that comes to America got its chart from Columbus. Every novel is a debtor to Homer. Every carpenter who shaves with a foreplane borrows the genius of a forgotten inventor. Life is girt all around with a zodiac of sciences, the contributions of men who have perished to add their point of light to our sky." But, not to multiply quotations, it must be clear that Emerson's doctrine of the Universal Reason immanent in Man necessarily led him, as it led the old Stoics, to the conception of human brotherhood and interdependence. He has put the point forcibly himself: "The heart and soul of all men being one, this bitterness of His and Mine ceases. His is mine. I am my brother, and my brother is me." Society is not, then, with Emerson, an aggregation of disassociated, independent beings, but a living whole:

"A subtle chain of countless rings
The next unto the farthest brings."

This is the essence of the social gospel of to-day, which demands that no man shall live unto himself alone; and asserts that there is no individual right which consists with the public ill.

Passing now to Emerson's more definite views on the subject of social reform, we find an attitude somewhat different from that of men of our own time; the actuating motive to reform is hardly the same. It was not with him, as it is with us to-day, the terrible spectacle of the misery and want of thousands of our fellows. The hells of huge towns were not known to him. New York, his country's capital, showed no such hideous dens of disease and despair as it abounds in to-day. No; what chiefly impelled him was his consciousness of "the contrast of the dwarfish Actual with the exorbitant Idea;" the lowness of men's aims, the injustice, meanness, and "squalid contentment" which characterised the society about him. It was, from his standpoint, the task of the reformer to make the ideal actual. "What is man born for," he asks, "but to be a Reformer, a Re-maker, of what man has

made; a renouncer of lies; a restorer of truth and good, imitating that great Nature which embosoms us all, and which sleeps no moment on an old past." 66 "'All particular reforms are the removing of some impediment" —that is, some impediment to the free activity of the spirit, and the realisation of the ideal life. Man is everywhere thwarted by these impediments. "The young man, on entering life, finds the way to lucrative employments blocked with abuses. The ways of trade are grown selfish to the borders of theft, and supple to the borders (if not beyond the borders) of fraud." Of course, we are all implicated in this charge, says Emerson; "it is only necessary to ask a few questions as to the progress of the articles of commerce from the fields where they grew to our houses, to become aware that we eat, and drink, and wear perjury and fraud in a hundred commodities." This is a tolerably strong indictment, and every word of it will, I think, stand true in application to our own condition to-day. I need not leave my immediate subject to insist upon this here. Emerson sees the need of radical changes, and says we shall have to look into the law of property by which men drive a trade in the great boundless Providence which has given the air, the water, and the land to men to use, and not to fence in and monopolise." "A cultivated man becomes ashamed of his property out of respect for his nature. Especially he hates what he has, if he see that it is accidental-came to him by inheritance, or gift, or crime; then he feels that it is not having; it does not belong to him, has no root in him, and merely lies there because no revolution or no robber takes it away." Emerson, then, pleads for deep-reaching, general reform. He has not, however, entered into details upon the subject: it is not his province. He is only specific in regard to individual and domestic reform; upon which he has much to say that is striking and helpful.

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He starts from the idea that the world exists for the education of each man, whose life in all its relations should be a pursuit and service of this educational aim.

He finds that this idea prevails neither in the home, the school, nor in our social life and institutions, but the lower ideas of comfort, of luxury, of money-getting. And our relations to our fellows are false and inhuman. "See this wide society of labouring men and women; we allow ourselves to be served by them, we live apart from them, and we meet them without a salute in the streets. We do not greet their talents, nor rejoice in their good fortune, nor foster their hopes, nor in the assembly vote for what is dear to them." The truth respecting our family life is, he insists, that we are slaves of possessions and appliances. The father wastes a life in money-making; the son is overmastered by his inheritance. The end of life is lost sight of; the pursuit of the means engages us almost entirely :

"late and soon,

Getting and spending we lay waste our powers."

And look at the home; does it, he asks, express the educational idea? Is it a place of noble hospitality arranged for the highest benefits? He finds it, in too many instances, a sort of warehouse of finery, overweighted by the multitude of conveniences. Here it will, perhaps, be well to guard Emerson against the charge sometimes brought against him, in common with Thoreau, of a fanatical asceticism. He believes that life should be rich and joyous, but in order to make it so, there must be some rigour in our regimen to keep us alert, sensitive, and energetic. That is why he advocates simplicity; holding that by it we get closer to realities, and can better find enjoyment in the simple things always near And Emerson, as it will be readily gathered, is unhesi tatingly democratic-democratic in the largest and highest sense. He has an unwavering faith in man, holding (as his creed in the divine essence in man warrants) that there is "an infinite worthiness in him which will appear at the call of worth." Yet with this generous democratic tendency he amply provides against the dangers attending complete democratic ascendency. His insistence on self-reliance, on

us.

the sacredness of individual integrity, and the necessity of the broadest and best education, fully counteracts the danger of majority tyranny and of easy acquiescence in vulgar standards, He does not fail to insist upon the need of "formidable individuals" to constitute a true and unprivileged aristocracy of solid worth and honour, who will keep men to the higher levels. Indeed, it might be charged against his strenuous individualism that it tends to foster an extreme of self-assertion and exclusiveness, the more so, that the social instinct finds in his writings comparatively faint expression.

Any sketch of Emerson's thought would be incomplete which omitted to notice his doctrine of Compensation. It furnishes his ethical sanction. His criterion of the rightness or wrongness of an action is its effect upon the agent. We cannot do wrong without loss of health and power, for we put ourselves out of harmony with the law of things, which means lessening the joy and fulness of life. Evil is privative (or, as Emerson puts it in another form, it is "good in the making "). From his point of view there is no evasion of consequence. It matters not what the seemingly outward effect may be—that it may not appear to harm others or that nobody knew of it; if the act offends against our nature and conscience it is wrong, and will hurt us. If, on the other hand, our acts are true to conscience, we shall be serving universal ends; they will bring good to others, and that peace and joy to ourselves which is the recompense of the moral life. That good for me, in this sense of satisfying the deity within, must mean good for others, is obvious, if the world is an integral whole, pervaded by one law, operant in all its parts. That, of course, Emerson postulates. "The entire system of things is represented in every particle." "The value of the universe contrives to throw itself into every point." As the motion of an atom is felt throughout the whole frame of things, so the effect of any act is universal in its consequence. Hence the law of compensation, the divine Nemesis, rules everywhere at all times. "Justice is not postponed," but done here and now, though we may fail to see how. "The

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particular man aims to be somebody; to set up for himself; to truck and higgle for a private good." Impossible: private and public are not to be separated. We cannot thus halve things, any more than we can get an inside that shall have no outside, or a light without a shadow." "Human labour, through all its forms, from the sharpening of a stake to the construction of a city or an epic, is one immense illustration of the perfect compensation of the universe. The absolute balance of Give and Take, the doctrine that everything has its price-and if that price is not paid, not that thing but something else is obtained, and that it is impossible to get anything without its price,-is not less sublime in the columns of a ledger than in the budgets of states, in the laws of light and darkness, in all the action and reaction of nature."

In attempting to methodise Emerson we are conscious of doing him a certain violence. These marshalled ideas are but the disjecta membra of the body of his thought. We must come into relation with the living whole; then we shall feel as in the presence of a sane, virile personality, which we value, not for any set opinions, but for the suggestiveness and impulse conveyed. It is true to say of Emerson what Lecky says of Emerson's familiar friend, Montaigne, that "his originality consists, not so much in his definite opinions or in his arguments, as in the general tone and character of his mind." We fall back again on Emerson's own touchstone, quality of tone, a something which neither admits nor requires argumentative proof. If we do not feel it, there is nothing more to be said. The danger is, that in methodising we may give a wrong impression by slighting the poet that is dominant throughout his works. For, after all, it is the poet in Emerson that exercises such strong fascination. Who in modern times has made us feel so deeply the loveliness of virtue and truth and courage? Who has so made us aware of "the linked purpose of the whole;" of man's life as part of the cosmic life, throbbing with the pulses of universal being? Who has made us feel the repose and exquisite charm of