94 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



How does he try to interest the reader in the images of these hundred 

 greatest figures of history ? Why, by writing thus : " The great are 

 our better selves, ourselves with advantages. It is the only platform 

 on which all men can meet. If you deal with a vulgar mind, life is re- 

 duced to beggary. He makes me rich, him I call Plutus, who shows 

 me that every man is mine, and every faculty is mine — who does not 

 impoverish me in praising Plato, but contrariwise, is adding assets to 

 my industry." Well, that alone seems to us pure strain to say some- 

 thing new, without much care whether or not it be true. Beethoven's 

 faculty is not mine, whether I like to say so or not — nay, nothing can 

 make it mine ; probably nothing can make me even understand it. 

 Great men are not our better selves, they are only something that our 

 better selves very slowly learn to apprehend. But as if that were not 

 overstrained enough, Emerson goes on : "An ethereal sea ebbs and 

 flows, surges and rushes hither and thither, carrying its whole virtue 

 into every creek and inlet which it bathes. To this sea, every human 

 house has a water-front. Every truth is a power. Every idea, from 

 the moment of its emergence, begins to gather material force, after 

 a little while makes itself known. It works first on thoughts, then 

 on things ; makes feet, and afterward shoes ; first hands, then gloves ; 

 makes men, and so the age and its material soon after. The history 

 of the world is nothing but a procession of clothed ideas. As certain- 

 ly as water falls in rain on the tops of mountains, and runs down 

 into valleys, plains, and pits, so does thought fall first in the best 

 minds, and runs down from class to class until it touches the masses, 

 and so makes revolutions." 



We have heard that kind of thing from Mr. Emerson now for so 

 many years, that it has almost the charm of an old, old landscape, to 

 find him saying again now what he said in the first volume which Mr. 

 Carlyle introduced to the British public with the unique emphasis of 

 one of his peculiar redundancies of repetition, " The words of such 

 a man, what words he thinks fit to speak, are worth attending to." 

 But no one, we think, who puzzled out Mr. Emerson in his youth, and 

 has since compared his mode of presenting the Pantheistic idea with 

 that of other thinkers, will regard it as a simple or natural mode — 

 quite apart from any opinion as to the truth or falsehood of the idea 

 itself. It is emphatically an unnatural and paradoxical mode of pre- 

 senting it. It is the mode of a man who wishes to say something 

 grander than any clear thought he can express, something that does 

 not fit the thought so much as attract attention to it by phraseological 

 unsuitability and extravagance. It is the style of one of the Illuminati, 

 not of simple, sincere philosophy. 



And even among a very different school — the school of what we 

 may call physical skepticism, as distinguished from transcendental 

 skepticism — there is the same tendency to intellectual strain, as in the 

 case of the late Professor Clifford — a man of whom his biographer 



