William Atkinson - The Complete Works of William Walker Atkinson

“Being himself a man of many intuitions, and of wonderful vigor in phrasing them, he is to be, regarded as a prophet rather than as a philosopher. He sought, to construct no system, but stood for a constant idealistic impulse . What he wrote was not based primarily on experience, nor did he ever write as the so-called man of the world. He is criticized for relying chiefly or altogether upon his intuitive consciousness, instead of submitting his generalization to the test of reason.”

Emerson was essentially an idealist. Personally, he preferred the latter term to, that of Transcendentalist, as which he was classed by the men of his day, and which causes his philosophy to be termed Transcendentalism. He said that the majority of people did not know what they meant by the latter term. He said, whilst in the midst of the work of the Transcendental Movement:

“What is popularly called Transcendentalism among us is Idealism — Idealism as it appears in 1842.…The Idealism of the present day acquired the name of Transcendentalism by the use of that term by Immanuel Kant of Konigsberg, who replied to the skeptical philosophy of Locke, which insisted that there was nothing in the intellect which was not previously in the experience of the senses, by showing that there was a very important class of ideas, or imperative forms, which did not come by experience, but through which experience was acquired; that these were intuitions of the mind itself; and he denominated them Transcendental forms. The extraordinary profoundness and precision of that man’s thinking have given vogue to his nomenclature, in Europe and America to that extent, that whatever belongs to the class of intuitive thought is popularly called at the present day, Transcendental .”

Emerson makes the following distinction and definition of Idealism:

“As thinkers, mankind have ever divided into two sects, Materialists and Idealists; the first class founded on experience, the second on consciousness; they perceive that the senses are not final; they give us representations of things, but what the things themselves are they cannot tell. The Materialist insists upon facts, on history, on the force of circumstances, and the animal wants of man; the Idealist, on the power of Thought and of Will, on inspiration, on miracle, on individual culture. The Idealist concedes all that the other affirms.…and then asks him for his grounds of assurance that things are as his senses represent them. But, I, he says, affirm facts not affected by the illusions of sense, facts which are of the same nature as the faculty which reports them.… He does not deny the sensuous fact—by no means; but he will not see that alone.”

This definition recalls the celebrated classification of Prof. William James, who, in his work on “Pragmatism, “ says:

“I will write these traits down in two columns. I think you will practically recognize the two types of mental make-up that I mean if I head the columns by the titles ‘tender-minded’ and ‘tough-minded,’ respectively:

“Each of you probably knows some well-marked example of each type, and you know what each example thinks of the example on the other side of the line. They have a low opinion of each other. Their antagonism, whenever as individuals their temperaments have been intense, has formed in all ages a part of the philosophic atmosphere of the time. It forms a part of the philosophic atmosphere of to-day. The tough think of the tender as sentimentalists and soft-heads. The tender feel the tough to be unrefined, callous and brutal. Their mutual reaction is very much like that that takes place when Boston tourists mingle with a population like that of Cripple Creek. Each side believes the other to be inferior to itself; but disdain in one case is mingled with amusement, in the other it has a dash of fear.”

There is no doubt regarding the place to which Emerson must be assigned in the classification given by Professor James. He is the ideal “tender-minded” individual. He is an idealist of the idealists. As Cooke says:

“Emerson belongs in the succession of the Idealists. That company he loves wherever its members are found, whether among Buddhists or Christian mystics, whether Transcendentalist or Sufi, whether Saadi, Boehme, Fichte, or Carlyle. These are the writers he studies, these the men he quotes, these the thinkers who come nearest his own thought. He is in the succession of minds who have followed in the wake of Plato, who is regarded by him as the world’s greatest thinker. More directly still, Emerson is in that succession of thinkers represented by Plotinus, Eckhardt and Schelling, who have interpreted Idealism in the form of Mysticism.”

Whipple says of Emerson as a philosopher:

“His intellect is intuitive, but not reflective. It contains no considerable portion of the element which is essential to the philosopher. His ideas proceed from the light of genius , and from wise observation of Nature; they come in flashes of inspiration and ecstasy ; his pure gold is found in places near the surface, not brought out laboriously from the depths of the mine in the bowels of the earth. He has no taste for the apparently arid abstractions of philosophy. His mind is not organized for the comprehension of its sharp distinctions. Its acute reasonings present no charm to his fancy, and its lucid deductions are to him as destitute of fruit as an empty nest of boxes. In the sphere of pure speculation he has shown neither originality nor depth. He has thrown no light on the great topics of speculation, He has never fairly grappled with the metaphysical problems which have called for the noblest efforts of the mind in every age, and which, not yet reduced to positive science, have not ceased to enlist the clearest and strongest intellects in the work of their solution. On all questions of this kind the writings of Emerson are wholly unsatisfactory. He looks at them only in the light of the imagination . He frequently offers brave hints, pregnant suggestions, cheering encouragements, but no exposition of abstract truth has ever fallen from his keen pen.”

As a philosopher, Emerson belongs to that class of geniuses who may be termed intuitional, inspirational, awakening, stimulating. As Cooke well says of him: “Emerson belongs to that company of illuminated souls who have done for the modern world what the sages, prophets and seers did for the ancient world.” He is a Hindu guru , or a Sufi pir , rather than a Western teacher. He disdains the necessity of proof, and feels that his words should carry their own proof. His is the attitude of the sage of the Orient, rather than of the professor of philosophy of the Western world.

That Emerson’s thought is based upon that of Plato and the Neo-Platonists cannot be doubted, although there always appears running through his mental creations the golden thread of the teachings of Oriental thought. Plato would claim him as a son—the Hindu Vedantist and the Persian Sufi would claim him as a brother. Mystics of every age, and of every land, would welcome him as of their own kind. Believers in reincarnation would attribute to him successive births first in Hindu and in Persian bodies, and later in the fleshly garments of philosophers of ancient Greece. He is of the royal mystic descent, in a straight and unbroken line. His “Over-Soul” might have been written either by a Hindu Vedantist, a Persian Sufi, or a “god-drunken” Grecian philosopher. Modern advocates of what is called “cosmic consciousness” find an explanation for his genius in their theories, and, indeed, in his “Over-Soul” he gives utterances that would indicate an experience of the kind indicated by this school.