belongs to the order of imaginative men. The imagination is his organ.
His reading, which is very extensive in range, has covered this
department more completely than any. He is at home with the seers,
Swedenborg, Plotinus, Plato, the books of the Hindus, the Greek
mythology, Plutarch, Chaucer, Shakspeare, Henry More, Hafiz; the books
called sacred by the religious world; "books of natural science,
especially those written by the ancients,--geography, botany,
agriculture, explorations of the sea, of meteors, of astronomy;" he
recommends "the deep books." Montaigne has been a favorite author on
account of his sincerity. He thinks Hindu books the best gymnastics for
the mind.
His estimate of the function of the poetic faculty is given in his
latest volume.
"Poetry is the perpetual endeavor to express the spirit of the
thing; to pass the brute body, and search the life and reason which
causes it to exist; to see that the object is always flowing away,
whilst the spirit or necessity which causes it subsists." "The poet
contemplates the central identity; sees it undulate and roll this
way and that, with divine flowings, through remotest things; and
following it, can detect essential resemblances in natures never
before compared." "Poetry is faith. To the poet the world is virgin
soil; all is practicable; the men are ready for virtue; it is
always time to do right. He is the true recommencer, or Adam in the
garden again." "He is the healthy, the wise, the fundamental, the
manly man, seer of the secret; against all the appearance, he sees
and reports the truth, namely, that the soul generates matter. And
poetry is the only verity, the expression of a sound mind, speaking
after the ideal, not after the apparent." "Whilst common sense
looks at things or visible nature as real and final facts, poetry,
or the imagination which dictates it, is a second sight, looking
through these and using them as types or words for thoughts which
they signify."
By the poet, Emerson is careful to say that he means the potential or
ideal man, not found now in any one person.
The upshot of it all is that soul is supreme. Not _the_ soul, as if that
term designated a constituent part of each man's nature.
"All goes to show that the soul is not an organ, but animates and
exercises all the organs; is not a function, like the power of
memory, of calculation, of comparison, but uses these as hands and
feet; 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. From within or from
behind, a light shines through us upon things, and makes us aware
that we are nothing, but the light is all. A man is the facade of a
temple, wherein all wisdom and all good abide."
We stand now at the centre of Emerson's philosophy. His thoughts are few
and pregnant; capable of infinite expansion, illustration and
application. They crop out on almost every page of his characteristic
writings; are iterated and reiterated in every form of speech; and put
into gems of expression that may be worn on any part of the person. His
prose and his poetry are aglow with them. They make his essays oracular,
and his verse prophetic. By virtue of them his best books belong to the
sacred literature of the race; by virtue of them, but for the lack of
artistic finish of rhythm and rhyme, he would be the chief of American
poets.
The first article in Mr. Emerson's faith is the primacy of Mind. That
Mind is supreme, eternal, absolute, one, manifold, subtle, living,
immanent in all things, permanent, flowing, self-manifesting; that the
universe is the result of mind, that nature is the symbol of mind; that
finite minds live and act through concurrence with infinite mind. This
idea recurs with such frequency that, but for Emerson's wealth of
observation, reading, wit, mental variety and buoyancy, his talent for
illustration, gift at describing details, it would weary the reader. As
it is, we delight to follow the guide through the labyrinth of his
expositions, and gaze on the wonderful phantasmagoria that he exhibits.
His second article is the connection of the individual intellect with
the primal mind, and its ability to draw thence wisdom, will, virtue,
prudence, heroism, all active and passive qualities. This belief, as
being the more practical, has even more exuberant expression than the
other:
"The relations of the soul to the divine spirit are so pure that it
is profane to seek to interpose helps. Whenever a mind is simple,
and receives a divine wisdom, all things pass away--means,
teachers, texts, temples fall; it lives now, and absorbs past and
future into the present hour."
"Let man learn the revelation of all nature and all thought to his
heart; this, namely: that the highest dwells with him; that the
sources of nature are in his own mind, if the sentiment of duty is
there."
"Ineffable is the union of man and God in every act of the soul;
the simplest person who, in his integrity, worships God, becomes
God; yet for ever and ever the influx of this better and universal
self is new and unsearchable."
"We are wiser than we know. If we will not interfere with our
thought, but will act entirely, or see how the thing stands in God,
we know the particular thing, and every thing, and every man. For
the Maker of all things and all persons stands behind us, and casts
His dread omniscience through us over things."
"The only mode of obtaining an answer to the questions of the
senses, is to forego all low curiosity, and, accepting the tide of
being which floats us into the secret of nature, work and live,
work and live, and all unawares the advancing soul has built and
forged for itself a new condition, and the question and the answer
are one."
"We are all discerners of spirits. That diagnosis lies aloft in our
life or unconscious power."
"We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles.
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."
"All the forms are fugitive,
But the substances survive;
Ever fresh the broad creation--
A divine improvisation,
From the heart of God proceeds,
A single will, a million deeds.
Once slept the world an egg of stone,
And pulse and sound, and light was none;
And God said 'Throb,' and there was motion,
And the vast mass became vast ocean.
Onward and on, the eternal Pan,
Who layeth the world's incessant plan,
Halteth never in one shape,
But forever doth escape,
Like wave or flame, into new forms
Of gem and air, of plants and worms.
I that to-day am a pine,
Yesterday was a bundle of grass.
He is free and libertine,
Pouring of his power, the wine
To every age--to every race;
Unto every race and age
He emptieth the beverage;
Unto each and unto all--
Maker and original.
The world is the ring of his spells,
And the play of his miracles.
As he giveth to all to drink,
Thus or thus they are, and think.
He giveth little, or giveth much,
To make them several, or such.
With one drop sheds form and feature;
With the second a special nature;
The third adds heat's indulgent spark;
The fourth gives light, which eats the dark;
In the fifth drop himself he flings,
And conscious Law is King of kings.
Pleaseth him, the Eternal Child
To play his sweet will--glad and wild.
As the bee through the garden ranges,
From world to world the godhead changes;
As the sheep go feeding in the waste,
From form to form he maketh haste.
This vault, which glows immense with light,
Is the inn, where he lodges for a night.
What recks such Traveller, if the bowers
Which bloom and fade, like meadow flowers--
A bunch of fragrant lilies be,
Or the stars of eternity?
Alike to him, the better, the worse--
The glowing angel, the outcast corse.
Thou meetest him by centuries,
And lo! he passes like the breeze;
Thou seek'st in globe and galaxy,
He hides in pure transparency;
Thou askest in fountains, and in fires,
He is the essence that inquires.
He is the axis of the star;
He is the sparkle of the spar;
He is the heart of every creature;
He is the meaning of each feature;
And his mind is the sky,
Than all it holds, more deep, more high."
Mr. Emerson is never concerned to defend himself against the charge of
pantheism, or the warning to beware lest he unsettle the foundations of
morality, annihilate the freedom of the will, abolish the distinction
between right and wrong, and reduce personality to a mask. He makes no
apology; he never explains; he trusts to affirmation, pure and simple.
By dint of affirming all the facts that appear, he makes his
contribution to the problem of solving all, and by laying incessant
emphasis on the cardinal virtues of humility, fidelity, sincerity,
obedience, aspiration, simple acquiescence in the will of the supreme
power, he not only guards himself against vulgar misconception, but
sustains the mind at an elevation that makes the highest hill-tops of
the accepted morality disappear in the dead level of the plain.
The primary thoughts of his philosophy, if such it may be termed,
Emerson takes with him wherever he goes. Does he study history, history
is the autobiography of the Eternal Mind. The key is in the sentence
that begins the Essay on History:
"There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an
inlet to the same, and to all of the same. He that is once admitted
to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate. What
Plato has thought, he may think; what a saint has felt, he may
feel; what at any time has befallen any man, he can understand. Who
hath access to this universal mind, is a party to all that is or
can be done, for that is the only and sovereign agent." "This human
mind wrote history, and this must read it. The sphinx must solve
her own riddle. If the whole of history is in one man, it is all to
be explained from individual experience. There is a relation
between the hours of our life and the centuries of time. Of the
universal mind each individual man is one more incarnation. All its
properties consist in him. Each new fact in his private experience
flashes a light on what great bodies of men have done, and the
crises of his life refer to national crises." In the "Progress of
Culture" the same sentiment recurs.
"What is the use of telegraphy? What of newspapers? To know in each
social crisis how men feel in Kansas, in California, the wise man
waits for no mails, reads no telegrams. He asks his own heart. If
they are made as he is, if they breathe the same air, eat of the
same wheat, have wives and children, he knows that their joy or
resentment rises to the same point as his own. The inviolate soul
is in perpetual telegraphic communication with the Source of
events, has earlier information, a private despatch, which relieves
him of the terror which presses on the rest of the community."
"We are always coming up with the emphatic facts of history in our
private experience, and verifying them here. All history becomes
subjective; in other words, there is properly no history; only
biography. Every mind must know the whole lesson for itself,--must
go over the whole ground. What it does not see, what it does not
live, it does not know."
In the appreciation of scientific facts the same method avails. Tyndall
commends Emerson as "a poet and a profoundly religious man, who is
really and entirely undaunted by the discoveries of science, past,
present, or prospective." The praise seems to imply some misconception
of Emerson's position. Tyndall intimates that Emerson is undaunted where
others fear. But this is not so. No man deserves commendation for not
dreading precisely what he desires. Emerson, by his principle, is
delivered from the alarm of the religious man who has a creed to defend,
and from the defiance of the scientific man who has creeds to assail. To
him Nature is but the symbol of spirit; this the scientific men, by
their discoveries, are continually proving. The faster they disclose
facts, and the more accurately, the more brilliantly do they illustrate
the lessons of the perfect wisdom. For the scientific _method_ he
professes no deep respect; for the scientific _assumptions_ none
whatever. He begins at the opposite end. They start with matter, he
starts with mind. They feel their way up, he feels his way down. They
observe phenomena, he watches thoughts. They fancy themselves to be
gradually pushing away as illusions the so-called entities of the soul;
he dwells serenely with those entities, rejoicing to see men paying
jubilant honor to what they mean to overturn. The facts they bring in,
chemical, physiological, biological, Huxley's facts, Helmholtz's,
Darwin's, Tyndall's, Spencer's, the ugly facts which the theologians
dispute, he accepts with eager hands, and uses to demonstrate the force
and harmony of the spiritual laws.
"Science," he says, "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
exists in system, in relation. The metaphysician, the poet, only
sees each animal form as an inevitable step in the path of the
creating mind." "The savans are chatty and vain; but hold them hard
to principle and definition, and they become mute and near-sighted.
What is motion? What is beauty? What is matter? What is life? What
is force? Push them hard and they will not be loquacious. They will
come to Plato, Proclus and Swedenborg. The invisible and
imponderable is the sole fact." "The atomic theory is only an
interior process _produced_, as geometers say, or the effect of a
foregone metaphysical theory. Swedenborg saw gravity to be only an
external of the irresistible attractions of affection and faith.
Mountains and oceans we think we understand. Yes, so long as they
are contented to be such, and are safe with the geologist; but when
they are melted in Promethean alembics and come out men; and then
melted again, come out woods, without any abatement, but with an
exaltation of power!"
Emerson is faithful in applying his principle to social institutions and
laws. His faith in ideal justice and love never blenches. In every
emergency, political, civil, national, he has been true to his
regenerating idea; true as a recreator from the inside, rather than as a
reformer of the outside world. A profounder, more consistent, more
uncompromising radical does not exist; a less heated, ruffled or anxious
one cannot be thought of. He scarcely ever suggested measures, rarely
joined in public assemblies, did not feel at home among politicians or
agitators. But his thought never swerved from the line of perfect
rectitude, his sympathies were always human. His heart was in the
anti-slavery movement from the beginning. He was abroad in its stormy
days, his steadfast bearing and cheerful countenance carrying hope
whenever he appeared. His name stood with that of his wife in the list
of signers to the call for the first National Woman's Rights Convention,
in 1850. The Massachusetts Historical Society, the American Society of
Arts and Sciences have honored themselves by electing him a member; the
Alumni of Harvard University joyfully made him an overseer; he was
proposed as rector of the University of Glasgow. Such confidence did the
great idealist inspire, that he has been even called to the duty of
Examiner at West Point Military Academy. His name is spoken in no
company with other than respect, and his influence is felt in places
where it is not acknowledged, and would be officially disavowed.
Mr. A. B. Alcott, a townsman of Mr. Emerson, and a close acquaintance,
in his "Concord Days" says pleasant things of his friend, just and
discerning things, as well as pleasant.
"Consider," he says, "how largely our letters have been enriched by
his contributions. Consider, too, the change his views have wrought
in our methods of thinking; how he has won over the bigot, the
unbeliever, at least to tolerance and moderation, if not
acknowledgment, by his circumspection and candor of statement." "A
poet, speaking to individuals as few others can speak, and to
persons in their privileged moments, he is heard as none others
are. 'Tis every thing to have a true believer in the world, dealing
with men and matters as if they were divine in idea and real in
fact, meeting persons and events at a glance, directly, not at a
millionth remove, and so passing fair and fresh into life and
literature." "His compositions affect us, not as logic linked in
syllogisms, but as voluntaries rather, as preludes, in which one is
not tied to any design of air, but may vary his key or not at
pleasure, as if improvised without any particular scope of
argument; each period, paragraph, being a perfect note in itself,
however it may chance chime with its accompaniments in the piece,
as a waltz of wandering stars, a dance of Hesperus with Orion."
After this, one is surprised to hear Mr. Alcott say, "I know of but one
subtraction from the pleasure the reading of his books--shall I say his
conversation?--gives me; his pains to be impersonal or discreet, as if
he feared any the least intrusion of himself were an offence offered to
self-respect, the courtesy due to intercourse and authorship." To others
this exquisite reserve, this delicate withdrawal behind his thought, has
seemed not only one of Emerson's peculiar charms, but one of his most
subtle powers. Personal magnetism is very delightful for the moment. The
exhibition of attractive personal traits is interesting in the lecture
room; sometimes in the parlor. The public, large or small, enjoy
confidences. But in an age of personalities, voluntary and involuntary,
the man who keeps his individual affairs in the background, tells
nothing of his private history, holds in his own breast his petty
concerns and opinions, and lets thoughts flow through him, as light
streams through plate glass, is more than attractive--is noble, is
venerable. To his impersonality in his books and addresses, Emerson owes
perhaps a large measure of his extraordinary influence. You may search
his volumes in vain for a trace of egotism. In the lecture room, he
seems to be so completely under the spell of his idea, so wholly
abstracted from his audience, that he is as one who waits for the
thoughts to come, and drops them out one by one, in a species of
soliloquy or trance. He is a bodiless idea. When he speaks or writes,
the power is that of pure mind. The incidental, accidental, occasional,
does not intrude. No abatement on the score of personal antipathy needs
to be made. The thought is allowed to present and commend itself. Hence,
when so many thoughts are forgotten, buried beneath affectation and
verbiage, his gain in brilliancy and value as time goes on; and in an
age of ephemeral literature his books find new readers, his mind exerts
wider sway. That his philosophy can be recommended as a sound rule to
live by for ordinary practitioners may be questioned. It is better as
inspiration than as prescription. For maxims it were wiser to go to
Bentham, Mill or Bain. The plodders had best keep to the beaten road.
But for them who need an atmosphere for wings, who require the impulse
of great motives, the lift of upbearing aspirations--for the
imaginative, the passionate, the susceptible, who can achieve nothing
unless they attempt the impossible--Emerson is the master. A single
thrill sent from his heart to ours is worth more to the heart that feels
it, than all the schedules of motive the utilitarian can offer.
X.
THE MYSTIC.
If among the representatives of spiritual philosophy the first place
belongs to Mr. Emerson, the second must be assigned to Mr. Amos Bronson
Alcott,--older than Mr. Emerson by four years (he was born in 1779), a
contemporary in thought, a companion, for years a fellow townsman, and,
if that were possible, more purely and exclusively a devotee of
spiritual ideas. Mr. Alcott may justly be called a mystic--one of the
very small class of persons who accept without qualification, and
constantly teach the doctrine of the soul's primacy and pre-eminence. He
is not a learned man, in the ordinary sense of the term; not a man of
versatile mind or various tastes; not a man of general information in
worldly or even literary affairs; not a man of extensive commerce with
books. Though a reader, and a constant and faithful one, his reading has
been limited to books of poetry--chiefly of the meditative and interior
sort--and works of spiritual philosophy. Plato, Plotinus, Proclus,
Jamblichus, Pythagoras, Boehme, Swedenborg, Fludd, Pordage, Henry More,
Law, Crashaw, Selden, are the names oftener than any on his pages and
lips. He early made acquaintance with Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress,"
and never ceased to hold it exceedingly precious, at one period making
it a rule to read the volume once a year. His books are his friends; his
regard for them seems to be personal; he enjoys their society with the
feeling that he gives as well as receives. He loves them in part because
they love him; consequently, in all his quoting of them, his own mind
comes in as introducer and voucher as it were. His indebtedness to them
is expressed with the cordiality of an intimate, rather than with the
gratitude of a disciple. His own mind is so wakeful and thoughtful, so
quick and ready to take the initiative, that it is hard to say in what
respect even his favorite and familiar authors have enriched him. What
was not originally his own, is so entirely made his own by sympathetic
absorption, that the contribution which others have made is not to be
distinguished from his native stores. Few men seem less dependent on
literature than he.
Mr. Alcott is a thinker, interior, solitary, deeply conversant with the
secrets of his own mind, like thinkers of his order, clear, earnest, but
not otherwise than monotonous from the reiteration of his primitive
ideas. We have called him a mystic. Bearing in mind the derivations of
the word--[Greek: myein]--to brood, to meditate, to shut one's self up
in the recesses of consciousness, to sink into the depths of one's own
being for the purpose of exploring the world which that being contains;
of discovering how deep and boundless it is, of meeting in its retreats
the form of the Infinite Being who walks there in the evening, and makes
his voice audible in the mysterious whispers that breathe over its
plains,--it well describes him. He is a philosopher of that school;
instead of seeking wisdom by intellectual processes, using induction and
deduction, and creeping step by step towards his goal,--he appeals at
once to the testimony of consciousness, claims immediate insight, and
instead of hazarding a doctrine which he has argued, announces a truth
which he has seen; he studies the mystery of being in its inward
disclosures, contemplates ultimate laws and fundamental data in his own
soul.
While Mr. Emerson's idealism was nourished--so far as it was supplied
with nourishment from foreign sources--by the genius of India, Mr.
Alcott's was fed by the speculation of Greece. Kant was not his master,
neither was Fichte nor Schelling, but Pythagoras rather; Pythagoras more
than Plato, with whom, notwithstanding his great admiration, he is less
intimately allied. He talks about Plato, he talks Pythagoras. Of the
latter he says: