and illustration; it will fast enough gather beauty, music, picture,
poetry."

It is a bold prophecy, but who can doubt that all improbable and
unverifiable traditional knowledge of all kinds will make way for the
established facts of science and history when these last reach it in
their onward movement? It may be remarked that he now speaks of science
more respectfully than of old. I suppose this Essay was of later date
than "Beauty," or "Illusions." But accidental circumstances made such
confusion in the strata of Emerson's published thought that one is often
at a loss to know whether a sentence came from the older or the newer
layer.

We come to "Considerations by the Way." The common-sense side of
Emerson's mind has so much in common with the plain practical
intelligence of Franklin that it is a pleasure to find the philosopher
of the nineteenth century quoting the philosopher of the eighteenth.

"Franklin said, 'Mankind are very superficial and dastardly: they
begin upon a thing, but, meeting with a difficulty, they fly from it
discouraged; but they have the means if they would employ them.'"

"Shall we judge a country by the majority, or by the minority? By the
minority, surely." Here we have the doctrine of the "saving remnant,"
which we have since recognized in Mr. Matthew Arnold's well-remembered
lecture. Our republican philosopher is clearly enough outspoken on this
matter of the _vox populi_. "Leave this hypocritical prating about the
masses. Masses are rude, lame, unmade, pernicious in their demands, and
need not to be flattered, but to be schooled. I wish not to concede
anything to them, but to tame, drill, divide, and break them up, and
draw individuals out of them."

Pere Bouhours asked a question about the Germans which found its answer
in due time. After reading what Emerson says about "the masses," one is
tempted to ask whether a philosopher can ever have "a constituency" and
be elected to Congress? Certainly the essay just quoted from would not
make a very promising campaign document. Perhaps there was no great
necessity for Emerson's returning to the subject of "Beauty," to which
he had devoted a chapter of "Nature," and of which he had so often
discoursed incidentally. But he says so many things worth reading in the
Essay thus entitled in the "Conduct of Life" that we need not trouble
ourselves about repetitions. The Essay is satirical and poetical rather
than philosophica