EMERSON'S PROSE WORKS.[36]
Mr. Emerson's literary reputation is established, and placed beyond the reach of criticism. No living writer surpasses him in his mastery of pure and classic English, or equals him in the exquisite delicacy and finish of his chiselled sentences, or the metallic ring of his style. It is only as a thinker and teacher that we can venture any inquiry into his merits; and as such we cannot suffer ourselves to be imposed upon by his oracular manner, nor by the apparent originality either of his views or his expressions.
Mr. Emerson has had a swarm both of admirers and of detractors. With many he is a philosopher and sage, almost a god; while with others he is regarded as an unintelligible mystic, babbling nonsense just fitted to captivate beardless young men and silly maidens with pretty curls, who constituted years ago the great body of his hearers and worshippers. We rank ourselves in neither class, though we regard him as no ordinary man, and as one of the deepest thinkers, as well as one of the first poets, of our country. We know him as a polished gentleman, a genial companion, and a warm-hearted friend, whose kindness does not pass over individuals and waste itself in a vague philanthropy. So much, at least, we can say of the man, and from former personal acquaintance as well as from the study of his writings.
Mr. Emerson is no theorist, and is rather of a practical than of a speculative turn of mind. What he has sought all his life, and perhaps is still seeking, is the real, the universal, and the permanent in the events of life and the objects of experience. The son of a Protestant minister, brought up in a Protestant community, and himself for some years a Protestant minister, he early learned that the real, the universal, and permanent are not to be found in Protestantism; and assuming that Protestantism, in some or all its forms, is the truest exponent of the Christian religion, he very naturally came to the conclusion that they are not to be found in Christianity. He saw that Protestantism is narrow, hollow, unreal, a sham, a humbug, and, ignorant of the Catholic Church and her teaching, he considered that she must have less of reality, be even more of a sham or humbug, than Protestantism itself. He passed then naturally to the conclusion that all pretensions to a supernaturally revealed religion are founded only in ignorance or craft, and rejected all of all religions, except what may be found in them that accords with the soul or the natural reason of all men. This may be gathered from his brief essay, entitled Nature, first published in 1836. We quote a few paragraphs from the introduction:
"Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and a philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not a history of theirs?... The sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works, and laws, and worship.
"Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable. We must trust the perfection of creation so far as to believe that whatever curiosity the order of things has awakened in our minds, the order of things can satisfy. Every man's condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life before he apprehends it as truth. In like manner, nature is already, in its forms and tendencies, describing its own design. Let us interrogate the great apparition that shines so peacefully around us. Let us inquire, To what end is nature?
"All science has one aim, to find a theory of nature. We have theories of races and of functions, but scarcely yet a remote approach to an idea of creation. We are now so far from the road to truth that religious teachers dispute and hate each other, and speculative men are deemed unsound and frivolous. But to a sound judgment, the most abstract truth is the most practical. Whenever a true theory appears, it will be its own evidence. Its test is, that it will explain all phenomena. Now many are thought not only unexplained, but inexplicable—as language, sleep, madness, dreams, beasts, sex." (Vol. i. pp. 5, 6.)
These extracts give us the key to Mr. Emerson's thought, which runs through all his writings, whether in prose or poetry; though more fully mastered and better defined in his later productions, essays, and lectures, than it was in his earliest production from which we have quoted. In studying these volumes, we are convinced that what the writer is after is reality, of which this outward, visible universe, both as a whole and in all its parts, symbolizes. He seeks life, not death; the living present, not the corpse of the past. Under this visible world, its various and ever-varying phenomena, lies the real world, one, identical, universal, and immutable, which it copies, mimics, or symbolizes. He agrees with Plato that the real thing is in the methexis, not in the mimesis; that is, in the idea, not in the individual and the sensible, the variable and the perishable. He wants unity and catholicity, and the science that does not attain to them is no real science at all. But as the mimesis, in his language the hieroglyphic, copies or imitates the methexic, we can, by studying it, arrive at the methexic, the reality copied or imitated.
We do not pretend to understand Plato throughout, nor to reconcile him always with himself; but as far as we do understand him, the reality, what must be known in order to have real science, is the idea, and it is only by ideas that real science is attained. Ideas are, then, both the object and the medium of knowledge. As the medium of knowledge, the idea may be regarded as the image it impresses on the mimetic, or the individual and the sensible, as the seal on the wax. This image or impression is an exact fac-simile of the idea as object. Hence by studying it we arrive at the exact knowledge of the idea, or what is real, invariable, universal, and permanent in the object we would know. The lower copies and reveals the next higher, and thus we may rise, step by step, from the lowest to the highest, to "the first good and the first fair," to the good, the beautiful, or Being that is being in itself. Thus is it in science. But the soul has two wings on which it soars to the empyrean, intelligence and love. The lowest form or stage of love is that of the sexes, a love of the senses only; but this lowest love symbolizes a higher or ideal love, rising stage by stage to the pure ideal, or the love of absolute beauty, the beautiful in itself, the love to which the sage aspires, and the only love in which he can rest or find repose.
We do not say that Mr. Emerson follows Plato in all respects; for he occasionally deviates from him, sometimes for the better, and sometimes for the worse; but no one not tolerably well versed in the Platonic philosophy can understand him. In his two essays on Plato, in his second volume, he calls him the Philosopher, and asserts that all who talk philosophy talk Plato. He also maintains that Plato represented all the ages that went before him, possessed all the science of his contemporaries, and that none who have come after him have been able to add any thing new to what he taught. He includes Christianity, Judaism, and Mohammedanism in Plato, who is far broader and more comprehensive than them all. Plato of all men born of woman stood nearest the truth of things, and in his intellectual and moral doctrines surpassed all who went before or have come after him.
We find many things in Plato that we like, and we entirely agree with him that the ideal is real; but we do not agree with Mr. Emerson, that nothing in science has been added to the Platonic doctrine. We think Aristotle made an important addition in his doctrine of entelechia; Leibnitz, in his definition of substance, making it a vis activa, and thus exploding the notion of passive or inert substances; and finally, Gioberti, by his doctrine of creation as a doctrine, or rather principle, of science. Plato had no conception of the creative act asserted by Moses in the first verse of Genesis. Plato never rose above the conception of the production of existences by way of formation, or the operation of the plastic force on a preëxisting and often intractable matter. He never conceived of the creation of existences from nothing by the sole energy or power of the creator. He held to the eternal existence of spirit and matter, and we owe to him principally the dualism and antagonism that have originated the false asceticism which many attribute to Christian teaching; but which Christianity rejects, as is evident from its doctrine of the Incarnation and that of the resurrection of the flesh. Gioberti has shown, as the writer thinks, that creation is no less a scientific principle than a Christian dogma. He has shown that the creative act is the nexus between being and existences, and that it enters as the copula into the primum philosophicum, without which there could be no human mind, and consequently no human science. There are various other instances we might adduce in which people talk very good sense, even profound philosophical and theological truth, and yet do not talk Plato. We hardly think Mr. Emerson himself will accept all the moral doctrines of Plato's Republic, especially those relating to marriage and the promiscuous intercourse of the sexes; for Plato goes a little beyond what our free-lovers have as yet proposed.
Aristotle gives us, undoubtedly, a philosophy, such as it is, and a philosophy that enters largely into modern modes of thought and expression; but we can hardly say as much of Plato. He has profound thoughts, no doubt, and many glimpses of a high—if you will, the highest order of truth; but only when he avowedly follows tradition, and speaks according to the wisdom of the ancients. He seems to us to give us a method rather than a philosophy, and very little of our modern philosophical language is derived from him. Several of the Greek fathers, and St. Augustine among the Latins, incline to Platonism; but none of them, so far as we are acquainted with them, followed him throughout. The mediæval doctors, though not ignorant of Plato, almost without an exception prefer Aristotle. The revival of Platonism in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries brought with it a revival of heathenism; and Plato has since been held in much higher esteem with the heterodox and makers of fanciful systems than with the orthodox and simple believers. We trace his influence in what the romancers call chivalry, which is of pagan origin, though some people are ill-informed enough to accredit it to the church; and we trace to his doctrine of love, so attractive to many writers not in other respects without merit, the modern babble about "the heart," the confusion of charity with philanthropy, and the immoral doctrines of free love, which strike at Christian marriage and the Christian family. The "heart," in the language of the Holy Scriptures, means the affections of the will, and the love they enjoin as the fulfilment of the law and the bond of perfection is charity, a supernatural virtue, in which both the will and the understanding are operative, not a simple, natural sentiment, or affection of the sensibility, or the love of the beautiful, and dependent on the imagination.