g disciples,--of planting themselves on their
instincts, consulting their own spiritual light for guidance,--trusting
to intuition,--without reference to any other authority, he opened the
door to extravagances in any unbalanced minds, if such there were, which
listened to his teachings. Too much was expected out of the mouths of
babes and sucklings. The children shut up by Psammetichus got as far as
one word in their evolution of an original language, but _bekkos_ was a
very small contribution towards a complete vocabulary. "The Dial"
was well charged with intuitions, but there was too much vagueness,
incoherence, aspiration without energy, effort without inspiration, to
satisfy those who were looking for a new revelation.

The gospel of intuition proved to be practically nothing more or less
than this: a new manifesto of intellectual and spiritual independence.
It was no great discovery that we see many things as truths which we
cannot prove. But it was a great impulse to thought, a great advance
in the attitude of our thinking community, when the profoundly devout
religious free-thinker took the ground of the undevout and irreligious
free-thinker, and calmly asserted and peaceably established the right
and the duty of the individual to weigh the universe, its laws and its
legends, in his own balance, without fear of authority, or names, or
institutions.

All this brought its dangers with it, like other movements of
emancipation. For the Fay _ce que voudras_ of the revellers of Medmenham
Abbey, was substituted the new motto, Pense _ce que voudras_. There was
an intoxication in this newly proclaimed evangel which took hold of some
susceptible natures and betrayed itself in prose and rhyme, occasionally
of the Bedlam sort. Emerson's disciples were never accused of falling
into the more perilous snares of antinomianism, but he himself
distinctly recognizes the danger of it, and the counterbalancing
effect of household life, with its curtain lectures and other benign
influences. Extravagances of opinion cure themselves. Time wore off the
effects of the harmless debauch, and restored the giddy revellers to the
regimen of sober thought, as reformed spiritual inebriates.

Such were some of the incidental effects of the Emersonian declaration
of independence. It was followed by a revolutionary war of opinion not
yet ended or at present like to be. A local outbreak, if you will, but
so was throwing the tea overboard. A provi