Emerson | Page 2

the prince of Idealists? Are we to look for the
sources of his thought in Kant or Jacobi, in Fichte or Schelling? How
does he stand towards Parmenides and Zeno, the Egotheism of the
Sufis, or the position of the Megareans? Shall we put him on the shelf

with the Stoics or the Mystics, with Quietist, Pantheist, Determinist? If
life were long, it might be worth while to trace Emerson's affinities
with the philosophic schools; to collect and infer his answers to the
everlasting problems of psychology and metaphysics; to extract a set of
coherent and reasoned opinions about knowledge and faculty,
experience and consciousness, truth and necessity, the absolute and the
relative. But such inquiries would only take us the further away from
the essence and vitality of Emerson's mind and teaching. In philosophy
proper Emerson made no contribution of his own, but accepted,
apparently without much examination of the other side, from Coleridge
after Kant, the intuitive, à priori and realist theory respecting the
sources of human knowledge, and the objects that are within the
cognisance of the human faculties. This was his starting-point, and
within its own sphere of thought he cannot be said to have carried it
any further. What he did was to light up these doctrines with the rays of
ethical and poetic imagination. As it has been justly put, though
Emersonian transcendentalism is usually spoken of as a philosophy, it
is more justly regarded as a gospel.[1] But before dwelling more on this,
let us look into the record of his life, of which we may say in all truth
that no purer, simpler, and more harmonious story can be found in the
annals of far-shining men.
[Footnote 1: Frothingham's Transcendentalism in New England: a
History--a judicious, acute, and highly interesting piece of criticism.]

I.
Ralph Waldo Emerson was born at Boston, May 25, 1803. He was of
an ancient and honourable English stock, who had transplanted
themselves, on one side from Cheshire and Bedfordshire, and on the
other from Durham and York, a hundred and seventy years before. For
seven or eight generations in a direct and unbroken line his forefathers
had been preachers and divines, not without eminence in the Puritan
tradition of New England. His second name came into the family with
Rebecca Waldo, with whom at the end of the seventeenth century one
Edward Emerson had intermarried, and whose family had fled from the

Waldensian valleys and that slaughter of the saints which Milton called
on Heaven to avenge. Every tributary, then, that made Emerson what
he was, flowed not only from Protestantism, but from 'the Protestantism
of the Protestant religion.' When we are told that Puritanism inexorably
locked up the intelligence of its votaries in a dark and straitened
chamber, it is worthy to be remembered that the genial, open, lucid, and
most comprehensive mind of Emerson was the ripened product of a
genealogical tree that at every stage of its growth had been vivified by
Puritan sap.
Not many years after his birth, Emerson's mother was left a widow with
narrow means, and he underwent the wholesome training of frugality in
youth. When the time came, he was sent to Harvard. When Clough
visited America a generation later, the collegiate training does not
appear to have struck him very favourably. 'They learn French and
history and German, and a great many more things than in England, but
only imperfectly.' This was said from the standard of Rugby and Balliol,
and the method that Clough calls imperfect had merits of its own. The
pupil lost much in a curriculum that had a certain rawness about it,
compared with the traditional culture that was at that moment (1820)
just beginning to acquire a fresh hold within the old gray quadrangles
of Oxford. On the other hand, the training at Harvard struck fewer of
those superfluous roots in the mind, which are only planted that they
may be presently cast out again with infinite distraction and waste.
When his schooling was over, Emerson began to prepare himself for
the ministrations of the pulpit, and in 1826 and 1827 he preached in
divers places. Two years later he was ordained, and undertook the
charge of an important Unitarian Church in Boston. It was not very
long before the strain of forms, comparatively moderate as it was in the
Unitarian body, became too heavy to be borne. Emerson found that he
could no longer accept the usual view of the Communion Service, even
in its least sacramental interpretation. To him the rite was purely
spiritual in origin and intent, and at the best only to be retained as a
commemoration. The whole world, he said, had been full of idols and
ordinances and forms, when 'the Almighty God was pleased to qualify
and