me
he is inclined to condemn the symbol altogether as being of too
"accidental" a character. But it is surely simpler to throw
symbolism overboard so far as genuine mystic experience is
concerned. What the mystic is in search of is "meaning" in its
own right--"meaning" existing in and for itself. Anything less is
a fraud. Emerson nearly reached this conclusion, as witness the
following passage: "A happy symbol is a sort of evidence that
your thought is just. . . . If you agree with me, or if Locke or
Montesquieu agree, I may yet be wrong; but if the elm tree
thinks the same thing, if running water, if burning coal, if
crystals, if alkalies, in their several fashions, say what I say, it
must be true." Here Emerson is all but clean out of the tangle.
He speaks of a "happy symbol." But inasmuch as this "happy
symbol" is to express what the elm tree, the running water, and
the rest, _actually say_ in their several fashions, it is safer to
drop the idea of symbolism altogether; for what they _say_, is
not what they "stand for," but what they actually _are_.

If the contention is renewed that the elm tree, running water,
and the rest, _suggest_ truths and thoughts beyond themselves,
of course the point may be readily granted. But this is only to
affirm that every object is linked on to every other object by a
multiplicity of relations--that each part is woven into the texture
of a larger whole in a universe of interpenetrations. The
consistent working out of the organic interdependence of the
modes and forms of existence is found in such a system as that
of Hegel, where each part pre-supposes correlatives, and where
each stage or "moment" includes all the past, and presses on to
that which dialectically succeeds. It is not necessary to be a
Hegelian to appreciate the grand idea of his doctrine--that all
modes and manifestations of the Real are logically and
organically connected. But to say that one stage of the evolution
of the Idea is dependent on another, or essentially involves
another, is not to make the lower of the stages symbolic of the
higher. Indeed to introduce the concept of symbolism at all into
such a context is to court inextricable confusion. Let symbolism
be one thing, and let organic (or dialectic) connection be
another--then we know where we are when we claim for natural
objects that they have a being and a meaning in their own right,
and that they are akin to the soul of man. Emerson had a firm
grasp o