torians; and
ordinarily they discover it, according to their lights. The truths
they find are never complete, and are not always important; but they
are integral parts of the truth, facts and circumstances that help to
fill in the picture, and that no later interpretation can invalidate
or afford to contradict. But professional philosophers are usually
only apologists: that is, they are absorbed in defending some vested
illusion or some eloquent idea. Like lawyers or detectives, they study
the case for which they are retained, to see how much evidence or
semblance of evidence they can gather for the defence, and how much
prejudice they can raise against the witnesses for the prosecution;
for they know they are defending prisoners suspected by the world, and
perhaps by their own good sense, of falsification. They do not covet
truth, but victory and the dispelling of their own doubts. What they
defend is some system, that is, some view about the totality of
things, of which men are actually ignorant. No system would have ever
been framed if people had been simply interested in knowing what is
true, whatever it may be. What produces systems is the interest in
maintaining against all comers that some favourite or inherited idea
of ours is sufficient and right. A system may contain an account of
many things which, in detail, are true enough; but as a system,
covering infinite possibilities that neither our experience nor our
logic can prejudge, it must be a work of imagination and a piece of
human soliloquy. It may be expressive of human experience, it may be
poetical; but how should anyone who really coveted truth suppose that
it was true?

Emerson had no system; and his coveting truth had another exceptional
consequence: he was detached, unworldly, contemplative. When he came
out of the conventicle or the reform meeting, or out of the rapturous
close atmosphere of the lecture-room, he heard Nature whispering to
him: "Why so hot, little sir?" No doubt the spirit or energy of the
world is what is acting in us, as the sea is what rises in every
little wave; but it passes through us, and cry out as we may, it will
move on. Our privilege is to have perceived it as it moves. Our
dignity is not in what we do, but in what we understand. The whole
world is doing things. We are turning in that vortex; yet within us is
silent observation, the speculative eye before which all passes, which
bridges the distances and compares the comba