Berkeley or
Plato. A slightly different education might have led him to throw his
teaching into the form of historical essays or of stump speeches. He
might, perhaps, have been bred a stonemason, and have done his work in
the world by travelling with a panorama. But he would always have been
Emerson. His weight and his power would always have been the same. It is
solely as character that he is important. He discovered nothing; he
bears no relation whatever to the history of philosophy. We must regard
him and deal with him simply as a man.

Strangely enough, the world has always insisted upon accepting him as a
thinker: and hence a great coil of misunderstanding. As a thinker,
Emerson is difficult to classify. Before you begin to assign him a
place, you must clear the ground by a disquisition as to what is meant
by "a thinker", and how Emerson differs from other thinkers. As a man,
Emerson is as plain as Ben Franklin.

People have accused him of inconsistency; they say that he teaches one
thing one day, and another the next day. But from the point of view of
Emerson there is no such thing as inconsistency. Every man is each day a
new man. Let him be to-day what he is to-day. It is immaterial and waste
of time to consider what he once was or what he may be.

His picturesque speech delights in fact and anecdote, and a public which
is used to treatises and deduction cares always to be told the moral. It
wants everything reduced to a generalization. All generalizations are
partial truths, but we are used to them, and we ourselves mentally make
the proper allowance. Emerson's method is, not to give a generalization
and trust to our making the allowance, but to give two conflicting
statements and leave the balance of truth to be struck in our own minds
on the facts. There is no inconsistency in this. It is a vivid and very
legitimate method of procedure. But he is much more than a theorist: he
is a practitioner. He does not merely state a theory of agitation: he
proceeds to agitate. "Do not," he says, "set the least value on what I
do, or the least discredit on what I do not, as if I pretended to settle
anything as false or true. I unsettle all things. No facts are to me
sacred, none are profane. I simply experiment, an endless seeker with no
past at my back." He was not engaged in teaching many things, but one
thing,--Courage. Sometimes he inspires it by pointing to great
characters,--Fox, Milton, Alcibiades; sometimes he i