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LEsson 4a
Emerson, the Torch-Bearer.
I shall not attempt to present, even briefly, an account of
the life and work of Emerson. The facts regarding the man
and his work have been told, and retold, by far abler pens.
The libraries contain many books giving this information from
the viewpoints of their respective writers. The encyclopedias
give full accounts, more or less impartial, regarding the career
of this brilliant star which blazed in the firmament of thought,
and which, although it has been resolved into its original
elements, still serves to brighten the minds and lives of men
to-day, and will serve a like purpose for many generations to
come. For our present purpose it is sufficient to consider the
philosophy of the man only in its relation to, and connection
with, the spirit of the thought of to-day which so many think
has risen suddenly without an especial cause. As Plato says:
The problem of philosophy is, for all that exists conditionally,
to find a ground unconditioned and absolute. From his first
notable work, entitled Nature, Emerson sought to establish
his idea regarding that ground unconditioned and absolute.
In considering the philosophy of Emerson, one must
not expect him to proceed, as have the majority of other
philosophers, by scientific and logical reasoning his method
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36
is rather intuitional than rational, in the ordinary usage of the
latter term. Trent says of him:
Being himself a man of many intuitions, and of wonderful vigor
in phrasing them, he is to be, regarded as a prophet rather than as
a philosopher. He sought, to construct no system, but stood for a
constant idealistic impulse. What he wrote was not based primarily on
experience, nor did he ever write as the so-called man of the world.
He is criticized for relying chiefly or altogether upon his intuitive
consciousness, instead of submitting his generalization to the test of
reason.
Emerson was essentially an idealist. Personally, he preferred
the latter term to, that of Transcendentalist, as which he was
classed by the men of his day, and which causes his philosophy
to be termed Transcendentalism. He said that the majority
of people did not know what they meant by the latter term.
He said, whilst in the midst of the work of the Transcendental
Movement:
What is popularly called Transcendentalism among us is Idealism
Idealism as it appears in 1842. The Idealism of the present day acquired
the name of Transcendentalism by the use of that term by Immanuel
Kant of Konigsberg, who replied to the skeptical philosophy of Locke,
which insisted that there was nothing in the intellect which was not
previously in the experience of the senses, by showing that there was
a very important class of ideas, or imperative forms, which did not
come by experience, but through which experience was acquired; that
these were intuitions of the mind itself; and he denominated them
Transcendental forms. The extraordinary profoundness and precision
of that man s thinking have given vogue to his nomenclature, in Europe
and America to that extent, that whatever belongs to the class of
intuitive thought is popularly called at the present day, Transcendental.
Emerson, the Torch-Bearer.
37
Emerson makes the following distinction and definition of
Idealism:

As thinkers, mankind have ever divided into two sects, Materialists

and Idealists; the first class founded on experience, the second on
consciousness; they perceive that the senses are not final; they give
us representations of things, but what the things themselves are they
cannot tell. The Materialist insists upon facts, on history, on the force
of circumstances, and the animal wants of man; the Idealist, on the
power of Thought and of Will, on inspiration, on miracle, on individual
culture. The Idealist concedes all that the other affirms. and then asks
him for his grounds of assurance that things are as his senses represent
them. But, I, he says, affirm facts not affected by the illusions of sense,
facts which are of the same nature as the faculty which reports them.
He does not deny the sensuous fact by no means; but he will not see
that alone.
This definition recalls the celebrated classification of Prof.
William James, who, in his work on Pragmatism,
says:
I will write these traits down in two columns. I think you will
practically recognize the two types of mental make-up that I mean if
I head the columns by the titles tender-minded and tough-minded,
respectively:
The Tender-Minded The Tough-Minded
Rationalistic (going by principles ), Sensationalistic,
Intellectualistic, Materialistic,
Idealistic, Pessimistic,
Optimistic, Irreligious,
Religious, Fatalistic,
Free-Willist, Pluralistic,
Monistic, Skeptical.
Dogmatical.
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38
Each of you probably knows some well-marked example of each
type, and you know what each example thinks of the example on the
other side of the line. They have a low opinion of each other. Their
antagonism, whenever as individuals their temperaments have been
intense, has formed in all ages a part of the philosophic atmosphere
of the time. It forms a part of the philosophic atmosphere of to-day.
The tough think of the tender as sentimentalists and soft-heads. The
tender feel the tough to be unrefined, callous and brutal. Their mutual
reaction is very much like that that takes place when Boston tourists
mingle with a population like that of Cripple Creek. Each side believes
the other to be inferior to itself; but disdain in one case is mingled with
amusement, in the other it has a dash of fear.
There is no doubt regarding the place to which Emerson
must be assigned in the classification given by Professor James.
He is the ideal tender-minded individual. He is an idealist of
the idealists. As Cooke says:
Emerson belongs in the succession of the Idealists. That company
he loves wherever its members are found, whether among Buddhists
or Christian mystics, whether Transcendentalist or Sufi, whether Saadi,
Boehme, Fichte, or Carlyle. These are the writers he studies, these the
men he quotes, these the thinkers who come nearest his own thought.
He is in the succession of minds who have followed in the wake of
Plato, who is regarded by him as the world s greatest thinker. More
directly still, Emerson is in that succession of thinkers represented by
Plotinus, Eckhardt and Schelling, who have interpreted Idealism in the
form of Mysticism.
Whipple says of Emerson as a philosopher:
His intellect is intuitive, but not reflective. It contains no considerable
portion of the element which is essential to the philosopher. His ideas
proceed from the light of genius, and from wise observation of Nature;

they come in flashes of inspiration and ecstasy; his pure gold is found in
Emerson, the Torch-Bearer.
39
places near the surface, not brought out laboriously from the depths of
the mine in the bowels of the earth. He has no taste for the apparently
arid abstractions of philosophy. His mind is not organized for the
comprehension of its sharp distinctions. Its acute reasonings present
no charm to his fancy, and its lucid deductions are to him as destitute
of fruit as an empty nest of boxes. In the sphere of pure speculation
he has shown neither originality nor depth. He has thrown no light
on the great topics of speculation, He has never fairly grappled with
the metaphysical problems which have called for the noblest efforts of
the mind in every age, and which, not yet reduced to positive science,
have not ceased to enlist the clearest and strongest intellects in the
work of their solution. On all questions of this kind the writings of
Emerson are wholly unsatisfactory. He looks at them only in the light of
the imagination. He frequently offers brave hints, pregnant suggestions,
cheering encouragements, but no exposition of abstract truth has ever
fallen from his keen pen.
As a philosopher, Emerson belongs to that class of geniuses
who may be termed intuitional, inspirational, awakening,
stimulating. As Cooke well says of him: Emerson belongs to that
company of illuminated souls who have done for the modern
world what the sages, prophets and seers did for the ancient
world. He is a Hindu guru, or a Sufi pir, rather than a Western
teacher. He disdains the necessity of proof, and feels that his
words should carry their own proof. His is the attitude of the
sage of the Orient, rather than of the professor of philosophy
of the Western world.
That Emerson s thought is based upon that of Plato and
the Neo-Platonists cannot be doubted, although there always
appears running through his mental creations the golden
thread of the teachings of Oriental thought. Plato would claim
him as a son the Hindu Vedantist and the Persian Sufi would
claim him as a brother. Mystics of every age, and of every
land, would welcome him as of their own kind. Believers in
reincarnation would attribute to him successive births first in
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40
Hindu and in Persian bodies, and later in the fleshly garments
of philosophers of ancient Greece. He is of the royal mystic
descent, in a straight and unbroken line. His Over-Soul might
have been written either by a Hindu Vedantist, a Persian Sufi,
or a god-drunken Grecian philosopher. Modern advocates of
what is called cosmic consciousness find an explanation for
his genius in their theories, and, indeed, in his Over-Soul he
gives utterances that would indicate an experience of the kind
indicated by this school.
Emerson holds that God is the Universal Substance, from
which the universe is formed; the Universal Mind which holds
the mind of all; the Universal Spirit which is immanent in all
men. He says:
There seems to be a necessity in Spirit to manifest itself in material
forms; and day and night, river and storm, beast and bird, acid and
alkali pre-exist in necessary ideas in the mind of God, and are what
they are by virtue of preceding affections in the world of Spirit.
The world proceeds from the same Spirit as the body of man. It is a
remoter and inferior incarnation of God, a projection of God in the
unconscious.
Under all this running sea of circumstance, whose
waters ebb and flow with perfect balance, lies the original abyss of

real Being. Essence, or God, is not a relation, or a part, but the whole.
Being is the vast affirmative, excluding negation, self-balanced, and
swallowing up all relations, parts, and times within itself on every
topic is the resolution of all into the everlasting One.
To Emerson, God is all in All, and All in all. He says:
Truth, goodness and beauty are but different faces of the same All.
God is, and all things are but shadows of him.
The true doctrine of
omnipresence is, that God reappears with all His parts in every moss
and cobweb. The value of the universal contrives to throw itself into
every point.
Emerson, the Torch-Bearer.
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