the sentiments or wants, and what will satisfy them, and you have ascertained what is matter of intuition. The sentiments are, then, the measure of the truth and goodness of the objects, that is, the authority we have for saying the objects are, and that they are good." The sentiments are admitted to be facts of the soul, permanent, unalterable, essential; therefore the soul itself; therefore man, under a given aspect. Consequently, the assertion, that absolute religion and morality are matters of intuition, not only invalidates the objection we are considering, but also confirms our assertion, that the transcendentalists hold man to be the measure of truth and goodness.

But we have not yet seized the precise sense in which the transcendentalists hold man to be the measure of truth and goodness. They distinguish, or attempt to distinguish, between man as person, and man as impersonal soul or nature, and predicate the measure of man in the latter sense, not in the former. This is an important fact, and must not be overlooked, if we would attain to a right understanding of transcendentalism.

According to the transcendental view, man is twofold: personal, as Peter, James, or John; impersonal, as simple human nature, a force, or aggregate of forces, underlying the personality. Of the first they make no great account. It is the latter which they call "Impersonal Reason," "Spontaneity," "Instinct," "Nature," the Soul," "the great Soul," the Over-Soul," "the Divine in Man," and which is supposed to enlarge its proportions as it frees itself and recedes from the restrictions and limitations of personality, and to expand at last into the infinite God, the background of all being, the substantiality of all existences, whether material or immaterial-to which they refer when they speak in such lofty terms, and predicate such glorious attributes of man. Man, as mere person, is weak, and falls into the silliest errors, the grossest absurdities, the most degrading and debasing superstitions; but as the impersonal soul, as freed from all personal restrictions and limitations, he is great, grand, noble, sublime, a god, walking the earth in majesty, and the master of all things. If we will but sink our mean and contemptible personality, abandon ourselves to the soul, to its intuitions, spontaneous utterances and suggestions,-to the great unconscious nature that underlies us, we shall find ourselves one with the Universal Mind, one with the Great Soul of All, whose dread omnis

cience and almightiness flow into and through us, opening all things to our intuitions, and subjecting all things to our power. Then are we the measure of all things, because one with their Maker, and do contain the source and law of all things in ourselves. Hence, Mr. Emerson says:—

"The heart which abandons itself to the Supreme Mind finds itself related to all its works, and will travel a royal road to particular knowledges and powers. For in ascending to this primary and aboriginal sentiment, we have come from our remote station on the circumference, instantaneously, to the center of the world, where, as in the closet of God, we see causes, and anticipate the universe, which is but a slow effect. . . . . .Persons themselves acquaint us with the impersonal. In all conversation between two persons, a tacit reference is made to a third party, to a common nature. That third party or common nature is not social; it is impersonal; is God.” — lb. pp. 228, 229.

All this is express enough; but here is another passage, still more express, if possible.

"It is a secret which every intellectual man quickly learns, that, beyond the energy of his possessed and conscious intellect, he is capable of a new energy (as of an intellect doubled on itself), by abandonment to the nature of things; that beside his privacy of power, as an individual man, there is a great public power, on which he can draw, by unlocking, at all risks, his human doors, and suffering the ethereal tide to roll and circulate through him; then he is caught up into the life of the universe, his speech is thunder, his thought is law, and his words are universally intelligible as the plants and animals. The poet knows that he speaks adequately, then, only when he speaks somewhat wildly, or 'with the flower of the mind;' not with the intellect used as an organ, but with the intellect released from all service, and suffered to take its direction from its celestial life, or, as the ancients were wont to express themselves, not with the intellect alone, but with the intellect inebriated by nectar. As the traveller, who has lost his way, throws his reins on the horse's neck, and trusts to the instinct of the animal to find the road, so must we do with the divine animal we ride through this world. For if in any manner we can stimulate this instinct, new passages are opened into nature, the mind flows into and through things hardest and highest, and the metamorphosis is possible. This is the reason why bards love wine, mead, narcotics, coffee, tea, opium, the fumes of sandal-wood and tobacco, or whatever other species of animal exhilaration.”—Essays, 2d Series, 1844, pp. 28-30.

These quotations sufficiently establish the fact that transcendentalism does distinguish, in man, between the personal and the impersonal, and makes the impersonal, to the exclusion of the personal, the measure of truth and goodness.

17

What, then, do transcendentalists mean by the impersonal man, the great soul, the unconscious energy, of which they speak with so much awe and emphasis, and to which they exhort us to abandon ourselves without reserve? Whatever they may mean by it, this much, we think, is certain, that they include it in the definition of man, and that the distinction they make is a distinction between what they regard as the personal and the impersonal in man, not between man and something not man. They can, then, mean nothing more by it than simple human nature minus human personality. Ascertain, then, what in man is constitutive, or the essential characteristic, of personality, eliminate that from the conception or definition of man, and what remains will be at least all they do or can mean by the impersonal soul.

A person, in ordinary language, is a rational being, according to Locke "a thinking and intelligent being"; according to the schoolmen, after Boetius, rationalis naturæ individua substantia,-an individual substance of rational nature, and personality is defined by philosophers to be "the last complement of rational nature." A person must be an individual substance or being, because, in the language of the schoolmen, a singular, not a universal,-a whole, not a part, subsisting in and acting from itself as subject, not in and from another, and incommunicable, not held or shared in common; and of rational nature, because individual substances not rational by nature or essence are never regarded as persons. We may have individual substances not rational by nature, as the stone, the plant, the tree; and even individual substances which are up to a certain degree intelligent, as the dog, the ox, the horse, to which it would be rash to deny at least an imperfect degree, or the rude beginnings, of intelligence, without having personality, because these are not of rational nature. That, then, in man, which is constitutive of personality, its distinctive mark or essential characteristic, is not substantiality, nor individuality,-although, if these, or either of them, be wanting, there is no person,-but the rational nature. The rational nature is expressed by the word reason, therefore the essential characteristic of personality is reason. Where reason is, there is personality, and where reason is wanting, personality is wanting; and, as we shall soon see, where personality is wanting, reason also is wanting.

But personality is the last complement of rational na

VOL. VI-2

ture, that is, rational nature brought to its terminus, fulfilled, or, if you please, realized. Man, regarded as the genus, as abstract human nature, is, no doubt, rational nature, but without its last complement,―rational nature unfulfilled, a metaphysical rational nature,-a possible, but not a real, rational nature. It becomes real, is fulfilled, receives its last complement, only in individual men and women, beyond which it has no existence in re. It is impersonal, and, properly speaking, void. Hence, we may say human nature attains to personality only in individualization,-is personal only as individualized because it is only as individualized that it receives its last complement, or becomes a real being.

There are, then, three points of view from which we may consider personality, and distinguish the personal from the impersonal. 1. We may consider the person as subject, and wish to note the fact that the person subsists in and operates from himself. In this case, we make, under this point of view, the mark of personality substantia, substance. 2. We may wish to denote by person, not abstract human nature, man in general, but human nature as fulfilled, realized, having its last complement; and then, under this point of view, we add individua, make the mark of personality individuality. 3. But if we wish to distinguish persons from all beings or subsistences not persons, and to express the essential quality of personal natures, we make its characteristic

reason.

Now it is only from these three, or some one of these three points of view, that it is possible to distinguish between the personal and impersonal. The transcendentalists cannot adopt the first, because the impersonal of which they speak is to be taken as a substantive existence; since they regard it as subsisting in and operating from itself as subject, not as an attribute, a function, an operation, or phenomenon of some other subject on which it is dependent.

Do they adopt the second? They have frequently the air of doing so, and we are not sure but, to a very considerable extent, they really do intend by the impersonal soul the generic man, or man in general, as distinguished from the individual man. This is the most natural interpretation of their language. But, if this is their meaning, if by sinking personality they mean sinking the individual and falling back on human nature as abstract human nature, they require us to fall back on human nature unfulfilled, wanting

its last complement, in which sense it is a mere essentia metaphysica, and has no real existence, is no entity, and can be the subject of no act or operation: for, as we have said, human nature is real only as individualized in men and women. Out of individuals it is an abstraction, existing, if you will, in conceptu, but not in re. It is the simple genus; and genera are real, active, operative, only in substance, as they become substantia, and these, again, only as fulfilled, as they receive their last complement in becoming subsistentiæ. To sink individuality and fall back on generic man, or man in general would be to fall back on a metaphysical abstraction, practically on nothing, and to take a nonentity for our sovereign guide or teacher.

We are not ignorant that the humanitarian division of the transcendentalists exhort us to sink the individual and to fall back on our common humanity, and seem to teach that this common humanity is not merely that which each individual man realizes, but that it is, as it were, a mighty entity, a vast reservoir of wisdom, virtue, and strength, which individuals do not and cannot exhaust. We ourselves, especially during the interval between our rejection of eclecticism and our conversion to Christianity, following Plato, the Neo-Platonists, Leroux, and the Saint-Simonians, and some half glimpses of the teachings of the old realists, whose doctrines we did not understand, fell into this absurdity, and sought to make it appear that humanity, not as the collective mass of individuals, but as genus, as out of all individuals, has a real, an entitative existence, and can operate as subject; and that in this sense humanity is not what is common to all individuals, but a somewhat that transcends all individuals, and makes all individuals, manifesting itself in various degrees,-in one individual under one aspect, in another under another, and so on. An individual we regarded as a particular manifestation of a particular aspect or phase of humanity, as a particular act of an individual manifests some particular aspect or phase of the individual; and the mission of the individual we declared to be, through his whole life, the realization in his own thoughts, words, and deeds of that particular phase or aspect of humanity he represents. It was in this way we solved the old question of individuation, and found, as we supposed, a basis for the state, and legitimated, so to speak, individual liberty. Taking this view, we necessarily held humanity to be greater than the individual, nay, greater