uence
depended upon his logic, he would be easily disposed of. Fortunately
they do not. They depend, let me repeat, upon his spiritual power and
insight, and the minor defects I am pointing out are only like flies in
amber.

He thought in images more strictly than any other contemporary writer,
and was often desperately hard-put to it to make his thought wed his
image. He confessed that he did not know how to argue, and that he
could only say what he saw. But he had spiritual vision; we cannot
deny this, though we do deny him logical penetration. I doubt if
there ever was a writer of such wide and lasting influence as Emerson,
in whom the logical sense was so feeble and shadowy. He had in this
respect a feminine instead of a masculine mind, an intuitional instead
of a reasoning one. It made up in audacious, often extravagant,
affirmations what it lacked in syllogistic strength. The logical mind,
with its sense of fitness and proportion, does not strain or
over-strain the thread that knits the parts together. It does not jump
to conclusions, but reaches them step by step. The flesh and blood of
feeling and sentiment may clothe the obscure framework of logic, but
the logic is there all the same. Emerson's mind was as devoid of
logical sense as are our remembered dreams, or as Christian Science is
of science. He said that truth ceased to be such when polemically
stated. Occasionally he amplifies and unfolds an idea, as in the
essays already mentioned, but generally his argument is a rope of
sand. Its strength is the strength of the separate particles. He is
perpetually hooking things together that do not go together. It is
like putting an apple on a pumpkin vine, or an acorn on a hickory. "A
club foot and a club wit." "Why should we fear," he says, "to be
crushed by the same elements--we who are made up of the same
elements?" But were we void of fear, we should be crushed much oftener
than we are. The electricity in our bodies does not prevent us from
being struck by lightning, nor the fluids in our bodies prevent the
waters from drowning us, nor the carbon in our bodies prevent carbon
dioxide from poisoning us.

One of Emerson's faults as a writer arose from his fierce hunger for
analogy. "I would rather have a good symbol of my thought," he
confesses, "than the suffrage of Kant or of Plato." "All thinking is
analogizing, and it is the use of life to learn metonymy." His passion
for analogy betrays him here and there i