Thus one pregnant sentence of Emerson’s shows, when we examine it more closely, that he had seen deeper into the mysteries of nature, and of the human mind, than thousands of philosophers, call them evolutionists (realists) or nominalists. Evolutionists imagine that they have explained everything that requires explanation in nature if they have shown a more or less continuous development from the moneres to man, from the thrills of the moneres to the thoughts of man. Nominalists again think that by ascending from the single to the general, and by comprehending the single under a general name, they have solved all the questions involved in nature, that is, in our comprehension of nature. They never seem to remember that there was a time when all that we call either single or general, but particularly all that is general, had for the first time to be conceived or created. Before there was a single tree, some one must have thought the tree or treehood. Before there was a single ape, or a single man, some one must have thought that apehood or that manhood which we see realised in every ape and in every man, unless we can bring ourselves to believe in a thoughtless world. If that first thought was the concept of a mere moneres, still in that thought there must have been the distant perspective of ape or man, and it is that first thought alone which to the present day keeps the ape an ape, and a man a man. Divine is hardly a name good enough for that first Thinker of Thoughts. Still, it is that Divinity which Emerson meant when he said that generalisation is always a new influx of divinity into the mind because it reveals to the mind the first thoughts, the Divine Logoi, of the universe. The thrill of which he speaks is the thrill arising from the nearness of the Divine, the sense of the presence of those Divine Logoi, or that Divine Logos, which in the beginning was with God, and without which not anything was made that was made. Evolution can never be more than the second act; the first act is the Volition or the Thought of the universe, unless we hold that there can be effect without a cause, or a Kosmos without a Logos.
Such utterances, lost almost in the exuberance of Emerson’s thoughts, mark the distinction between a thoughtful and a shallow writer, between a scarred veteran and a smooth recruit. They will give permanence to Emerson’s influence both at home and abroad, and place him in the ranks of those who have not lived or thought in vain. When he left my house, I knew, of course, that we should never meet again in this life, but I felt that I had gained something that could never be taken from me.
Another eminent American who often honoured my quiet home at Oxford was James Russell Lowell, for a time United States Minister in England. He was a Professor and at the same time a politician and a man of the world. Few essays are so brimful of interesting facts and original reflections as his essays entitled “Among my Books.” His “Biglow Papers,” which made him one of the leading men in the United States, appeal naturally to American rather than to Cosmopolitan readers. But in society he was at home in England as much as in America, in Spain as well as in Holland.
I came to know him first as a sparkling correspondent, and then as a delightful friend.
Here is the letter which began our intimacy:—
Legacion de nos Estados Unidos
de America en Espana.
18th Jan. 1880.
I read with great satisfaction what you wrote about jade.[[12]] One is tempted to cry out, with Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, “How now, ye pampered jades of Asia!” One thing in the discussion has struck me a good deal, and that is, the crude notion which intelligent men have of the migration of tribes. I think most men’s conception of distance is very much a creature of maps—which make Crim Tartary and England not more than a foot apart, so that the feat of the old rhyme—“to dance out of Ireland into France,” looks easy. They seem to think that the shifting of habitation was accomplished like a modern journey by rail, and that the emigrants wouldn’t need tools by the way or would buy them at the nearest shop after their arrival. There is nothing the ignorant and the poor cling to so tenaciously as their familiar household utensils. Incredible things are brought every day to America in the luggage of emigrants—things often most cumbrous to carry and utterly useless in the new home. Families that went from our seaboard to the West a century ago, through an almost impenetrable wilderness, carried with them all their domestic pots and pans—even those, I should be willing to wager, that needed the tinker. I remember very well the starting of an expedition from my native town of Cambridge in 1831, for Oregon, under the lead of a captain of great energy and resource. They started in waggons ingeniously contrived so as to be taken to pieces, the body forming a boat for crossing rivers. They carried everything they could think of with them, and got safely to the other side of the continent, as hard a job, I fancy, as our Aryan ancestors had to do. There is hardly a family of English descent in New England that doesn’t cherish, as an heirloom, something brought over by the first ancestors two hundred and fifty years ago. And besides the motive of utility there is that also of sentiment—particularly strong in the case of an old tool.
Faithfully yours, J. R. Lowell.