that Common Sense is their special and
exclusive portion. The small Transcendentalist goes in search of truth
with the meshes of his net so large that he takes no fish. His
landscapes are all horizon. It is only the great idealists, like
Emerson, who take care not to miss the real.

The remedy for the break-down of the old churches would, in the mind of
the egotist, have been to found a new one. But Emerson knew well before
Carlyle told him, that 'no truly great man, from Jesus Christ downwards,
ever founded a sect--I mean wilfully intended founding one.' Not only
did he establish no sect, but he preached a doctrine that was positively
incompatible with the erection of any sect upon its base. His whole hope
for the world lies in the internal and independent resources of the
individual. If mankind is to be raised to a higher plane of happiness
and worth, it can only be by the resolution of each to live his own life
with fidelity and courage. The spectacle of one liberated from the
malign obstructions to free human character, is a stronger incentive to
others than exhortation, admonition, or any sum of philanthropical
association. If I, in my own person and daily walk, quietly resist
heaviness of custom, coldness of hope, timidity of faith, then without
wishing, contriving, or even knowing it, I am a light silently drawing
as many as have vision and are fit to walk in the same path. Whether I
do that or not, I am at least obeying the highest law of my own being.

In the appeal to the individual to be true to himself, Emerson does not
stand apart from other great moral reformers. His distinction lies in
the peculiar direction that he gives to his appeal. All those
regenerators of the individual, from Rousseau down to J.S. Mill, who
derived their first principles, whether directly or indirectly, from
Locke and the philosophy of sensation, experience, and acquisition,
began operations with the will. They laid all their stress on the
shaping of motives by education, institutions, and action, and placed
virtue in deliberateness and in exercise. Emerson, on the contrary,
coming from the intuitional camp, holds that our moral nature is
vitiated by any interference of our will. Translated into the language
of theology, his doctrine makes regeneration to be a result of grace,
and the guide of conscience to be the indwelling light; though, unlike
the theologians, he does not trace either of these mysterious gifts to
the special ch