Should the analyses of Taine and Lewes prove successful at last, and be accepted by the authorities in speculative philosophy, idealism, as a philosophy, must disappear. The days of metaphysics in the old sense, will be numbered; the German schools from Kant to Hegel will become obsolete; Jacobi's doctrine of faith, Fichte's doctrine of the absolute Ego, Schelling's doctrine of intellectual intuition, will be forgotten; Cousin's influence will be gone; the fundamental ideas of Transcendental teachers, French, English, American, will be discredited; and the beliefs founded on them will fade away. There will, however, be no cause to apprehend the personal, social, moral or spiritual demoralization which the "Sensualist" doctrines of the last century were accused of encouraging. The attitude of the human mind towards the great problems of destiny has so far altered, the problems themselves have so far changed their face, that no shock will be felt in the passage from the philosophy of intuition to that of experience. Questions respecting the origin, order and regulation of the world, the laws of character, the constitution of society, the conditions of welfare, the prospects and relations of the individual, are put in new forms, discussed by new arguments, and answered by new assurances. The words atheism and materialism have passed through so many definitions, the conceptions they stand for have become so completely transformed by the mutations of thought, that the ancient antipathies are not longer excusable; the ancient fears are weak. The sanctities that once were set apart in ideal shrines will be perfectly at home among the demonstrated facts of common life.
If, on the other hand, the school to which Spencer, Fiske and Tyndall belong is right, the science of mind will recover its old dignity, though under new conditions. Nobody has spoken more plainly against the intuitive philosophy, than Mill. No one probably is further from it than Tyndall, though he responds in sentiment to the eloquent affirmations of Martineau, and quotes Emerson enthusiastically, as "a profoundly religious man who is really and entirely undaunted by the discoveries of science, past, present or prospective; one by whom scientific conceptions are continually transmuted into the finer forms and warmer hues of an ideal world." Under the influences of the new psychology, dogmatic idealism will probably be deprived of its sceptre and sway. The claim to intuitive knowledge of definite truths of any order whatsoever will be abandoned, as untenable on scientific or philosophical grounds; but imagination, which, as Emerson says, "respects the cause," – "the vision of an inspired soul reading arguments and affirmations in all nature of that which it is driven to say;" emotion, which contains all the possibilities of feeling and hope; the moral sentiment, which affirms principles with imperative authority; these remain, and claim their right to create ideal worlds of which the natural world is image and symbol. The Transcendentalism which concedes to all mankind spiritual faculties by virtue whereof divine entities are seen in definite shape – the personal God – the city of the heavenly Jerusalem – will be superseded by the poetic idealism that is the cheer and inspiration of poetic minds, animating them with fine visions, and gladdening them with unfading, though vague, anticipations.
The Transcendental doctrine has been exposed to most deadly assault on the ethical side. The theory of moral intuition, which held that "every man is, according to the cautious statement of James Walker, born with a moral faculty, or the elements of a moral faculty, which, on being developed, creates in him the idea of a right and a wrong in human conduct; which summons him before the tribunal of his own soul for judgment on the rectitude of his purposes; which grows up into an habitual sense of personal responsibility, and thus prepares him, as his views are enlarged, to comprehend the moral government of God, and to feel his own responsibility to God as a moral governor," – has fallen into general disrepute; and in its place a persuasion is abroad, that, in the language of Grote, "the universal and essential tendencies of the moral sense, admit of being most satisfactorily deduced from other elementary principles of our nature." It is now a widely accepted belief among conservative thinkers, that "conscience" is not a faculty, or an element, existing here in germ, there in maturity; but is the result of social experience. Moderate Transcendentalists conceded the necessity of educating conscience, which still implied the existence of a conscience or moral sense to be educated. It is now contended that conscience itself is a product of education, a deposit left in the crucible of experiment, a habit formed by the usage of mankind. The justification of this view has gone so far, that it seems likely to become the recognized account of this matter; but in course of substantiating this doctrine, a new foundation for ethical feeling and judgment is laid, which is as immovable as the transcendental "facts of consciousness." The moral sentiments are represented as resting on the entire past of the race, on reefs of fact built up by the lives of millions of men, from the bottom of the deep of humanity. The finest moral sensibility caps the peak of the world's effort at self-adjustment, as the white, unsullied snow rests on the summit of the Jungfrau. The intuition is referred to in another genesis, but it is equally clear and equally certain. The difference of origin creates no difference of character. Moral distinctions are precisely the same for idealists and sensationalists. Here at least, the transcendentalist and his adversary can dwell in amity together.
IX.
THE SEER
A discerning German writer, Herman Grimm, closes a volume of fifteen essays, with one on Ralph Waldo Emerson, written in 1861, approved in 1874. The essay is interesting, apart from its literary merit, as giving the impression made by Mr. Emerson on a foreigner to whom his reputation was unknown, and a man of culture to whom books and opinions rarely brought surprise. He saw a volume of the "Essays" lying on the table of an American acquaintance, looked into it, and was surprised that, being tolerably well practised in reading English, he understood next to nothing of the contents. He asked about the author, and, learning that he was highly esteemed in his own country, he opened the book again, read further, and was so much struck by passages here and there, that he borrowed it, carried it home, took down Webster's dictionary, and began reading in earnest. The extraordinary construction of the sentences, the apparent absence of logical continuity, the unexpected turns of thought, the use of original words, embarrassed him at first; but soon he discovered the secret and felt the charms. The man had fresh thoughts, employed a living speech, was a genuine person. The book was bought, read and re-read, "and now every time I take it up, I seem to take it up for the first time."
The power that the richest genius has in Shakspeare, Rafael, Goethe, Beethoven, to reconcile the soul to life, to give joy for heaviness, to dissipate fears, to transfigure care and toil, to convert lead into gold, and lift the veil that conceals the forms of hope, Grimm ascribes in the highest measure to Emerson.
"As I read, all seems old and familiar as if it was my own well-worn thought; all seems new as if it never occurred to me before. I found myself depending on the book and was provoked with myself for it. How could I be so captured and enthralled; so fascinated and bewitched? The writer was but a man like any other; yet, on taking up the volume again, the spell was renewed – I felt the pure air; the old weather-beaten motives recovered their tone."
To him Emerson seemed to stand on the ground of simple fact, which he accepted in all sincerity.
"He regards the world in its immediate aspect, with fresh vision; the thing done or occurring before him opens the way to serene heights. The living have precedence of the dead. Even the living of to-day of the Greeks of yesterday, nobly as the latter thought, moulded, chiselled, sang. For me was the breath of life, for me the rapture of spring, for me love and desire, for me the secret of wisdom and power."… "Emerson fills me with courage and confidence. He has read and observed, but he betrays no sign of toil. He presents familiar facts, but he places them in new lights and combinations. From every object the lines run straight out, connecting it with the central point of life. What I had hardly dared to think, it was so bold, he brings forth as quietly as if it was the most familiar commonplace. He is a perfect swimmer on the ocean of modern existence. He dreads no tempest, for he is sure that calm will follow it; he does not hate, contradict, or dispute, for he understands men and loves them. I look on with wonder to see how the hurly-burly of modern life subsides, and the elements gently betake themselves to their allotted places. Had I found but a single passage in his writings that was an exception to this rule, I should begin to suspect my judgment, and should say no further word; but long acquaintance confirms my opinion. As I think of this man, I have understood the devotion of pupils who would share any fate with their master, because his genius banished doubt and imparted life to all things."
Grimm tells us that one day he found Emerson's Essays in the hands of a lady to whom he had recommended them without effect. She had made a thousand excuses; had declared herself quite satisfied with Goethe, who had all that Emerson could possibly have, and a great deal more; had expressed doubts whether, even if Emerson were all that his admirers represented, it was worth while to make a study of him. Besides, she had read in the book, and found only commonplace thoughts which had come to herself, and which she considered not of sufficient importance to express. So Emerson was neglected.
"On this occasion she made him the subject of conversation. She had felt that he was something remarkable. She had come upon sentences, many times, that opened the darkest recesses of thought. I listened quietly, but made no response. Not long afterwards she poured out to me her astonished admiration in such earnest and impassioned strain, that she made me feel as if I was the novice and she the apostle."
This experience was repeated again and again, and Grimm had the satisfaction of seeing the indifferent kindle, the adverse turn, the objectors yield. The praise was not universal indeed; there were stubborn dissentients who did not confess the charm, and declared that the enthusiasm was infatuation. Such remained unconverted. It was discovered that Emerson came to his own only, though his own were a large and increasing company.
The reasons of Grimm's admiration have been sufficiently indicated in 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 æons. 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 coöperators 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.
Mr. Emerson's place is among poetic, not among philosophic minds. He 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.