154 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



adoption of the Galveston or Des Moines plan of city government, a 

 plan which looks toward organized social efficiency more than it does 

 toward the preservation of individual rights. Nietzsche died in nine- 

 teen hundred, too early perhaps to realize that the scientific foundations 

 for the work of his life were crumbling beneath his feet. 



Emerson's death occurred in 1882. It must have been then even 

 less clear that the theological basis for his philosophy, if it may be so 

 called, was also in no very long time to lose much of its weight. The 

 idealism that in unitarianism lifted man up to the level of Christ soon 

 wrought a kind of self-destruction by bringing Christ down to the level 

 of man. The exaltation of man, of his individual greatness through 

 his kinship with the divine that was Emerson's especial word ceased to 

 be an exaltation when it reduced the divinity of Christ to a merely 

 human greatness. Protestant theology, going forward to its ultimate 

 conclusions, accepting the results of the higher criticism, studying the 

 Bible as a great but as a human literature, compromising with evolution 

 as a causo-mechanical explanation of the origin of things, finally leaves 

 Emerson's individualism without any sufficient body of supporting 

 voices in the house of his friends. There remain, to be sure, the chris- 

 tian scientists. They derive from Emerson, and, with a beautiful blind- 

 ness to the results of both christian scholarship and the conclusions of 

 modern science, they push the Emersonian ideas to a point at which 

 they become nonsense. Theirs is a beautiful madness, but it is mad- 

 ness. They represent only the aberrant tendencies of more or less un- 

 balanced minds. Their belief that each human being may be the master 

 of himself, his body and the material world, may be himself a kind of 

 God, if he wills, does not go far in support of individualism as a general 

 feeling among men. It was otherwise with Emerson. He and those 

 of his fellowship were enormously influential in American thinking. It 

 may be doubted whether any other man has been equally important in 

 shaping the ideals of the more intelligent classes in America. It is 

 something of moment when on one side that influence is breaking down 

 and on another is turning into the vagaries of people who clutch at cob- 

 webs spun out of the froth of some fanatic's ravings. 



One thing is to be borne in mind and that is that the truth or falsity 

 to be found in either Emerson or Nietzsche is for the moment of no 

 matter. It is sufficient as explanation of the growing preponderance of 

 socialistic over individualistic tendencies to show that two of the funda- 

 mental inspirations for individualism as seen in them are materially less 

 active forces in society than they were twenty or thirty years ago. If 

 that were mere change of sentiment, it would be of less importance. 

 The fact that it is not sentiment, that it is a change of front resultant 

 from a changed understanding of what the world is for man, and that 

 it is a new establishment of values of things for man to achieve and be 



