e bad-habit part
of tradition, the hog-mind of the few (the minority), comes in play.
The possessors of this are called leaders, but even these "thick-skins"
are beginning to see that the MOVEMENT is the leader, and that they are
only clerks. Broadly speaking, the effects evidenced in the political
side of history have so much of the physical because the causes have
been so much of the physical. As a result the leaders for the most part
have been under-average men, with skins thick, wits slick, and hands
quick with under-values, otherwise they would not have become leaders.
But the day of leaders, as such, is gradually closing--the people are
beginning to lead themselves--the public store of reason is slowly
being opened--the common universal mind and the common over-soul is
slowly but inevitably coming into its own. "Let a man believe in God,
not in names and places and persons. Let the great soul incarnated in
some poor ... sad and simple Joan, go out to service and sweep chimneys
and scrub floors ... its effulgent day beams cannot be muffled..." and
then "to sweep and scrub will instantly appear supreme and beautiful
actions ... and all people will get brooms and mops." Perhaps, if all of
Emerson--his works and his life--were to be swept away, and nothing of
him but the record of the following incident remained to men--the
influence of his soul would still be great. A working woman after
coming from one of his lectures said: "I love to go to hear Emerson,
not because I understand him, but because he looks as though he thought
everybody was as good as he was." Is it not the courage--the spiritual
hopefulness in his humility that makes this story possible and true? Is
it not this trait in his character that sets him above all creeds--that
gives him inspired belief in the common mind and soul? Is it not this
courageous universalism that gives conviction to his prophecy and that
makes his symphonies of revelation begin and end with nothing but the
strength and beauty of innate goodness in man, in Nature and in God,
the greatest and most inspiring theme of Concord Transcendental
Philosophy, as we hear it.

And it is from such a world-compelling theme and from such vantage
ground, that Emerson rises to almost perfect freedom of action, of
thought and of soul, in any direction and to any height. A vantage
ground, somewhat vaster than Schelling's conception of transcendental
philosophy--"a philosophy of Nature become subject