of a divine
personality." All the religions this world has ever known, have been
but the aftermath of the ethics of one or another holy person; "as soon
as character appears be sure love will"; "the intuition of the moral
sentiment is but the insight of the perfection of the laws of the
soul"; but these laws cannot be catalogued.

If a versatilist, a modern Goethe, for instance, could put all of
Emerson's admonitions into practice, a constant permanence would
result,--an eternal short-circuit--a focus of equal X-rays. Even the
value or success of but one precept is dependent, like that of a
ball-game as much on the batting-eye as on the pitching-arm. The
inactivity of permanence is what Emerson will not permit. He will not
accept repose against the activity of truth. But this almost constant
resolution of every insight towards the absolute may get a little on
one's nerves, if one is at all partial-wise to the specific; one begins
to ask what is the absolute anyway, and why try to look clear through
the eternities and the unknowable even out of the other end. Emerson's
fondness for flying to definite heights on indefinite wings, and the
tendency to over-resolve, becomes unsatisfying to the impatient, who
want results to come as they walk. Probably this is a reason that it is
occasionally said that Emerson has no vital message for the rank and
file. He has no definite message perhaps for the literal, but messages
are all vital, as much, by reason of his indefiniteness, as in spite of
it.

There is a suggestion of irony in the thought that the power of his
vague but compelling vitality, which ever sweeps us on in spite of
ourselves, might not have been his, if it had not been for those
definite religious doctrines of the old New England theologians. For
almost two centuries, Emerson's mental and spiritual muscles had been
in training for him in the moral and intellectual contentions, a part
of the religious exercise of his forebears. A kind of higher
sensitiveness seems to culminate in him. It gives him a power of
searching for a wider freedom of soul than theirs. The religion of
Puritanism was based to a great extent, on a search for the unknowable,
limited only by the dogma of its theology--a search for a path, so that
the soul could better be conducted to the next world, while Emerson's
transcendentalism was based on the wider search for the unknowable,
unlimited in any way or by anything except the vast bounds of inn