II. The kaleidoscopic Emerson. (Bicentennial Essays: Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)).

JUST WHEN INTEREST in Emerson seems to wane, he rises like the proverbial phoenix. In the 1990's, at least two books (not to mention the ceaseless flow of articles and doctoral dissertations) concerning Emerson were published: Robert D. Richardson, Jr.'s Emerson: the Mind on Fire (1995) and Carlos Baker's Emerson Among the Eccentrics: A Group Portrait (1852). Richardson's subtitle is uniquely appropriate. It indicates that sparks from Emerson's "mind on fire," like those from any fire fueled by the shifting winds of critics and different generations, continue to fly in all directions.

Ever since Emerson left the ministry in 1832, he became the subject

of conflicting views concerning the worth of his work and even the worth of his personal self. Much of the criticism was negative. When Emerson delivered his "Divinity School Address" at Harvard University in 1838, the response was such that he was not invited back to lecture there for the next thirty years. Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose friendship Emerson tried to cultivate, wrote in his 1842 journal that Emerson was "that everlasting rejecter of all that is, and seeker for he knows not what." By contrast, Herman Melville, in whose works Emerson expressed little interest, found Emerson's seeming optimism jarring to his own brooding pessimism. After he heard Emerson lecture in 1849, Melville wrote in a letter to a friend (E.A. Duyckinck) that this "Plato who talks through his nose"was "a humbug," though "no common humbug." Melville claimed some years later that Emerson's vision of the world "proceeded from a defect in the region of the heart." He also satirized Emerson's Transcendental philosophy in the character of Plotinus Plinlimmon in his novel Pierre (1852).

Even among those who praised him there was an occasional though perhaps unintentional denigration. In his lecture on Emerson (later published in his Discourses in America in 1885), Matthew Arnold called Emerson "the friend and aider of thosewho would live in the spirit." What, however, many readers seem to recall most from Arnold's well-intentioned remarks on Emerson are the following words: "We have not in Emerson a great poet, a great writer, a great philosopher-maker."

Occasionally, there was a dig at what some perceived as Emerson's "Yankee shrewdness" overpowering his thirst for spiritual awareness. So ardent an Emersonian as James Russell Lowell could not resist a satiric thrust at his idol in his

Fable for Critics (1848):
...his [Emerson's] is, we may say,
A Greek head on right Yankee shoulders,
   whose range
Has Olympus for one pole, for t'other the
  [Stock] Exchange.

Despite the shortcomings that the critics mentioned above found in Emerson, he had many admirers both in the United States and in Europe. In the United States, he was praised by James Greenleaf Whittier, Theodore Parker, Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell, and (despite their occasional disagreements) by Henry David Thoreau. In 1880, Whittier declared: "No living poet of the English-speaking tongue has written verses bearing more distinctly than his the mark of immortality." And, although Walt Whitman's excessive eccentricities and explicit sexuality in later editions of Leaves of Grass irritated Emerson, it was Whitman who declared in 1854, "I was simmering, simmering, and Emerson brought me to a boil." Evidently, Emerson's essay "The Poet" helped fashion Whitman's radical verse and thoughts in his first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855).

In England, Emerson was praised by Thomas Carlyle, Arthur R. Clough, and many others. It should also be recalled that, despite Matthew Arnold's previously quoted statement, he declared in the same lecture:

As Wordsworth's poetry is, in my judgment, the most important work in verse in our language, during the present century, so Emerson's Essays are, I think, the most important work done in prose. His work is more important than Carlyle's.

One should also not forget Emerson's influence on writers in other countries in Europe during Emerson's life. In France, he was hailed by Charles Baudelaire, Ernest Renan, and Hippolyte Tame, and by the Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev. In Germany, the greatest influence was on Nietzsche, who is said to have brought along a volume of Emerson on all his travels.

Nietzsche's embrace of Emerson's views was not shared by some American critics. Although often called the father of New England Transcendentalism and the Sage of Concord, Emerson came under attack by the distinguished professor of philosophy at Emerson's alma mater, George Santayana of Harvard University:

At bottom he [Emerson] had no doctrine at all. The deeper he went and the more he tried to grapple with fundamental conceptions, the vaguer and more elusive they became in his hands. Did he know what he meant by Spirit or the "Over-Soul"? Could he say what he understood by the terms, so constantly on his lips, Nature, Law, God, Benefit, or Beauty? He could not, and the consciousness of that in capacity was so lively within him that he never attempted to give articulation to his philosophy. (1)

As if this attack from Santayana were not enough, there was an even more scathing attack by a president of Yale University (A. Bartlett Giamatti), made to the senior class in his baccalaureate address in 1982. President Giamatti claimed that Emerson "freed our politics and our politicians from any sense of restraint by extolling self-generated, unaffiliated power as the best foot to place in the small of the back of the man in front of him." (2)

Emerson, however, also has had his defenders. Among those to whom Emerson became a god in the philosophical-political canon have been the American pragmatists like C.S. Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, who embraced Emerson's preference for experience as an educative force; critics like Vernon Louis Parrington (in his Main Currents of American Thought, 1927), and F.O. Matthiessen (in his American Renaissance, 1941), both of whom endorsed what they believed were Emerson's great contributions to the development of American democracy. And long before the attack made by President Giamatti of Yale, there was Dr. Charles W. Eliot, a former president of Harvard, who was so impressed with Emerson's ideas on education that he invited him to give a series of lectures there. (The lectures were eventually published in 1887 as "The Natural History of Intellect.")

Emerson's poetry received unstinting praise from Robert Frost, who included him (in 1959) among the four greatest Americans. (The other three were "George Washington, the general and statesman; Thomas Jefferson, the political thinker; Abraham Lincoln, the martyr and savior.") Frost especially praised Emerson's "Concord Hymn" and "Uriel," which he called "the best poem yet written in Western literature." (By contrast, Yvor Winters and T.S. Eliot found Emerson's alleged Romantic orientation and syrupy view of reality excessively sentimental and even fraudulent.)

The seed which James Russell Lowell's satiric references to Emerson's apparent yen for both Olympian and Stock Exchange achievements grew into a full--fledged anti-Emerson attack in Kenneth Lynn's review of Gay Wilson's 1981 biography of Emerson. In that review (in Commentary, March 1982), Professor Lynn alleges that there was something coarsely materialistic in Emerson's pursuit of his first wife, Ellen Tucker--and, even more so, in his pursuit of her wealth. When she died after eighteen months of marriage to Emerson, it was his inheritance of her property which enabled him, according to Lynn, to make and enjoy his first trip to Europe, and, from his "comfortable assurance of an annual income," to urge others to shun vulgar materialism.

One could continue indefinitely to summarize these divergent opinions concerning Emerson's worth as a person, as a philosopher, as a poet, and as "a man of letters." The three camps (pro-Emerson, anti-Emerson, and occasionally an attempt to present a balanced evaluation of Emerson) generally presented their cases with vigor, if not always with evidentiary substantiation. The question, however, remains: How could one individual (and his works) give rise to such contradictory judgments concerning his worth? The remainder of this essay will try to address this seemingly insoluble conundrum and offer a rationale for continued study of the man who was called in 1929 "The Wisest American" by one of his biographers, Wendell Phillips.

There are many reasons why Emerson provokes either a hostile denunciation or a fervent embrace. For those who find in Emerson the seeds of anarchy, there is much in Emerson's writing which would sustain that judgment. One need only cite such a statement as the following from his essay "Circles," and Emerson would be hailed as the spiritual progenitor of the Woodstock generation:

The one thing which we seek with insatiable desire is to forget ourselves, to be surprised out of our propriety, to lose our sempiternal memory and do something without knowing how or why, in short to draw a new circle. Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.

Or what could better express the credo of the 1960s and 1970s generation than this excerpt from his "Self-Reliance"?: "Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members." Feminists might enhance Emerson's call to rebellion by adding "womanhood" to "manhood."

On the other hand, if one were to seek encouragement to change the modus operandi of a system and to innovate previously untried ideas, one would, like President Eliot of Harvard University, embrace Emerson's call for change in the status quo as found in his "The American Scholar":

Colleges, in like manner, have their indispensable office,--to teach elements. But they can only highly serve us when they aim not to drill, but to create; when they gather from far everyray of various genius to their hospitable halls, and by the concentrated fires, set the hearts of their youth on flame. Thought and knowledge are natures in which apparatus and pretension avail nothing.

In a similar vein, Emerson's views on religion, especially on Christianity, precipitated hostile reaction in his own time--and they continue to do so in our own era. A few weeks after Emerson delivered his "Divinity School Address" at Harvard in 1838, Andrews Norton, a conservative Unitarian and a former divinity professor, violently attacked Emerson and liberal Transcendentalists in a Boston newspaper. He maintained that Christianity must be apprehended by accepting all of the Bible and its authorities. "There can be no intuition, no direct perception of the truths of Christianity." (3)

Attacks on Emerson's concepts of religion, especially his perceived comments on traditional Christianity, did not cease with his death in 1882. They have continued without much abatement and are likely to continue so long as some people continue to maintain that they have the ultimate truth on the ultimate questions. Consider, for example, the kind of opposition Emerson's March 1868 journal entry would create today:

Can any one doubt that if the noblest saint among the Buddhists, the noblest Mahometan, the highest Stoic in Athens, the purest & wisest Christian, Menu in India, Confucius in China, Spinoza in Holland, could some where meet & converse together, they would find themselves denounced by their own sects, & sustained by these believed adversaries of their sects. Jeremy Taylor, George Herbert, Pascal even, Pythagoras, if these could all converse intimately, two & two, how childish their country traditions would appear.

Such an ecumenical vision is unacceptable to those who hold a monochromatic monopoly on religious truth. In an article which appeared in The New York Times Magazine on March 16, 1997, with the heading "Some of Their Best Friends Are Jews," James Sibley (appointed by the House Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention as its missionary to the Jews) is quoted as saying (as if in reply to Emerson): "There's a feeling in America, even among Christians, that everything's equal, that Christians, Jew, Muslim, Hindu, it's all the same thing thing.... Ecumenism is not the way."

Sustained reflection and disillusioning experiences have led me to believe that concerning religion, non est disputandum, and, like Melville's Bartleby, "I prefer not to." For those who insist, however, on engaging in theological disputations, I'd like to see a greater awareness and application of the following two aphorisms:

"We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another." (Jonathan Swift, Thoughts on Various Subjects (1711) "In my Father's house are many mansions." (John, 14:1-2)

Emerson's views on education have also provided fodder for pro- and anti-Emerson fusillades. As mentioned earlier, the pragmatic philosophers like John Dewey, who believed that one learns chiefly by doing and not by memorizing, applauded Emerson's teaching that experience is the greatest teacher. On the other hand, more traditionally oriented educators blame Emerson's views on education for the decline in academic standards and performance. They certainly would not warm up to Emerson's denunciation of the classical education he found in colleges in his day. Note his November 1842 journal entry:

Some thousands of young men are graduated at our colleges in this country every year, and the persons who at 40 years still read Greek can all be counted on your hand. I never met with ten. Three persons I have seen who read Plato. But is not this absurd--that the whole liberal talent of this country should be dedicated in all its best years to these studies [Greek & Latin] which lead to nothing?

It could be argued that firmly-held opinions regarding Emerson are generally given by individuals who can be labeled by a specific designation like "Conservative," "Liberal," "Progressive," "Fundamentalist," etc. One wonders whether the condemnation or the endorsement is caused by the evaluator's preconditioned judgment or by a judicious examination of all that Emerson has said and written in the more than forty volumes of his writings. In perhaps his best-known essay, "Self-Reliance," Emerson prophetically intuited that a person's acknowledged affiliation would direct that individual's judgment:

If I know your sect I anticipate your argument. I hear a preacher announce for his text and topic the expediency of one of the institutions of his church. Do I not know beforehand that not possibly can he say a new and spontaneous word? Do I not know that with all this ostentation of examining the grounds of the institution he will do no such thing? Do I not know that he is pledged to himself not to look but at one side, the permitted side, not as a man, but as a parish minister? He is a retained attorney, and these airs of the bench are the emptiest affectation.

It can also be argued, as did Emerson, that a person's views may change--that yesterday's liberals and even radicals may become today's neoconservatives (but hardly the other way around); that some may even change their religion or become completely alienated from it. Emerson himself declared in his September 14,1839, journal entry: "I hate preaching, whether in pulpits or in teachers' meetings. Preaching is a pledge, and I wish to say what I think and feel today, with the proviso that tomorrow perhaps I shall contradict it all. Freedom boundless I wish. I will not pledge myself not to drink wine, not to drink ink, not to lie and not to commit adultery, lest I hanker tomorrow to do these very things by reason of my having tied my hands." And, of course, there is that overworked apothegm from his "Self-Reliance": "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do."

It is Emerson's consistent inconsistencies which give many readers of his works their greatest discomfort. What is one to make, for example, of his shifts between what he called, in his essay "Intellect," "opposite negations"? How is one to explain these shifts in Emerson's thinking, and do they invalidate his value as a source of illumination for our times?

If one is inclined to dismiss Emerson as a subjective Romantic who never really developed a systematic philosophy the way that traditionally accepted philosophers did (Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Spinoza, et al.), then quite obviously Emerson's occasionally maddening flip--flops would sustain one's dismissal of Emerson from consideration as a serious philosopher in the great tradition. Surely it must also be acknowledged that the father of Transcendentalism stood on the shoulders of others--e.g., Immanuel Kant (especially as seen through the interpretation given by Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Biographia Litteraria (with emphasis on Chapter 14.) (4) On the other hand, who is it that does not stand on the shoulders of his predecessors? Alfred North Whitehead was more right than wrong when he wrote in 1929 in his Process and Realily, "The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato."

Immanuel Kant and Samuel Taylor Coleridge were not, of course, the only ones to whom Emerson was indebted. As Robert D. Richardson, Jr., makes us aware in his Emerson, The Mind on Fi re, Emerson was an omnivorous reader. Not only did he master the generally accepted canons of Western literature and philosophy, but he also immersed himself in the riches of Eastern literature and philosophy as well--not to mention his also mastering useful bits of knowledge from books on agriculture (especially tree planting, science--and corresponding with such eminences as Thomas Carlyle. Such an encyclopedic embracing of ideas from divergent sources was bound to result in a proliferation of sometimes contradictory thoughts, and a profusion of quotations. Emerson, however, in an 1867 journal entry forcefully defended the use of quotations--perhaps, too forcefully:

In this old matter of Originality & Quotation, a few points to be made distinctly.

The apparently immense amount of debt to the old. Bynecessity & byproclivity, & by delight, we all quote. We quote books, & arts & science, & religion, & customs, & laws. Yes, & houses, tables & chairs. At first view, 'tis all quotation--all we have. But presently we make distinction. 1. By wise quotation. Vast difference in the mode of quotation. One quotes so well, that the person quoted is a gainer. The quoter's selection honors & celebrates the author. The quoter gives more fame than he receives aid. Thus, Coleridge.

Besides his immersion in the world's literature and philosophy, there are other reasons to account for Emerson's occasional inconsistencies. He tends to be more reflective and soulful in his journal entries than in his public lectures (most of which were eventually published). There is sometimes a vast difference between the public orator who often held his audiences spellbound for two hours or so with his stentorian eloquence (although some found his lectures more soporific than spellbinding), and the solitary Emerson who bared his soul in his journals. He could be both hortatory and minatory in his public utterances and yet retreat to a small, still voice in the solitude of his study.

And, of course, since he lived a relatively long life (1803-1882), the force of new experiences inevitably caused a change in his world view. As we have been told by a number of distinguished writers, notably by Goethe, whom Emerson much admired, Romanticism is a disease; Classicism is health. According to his son, Emerson waited twenty years before he wrote Part II of his poem "Threnody," Part I of which was written after his son Waldo's death in 1842. It is thus likely that it was the passage of time which determined the difference in emotions between the two parts. (Another theory is that Emerson kept revising the poem very frequently.) It also seems quite evident to me that it was the passage of time and the changes in philosophy caused by experience that made him drift away from his enthusiastic endorsement of the 1855 edition of Whitman's Leaves of Grass when in later editions Whitman became more sexually explicit. Whereas in his May 21,1833, journal entry, he wrote, "I like the sayers of No better than the sayers of Yes," he became, almost thirty years later, much more cautious in making sweeping judgments. After his parti pris generalizations were tamed by subsequent experience, he wrote in his December 1862 journal, "I ought to have added to my list of benefits of age the general views of life we get at sixty when we penetrate show and look at facts."

Considering the plethora of inconsistencies in Emerson's total oeuvre and the seemingly unresolved opposing evaluations of his worth by critics, how are we to see him now that we have entered the twenty-first century? It should be recognized, first of all, that Emerson has become common currency. Parts of him have been appropriated by various individuals and various causes. In my collection of Emersonia, I find a full-page advertisement in Time (November 10, 1961) from the John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance Company, with a large portrait of Emerson, and subtitled: "He was the voice of the American dream." Apparently, those who approved the ad at John Hancock were not familiar with Emerson's 1847 journal entry: "I feel, meantime, that those who succeed in life, in civilized society, are beasts of prey. It has always been so."

His pervasive influence has been reflected in many areas, some of them somewhat unexpected. When one visits the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., one may be somewhat surprised to learn that it was a lecture that Henry Clay Folger heard Emerson give on Shakespeare at Amherst College in 1879 that sparked Folger's interest in Shakespeare, an interest that eventually resulted in the construction of the Folger Library.

It is even more surprising (albeit pleasantly so) to learn that when Woody Hayes, the legendary, successful football coach at Ohio State University, was asked in 1982 to give an address at Harvard University commemorating the hundredth anniversary of Emerson's death, he said, "Emerson was an inspiration to me all my life.... He was an enormously positive man. He would've made a great football coach." (5)

Excerpting Emerson for one's purpose can, of course, be tricky. Even so astute (and conservative) a political commentator as William Safire can be entrapped by quoting only a fragment of Emerson's many statements: "When Sen. Rufus Choate in 1856 coined a phrase by criticizing 'the glittering and sounding generalities' of the Declaration of Independence, Ralph Waldo Emerson snapped back with: 'Glittering generalities? They are blazing ubiquities!'" (6) Mr. Safire either ignored or was in ignorance of Emerson's occasional contempt for the masses (as expressed in his "Consider by the Way," in his The Conduct of Life: "Masses! The calamity is the masses.... If government knew how, I should like to see it check, not multiply the population.... Away with this hurrah of masses.")

Even the most controversial parts of Emerson's "Self-Reliance" have their defenders. Consider, for example, the following excerpt from that essay:

On my saying "What have I do do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from within?" my friend suggested, "But these impulses may be from below, not from above." I replied, "They do not seem to me to be such, but if lam the Devil's child, I will live then from the Devil." No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution; the only wrong what is against it.

And yet so gentlemanly a poet as Robert Penn Warren, rereading Emerson on a flight to New York, can write in his "Homage to Emerson, on Night Flight to New York": "There is/No sin. Not even error..., for/at 38,000 feet Emerson/Is dead right."7 I suppose, if one wishes, one could respond to Warren's acquittal of Emerson by saying that at "38,000 feet," one's judgment becomes somewhat flighty.

How do we resolve these opposing interpretations of Emerson? Walt Whitman offers us one way Out of this maze. In his Specimen Days and Collect (1882), he writes: "He [Emerson] does not see or take one side, one presentation, only or mainly.... He sees all sides." Whitman, of course, was merely echoing what is one of the recurrent principles in Emerson's thought: All in life is on the Over-Soul's (that is, God's) continuum. Whether it be "good" on one end of the continuum or "evil" on the other end, everything is merely a part of God's all-encompassing unity. In this kind of philosophical framework, even his troubling inconsistencies can be part of this continuum.

Somehow, such a rationale seems to me like an anodyne offered to those who seek an existence of painless acceptance rather than an endless quest to reconcile seeming irreconcilables. Emerson maintains his vitality for me for several reasons. He remains America's most quotable author, some of whose aphorisms can startle one with their current applicability. In his first important work, "Nature" (1836), he anticipated Albert Einstein's search for a unified theory of the world with his "Whenever a true theory appears, it will be its own evidence. Its testis, that it will explain all phenomena." In his essay "Fate," he foresaw the onslaught of the advertising media's stress on physicality: "In certain men digestion and sex absorb the vital force." And he issued matchless advice to those in our frenzy-filled century who are searching for inner peace when he ended his "Self-Reliance" with these words: "Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles."

Emerson is the comforter who (like his admirer, Robert Frost) has been "one acquainted with the night."

What insures his lasting fame, however, is not his aphoristic elegance, his ecumenical vision, his arguable nuggets of wisdom literature in his published essays, lectures, sermons, letters, literary criticism, and especially his journals. What gives him the ineradicable stamp of greatness is that there is enough richness and "infinitude of the private man" (to quote him again) to allow each reader to see in Emerson his own reflection. He is the Rorschach test by which one interprets his own preferences and prejudices. He thus becomes the gauge by which one measures one's own adequacies and inadequacies.

APPENDIX

The following represent a very limited and arbitrary sampling of Emerson's inconsistencies. Here I excerpt some passages from his works on a variety of topics. Column A quotations are contrasted with opposing statements in Column B.

Emerson's Swings Between "Opposite Negations"

He in whom the love of truth predominates will keep himself aloof from all the moorings, and afloat. He will abstain from dogmatism, and recognize all the opposite negations between which, as walls, his being is swung.

"Intellect" (1841)

Column A                          Column B

On Democracy

Democracy, Freedom, has its root  Society always consists in
in the sacred truth that every    greatest part of young and
man hath in him the divine        foolish persons. The old, who
Reason, or that, though few men   have seen through the hypocrisy
since the creation of the world   of courts and statesmen, die and
live according to the dictates    leave no wisdom to their sons.
of Reason, yet all men are        They believe their own
created capable of so doing,      newspapers, as their fathers did
that is the equality and the      at their age. With such an
only equality of all men. To      ignorant and deceivable
this truth we look when we say,   majority, States would soon run
Reverence thyself; Be true to     to ruin, but that there are
thyself.                          limitations beyond which the
--Journals (December 1834)        folly and ambition of governors
                                  cannot go.
                                  --"Politics" (1844)

On Fate and Free Will

As long as lam weak, I shall      No picture of life can have any
talk of Fate; whenever the God    veracity that does not admit the
fills me with his fulness, I      odious facts. A man's power is
shall see the disappearance of    hooped in by a necessity which,
Fate. Journals (April 1842) You   by many experiments, he touches
think me the child of my          on every side until he learns
circumstances: I make my          its arc.
circumstance.                     --"Fate" (1851-1853)
--"The Transcendentalist" (1842)

On Nature

The rounded world is fair to      Nature is no sentimentalist,--
see,                              does not cosset or pamper us. We
Nine times folded in mystery;     must see that the world is rough
Though baffled seers cannot       and surly, and will not mind
impart                            drowning a man or a woman, but
The secret of its laboring        swallows your ship like a grain
heart,                            of persons, tingles your blood,
Throb thine with Nature's         benumbs your feet, freezes a man
throbbing                         like an apple. The diseases, the
breast,                           elements, fortune, gravity,
And all is clear from east to     lightning, respect no persons.
west.                             The way of Providence is a
--"Nature" (1844)                 little rude.
                                  --"Fate" (1851-1853)

On Old Age

Nature abhors the old, and old    In old persons...we often
age seems the only disease; all   observe a fair, plump,
others run into this one. We      perennial, waxen complexion,
call it by many names,--fever,    which indicates that all the
intemperance, insanity,           ferment of earlier days has
stupidity and crime; they are     subsided into serenity of
all forms of old age; they are    thought and behavior.
rest, conservatism,               --"Old Age" (1862)
appropriation, inertia; not
newness, not the way onward. We
grizzle every day. I see no need
of it."
--"Circles" (1841)

On the Past

...why should we grope among the  The past has a new value every
dry bones of the past, or put     moment to the active mind,
the living generation into        through the incessant
masquerade out of its faded       purification and better method
wardrobe?                         of its memory.... Without memory
--"Nature" (1836)                 all life and thought were an
                                  unneeded procession.
                                  --"The Natural History of the
                                  Intellect" (1887)

On Prayer

As men's prayers are a disease    Let us not have the prayers of
of the will, so are their creeds  one sect, nor of the Christian
a disease of the intellect."      Church, but of men in all ages
--"Self-Reliance" (1841)          and religions who have prayed
                                  well.
                                  --"Papers from The Dial" (1840-
                                  1844)

On Science

The Religion that is afraid of    Empirical science is apt to
science dishonours God and        cloud the sight, and by the very
commits suicide.                  knowledge of functions and
--Journals (March 4, 1831)        processes to bereave the student
                                  of the manly contemplation of
                                  the whole.
                                  --"Nature" (1836)

On Self-Reliance

Trust thyself.... Nothing is at   The individual is always
last sacred but the integrity of  mistaken.
your own mind.                    "Experience" (1844)
--"Self-Reliance" (1841)
                                  Self-reliance, the height and
                                  perfection of man, is reliance
                                  on God.
                                  --"The Fugitive Slave Law" (1854)

On Solitude and Friendship

...[A] man is stronger than a     There is a class of persons to
city.... his solitude is more     whom by all spiritual affinity I
prevalent and beneficent than     am bought and sold; for them I
the concert of crowds.            will go to prison if need be.
--Journals (October 17, 1840)     --"Self-Reliance" (1841)

[Author's Note: Sources for quotations from Emerson's works are given within the article text. Sources for other quotations, and additional comments, are listed below.]

1. George Santayana, "Emerson," Emerson: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Milton Konvitz and Stephen Whicher (Englewood, N.J., 1962), 31.

(2.) Time (May 10, 1982), 124.

(3.) Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Emerson, The Mind on Fire: A Biography (The University of California Press, 1995), 299.

(4.) To help clarify one's confusion in trying to under. stand Emerson's borrowing from Kant, one should recall that when Emerson uses the words "Reason" and "Understanding" in his lectures/essays, composed when he was writing about Transcendentalism in the 1830s, he uses the words not in their ordinary meaning but (following Coleridge's somewhat befuddled conception of Kantian terms Verstand and Vernunft) in a wholly different sense. When Emerson uses Reason, he means by it "intuition," and when he uses "Understanding," he means by it "a logical and pragmatic intelligence."

A similar difficulty of what Emerson means by his "Over-Soul" would considerably disappear if one substituted for it the more traditional word of "God." His use of the word "Over-Soul" was the tribute he paid to his Oriental reading.

(5.) The New York Times (April 27, 1982), C 7.

(6.) The Springfield (Mass.) Union-News (reprinted from The New York Times) (Jan. 24, 1997), A 15.

(7.) Quoted in Harold Bloom's "Mr. America," The New York Review of Books (November 22, 1984), 19, col. 1.

MILTON BIRNBAUM is a retired Dean of Arts and Sciences, and Professor of English at American International College whose articles and reviews are published widely in scholarly publications.