Mr. Emerson is right enough in making the sensible copy or imitate the intelligible, what there is true in Swedenborg's doctrine of correspondences; but wrong in making the mimetic purely phenomenal, unreal, a mere sense-show. The mimetic, the mimesis, by which Plato means the individual and the sensible, the variable and the transitory, is not the only real, nor the highest real, as sensists and materialists hold; but is as real in its order and degree as the methexic or ideal. Hence, St. Thomas is able to maintain that the sensible species, or accidents, as he calls them, can subsist without their subject, or, as we would say, the sensible body without the intelligible body; and therefore, that the doctrine of transubstantiation involves no contradiction; for it is not pretended that the sensible body undergoes any change, or that the sensible body of our Lord is present in the blessed eucharist. So St. Augustine distinguishes the visible—the sensible—body and the spiritual—intelligible—body, and holds both to be real. The individual is as real as the species—the socratitas, in the language of the schoolmen, as the humanitas—for neither is possible without the other. The sort of idealism, as it is called, that resolves the individual into the species, or the sensible into the intelligible, and thus denies the external world, is as unphilosophical as the opposite doctrine, that resolves the species into the individual and the intelligible into the sensible. Even Plato, the supposed father of idealism, does not make the mimesis absolutely unreal. For, to say nothing of the preëxistent matter, the image, picture, which is the exact copy of its ideal prototype, is a real image, picture, or copy.
But Mr. Emerson, if he recognizes the methexis at all, either confounds it with real and necessary being, or makes it purely phenomenal, and therefore unreal, as distinguished from real and necessary being. Methexis is a Greek word, and means, etymologically and as used by Plato, participation. Plato's doctrine is, that all inferior existences exist by participation of the higher, through the medium of what he calls the plastic soul, whence the Demiourgos of the Gnostics. His error was in making the plastic soul instead of the creative act of God the medium of the participation. Still, Plato made it the participation of ideas or the ideal, and, in the last analysis, of Him who is being in himself. Hence, he made a distinction, if not the proper distinction, between the methexis and God, or being by participation and the absolute underived being, or being in itself.
Mr. Emerson recognizes no real participation, and either excludes the methexis or identifies it with God, or absolute being. He thus reduces the categories, as does Cousin, to being and phenomenon, or, in the only barbarism in language he permits himself, the ME—le moi—and the NOT ME—le non moi—the root-error, so to speak, of Fichte. He takes himself as the central force, and holds it to be the reality expressed in the NOT ME. The NOT ME being purely phenomenal, only the ME is real. By the ME he, of course, does not mean his own personality, but the reality which underlies and expresses itself in it. The absolute Ich, or ego, of Fichte is identical in all men, is the real man, the "one man," as Mr. Emerson says; and this "one man" is the reality, the being, the substance, the force of the whole phenomenal universe. There is, then, no methexis imitated, copied, or mimicked by the mimesis, or the individual and sensible universe. The mimesis copies not a participated or created intelligible, but, however it may be diversified by degrees, it copies directly God himself, the one real being and only substance of all things. If we regard ourselves as phenomenal, we are unreal, and therefore nothing; if as real, as substantive, as force, we do not participate, mediante the creative act, of real being, but are identically it, or identical with it; which makes the author not only a pantheist, but a more unmitigated pantheist than Plato himself.
Neither Plato nor Mr. Emerson recognizes any causative force in the mimesis. Plato recognizes causative force only in ideas, though he concedes a power of resistance to the preëxistent matter, and finds in its intractableness the cause of evil; Mr. Emerson recognizes causative or productive force only in the absolute, and therefore denies the existence of second causes, as he does all distinction between first cause and final cause; which is the very essence of pantheism, which Gioberti rightly terms the "supreme sophism."
We have used the Greek terms methexis and mimesis after Plato, as Gioberti has done in his posthumous works, but not precisely in Gioberti's sense. Gioberti identifies the methexis with the plastic soul asserted by Plato, and revived by old Ralph Cudworth, an Anglican divine of the seventeenth century; but though we make the methexis causative in the order of second causes, we do not make it productive of the mimesis. It means what are called genera and species; but even in the order of second causes, genera are generative or productive only as specificated, and species only as individualized. God must have created the genus specificated and the species individualized before either could be active or productive as second cause. The genus does not and cannot exist without specification, nor the species without individualization, any more than the individual can exist without the species, or the species without the genus. For instance, man is the species, according to the schoolmen, the genus is animal, the differentia is reason, and hence man is defined a rational animal. But the genus animal, though necessary to its existence, cannot generate the species man, any more than it could have generated itself. The species can exist only as immediately individuated by the first cause, and hence the pretence of some scientists—more properly sciolists,—that new species are formed either by development or by natural selection, is simply absurd, as has been well shown by the Duke of Argyll. God creates the species as well as the genera; and it is fairly inferred from the Scriptures that he creates all things in their genera and species "after their kind." Furthermore, if God had not created the human species individualized in Adam, male and female, there could have been no men by natural generation, any more than if there had been no human species at all.
This, as we understand it, excludes alike the plastic soul of the Platonists and the Demiourgos of the Gnostics, and teaches that the mimesis is as directly created by God himself as the methexis. Mr. Emerson, indeed, uses neither of these Platonic terms, though if he had, he would, with his knowledge of the Christian doctrine of creation, have detected the error of Plato, and most likely have escaped his own. The term methexis—participation—excludes the old error that God generates the universe, which is rather favored by the terms genera and species. We use the term mimesis because it serves to us to express the fact that the lower copies or imitates the higher, and therefore the doctrine of St. Thomas, that "Deus est similitudo rerum omnium," or that God is himself the type or model after which the universe is created, and which each and every existence in its own order and degree strives to copy or represent. The error of Plato is, that he makes the methexis an emanation rather than a creature, and the plastic power that produces the mimesis; the error of Mr. Emerson, as we view the matter, is, that he makes the mimetic purely phenomenal, therefore unreal, sinks it in the methexic, and the methexis itself in God, as the one only being or substance, the natura naturans of Spinoza.
With Plato, the mimesis is the product of the methexic, but is itself passive, and the sooner the soul is emancipated from it the better; though what is the soul in his system of ideas we understand not. With Mr. Emerson, it is neither active nor passive, for it is purely phenomenal, therefore nothing. With us it is real, and, like all real existences, it is active, and is not a simple image or copy of the methexic or the ideal, but is in its order and degree a vis activa, and copies or imitates actively the divine type or the idea exemplaris in the divine mind, after which it is created.
Mr. Emerson says, in the introduction to his essay on Nature, "Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of nature and soul." But all activity is in the soul, and what is distinguishable from the soul is purely phenomenal, and, if we may take his essay on the Over-soul, not republished in these volumes, is but the soul's own projection of itself. The soul alone is active, productive, and it is myself, my own ego; not indeed in its personal limitations and feebleness, but in its absoluteness, as the absolute or impersonal Ich of Fichte, and identically God, who is the great, the absolute I am.
The error is obvious. It consists in the denial or in the overlooking of the fact that God creates substances, and that every substance is, as Leibnitz defines it, a force, a vis activa, acting always from its own centre outward. Whatever actually exists is active, and there is and can be no passivity in nature. Hence, Aristotle and the schoolmen after him call God, who is being and being in its plenitude, actus purissimus, or most pure act, in whom there are no possibilities to be actualized. Mr. Emerson errs in his first principles, in not recognizing the fact that God creates substances, and that every substance is an activity, therefore causative either ad intra or ad extra, and that every created substance is causative in the order of second causes. What we maintain in opposition both to him and Plato is, that these created substances are at once methexic and mimetic in their activity.
It were an easy task to show that whatever errors there may be, or may be supposed to be, in Mr. Emerson's works grow out of the two fundamental errors we have indicated—the identification of soul, freed from its personal limitations, as in Adam, John, and Richard, with God, or the real being, substance, force, or activity, and the assumption that whatever is distinguishable from God is purely phenomenal, an apparition, a sense-show, a mere bubble on the surface of the ocean of being, as we pointed out in our comments on the proceedings of the Free Religionists, in the magazine for last November, and to which we beg leave to refer our readers.