MODERN IDEALISM: GOETHE:

CARLYLE

HAVING discovered the leading doctrines of Emerson and some of the leading qualities of his style, we next inquire concerning the effect of his reading. The style of Emerson has appeared to be original, securing by its combination of strength and simplicity an axiomatic point the derivation of which it is almost hopeless to search for among the many books he read, if indeed it is to be found in books at all. Is the question equally hopeless: Are the leading ideas of Emerson his own? The world had reached a fulness of years when he began to think and write. Centuries of thinkers and writers had preceded him. To utter a doctrine entirely new was, a priori, a matter of great difficulty. Did Emerson succeed in striking out a fresh path on the complicated map of ideas, or was his mission rather to stimulate others to walk bravely in age-approved paths, as he himself was doing? In short, was he primarily a revealer, or an inspirer?

To answer this question will take us into the course of his reading, and it may be said here that

Emerson's manner of reading was his own. He sought in books primarily the thoughts that, so far as he could tell, he already entertained. Or he sought concrete illustrations of such thought. Or, again, he sought stimulus and a working mood. That book he liked best which put him into the frame of mind for work, and by work he meant the expression of such thoughts as, when heard or read by others, would in turn benefit men, by giving them the good hope which never left him, and by establishing those foundations of faith which result in high and orderly living.

The main lines of Emerson's reading, desultory though it was, were in the current idealism, with occasional excursions into mysticism and pantheism; in the philosophy and poetry of the Orient; in Plato, with less important Greek philosophers, and in Montaigne. He preferred the poets to the philosophers, but it must be remembered that he called Swedenborg and Plato poets. From the English poets it is safe to say Emerson gained life rather than doctrine, a stimulus to self-expression. Wordsworth he never fully admired, though Wordsworth's view of nature as the gateway to God was not unlike his own. Shakespeare to Emerson lacked the moral elevation which will mark the Prophet-Poet of the future. From Plutarch, in the nature of the case, he culled anec

dote rather than absorbed philosophy. From the preacher William Ellery Channing, whom as a youth he had heard with delight, Emerson received the truth that morality and religion blend, one into the other; from him he learned the progressive Right, revealing itself to every human soul; the one-ness of each soul to its divine Source; its power to receive Divinity and to grow; the sacredness of the individual conscience, and the freedom due to individual thought. He found as well in Channing some things that he did not fully accept, such as a postulating of the unique nature of Christ, a special emphasis upon the Bible, and an unqualified belief in immortality.

It will be sufficient, therefore, to confine our inquiry to the lines already laid down. Let us begin by asking what Emerson found in the current idealism, historically descending from Berkeley, and expressed with more variety and vigor in Germany, whence it was interpreted for English readers by Coleridge and Carlyle.

A letter from Dr. Edward Waldo Emerson, in answer to questions concerning his father's acquaintance with philosophy, says: "In college Mr. Emerson read Cudworth,' delighting in his book

'Emerson puts Cudworth among authors of the second class, in an abstract of a lecture given in Appendix F to Cabot's

not for the writer's views but for what it told him of Plato and the older philosophers; and he was thus led to their works. The ancient philosophers with their poetical ideas - Heracleitus, Xenophanes, Empedocles, Plato, and the Neo-Platonists, especially Plotinus, - appealed to him far more than modern metaphysicians, for whose works he cared little. . . . He first got at the thoughts of the Germans (from Eckhart and Leibnitz down to Kant, Goethe, Oken, and Schelling) through Coleridge, in whose works he took great pleasure.

But it was the great poets he cared for as teachers far more than the metaphysicians. He classed Swedenborg and Plato as poets."

I

It appears, then, that Emerson gave heartiest attention to writers of imagination, and that he turned more readily to the ancient than to the modern philosophers. This view is corroborated by a passage in "English Traits," in the midst of which, citing Berkeley, Schelling, Hegel, and many more as examples of men who lived on a high plane of thought, Emerson says: "These . . . do all have a kind of filial retrospect to Plato and the Greeks."

"Life," p. 715. Cudworth was the author of "The True Intellectual System of the Universe" (1678). See IV, 294, and Index.

I P. 241.

Yet when a boy he had caught Berkeley's thought with delight, as a letter to Margaret Fuller tells us. "I know but one solution to my nature and relations, which I find in remembering the joy with which in my boyhood I caught the first hint of the Berkeleyan philosophy, and which I certainly never lost sight of afterwards. . . . I was not an electrician but an idealist. I could see that there was a Cause behind every stump and clod, and, by the help of some fine words, could make every old wagon and wood-pile and stone-wall oscillate a little and threaten to dance." The belief of Berkeley is hit off in another part of the passage from "English Traits" cited above: "that we have no certain assurance of the existence of matter." 2

I

Moreover, throughout Emerson's works are scattered references by name, and occasionally by doctrine, to the German philosophers of the Kantian school. "Build therefore your own world," say

both Kant and Emerson.3 Now and then Schelling is quoted.4 And Hegel's name appears oftener than any more explicit reference.5

'Cabot's "Life," p. 478.

2 v, 242.

3 Cabot's "Life," p. 261. 1, 64; also, VI, 9.

4 V, 242; VI, 13.

5 But see V, 242.