If I, in my own person and daily walk, quietly resist
heaviness of custom, coldness of hope, timidity of faith, then without
wishing, contriving, or even knowing it, I am a light silently drawing
as many as have vision and are fit to walk in the same path. Whether I
do that or not, I am at least obeying the highest law of my own being.
In the appeal to the individual to be true to himself, Emerson does not
stand apart from other great moral reformers. His distinction lies in
the peculiar direction that he gives to his appeal. All those
regenerators of the individual, from Rousseau down to J.S. Mill, who
derived their first principles, whether directly or indirectly, from
Locke and the philosophy of sensation, experience, and acquisition,
began operations with the will. They laid all their stress on the
shaping of motives by education, institutions, and action, and placed
virtue in deliberateness and in exercise. Emerson, on the contrary,
coming from the intuitional camp, holds that our moral nature is
vitiated by any interference of our will. Translated into the language
of theology, his doctrine makes regeneration to be a result of grace,
and the guide of conscience to be the indwelling light; though, unlike
the theologians, he does not trace either of these mysterious gifts to
the special choice and intervention of a personal Deity. Impulsive and
spontaneous innocence is higher than the strength to conquer temptation.
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