and
space--embosomed in time and space. And time and space, what are
they? Our first problems, which we ponder all our lives through,
and leave where we found them; whose outrunning immensity, the old
Greeks believed, astonished the gods themselves; of whose dizzy
vastitudes, all the worlds of God are a mere dot on the margin;
impossible to deny, impossible to believe. Yet the moral element in
man counterpoises this dismaying immensity and bereaves it of
terror."
Emerson has been called the prince of Transcendentalists. It is nearer
the truth to call him the prince of idealists. A Transcendentalist, in
the technical sense of the term, it cannot be clearly affirmed that he
was. Certainly he cannot be reckoned a disciple of Kant, or Jacobi, or
Fichte, or Schelling. He calls no man master; he receives no teaching on
authority. It is not certain that he ever made a study of the
Transcendental philosophy in the works of its chief exposition. In his
lecture on "The Transcendentalist," delivered in 1842, he conveys the
impression that it is idealism--active and protesting--an excited
reaction against formalism, tradition, and conventionalism in every
sphere. As such, he describes it with great vividness and beauty. But as
such merely, it was not apprehended by metaphysicians like James Walker,
theologians like Parker or preachers like William Henry Channing.
Emerson does not claim for the soul a special faculty, like faith or
intuition, by which truths of the spiritual order are perceived, as
objects are perceived by the senses. He contends for no doctrines,
whether of God or the hereafter, or the moral law, on the credit of such
interior revelation. He neither dogmatizes nor defines. On the contrary,
his chief anxiety seems to be to avoid committing himself to opinions;
to keep all questions open; to close no avenue in any direction to the
free ingress and egress of the mind. He gives no description of God that
will class him as theist or pantheist; no definition of immortality that
justifies his readers in imputing to him any form of the popular belief
in regard to it. Does he believe in personal immortality? It is
impertinent to ask. He will not be questioned; not because he doubts,
but because his beliefs are so rich, various and many-sided, that he is
unwilling, by laying emphasis on any one, to do an apparent injustice to
others. He will be held to no definitions; he will be reduced to no
final statements. The mind must have free range. Critics complain of the
tantalizing fragmentariness of his writing; it is evidence of the
shyness and modesty of his mind. He dwells in principles, and will not
be cabined in beliefs. He needs the full expanse of the Eternal Reason.
In the chapter on Worship--"Conduct of Life," p. 288, he writes thus:
"Of immortality, the soul, when well employed, is incurious; it is
so well, that it is sure it will be well; it asks no questions of
the Supreme Power; 'tis a higher thing to confide, that if it is
best we should live, we shall live--it is higher to have this
conviction than to have the lease of indefinite centuries, and
millenniums and aeons. Higher than the question of our duration, is
the question of our deserving. Immortality will come to such as are
fit for it, and he who would be a great soul in future, must be a
great soul now. It is a doctrine too great to rest on any legend,
that is, on any man's experience but our own. It must be proved, if
at all, from our own activity and designs, which imply an
interminable future for their play."
The discourse on Immortality, which closes the volume, "Letters and
Social Aims," moves on with steady power, towards the conclusion of
belief. Emerson really seems about to commit himself; he argues and
affirms, with extraordinary positiveness. Of skepticism, on the subject,
he says:
"I admit that you shall find a good deal of skepticism in the
streets and hotels, and places of coarse amusement. But that is
only to say that the practical faculties are faster developed than
the spiritual. Where there is depravity there is a slaughter-house
style of thinking. One argument of future life is the recoil of the
mind in such company--our pain at every skeptical statement."
His enumeration of "the few simple elements of the natural faith," is as
clear and cogent as was ever made. He urges the delight in permanence
and stability, in immense spaces and reaches of time. "Every thing is
prospective, and man is to live hereafter." He urges that:
"The implanting of a desire indicates that the gratification of
that desire is in the constitution of the creature that feels it;
the wish for food; the wish for motion; the wish for sleep, for
society, for knowledge, are not random whims, but grounded in the
structure of the creature, and meant to be satisfied by food; by
motion; by sleep; by society; by knowledge. If there is the desire
to live, and in larger sphere, with more knowledge and power, it is
because life and knowledge and power are good for us, and we are
the natural depositaries of these gifts."
He ranks as a hint of endless being the novelty which perpetually
attends life:
"The soul does not age with the body." "Every really able man, in
whatever direction he work--a man of large affairs--an inventor, a
statesman, an orator, a poet, a painter--if you talk sincerely with
him, considers his work, however much admired, as far short of what
it should be. What is this 'Better,' this flying ideal but the
perpetual promise of his Creator?"
The prophecy of the intellect is enunciated in stirring tones:
"All our intellectual action, not promises but bestows a feeling of
absolute existence. We are taken out of time, and breathe a purer
air. I know not whence we draw the assurance of prolonged life: of
a life which shoots that gulf we call death, and takes hold of what
is real and abiding, by so many claims as from our intellectual
history." "As soon as thought is exercised, this belief is
inevitable; as soon as virtue glows, this belief confirms itself.
It is a kind of summary or completion of man."
This reads very much like encouragement to the popular persuasion, yet
it comes far short of it; indeed, does not, at any point touch it. The
immortality is claimed for the moral and spiritual by whom thought is
exercised, in whom virtue glows--for none beside--and for these, the
individual conscious existence is not asserted. In the midst of the high
argument occur sentences like these:
"I confess that everything connected with our personality fails.
Nature never spares the individual. We are always balked of a
complete success. No prosperity is promised to _that_. We have our
indemnity only in the success of that to which we belong. _That_ is
immortal, and we only through that." "Future state is an illusion
for the ever present state. It is not length of life, but depth of
life. It is not duration, but a taking of the soul out of time, as
all high action of the mind does; when we are living in the
sentiments we ask no questions about time. The spiritual world
takes place--that which is always the same."
Goethe is quoted to the same purpose:
"It is to a thinking being quite impossible to think himself
non-existent, ceasing to think and live; so far does every one
carry in himself the proof of immortality, and quite spontaneously.
But so soon as the man will be objective and go out of himself, so
soon as he dogmatically will grasp a personal duration to bolster
up in cockney fashion that inward assurance, he is lost in
contradiction."
It is thought worth while to dwell so long on this point, because it
furnishes a perfect illustration of Emerson's intellectual attitude
towards beliefs, its entire sincerity, disinterestedness and modesty.
The serenity of his faith makes it impossible for him to be a
controversialist. He never gave a sweeter or more convincing proof of
this than in the sermon he preached on the Communion Supper, which
terminated his connection with his Boston parish, and with it his
relations to the Christian ministry, after a short service of less than
four years. The rite in question was held sacred by his sect, as a
personal memorial of Jesus perpetuated according to his own request. To
neglect it was still regarded as a reproach; to dispute its authority
was considered contumacious; to declare it obsolete and useless, an
impediment to spiritual progress, a hindrance to Christian growth, was
to excite violent animosities, and call down angry rebuke. Yet this is
what Mr. Emerson deliberately did. That the question of retaining a
minister who declined to bless and distribute the bread and wine, was
debated at all, was proof of the extraordinary hold he had on his
people. Through the crisis he remained unruffled, calm and gracious as
in the sunniest days. On the evening when the church were considering
his final proposition, with such result as he clearly foresaw, he sat
with a brother clergyman talking pleasantly on literature and general
topics, never letting fall a hint of the impending judgment, until, as
he rose to leave, he said gently, "this is probably the last time we
shall meet as brethren in the same calling," added a few words in
explanation of the remark, and passed into the street.
The sermon alluded to was a model of lucid, orderly and simple
statement, so plain that the young men and women of the congregation
could understand it; so deep and elevated that experienced believers
were fed; learned enough, without a taint of pedantry; bold, without a
suggestion of audacity; reasonable, without critical sharpness or
affectation of mental superiority; rising into natural eloquence in
passages that contained pure thought, but for the most part flowing in
unartificial sentences that exactly expressed the speaker's meaning and
no more. By Mr. Emerson's kind permission, the discourse is printed in
the last chapter of this volume. The farewell letter to the parish is
also printed here.
BOSTON, 22d December, 1832.
_To the Second Church and Society_:
CHRISTIAN FRIENDS:--Since the formal resignation of my official
relation to you in my communication to the proprietors in
September, I had waited anxiously for an opportunity of addressing
you once more from the pulpit, though it were only to say, let us
part in peace and in the love of God. The state of my health has
prevented, and continues to prevent me from so doing. I am now
advised to seek the benefit of a sea voyage. I cannot go away
without a brief parting word to friends who have shown me so much
kindness, and to whom I have felt myself so dearly bound.
Our connection has been very short; I had only begun my work. It is
now brought to a sudden close; and I look back, I own, with a
painful sense of weakness, to the little service I have been able
to render, after so much expectation on my part,--to the checkered
space of time, which domestic affliction and personal infirmities
have made yet shorter and more unprofitable.
As long as he remains in the same place, every man flatters
himself, however keen may be his sense of his failures and
unworthiness, that he shall yet accomplish much; that the future
shall make amends for the past; that his very errors shall prove
his instructors,--and what limit is there to hope? But a separation
from our place, the close of a particular career of duty, shuts the
book, bereaves us of this hope, and leaves us only to lament how
little has been done.
Yet, my friends, our faith in the great truths of the New Testament
makes the change of places and circumstances of less account to us,
by fixing our attention upon that which is unalterable. I find
great consolation in the thought that the resignation of my present
relations makes so little change to myself. I am no longer your
minister, but am not the less engaged, I hope, to the love and
service of the same eternal cause, the advancement, namely, of the
Kingdom of God in the hearts of men. The tie that binds each of us
to that cause is not created by our connexion, and cannot be hurt
by our separation. To me, as one disciple, is the ministry of
truth, as far as I can discern and declare it, committed; and I
desire to live nowhere and no longer than that grace of God is
imparted to me--the liberty to seek and the liberty to utter it.
And, more than this, I rejoice to believe that my ceasing to
exercise the pastoral office among you does not make any real
change in our spiritual relation to each other. Whatever is most
desirable and excellent therein, remains to us. For, truly
speaking, whoever provokes me to a good act or thought, has given
me a pledge of his fidelity to virtue,--he has come under bonds to
adhere to that cause to which we are jointly attached. And so I say
to all you who have been my counsellors and cooperators in our
Christian walk, that I am wont to see in your faces the seals and
certificates of our mutual obligations. If we have conspired from
week to week in the sympathy and expression of devout sentiments;
if we have received together the unspeakable gift of God's truth;
if we have studied together the sense of any divine word; or
striven together in any charity; or conferred together for the
relief or instruction of any brother; if together we have laid down
the dead in a pious hope; or held up the babe into the baptism of
Christianity; above all, if we have shared in any habitual
acknowledgment of that benignant God, whose omnipresence raises and
glorifies the meanest offices and the lowest ability, and opens
heaven in every heart that worships him,--then indeed are we
united, we are mutually debtors to each other of faith and hope,
engaged to persist and confirm each other's hearts in obedience to
the Gospel. We shall not feel that the nominal changes and little
separations of this world can release us from the strong cordage of
this spiritual bond. And I entreat you to consider how truly
blessed will have been our connexion, if in this manner, the memory
of it shall serve to bind each one of us more strictly to the
practice of our several duties.
It remains to thank you for the goodness you have uniformly
extended towards me, for your forgiveness of many defects, and your
patient and even partial acceptance of every endeavor to serve you;
for the liberal provision you have ever made for my maintenance;
and for a thousand acts of kindness which have comforted and
assisted me.
To the proprietors I owe a particular acknowledgment, for their
recent generous vote for the continuance of my salary, and hereby
ask their leave to relinquish this emolument at the end of the
present month.
And now, brethren and friends, having returned into your hands the
trust you have honored me with,--the charge of public and private
instruction in this religious society--I pray God, that, whatever
seed of truth and virtue we have sown and watered together, may
bear fruit unto eternal life. I commend you to the Divine
Providence. May He grant you, in your ancient sanctuary the service
of able and faithful teachers. May He multiply to your families and
to your persons, every genuine blessing; and whatever discipline
may be appointed to you in this world, may the blessed hope of the
resurrection, which He has planted in the constitution of the human
soul, and confirmed and manifested by Jesus Christ, be made good
to you beyond the grave. In this faith and hope I bid you farewell.
Your affectionate servant,
RALPH WALDO EMERSON.