supreme appreciation of clear and direct vision, it is not surprising to find that Emerson's predilection is for writers who stimulate our minds to independent activity, rather than for those who instruct. He himself valued Plato highly, but it was not for Plato's theory of knowledge and reasoned explanation of things, but for his flashes of insight and suggestive power. Hence his theory of books is that they are for nothing but to inspire, and are to be valued according to the mood which they induce in us. This is the key, of course, to his own works, which, as it has been said again and again, are pre-eminent for their inspiring effect. He held that the writer confers this greatest benefit of inspiration upon us by giving bold and generous expression to his own best impressions and insights. The expression was, he thought, the main matter: "expression is what we want; not knowledge, but vent, . . an utterance whole, generous, sustained, equal, and graduated at will, such as Montaigne, such as Beaumont and Fletcher, so habitually and easily attain." He claims that he is just such a reporter and striver after free utterance himself. "I confine my ambition to true reporting. I write anecdotes of the intellect, a sort of Farmers' Almanac of mental moods."

There is a touch of waywardness about this, but it contains an important element of truth. The baffled reader of Emerson will perhaps see in it an explanation of his detached and seemingly inconsequent style. Emerson, no doubt, obeyed his moods always; he allowed his mind uncurbed liberty, and obediently watched and reported its wonderful wanderings. But to suppose that these reports have no kind of unity and consistency is to make a great mistake. Still, there is another side of the question which shows the dangers of this rather venturesome reporting of mental moods. Emerson was aware of these dangers when he himself wrote-"I am always insincere, as always knowing there are other moods." This is rather startling; it reminds us of that modern product, dilettantism, about which M. Paul Bourget has lately written so suggestively. There is, however, a note of assurance about Emerson that wholly

differentiates him from the dilettantist (using that word in the stricter sense of M. Bourget's usage.) Modern dilettantism is the paralysis of conviction, ending in fitfulness and indifference. Emerson, on the other hand, has certain great convictions which give stability and concentration to life. He will admit many things with the dilettantist. He will recognise the multiplicity and conflicting nature of human creeds, and acknowledge that very much depends upon "the point of view." He is ready to give the various human tendencies and temperaments their due; and to value scepticism itself. He will concede the relativity and limitations of knowledge, and the impossibility of finality and absolute certainty of judgment. In all these respects he is unflinchingly modern, as he is also in his cheerful acceptance of the achievements of science. But with all this, and although he has no special philosophy to back him, he holds an impregnable faith in the divine unity and purpose of things; a faith which he does not attempt to substantiate by any ordered parade of logic and knowledge, but bases on internal experience and the deliverances of his own mind in presence of the facts of existence. He has no doubt of the supreme worth of life, and of the possibility of making it a thing of joy to all men. The world of nature and humanity-nature, with her infinitely varied charm and majesty; man, with his wondrous faculties, heroic impulses, and splendid creativeness-awakens in him feelings which are altogether satisfying. This is the secret of his audacious optimism. Emerson does not, therefore, lead us into the dilettantism which M. Bourget speaks of; but rather furnishes an antidote to it-an antidote which many of us, bewildered by the many-sidedness of modern life and the perplexing magnitude of our growing inheritance from the past, stand sorely in need of. Certainly, he who will help us to maintain, whilst multiplying our points of sympathetic contact with the world, an attitude of conviction and faith, confers upon us an inestimable benefit. Emerson has done this.

What, then, is Emerson's creed? The difficulty of ascertaining what his views are has led some critics to the conclusion that he has none in particular, or that his creed is quite a formless and inexpressible one. This is a mistake. We have, all of us who are not thorough-going Pyrrhonists, a certain way of envisaging the world, a certain scaffolding to our thought, or Weltanschauung, as the Germans say. Emerson, elusive though he often is, forms no exception to the rule. There is unity in his work, and certain fundamental ideas appear consistently throughout it. These we may now attempt to pass briefly in review, -without developing, however, many of their implications.

According to Emerson the universe is a vast unity, alive with deity or soul-that is to say, pervaded by a divine energy or Universal Mind, which expresses itself and is interpreted to man through Nature, and by its workings in himself. Nature is a living symbol, "a vast trope," through which, as through man, this Universal Mind is striving for ever fuller embodiment. Thus the Universe represents an ascending scale of life which attains its summit in man; and its history is a progress in the development of soul through the medium of matter or form:

In this way Emerson's conception harmonises with the modern evolutionary idea, which it is said that he with poetic prevision anticipated, taking a hint from Lamarck's phrase, "arrested development." But Emerson's view of development, being spiritualistic, implies something more than is implied in the usual materialistic evolutionary conception it implies that the scheme of things has a final aim, which is the perfection of spirit. This fundamental notion is the basis of Emerson's philosophy of Nature and History. Both Nature and Man are comprehensible to the individual because the same Mind speaks to him through both. From each soul, as from a centre, a “ray

of relation passes to every other thing, establishing a kinship. "Nature is the incarnation of a thought;" hence is legible to us. Furthermore, this identity of the power in Nature and in ourselves points the conclusion that Nature is moral: "All things preach to us." It is Emerson's intimate sense of this spiritual presence in Nature that makes of him the pagan that he often is, and impels him to anthropomorphise her. As with Nature, so with History: the clue to it is in our own minds. It is the record of the workings of "that one Mind common to all individual men." "What Plato has thought we may think, what a saint has felt we may feel;" because Plato and the saint were instruments of the same divine mind to which we also have access. And this explains his doctrine of Representative Men. "We delight in the great man because he is the ampler expression of what in us is cramped and small." It is a corollary of this view of things, that Nature is as divine and Man's possibilities are as great to-day as ever they were. "An everlasting Now reigns in Nature, which hangs the same roses on our bushes which charmed the Roman and the Chaldean in their hanging gardens." It is one of the fatal illusions "that the present is not the critical and decisive hour."

Emerson's doctrine of the Universal Mind is the starting point of his ethics. His central ethical idea is that famous one of Self-Reliance, by which he signifies trust in the dictates of the essentially divine, and therefore utterly trustworthy self, which speaks in us when we allow it hearing. Self-reliance is, therefore, self-abandonment. "To talk of reliance is a poor external way of speaking; speak rather of that which relies." Let, then, the prompting of this self (which is also the not-self) find utterance in speech and following in action; let us believe our instincts, and obey our spontaneous impulses. Each has his own special place and his own unique endowment; the power in us is new in nature. Let us cheerfully taking ourselves for better or worse, play resolutely our own part, obeying the law of our own naturę. Conformity is waste;

it scatters our force, loses time. "A man is to carry himself in the presence of opposition as if everything were titular and ephemeral but he." But perhaps you fear inconsistency? Be sincere, and you need not be troubled. "Let each moment have its sincere record without prospect or retrospect, and no doubt the whole will be found symmetrical." Emerson's first counsel of conduct is, therefore, like that of old Polonius-" To thy own self be true, and it follows, as the night the day, thou can'st not then be false to any man."

It will perhaps strike the reader that there has been too much stress upon self, and that too little has been said about others. But it must be borne in mind that Emerson's view is redeemed from any narrow egotism; for in the moments of self-reliance we transcend the narrow self and "live with the immeasurable mind." Moreover, this self is reflected in and by others. Still, the individualistic accent does, no doubt, predominate in Emerson. He bears the traces of his origin and epoch; traces of the eighteenth-century struggle for the emancipation of the individual and the transcendental faith in individual sufficiency. His writings are, as we know, a perfect storehouse of quotations for the modern advocate of "Personal Liberty." But there is this to be said, that Emerson's breadth of view and flexibility prevent narrowness; there is no dogmatic formulation of a stiffened creed of Individualism. On the contrary, there is frequent statement of the other side of the question; and his writings abound in passages which would quite satisfy the latter-day socialist. For Emerson clearly shows that he recognised the great modern doctrine of social solidarity. He saw the interdependence of human beings; he saw that the greatest of men is largely indebted to society for the elements of his greatness :

"All are needed by each one;
Nothing is great or small alone."

Of our immense indebtedness to the past could we have any more apt expression than in this passage ?-"Every ship