Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 2

by Unknown

III. EMERSON AS PHILOSOPHER

[The following address was delivered at Harvard University, May, 1903, as part of the Emerson Celebration:]

At the hundredth anniversary of Emerson's birthday, Harvard University is to take a noble share in the celebration. For years it has been one of the deepest desires of the Harvard community to erect in the college yard a building devoted to philosophy only. To-day this building is secured. To be sure, the good-will of the community must still do much before the funds allow the erection of a building spacious enough to fulfil our hopes; but whether the hall shall be small or large, we know to-day that it will soon stand under the Harvard elms and that over its door will be inscribed the name: Ralph Waldo Emerson. No worthier memorial could have been selected. Orations may be helpful, but the living word flows away; a statue may be lasting, but it does not awaken new thought. We shall have orations and we shall have a statue, but we shall have now, above all, a memorial which will last longer than a monument and speak louder than an oration: Emerson Hall will be a fountain of inspiration forever. The philosophical work of Harvard has been too long scattered in scores of places; there was no unity, philosophy had no real home. But Emerson Hall will be not only the workshop of the professional students of philosophy, will be not only the background for all that manifold activity in ethics and psychology, in logic and metaphysics, in æsthetics and sociology, it will become a new centre for the whole University, embodying in outer form the mission of philosophy to connect the scattered specialistic knowledge of the sciences. Harvard could not have offered a more glorious gift to Emerson's memorial.

But the spirit of such a memorial hour demands, more than all, sincerity. Can we sincerely say that the choice was wise, when we look at it from the point of view of the philosophical interests? It was beautiful to devote the building to Emerson. Was it wise, yes, was it morally right to devote Emerson's name to the Philosophy Building? Again and again has such a doubt found expression. Your building, we have heard from some of the best, belongs to scientific philosophy; the men who are to teach under its roof are known in the world as serious scholars, who have no sympathy with the vague pseudo-philosophy of popular sentimentalists; between the walls of your hall you will have the apparatus of experimental psychology, and you will be expected to do there the most critical and most consistent work in methodology and epistemology. Is it not irony to put over the door, through which daily hundreds of students are to enter, the name of a man who may be a poet and a prophet, a leader in literature and a leader in life, but who certainly was a mystic and not a thinker, an enthusiast but not a philosopher? Not only those who belittle him to-day and who short-sightedly deny even his immense religious influence, but even many of Emerson's warmest admirers hold such an opinion. They love him, they are inspired by the superb beauty of his intuitions, but they cannot respect the content of his ideas, if they do not wish to deny all their modern knowledge and scientific insight. Yes, for the most part they deny that his ideas form at all a connected whole; they are aphorisms, beautiful sparks. Did he not himself say: "With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall." And yet how can there be philosophy without consistency; how can we interpret reality if we contradict ourselves? If Emerson's views of the world did really not aim at consistency and did really ignore our modern knowledge, then it would be better to go on with our philosophical work in Harvard without shelter and roof than to have a hall whose name symbolizes both the greatest foe of philosophy, the spirit of inconsistency, and the greatest danger for philosophy, the mystic vagueness which ignores real science.

But Emerson stands smiling behind this group of admirers and says, "To be great is to be misunderstood." Yes, he did say, "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines;" but he soon adds, "Of one will the actions will be harmonious however unlike they seem." Emerson despises the consistency of the surface because he holds to the consistency of the depths, and every sentence he speaks is an action of the one will, and however unlike they seem they are harmonious, and, we can add, they are philosophical; and, what may seem to these anxious friends more daring, they are not only in harmony with each other, they are in deepest harmony with the spirit of modern philosophy, with a creed which ought to be taught by the most critical scholars of Harvard's Philosophy Hall.

What is the essence of Emerson's doctrine in the realm of philosophy? It seems like sacrilege to formulate anything he said in the dry terms of technical philosophy. We must tear from it all the richness and splendor of his style, we must throw off the glory of his metaphor, and we must leave out his practical wisdom and his religious emotion. It seems as if we must lose all we love. It is as if we were to take a painting of Raphael and abstract not only from the richly colored gowns of the persons in it, but from their flesh and blood, till only the skeletons of the figures remained. All beauty would be gone, and yet we know that Raphael himself drew at first the skeletons of his figures, knowing too well that no pose and no gesture is convincing, and no drapery beautiful if the bones and joints fit not correctly together. And such a skeleton of theoretical ideas appears not only without charm, it appears necessarily also uninteresting, without originality, commonplace. All the philosophies, from Plato to Hegel, brought down to their technical formulas, sound merely like new combinations of trivial elements, and yet they have made the world, have made revolutions and wars, have led to freedom and peace, have been mightier than traditions and customs; and it is true for every one of them that, as Emerson said, "A philosopher must be more than a philosopher."

There are, it seems, three principles of a philosophical character without which Emerson's life-work cannot be conceived. To bring them to the shortest expression we might say, Nature speaks to us; Freedom speaks in us; the Oversoul speaks through us. There is no word in Emerson's twelve volumes which is inconsistent with this threefold conviction, and everything else in his system either follows immediately from this belief or is a non-essential supplement. But that threefold faith is a courageous creed indeed. The first, we said, refers to Nature; he knew Nature in its intimacy, he knew Nature in its glory; "Give me health and a day and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous." And this Nature, that is the assertion, is not what natural sciences teach it to be. The Nature of the physicist, the dead world of atoms controlled by the laws of a dead causality, is not really the Nature we live in; the reality of Nature cannot be expressed by the record of its phenomena, but merely by the understanding of its meaning. Natural science leads us away from Nature as it really is. We must try to understand the thoughts of Nature. "Nature stretches out her arms to embrace man; only let his thoughts be of equal greatness;" and again Emerson says, "All the facts of natural history taken by themselves have no value, but are barren like a single sex; but marry it to human history and it is full of life;" and finally, "The philosopher postpones the apparent order of things to the empire of Thought."

And in the midst of Nature, of the living Nature, we breathe in freedom; man is free. Take that away and Emerson is not. Man is free. He does not mean the freedom of the Declaration of Independence, a document so anti-Emersonian in its conception of man; and he does not mean the liberty after which, as he says, the slaves are crowing while most men are slaves. No, we are free as responsible agents of our morality. We are free with that freedom which annuls fate; and if there is fate, then freedom is its most necessary part. "Forever wells up the impulse of choosing and acting in the soul." "So far as man thinks he is free." "Before the revelations of the soul, time, space, and nature shrink away." "Events are grown on the same stem with the personality; they are sub-personalities." "We are not built like a ship to be tossed, but like a house to stand." This freedom alone gives meaning to our life with its duties, and puts the accent of the world's history on the individual, on the personality: "All history resolves itself very easily into the biography of a few stout and earnest persons," and "An institution is the lengthened shadow of a man."

Nature speaks to us, Freedom speaks in us, but through us speaks a Soul that is more than individual, an over-individual soul, an "Oversoul, within which every man is contained and made one with all others." Now even "Nature is a great shadow, pointing always to the sun behind her." Every one of us belongs to an absolute consciousness which in us and through us wills its will; "Men descend to meet" and "Jove nods to Jove from behind each of us." Yes, "Man is conscious of a universal soul within or behind his individual life, wherein as in a firmament justice, truth, love, freedom arise and shine." The ideals, the duties, the obligations, are not man's will but the will of an Absolute.

Does not all this sound like a wilful denial of all that has been fixed by the sciences of our time? Does not every Sophomore who has had his courses in Physics, Psychology, and Sociology know better? He knows, we all know, that the processes of Nature stand under physical laws, that the will of man is the necessary outcome of psychological laws, that the ideals of man are the products of human civilization and sociological laws. And if every atom in the universe moves according to the laws which physics and chemistry, astronomy and geology, have discovered, is it not anti-scientific sentimentality to seek a meaning and thoughts in the mechanical motions of the dead world of substance? So the poet may speak, but we ought not to say that his fanciful dreams have value for scholarly philosophers. The philosophy of the scientist ought to be the acknowledgment that matter and energy, and space and time are eternal, and that the smallest grain of sand and the largest solar system move meaningless by blind causality.