inciple of
Individuality, never dies."

This passage dates from 1859, and readers of Bergson may like to compare
it with the contemporary Frenchman's saying: "The analytical faculties
can give us no realities."

Let us next hear Emerson himself, first in an early letter to his
brother Edward: "Do you draw the distinction of Milton, Coleridge, and
the Germans between Reason and Understanding? I think it a philosophy
itself, and, like all truth, very practical. Reason is the highest
faculty of the soul, what we mean often by the soul itself: it
never reasons, never proves, it simply perceives, it is vision. The
understanding toils all the time, compares, contrives, adds, argues;
near-sighted, but strong-sighted, dwelling in the present, the
expedient, the customary." And in 1833, after he had left the Unitarian
pulpit, Emerson made in his diary this curious attempt to reconcile the
scriptural language of his ancestral profession to the new vocabulary of
Transcendentalism: "Jesus Christ was a minister of the pure Reason. The
beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount are all utterances of the mind
contemning the phenomenal world... . The understanding can make nothing
of it. 'Tis all nonsense. The Reason affirms its absolute verity.... St.
Paul marks the distinction by the terms natural man and spiritual
man. When Novalis says, 'It is the instinct of the Understanding to
contradict the Reason,' he only translates into a scientific formula the
doctrine of St. Paul, 'The Carnal Mind is enmity against God.'"

One more quotation must suffice. It is from a poem by a forgotten
Transcendentalist, F. G. Tuckerman.

"No more thy meaning seek, thine anguish plead;
But, leaving straining thought and stammering word,
Across the barren azure pass to God;
Shooting the void in silence, like a bird--
A bird that shuts his wings for better speed!"

It is obvious that this "contemning the phenomenal world," this
"revulsion against the intellect as the sole source of truth," is highly
dangerous to second-class minds. If one habitually prints the words
Insight, Instinct, Intuition, Consciousness with capitals, and relegates
equally useful words like senses, experience, fact, logic to lower-case
type, one may do it because he is a Carlyle or an Emerson, but the
chances are that he is neither. Transcendentalism, like all idealistic
movements, had its "lunatic fringe," its camp-followers of excitable,
unstable visionar