Instinct and Intelligence
Clarence Darrow recently echoed that high estimate of instinct at the expense of intelligence which has been the fashion since Bergson. Some of these days, when that case has been overstated often enough, there will be a return swing of that pendulum. The instinctive wasp who, in order to paralyze it, knows how to sting a caterpillar “as though she knew its anatomy” may not always seem in all respects superior to the human surgeon who does actually know anatomy and can apply that knowledge in a thousand ways—versus the wasp’s one. Some day it will strike some one that no creature has an instinct against poison comparable in delicacy, subtlety, and fullness with a chemist’s noninstinctive, intelligent knowledge of poisons—and nonpoisons. So with a number of things. The pragmatic objection to our present glorification of instinct is that it tends to become a glorification of intellectual whim.—George Cram Cook in The Chicago Evening Post.
The Jewels of a Lapidary
Emerson’s Journals, Volume IX, 1856-1863. (Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston.)
At least nine events of permanent historic interest have occurred in American literature within the past few years: they are represented by the publication of nine volumes of Emerson’s Journals. Those who are trying to achieve a personal religion, which acknowledges God as an immanence instead of a proposition, hail with a quiet joy every extraction from the great mine in which Emerson stored the jewels of his life. If we do not recognize them as lapidarious we must perceive them as the better metals of ourselves, for this “friend and aider of those who would live in the spirit” inhumed those spiritual values which all men at some time or another seek as their own. Emerson buoys us up for our common struggles and makes us conscious of that aid which is the awakening of latent power. He composed the bricks which thousands of builders have used in fashioning beautiful personal temples. “I dot evermore in my endless journal,” he wrote to Carlyle; “... the arrangement loiters long, and I get a brick-kiln instead of a house.” Speaking of his philosophical work he confesses a “formidable tendency to the lapidary style,” and adds, “I build my house of boulders.”
Emerson’s published journals are kilns and quarries from which the foundation materials for the edifice of character have been obtained by countless builders. If he could not construct a system of philosophy, as Arnold alleges, he could and did provide the “boulders” and indicate the pattern which others have used. He is a part of every well-read American, and, chiefly through Carlyle, still lives in the land of his forefathers. He was an inspiration to Whitman, one of whose “specimen days” closed with “a long and blessed evening with Emerson.” Such evenings are as real now as in Whitman’s time, and are more commonly experienced, for Emerson is westward-bound. He has traveled slowly in this direction: “boulders” are not carried by exploiters and pioneers who build and live in a world not of “the spirit” but of the senses. With the establishing of easier communication between centers of thought and fields of action in America, New England “boulders” were brought hither, to chink the crude walls of western life; and it is a token of Emerson’s vitality and spiritual universality that his “bricks” and “boulders” are discoverable in all sorts of shacks which men are trying to improve. Lumber decays, but “boulders” remain, and some of them become talismanic.
In reading and re-reading Emerson’s Journals one is impressed with their remarkable quotability, and in this mechanical handiness of his work we have a partial explanation of the slowness with which it has been assimilated. “Boulders” are fated to be knocked about before they are appreciated. We throw them at one another with a sort of physical dexterity until, burnished and transformed, they are recognized as adapted to higher uses. We do not flippantly quote or mention the authors who have become personal to us; I quote Emerson’s Journal as a blessed soliloquy.
D. C. W.
New York Letter
George Soule