Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/104

 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 reduced 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 something 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 certainly 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 presenting 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