All this is generally realised and understood,
and men may now be left to find their way to the Emersonian doctrine
without the critic's prompting. Though it is only the other day that
Emerson walked the earth and was alive and among us, he is already one
of the privileged few whom the reader approaches in the mood of settled
respect, and whose names have surrounded themselves with an atmosphere
of religion.
It is not particularly profitable, again, to seek for Emerson one of the
labels out of the philosophic handbooks. Was he the prince of
Transcendentalists, or the prince of Idealists? Are we to look for the
sources of his thought in Kant or Jacobi, in Fichte or Schelling? How
does he stand towards Parmenides and Zeno, the Egotheism of the Sufis,
or the position of the Megareans? Shall we put him on the shelf with the
Stoics or the Mystics, with Quietist, Pantheist, Determinist? If life
were long, it might be worth while to trace Emerson's affinities with
the philosophic schools; to collect and infer his answers to the
everlasting problems of psychology and metaphysics; to extract a set of
coherent and reasoned opinions about knowledge and faculty, experience
and consciousness, truth and necessity, the absolute and the relative.
But such inquiries would only take us the further away from the essence
and vitality of Emerson's mind and teaching. In philosophy proper
Emerson made no contribution of his own, but accepted, apparently
without much examination of the other side, from Coleridge after Kant,
the intuitive, _a priori_ and realist theory respecting the sources of
human knowledge, and the objects that are within the cognisance of the
human faculties.
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