en he can abolish himself and
all heroes by letting in this element of reason, irrespective of
persons, this subtilizer and irresistible upward force, into our
thoughts, destroying individualism; the power is so great that the
potentate is nothing.--

"The genius of humanity is the right point of view of history. The
qualities abide; the men who exhibit them have now more, now less,
and pass away; the qualities remain on another brow.--All that
respects the individual is temporary and prospective, like the
individual himself, who is ascending out of his limits into a
catholic existence."

No man can be an idol for one who looks in this way at all men. But
Plato takes the first place in Emerson's gallery of six great personages
whose portraits he has sketched. And of him he says:--

"Among secular books Plato only is entitled to Omar's fanatical
compliment to the Koran, when he said, 'Burn the libraries; for
their value is in this book.' Out of Plato come all things that are
still written and debated among men of thought."--

"In proportion to the culture of men they become his
scholars."--"How many great men Nature is incessantly sending up
out of night to be _his men_!--His contemporaries tax him with
plagiarism.--But the inventor only knows how to borrow. When we are
praising Plato, it seems we are praising quotations from Solon and
Sophron and Philolaus. Be it so. Every book is a quotation; and
every house is a quotation out of all forests and mines and stone
quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors."

The reader will, I hope, remember this last general statement when
he learns from what wide fields of authorship Emerson filled his
storehouses.

A few sentences from Emerson will show us the probable source of some of
the deepest thought of Plato and his disciples.

The conception of the fundamental Unity, he says, finds its highest
expression in the religious writings of the East, especially in the
Indian Scriptures. "'The whole world is but a manifestation of Vishnu,
who is identical with all things, and is to be regarded by the wise as
not differing from but as the same as themselves. I neither am going nor
coming; nor is my dwelling in any one place; nor art thou, thou; nor are
others, others; nor am I, I.' As if he had said, 'All is for the soul,
and the soul is Vishnu; and animals and stars are tr