sm of Giordano Bruno, it has little in
common with Plato. The great idea, the latter tells us, in the
_Republic_, 'the idea of the God, is perceived with difficulty, but can
not be perceived without concluding that in the visible world it
produces light, and the star whence the light directly comes, and in the
invisible world it directly produces Strength and Intelligence.'
Strength and Intelligence; whose correlatives are Progress and
Happiness. Are there among Emerson's earlier 'big-sounding sentences and
words of state,' any of which these are the legitimate fruit? Does the
soul of Infinite Love that beamed from Nazareth inform these pages with
the active, perfect, immortal spirit of truth? No. In these essays,
Emerson is a royalist, an aristocrat: he aims for the centralization of
power; he does not elevate the masses; he claims for himself, for all
nature, ultra-refined and cultivated, to whom the Open Secret 'has been
discovered, a separate and highly superior personality. 'The height, the
duty of man is to be self-sustained, to need no gift, no foreign force.
Society is good when it does not violate me, but best when it is likest
to solitude.' What an Apollo Belvidere the man would be, moulded by no
sympathies, standing aloof from his race, and independent of it,
disdainful, magnificent, a palace of ice, untenable by the summer heat
of Love. The true cosmopolite is the man of his age, even if he has
known no latitude but that of his birth, for he has won for himself the
highest individuality, and the greatest power of association with his
fellow-man, and the laws that govern man in his efforts to secure these
are the laws of the only true social science. Henry Carey says with
reason, in Italy the highest individuality was found when the Campagna
was filled with cities. It is a narrow belief that the highest
development of character demands solitude. Give to a young man, genial,
impulsive, and intelligent, only the companionship of forest, sea, and
mountain, and the chances are, he will become morbid, unpractical, and
selfish. But place him in the same position in the decline, or even in
the noon of life, when the different parts of his nature have become
subordinated to each other, by friction with diverse human organizations
about him, and he will carry a brave individuality among nature's gifts,
being himself her noblest development. 'Men,' says Emerson, 'resemble
their contemporaries even more than their progeni