William Atkinson - The Complete Works of William Walker Atkinson

Emerson holds that God is the Universal Substance, from which the universe is formed; the Universal Mind which holds the mind of all; the Universal Spirit which is immanent in all men. He says:

“There seems to be a necessity in Spirit to manifest itself in material forms; and day and night, river and storm, beast and bird, acid and alkali pre-exist in necessary ideas in the mind of God, and are what they are by virtue of preceding affections in the world of Spirit.”… “The world proceeds from the same Spirit as the body of man. It is a remoter and inferior incarnation of God, a projection of God in the unconscious.”…“Under all this running sea of circumstance, whose waters ebb and flow with perfect balance, lies the original abyss of real Being. Essence, or God, is not a relation, or a part, but the whole. Being is the vast affirmative, excluding negation, self-balanced, and swallowing up all relations, parts, and times within itself…on every topic is the resolution of all into the everlasting One.”

To Emerson, God is all in All, and All in all. He says:

“Truth, goodness and beauty are but different faces of the same All.… God is, and all things are but shadows of him.”…“The true doctrine of omnipresence is, that God reappears with all His parts in every moss and cobweb. The value of the universal contrives to throw itself into every point.”

But Emerson does not try to define God. Like Spinoza, he holds that “to define God is to deny him.” He says:

“Of that ineffable essence which we call Spirit, he that thinks most will say least.”…“We can forsee God in the coarse, and, as it were, distant phenomena of matter, but when we try to define and describe himself, both language and thought desert us, and we are helpless as fools and savages. That essence refuses to be recorded in propositions; but when man has worshiped intellectually, the noblest ministry of nature is to stand as the apparition of God. It is the organ through which the universal spirit speaks to the individual, and strives to lead back the individual to it.”

He sings:

“Thou meetest him by centuries,

And lo’! he passes like the breeze;

Thou seek’st In globe and galaxy,

He hides in pure transparency;

Thou askest in fountains and in fires,

He s the essence that inquires.

He is the axis of the star;

He is the sparkle of the spar;

He is the heart of every creature;

He is the meaning of each feature;

And his mind is the sky,

Than all it holds more deep, more high.”

His poem, “Brahma,” voices the true Oriental spirit:

“If the red slayer thinks he slays,

Or if the slain thinks he is slain,

They know not well the subtle ways

I keep, and pass, and turn again.

Far or forgot to me is near;

Shadow or sunlight are the same;

The vanished gods to me appear;

And one to me are shame or fame.

They reckon ill who leave me out;

When they fly, I am the wings;

I am the doubter and the doubt,

And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.

The strong gods pine for my abode,

And pine in vain the Sacred Seven;

But thou, meek lover of the good!

Find me, and turn thy back on heaven.”

To Emerson, God is not a far-away Deity, but immanent Being. Emerson might have written the very words of Goethe, when the latter says:

“What kind of God was he who impelled things only from outside, and let the universe twirl around his fingers? God moves the world inwardly, cherishes nature in himself, himself in nature, so that whatever lives and works and exists in him never misses his power nor his spirit.”

It formerly was the fashion to defend Emerson from the charge of pantheism, because that term was misunderstood, or understood only in one of its senses. Theodore Parker once wrote regarding Emerson: “He has absolute confidence in God. He has been foolishly accused of pantheism, which sinks God in Nature; but no man is further from it.” But Emerson is a pantheist, in the usage of the term which indicates that God is immanent in His nature, and that all substance is of the One Substance; all mind of the One Mind; all spirit of the One Spirit. His, indeed, is the forerunner of the teaching of today, which, as Professor James has said, “may roughly be called the pantheistic field of vision, the vision of God as the indwelling divine rather than the eternal creator, and of human life as part and parcel of that deep reality .” No one who reads his “Nature” and his “Over-Soul” can have any doubts as to Emerson’s true position regarding true pantheism, nor his being the direct inspiration of the modern trend of thought in that direction.

Emerson taught that there exists a great World-Spirit—the Over-Soul in which we live and move and have our being. He says:

“The Supreme critic on all the errors of the past and present, and the only prophet of that which must be, is that great nature in which we rest as the earth lies in the soft arms of the atmosphere; that Unity, that Over-Soul, within which every man’s particular being is contained and made one with all other; that common heart of which all sincere conversation is the worship, to which all right action is submission; that overpowering reality which confutes our tricks and talents, and constrains everyone to pass for what he is, and to speak from his character and not from his tongue, and which evermore tends to pass into our thought and hand and becomes wisdom and virtue and power and beauty. We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime, within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty; to which every part and particle is equally related; the Eternal One.…We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are shining parts, is the soul.”

He holds that the individual soul may, and does, hold communion with the Over-Soul. He says:

“The heart which abandons itself to the Supreme Mind finds itself related to all its works, and will travel a royal road to particular knowledge and powers. For in ascending to this primary and aboriginal sentiment we have come from our remote station on the circumference instantaneously to the center of the world, where…we see causes, and anticipate the universe, which is but a slow effect. This communication is an influx of the Divine Mind into our mind. It is an ebb of the individual rivulet before the flowing surges of the sea of life. Every distinct apprehension of this central commandment agitates men with awe and delight. A thrill passes through all men at the reception of a new truth, or at the performance of a great action, which comes out of the heart of nature. In these communications the power to see is not separated from the will to do, but the insight proceeds from obedience, and the obedience proceeds from a joyful perception. “Every moment when the individual feels himself invaded by it, it is memorable. Always, I believe, by the necessity of our constitution a certain enthusiasm attends the individual consciousness of that divine presence. The character and duration of this enthusiasm varies with the state of the individual, from an ecstacy and trance and prophetic inspiration,—which is its rarer appearance, to the faintest glow of virtuous emotion, in which form it warms, like our household fires, all the families and associations of men, and makes society possible.…The trances of Socrates; the ‘union’ of Plotinus; the vision of Porphyry; the convulsions of George Fox and his Quakers; the Illumination of Swedenborg, are of this kind. What was in the case of these remarkable persons a ravishment, has, in innumerable instances in common life, been exhibited in less striking manner. Everywhere the history of religion betrays a tendency to enthusiasm. The raptures of the Moravian and Quietist; the opening of the Internal sense of the Word, in the language of the New Jerusalem Church; the revival of the Calvinistic churches; the experiences of the Methodists, are varying forms of that shudder of awe and delight with which the individual soul always mingles with the universal soul. The nature of these revelations is always the same; they are perceptions of the absolute law. They are solutions of the soul’s own questions. They do not answer the questions which the understanding asks. The soul answers never by words, but by the thing itself that is inquired after.…Behold, it saith, I am born into the great, the universal mind. I, the imperfect, adore my own Perfect. I am somehow receptive to the great soul, and thereby do I overlook the sun and the stars and feel them to be but the fair accidents and effects which change and pass. More and more the surges of everlasting nature enters into me, and I become public and human in my regards and actions. So come I to live In thoughts and act with energies which are immortal.”