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world, and especially under the names of Carpocratians, Priscilians, and Manichæans or Albigenses. They differ not essentially from the Pantheistic sect which gathered, in the thirteenth century, around what was called the "Eternal Gospel." Mr. Emerson, a man of great personal purity and rigid morals, does not hesitate to avow the legitimate consequences of Transcendentalism. Speaking of the Transcendentalist, he says "In action he easily incurs the charge of Antinomianism, by his avowal that he who has the Lawgiver may with safety not only neglect, but even contravene, every written commandment."— Dial, Vol. III., p. 300.

They cannot avoid this conclusion. They assume nature as the standard; and as in that which is instinctive and spontaneous it is nature that operates, they must conclude that whatevever is instinctive and spontaneous, whatever is natural, or prompted by the permanent and essential nature of man, is true and good, and will be accepted as such by the brave man, let the world say or do what it will.

But whence the evidence that nature is the standard, the measure of truth and goodness? What right have the Transcendentalists to make this very important assumption with which they set out? On this point they are far from being explicit, and far from being agreed among themselves. But generalizing their views as much as we can, and premising that what we allege must be understood not in all cases of the whole school, but some portion of one section and some of another, we find them alleging in its support,

1. That God, who is wise and good, is the author of nature, and must have made nature wise and good, and therefore the expression or revelation of his will. If the revelation of his will, we have the right to assume it as the standard or measure of truth and goodness.

But they have no right to this conclusion; 1. because none of them admit that God is in reality the author or creator of nature; and, 2. because they call God wise and good only because they hold him to be what their own nature reveals him to be. This last is a plain begging of the question. For, according to their mode of reasoning, their natures must be assumed to be wise and good, as the condition of demonstrating the wisdom and goodness of God. Whence the proof that God is wise and good? In the fact that he is what our natures reveal him to be. On what condition is this a proof of his wis

dom and goodness? Obviously, only on the condition that our natures themselves are wise and good. Moreover, 3. because, for aught they show, and as the whole Christian world believes, it may be that nature is not now in its normal state, but has fallen, and is cursed. Admitting nature was wise and good as it came from the hands of its Maker, it must still be shown to be what it was then, before they can have the right to assume it as the standard. But if nature be in its origin wise and good, and there has been no change, no fall, no curse, how will they account for the innumerable evils, the multiplied wrongs, which afflict the human race, and which force even them to become reformers, and to declaim against nearly all that has been or is in human life?

2. But, secondly, the moment man sinks his personality, he becomes absorbed, as it were, in universal nature, which, in the unity of its force, is God. It is, then, God that acts in what is instinctive and spontaneous, and, in obeying our instinctive nature, we are really and literally obeying God. He who obeys God obeys the Highest, and of course what he ought to obey. It is with a view like this, that Mr. Emerson says:

"His [man's] thought-is the Universe. His experience inclines him to behold the procession of facts you call the world as flowing perpetually outward from an invisible, unsounded centre in himself, centre alike of him and of them, and necessitating him to regard all things as subjective and relative to that unknown existence, relative to that aforesaid centre of him." — Dial, supra, p. 299.

This is perhaps somewhat enigmatical, but may be grasped if we bear in mind that Mr. Emerson's philosophy recognizes no distinct substantive existences, no distinct natures; but under, within, over, and through all forms or modes of existence, all of which are representative and phenomenal, it asserts one and the same mighty nature, which, as it touches us, he calls Over-Soul, and as it recedes from us and loses itself in the darkness, God, or the Unnamable. We, in our personality, represent it, as the bubble represents the ocean on whose surface it floats. As from the bubble's own point of view the whole ocean underlies it, is its substantiality, so each man, from his own point of view, represents the universal nature, which is his substance, being, force, or whatever of reality he hath. Millions of bubbles may rise, but each has the whole ocean as the centre of itself; so millions of men may be born, but each

has the universal centre in himself. This nature, force, substantiality, being of man, strictly and essentially one, is identical in all men and in all phenomena. It is THE ONE (1ò ěv) of the Alexandrian philosophers. It works always according to its own laws, and is all that we can conceive of the divine. To sink the phenomenal and rise to the one permanent universal nature is to lose men in man, and to become one with God, the highest consummation conceivable. All that is real is this one nature. It is the only doer, the only thinker, the only speaker, the only builder. It is the Universal Artist. Hence, in verse worthy of a nobler philosophy, Mr. Emerson breaks forth—

"Not from a vain and shallow thought
His awful Jove young Phidias brought;
Never from lips of cunning fell
The thrilling Delphic Oracle :

Out from the heart of nature rolled
The burdens of the Bible old;

The litanies of nations came,

Like the volcano's tongue of flame,

Up from the burning core below,

The canticles of love and woe.

The hand that rounded Peter's dome,

And groined the aisles of Christian Rome,
Wrought in a sad sincerity.

Himself from God he could not free;

He builded better than he knew.

The conscious stone to beauty grew.

"Know'st thou what wove yon wood-bird's nest
Of leaves, and feathers from her breast?

Or how the fish out-built her shell,
Painting with morn each annual cell!
Or how the sacred pine-tree adds
To her old leaves new myriads?
Such and so grew these holy piles,
Whilst love and terror laid the tiles.
Earth proudly wears the Parthenon
As the best gem upon her zone;
And morning opes with haste her lids
To gaze upon the Pyramids;
O'er England's abbeys bends the sky,
As on its friends, with kindred eye:
For out of Thought's interior sphere
These wonders rose to upper air,
And nature gladly gave them place,
Adopted them into her race,
And granted them an equal date
With Andes and with Ararat.

"These Temples grew as grows the grass.
Art might obey, but not surpass.
The passive Master lent his hand

To the vast Soul that o'er him planned,

And the same power that reared the shrine
Bestrode the tribes that knelt within.

Ever the fiery pentecost

Girds with one flame the countless host,
Trances the heart through chanting quires,
And through the priest the mind inspires."

Dial, Vol. I., No. 1., pp. 122, 123.

There is no mistaking the doctrine here set forth. It is the identity of all natures with the one nature, of all causes with the one cause, and of this one nature, this one cause, with the impersonal Soul, or God, unfathomed centre and being of each individual.

But, 1. This doctrine is asserted, not proved. No evidence of its truth is adduced, or attempted to be adduced. The Transcendentalists must pardon us, if we question their infallibility, and find it not easy to believe on their bare assertion, that all apparent individual substances are but one substance, and all apparently different natures are but one nature, and that that one nature is God. God is the sovereign cause of the universe; but where is the proof that he is the substance, the nature, of the universe?

But, 2. Admitting this, we must either say man is this one nature, or that man as a real being is not. If the latter, there is no further question of man, for it is idle to talk of that which is not. If the former, then God is man, and nothing more nor less than man. Then there is and should be no further question of God.

The attempt, then, to identify impersonal nature with God effects nothing in favor of that nature as a measure of truth and goodness; for, grant its perfect identity, you have gained nothing, for you have nothing but man; and the right to take man as the measure of truth and goodness is the point in question. Man is the same, whether you call him man, or call him God. Call him which you will, your measure remains always the instinctive nature; and that nature is simply what it is, neither less nor more.

Again, if you assume the identity of human nature with all natures, and of these with the one nature, and this one nature with God; and if you assume God to be the universal operator, operative in all phenomena, and operative as essentially true, beautiful, and good; how do you account for evil, for the existence of so much you are obliged to condemn and war against? You cannot ascribe it to personality, because personality, according to you, is purely representative, unreal, un

substantial, phenomenal, and therefore— though you seem not to be aware of it-necessarily uncreative, unproductive either of good or evil; for what is no substantive existence can be no cause, produce no effect. All force is in nature, and then none in personality. Then you must say one of two things :1. All that is and all that appears-for what appears depends wholly on what is, as there can be no shadow without a substance is true, wise, and good; and then you condemn and refute yourselves, for you are warring against almost all that is. This warring is right, or it is wrong. If right, then that which you war against is wrong, and so there is evil; if wrong, then is there evil, because the warring itself is an evil. Or, 2. You must say there is something which has no cause; that is to say, there are effects without causes, which is impossible and absurd.

3. Thirdly, Reason itself has two modes of activity, one personal, the other instinctive or spontaneous. As personal, it is human; as impersonal, spontaneous, it is God, or the word of God. Being absolute, it is one; therefore essentially one in the personality and out of it. If we confine ourselves to its personal modes of activity, which are finite, we are misled, involved in error; if we sink our personality and fall back on it in its spontaneous and impersonal activity, it becomes to us a perennial stream of truth, beauty, goodness, from God himself. This spontaneous activity of reason, Mr. Parker, after Cousin and the Editor of the Boston Quarterly Review, makes the principle of inspiration, which, according to him, if we would yield to it, would give us all we need.

This view, in the first place, is only another form of the one just dismissed, and differs from it only in name; and is therefore open to all the objections we have urged against that.

In the second place, reason has and can have no instinctive, or spontaneous, or impersonal activity; because reason is the essential characteristic of personality, which is the last complement of rational nature. Instinct or spontaneity is necessarily irrational; for the characteristic of reason is to operate propter finem, and, therefore, is possible only in a voluntary or personal agent. Reason is inconceivable without rational nature. Assume rational nature with its last complement, and it is a person; without its last complement, it is impersonal, indeed, but unreal, and gives you no actual reason, at best only reason in potentia, which is inactive, for only what is real is active.

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