Professor Tyndall, that we are attempting to transcend our faculties. We must be satisfied to affirm that "Conscious law is King of kings," and that, whether as nature or Deity, it orders all things for the best. Our author repeats or reproduces all the formula of the Aristotelean Optimism-puois ουδὲν μάτην ποιεῖἔχει τι θεῖον. The world is very good. Nature is τέλος καὶ βέλτιστον. She does nothing πενιχρῶς, in a mercenary spirit, but "adds in every instance a slight generosity, a drop too much," whence the tendency to excess necessary to life, the electricity without which the air would rot, the excitement of fanaticism, the redundancy of passion. "We hit above the mark to hit the mark," and all things are needful to each and each to all. Without conflict there would be no virtue; without imperfection in parts, no progress, which is the condition of life. Mr. Emerson's Optimism goes even farther than this. He accepts the position of the Megareans, that evil itself is only good in the making, that it differs from good only by a minus quantity, that, in its essence, it is not a real thing. Like Spinoza, "he acknowledges no hell, no devil, no positive and active agency at enmity with God; but sees in all things infinite gradations of beings all in their way obedient, and all fulfilling the part allotted to them." "Nothing," he exclaims, "shall warp me from the belief that every man is a lover of truth. There is no pure lie, no malignity in nature. The entertainment of the proposition of depravity is the last profligacy and profanation." And even this profanation must itself have a moral result in the eyes of Him who maintains "That night or day, that love or crime, The American transcendentalist arrives at his conclusions much more easily than Spinoza: they are not rigorous logical deductions from premises professing to be axiomatic, but isolated assertions, frequently inconsistent with each other, founded on the impulses, which he calls the intuitions, of a sanguine and pure, though in some directions a limited, mind.. Without attempting to throw any light on the problem here suggested, we may safely assert that our author's solution of it is unsatisfactory. Like a healthy man's view of disease, it is unsympathetic, even dangerous. To say that Evil is negative is a play on words, which does nothing to explain its origin, and little to unfold its purpose. We feel pain, sorrow, and sin, in active as well as in passive forms, in contrast, as great as ever, to pleasure, joy, and holiness: the question remains, Whence comes this perpetual negation? We may try to find the "type of Perfect" in the outer world; but Nature, at first sight, rather suggests a dualism. We may look for it in the mind; but all men, except confirmed saints and consistent philosophers, are conscious of an åðávaтos μáxn, "a baseness in the blood at such strange war with something good," that its moral aspect only deepens the mystery. Theologians have, successfully or not, endeavoured to unravel it. Thorough-going materialists have their answer in a reference to the blind working of purely physical laws. It has always been a stumblingblock to systems which more or less identify man with God. Mr. Emerson hardly seems to realise the magnitude of the difficulty. "Justice," he proclaims, "is the rhyme of things." The phrase is perhaps a happy one; but the facile Optimism, which asserts that the bad rhymes are proper parts of the poem, is liable to the same abuse as the Antinomianism of other mystics; for to most men the temptations of life are too strong to be resisted by the belief that, in yielding to them, we "waive a little of our claim" to a more dignified position in the Universe. In some passages, however, he guards himself more carefully; and, in transferring his theory from the individual to the larger historic scale, it appears, as does the correlative doctrine of the identity of Might and Right, in a less objectionable form. In assert ing that "the lesson of life is practically to believe what the years and the centuries say against the hours," that "through evil agents, through toys and atoms, a great and beneficent tendency irresistibly streams;" that we should "learn to look for the permanent in the mutable and fleeting, and bear the disappearance of things we were wont to reverence without losing our reverence," he only announces a Faith which "is large in time, and that which shapes it to some perfect end." But his Optimism, as that of other theorists, is either, like ancient Utilitarianism, untrue to nature, or, like modern Utilitarianism, hardly consistent with itself. The question regarding the relations of good and evil leads us from the consideration of Mr. Emerson's more purely Metaphysical to his Ethical views. In this instance, as in the former, we shall be more careful to represent correctly than to criticise. Our author is content to state, in broad terms, the two sides of the antinomy of Necessity and Free-will which lies at the basis of Moral Philosophy. Fate is with him, in many passages, another name for Nature. "The book of Nature is the book of Fate; she turns the gigantic pages leaf after leaf, never returning one." From this point of view he uses the language, sometimes of the believers in an external constraining Destiny, a "terrific Providence," sometimes of Determinism both in the form in which Mr. Mill rejects, and in the form in which he accepts, it. Emerson's intuitions are clear, but his logic is cloudy: he seldom allows himself to be pinned down to a definite belief. "The slippery Proteus" evades even the law of contradiction; and, passing, through a series of glittering paradoxes, from one Ontological peak to another, he escapes the drier if more decisive discussions on the plains of psychology. In one part of his work he admits that "organisation tyrannises over character;" that "men are what their mothers made them ;" and dwells on the limitations of circumstance in another, he asserts that these limitations become FATE AND FREE-WILL. 277 thinner as the soul ascends; that Fate has its lord; that Power is, in the dual world, a fact equally real with Law; that "intellect annuls Fate," which is "a name for facts not yet passed under the fire of thought, for causes which are unpenetrated;" that "the one serious and formidable thing in nature is a strong will;" and that "Life, in the direct ratio of its amount, is Freedom." Those sentences are nowhere reconciled with each other; unless we accept the statements that "Freedom is necessary," "a part of Fate is the Free-will of man," as a reconcilement; nor are the latter set reconcilable with the mystical side of our author's philosophy. If, as he declares, History is the action and reaction of Nature and Thoughttwo boys pushing each other on the curb-stone what becomes of the identity of subject and object in a single nature? The controversy between Liberty and Necessity cannot be resolved, according to the favourite method of modern harmonisers, into a difference of degree; for, behind the ambiguity of words, there is a real difference of opinion. Making every allowance for the force of circumstances, the question remains,-Is there any point at which absolute responsibility and power of choice begins? The moral argument concludes for the affirmative, the purely physical for the negative; but the physical is supplemented by the psychological, and the result depends on the possibility or impossibility of identifying the Will with the Desires. This aspect of the problem, Mr. Emerson scarcely contemplates. But, however unsatisfactory his solution, we accept the fact that he believes in both Fate and Free-will, as an index of the larger fact that Mysticism in America is inevitably and materially modified by Industrialism, that the Pantheistic tendency deprecated by De Tocqueville, is opposed and checked by a strong Individualism, by the feeling that without distinct centres of Will and Intelligence there is no true Personality. The nations of the North and West have accepted necessitarian theories with the proviso that they shall be active and not passive agents. "Let us," says the poet, "build temples to the Beautiful Necessity which secures that all is made of one piece, which makes man brave in believing that he cannot shun a danger that is appointed, nor incur one that is not :" on the other hand, "we are not the less compelled to affirm liberty, the significance of the individual, the grandeur of duty and the power of character."""Tis the best use of Fate to teach a fatal courage." As a practical moralist, Emerson abandons Spinoza and follows Kant. Ranging himself almost unreservedly on the side of Freedom, he speaks of man as autonomic, as the lord of circumstance, the maker of his character and the master of his fate. When he condescends to details, he is eminently realistic. His essays on "Wealth," "Culture," " Behaviour," "Power," exhibit, in their judicious balance of conflicting claims, the quintessence of common-sense. They all contain admirable rules for the conduct of life; inculcating prudence, suspicion of deceptions, address and tact in dealing with our fellows; appreciating success and geniality, the loss of which he holds to be a price too dear for the best performance; recommending economy, activity in commerce, concentration of effort, purposes well defined and consistently carried out. Woven of two curiously-intersecting threads, they present us with a unique conjunction of shrewdness and idealism. Their author has been termed "a Plotinus-Montaigne ;" and one of his admirers has not unfairly attributed to him "A Greek head on right Yankee shoulders, whose range Has Olympus for one pole, for th' other the Exchange.' There never was a mystic with so much of the spirit of the good farmer, the inventor, or the enterprising merchant. In his practical mood he disclaims "the lofty language in which Plato and the Platonists speak of all who are not devoted to their shining abstractions," and, like Bacon, would bring down |