tal 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 transient paintings;
and light is whitewash; and durations are deceptive; and form is
imprisonment; and heaven itself a decoy.'" All of which we see
reproduced in Emerson's poem "Brahma."--"The country of unity, of
immovable institutions, the seat of a philosophy delighting in
abstractions, of men faithful in doctrine and in practice to the idea of
a deaf, unimplorable, immense fate, is Asia; and it realizes this faith
in the social institution of caste. On the other side, the genius
of Europe is active and creative: it resists caste by culture; its
philosophy was a discipline; it is a land of arts, inventions, trade,
freedom."--"Plato came to join, and by contact to enhance, the energy of
each."

But Emerson says,--and some will smile at hearing him say it of
another,--"The acutest German, the lovingest disciple, could never tell
what Platonism was; indeed, admirable texts can be quoted on both sides
of every great question from him."

The transcendent intellectual and moral superiorities of this "Euclid of
holiness," as Emerson calls him, with his "soliform eye and his boniform
soul,"--the two quaint adjectives being from the mint of Cudworth,--are
fully dilated upon in the addition to the original article called
"Plato: New Readings."

Few readers will be satisfied with the Essay entitled "Swedenborg; or,
the Mystic." The believers in his special communion as a revealer of
divine truth will find him reduced to the level of other seers. The
believers of the different creeds of Christianity will take offence
at the statement that "Swedenborg and Behmen both failed by attaching
themselves to the Christian symbol, instead of to the moral sentiment,
which carries innumerable christianities, humanities, divinities in
its bosom." The men of science will smile at the exorbitant claims
put forward in behalf of Swedenborg as a scientific discoverer.
"Philosophers" will not be pleased to be reminded that Swedenborg call