e to speak of Emerson's doctrines, as Henry James did.
He had no doctrines. He had leading ideas, but he had no system, no
argument. It was his attitude of mind and spirit that was significant
and original. He would have nothing to do with stereotyped opinions.
What he said to-day might contradict what he said yesterday, or what
he might say to-morrow. No matter, the spirit was the same. Truth is a
sphere that has opposite poles. Emerson more than any other writer
stood for the contradictory character of spiritual truth. Truth is
what we make it--what takes the imprint of one's mind; it is not a
definite something like gold or silver, it is any statement that fits
our mental make-up, that comes home to us. What comes home in one mood
may not come home in another.

Emerson had no creed, he had no definite ideas about God. Personality
and impersonality might both be affirmed of Absolute Being, and what
may not be affirmed of it in our own minds?

The good of such a man as Emerson is not in his doctrines, but in his
spirit, his heroic attitude, his consonance with the universal mind.
His thought is a tremendous solvent; it digests and renders fluid the
hard facts of life and experience.

XIV

Emerson records in his Journal: "I have been writing and speaking what
were once called novelties, for twenty-five or thirty years, and have
not now one disciple. Why? Not that what I said was not true; not that
it has not found intelligent receivers; but because it did not go from
any wish in me to bring men to me, but to themselves. I delight in
driving them from me. What could I do, if they came to me?--they would
interrupt and encumber me. This is my boast that I have no school
follower. I should account it a measure of the impurity of insight, if
it did not create independence."

It is never easy to stray far from the master in high moral, aesthetic,
and literary matters and be on the safe side; we are only to try to
escape his individual bias, to break over his limitations and "brave
the landscape's look" with our own eyes. We are to be more on guard
against his affinities, his unconscious attractions and repulsions,
than against his ethical and intellectual conclusions, if one may make
that distinction, which I know is hazardous business. We readily
impose our own limitations upon others and see the world as old when
we are old.

Emerson criticized Carlyle because Carlyle was not Emerson, just as
Carlyle criticized Emer