Emerson was for basing the health of a modern
commonwealth on the only real strength, and the only kind of force that
can be relied upon, namely, the honest, manly, simple, and emancipated
character of the citizen. This gives to his doctrine a hold and a prize
on the work of the day, and makes him our helper. Carlyle's perverse
reaction had wrecked and stranded him when the world came to ask him for
direction. In spite of his resplendent genius, he had no direction to
give, and was only able in vague and turbid torrents of words to hide a
shallow and obsolete lesson. His confession to Emerson, quoted above,
looks as if at last he had found this out for himself.
If Emerson stood thus well towards the social and political drift of
events, his teaching was no less harmoniously related to the new and
most memorable drift of science which set in by his side. It is a
misconception to pretend that he was a precursor of the Darwinian
theory. Evolution, as a possible explanation of the ordering of the
universe, is a great deal older than either Emerson or Darwin. What
Darwin did was to work out in detail and with masses of minute evidence
a definite hypothesis of the specific conditions under which new forms
are evolved. Emerson, of course, had no definite hypothesis of this
sort, nor did he possess any of the knowledge necessary to give it
value. But it was his good fortune that some of his strongest
propositions harmonise with the scientific theory of the survival of the
fittest in the struggle for material existence.
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