keen and discursive intelligence, and they are strikingly
exemplified in the thought and in the person of Emerson. They
constitute what he called self-trust. Self-trust, like other
transcendental attitudes, may be expressed in metaphysical fables. The
romantic spirit may imagine itself to be an absolute force, evoking
and moulding the plastic world to express its varying moods. But for
a pioneer who is actually a world-builder this metaphysical illusion
has a partial warrant in historical fact; far more warrant than it
could boast of in the fixed and articulated society of Europe, among
the moonstruck rebels and sulking poets of the romantic era. Emerson
was a shrewd Yankee, by instinct on the winning side; he was a cheery,
child-like soul, impervious to the evidence of evil, as of everything
that it did not suit his transcendental individuality to appreciate or
to notice. More, perhaps, than anybody that has ever lived, he
practised the transcendental method in all its purity. He had no
system. He opened his eyes on the world every morning with a fresh
sincerity, marking how things seemed to him then, or what they
suggested to his spontaneous fancy. This fancy, for being spontaneous,
was not always novel; it was guided by the habits and training of his
mind, which were those of a preacher. Yet he never insisted on his
notions so as to turn them into settled dogmas; he felt in his bones
that they were myths. Sometimes, indeed, the bad example of other
transcendentalists, less true than he to their method, or the pressing
questions of unintelligent people, or the instinct we all have to
think our ideas final, led him to the very verge of system-making; but
he stopped short. Had he made a system out of his notion of
compensation, or the over-soul, or spiritual laws, the result would
have been as thin and forced as it is in other transcendental systems.
But he coveted truth; and he returned to experience, to history, to
poetry, to the natural science of his day, for new starting-points and
hints toward fresh transcendental musings.

To covet truth is a very distinguished passion. Every philosopher
says he is pursuing the truth, but this is seldom the case. As Mr.
Bertrand Russell has observed, one reason why philosophers often fail
to reach the truth is that often they do not desire to reach it. Those
who are genuinely concerned in discovering what happens to be true are
rather the men of science, the naturalists, the his