unded--the earth-beat, sea-beat, heart-beat, which make the tune
to which the sun rolls, and the globule of blood and the sap of the
trees."

An intuitive sense of values, tends to make Emerson use social,
political, and even economic phenomena, as means of expression, as the
accidental notes in his scale--rather than as ends, even lesser ends.
In the realization that they are essential parts of the greater values,
he does not confuse them with each other. He remains undisturbed except
in rare instances, when the lower parts invade and seek to displace the
higher. He was not afraid to say that "there are laws which should not
be too well obeyed." To him, slavery was not a social or a political or
an economic question, nor even one of morals or of ethics, but one of
universal spiritual freedom only. It mattered little what party, or
what platform, or what law of commerce governed men. Was man governing
himself? Social error and virtue were but relative. This habit of not
being hindered by using, but still going beyond the great truths of
living, to the greater truths of life gave force to his influence over
the materialists. Thus he seems to us more a regenerator than a
reformer--more an interpreter of life's reflexes than of life's facts,
perhaps. Here he appears greater than Voltaire or Rousseau and helped,
perhaps, by the centrality of his conceptions, he could arouse the
deeper spiritual and moral emotions, without causing his listeners to
distort their physical ones. To prove that mind is over matter, he
doesn't place matter over mind. He is not like the man who, because he
couldn't afford both, gave up metaphysics for an automobile, and when
he ran over a man blamed metaphysics. He would not have us get
over-excited about physical disturbance but have it accepted as a part
of any progress in culture, moral, spiritual or aesthetic. If a poet
retires to the mountain-side, to avoid the vulgar unculture of men, and
their physical disturbance, so that he may better catch a nobler theme
for his symphony, Emerson tells him that "man's culture can spare
nothing, wants all material, converts all impediments into instruments,
all enemies into power." The latest product of man's culture--the
aeroplane, then sails o'er the mountain and instead of an
inspiration--a spray of tobacco-juice falls on the poet. "Calm
yourself, Poet!" says Emerson, "culture will convert furies into muses
and hells into benefit. This wouldn't have bef