the creator, the creator in the infinite. This view admonishes me where the sources of wisdom and power lie." "Man is greater than he can see. Currents of the universal being circulate through me."s "The soul of the individual is but an emanation from the abyss of Deity and about to return from whence it came." "In all the magnificence and imperfection of our nature the man triumphs to remember that he bears about him a spark, which all beings venerate and acknowledge to be the emblem of God."10 And again Emerson states, "The foundations of man are not in matter but in spirit. The element of spirit is eternity."11 In magnificent conclusion he says: "Divine sentiments always soliciting us are breathed into us from on high, till we come to know that self reliance, the height and perfection of man, is reliance on God."12 As we pick out the patterns of the Nature motif from one aspect, we see that "Man is greater than he can see and the universe less because Time and Space relations vanish as laws are known."18 And again he states: "We must attribute necessary existence to spirit but we must esteem Nature as an accident and an effect."14 "I am somehow receptive of the great Soul, and thereby I do overlook the sun and the stars, and feel them to be fair accidents, effects which change and pass."15 But, regarding the other phase of his thought, he emphasizes Nature. "Nature answers to the Soul, part to part. One is seal, and one is print. Its beauty is the beauty of man's own mind. Its laws are the laws of man's own mind. Nature then becomes to man the measure of his own attainments. So much of nature as he is ignorant of, so much of his own mind does he not yet possess."16 Nature is placed thus in the whole scheme of things: "In the divine nature, intellect (of which man is an expression) is primary, nature secon 7 Nature, v. 1, p. 64. 10 Journal, v. 1, p. 165. 12 Fugitive Slave Law, v. 2, p. 236. 13 Nature, v. 1, p. 49. 14 15 Oversoul, v. 2, p. 296. 16 Nature, v. 1, p. 87. dary. It is the memory of the mind. That which once existed in intellect as pure law, has now taken body as nature."17 The world including Nature and Society, Emerson calls, "This shadow of the soul, this other me."18 And the use of the world is that man may learn its laws.19 Thus nature, the world and man are all expressions of intelligence, and nature and the world are "Merely means of arousing man's interior activity."20 This brings us to the persistently moral quality of the motif in the design. The purpose of this relation of man and nature and the world, according to Emerson, is distinctly a moral one, that is, its value is its result in man's conduct. "For the one thing in the world of worth, is the active soul."21 "Victory over things is the office of man. Of course, until this is accomplished, it is the war and insult of things over him. His continual tendency, his great danger is to overlook the fact that the world is his teacher, and the nature of the sun and moon, plant and animal, are only means of arousing him."22 "Thus man is ever invited onward into shining realms of knowledge and power by the shows of the world, which interpret to him the infinitude of his own consciousness."28 In Emerson's persistent design, then, we see that he was but saying in his writings and establishing in his life what Christianity had been teaching with its lips and not believing in its heart for nineteen hundred years. He saw man a child of God. "Our first experiences in moral, as in intellectual nature force us to discriminate a universal mind, identical in all men. It is the mind of the mind. We belong to it and it to us."24 Man's joy and value depends upon his realization of his divinity. Consciousness of divinity is a matter of growth depending on favorable environment. According to Emerson, that environment was those conditions which de 17 Method of Nature (oration), v. 1, 21 Nature, v. 1, p. 90. p. 197. 18 The Scholar, v. 1, p. 95. 19 Education, v. 10, p. 125. 20 Education, v. 10, p. 127. 22 Education, v. 10, p. 130. 24 Character, v. 5, p. 13. veloped man's faith in his Godhood, whether through Society, Solitude, contemplation of Nature, introspection or active life. "Out of our frivolous way of life, how can greatness ever grow? Come, now, let us go and be dumb."25 In contrast with the joys of solitude Emerson states: "The richest romance, the noblest fiction that was ever woven lies enclosed in human life."26 The way in which man is to establish his connection between God and himself, Emerson intimates in such passages as "Ineffable is the union of man and God in every act of the soul. The simplest person, who in his integrity worships God, becomes God."27 "There is a natural magnetism which is sure to select what belongs to it."28 "The transcendentalist believes in miracles, in the perpetual openness of the human mind to new influx of light and power; he believes in inspiration and ecstasy."29 "Let man learn the revelation of all nature and all thought to his heart, this, namely, that the Highest dwells with him. But if he would know what the great God speaketh, he must 'go into his closet and shut the door,' as Jesus said."30 With the outlines of the ever-recurring motif in mind, the unity of God, man and nature, with emphasis on man's divinity and the essentially moral character of living, we may now trace the pattern of this thought in education. With characteristic sweep Emerson announces that education should be as broad as man. "Whatever elements are in him, that should education foster and demonstrate."1 "Only so much do I know as I have lived,"32 and weaving in again the favorite motif Emerson says: "A point in education that I can never too much insist upon, is the tenet that every individual man has a bias which he must obey, and that it is only as he feels and obeys this, that he rightly develops and attains his legitimate power in 25 26 Letters,v. 1, p. 177. 27 Oversoul, v. 2, p. 292. 28 Spiritual Laws, v. 2, p. 133. 29 The Transcendentalist, v. 1, p. 335. 30 Oversoul, v. 2, p. 294. 31 Education, v. 10, p. 134. 32 American Scholar, v. 1, p. 94. the world."33 "All education is to accustom man to trust himself, to discriminate between higher and lower thoughts, to exert the timid faculties until they are robust and thus to train him to self help."34 Emphasizing the moral aspect of his design Emerson says: "The great object of education should be commensurate with the object of life. It should be a moral one: to teach self trust, to inspire the youth with an interest in himself, to acquaint him with the resources of his mind and to inflame him with a piety toward the Grand Mind in which he lives."35 If education is to be as broad as man its methods are to be as broad as all life and experience. "We have many teachers, we are in the world for culture, to be instructed in realities, in the laws of moral and intellectual nature, and our education is not conducted by toys and luxuries, but by austere and rugged masters, by poverty, by solitude, by passion, war and slavery, to know that paradise is under the shadow of the swords and that divine sentiments are always soliciting us from on high as an offset to a universe of crime and suffering."36 "Whatever the man does or whatever befalls him opens another chamber in his soul, that he has got a new feeling, a new thought, a new organ; a new degree of intellectual power."87 But even though life is to be the great university, it is not to be sought for its own end. "Man must not be content with anything as an end in itself, whether it be Nature, Intellect or practical affairs, but as a means of enriching him."38 "For we learn nothing rightly until we learn the symbolical character of life."39 The object of education as of all experience is culture, to fit one to perceive. "If I have renounced the search of truth, if I have come into the port of some pretending dogma, some new church, some Schelling or Cousin, I have died to all use of these new 33 Greatness, v. 8, p. 307. 34 Free Religious Assn., v. 11, p. 487. 37 Education, v. 10, p. 125-6. events that are born out of prolific time, every hour, into multitude of life."40 Elsewhere Emerson gives us glimpses of what education should be by what it is not. "Our culture has truckled to the times, to the senses. If the vast and the spiritual are omitted in education, so are the practical and the moral. It does not make us brave and free. We teach boys to be such men as we are. We do not teach them to aspire, to be all they can. We do not give them a training, as if we believed in their noble nature. We scarce educate their bodies. We do not train the eye and the hand. . . . We aim to make accountants, attorneys, engineers, but not to make able, earnest, greathearted men."41 But with characteristic fairness Emerson presents the other side of the picture. He says: "In affirming that the moral nature of man is the predominant element and should therefore be mainly consulted in the arrangements of school, I am very far from wishing that it should swallow up all other instincts and faculties of man. It should be enthroned in his mind, but if it monopolizes the man, he is not yet sound; he does not yet know his wealth. He is in danger of becoming merely devout and wearisome through the monotony of his thought. It is not less necessary that the intellect and active faculties should be nourished and matured. Let us apply to education the light of the same torch by which we have looked at all the phenomena of the time; the infinitude, namely, of every man.' 1142 With this expansive vision of education must be associated the teacher of divine perception. "I look for the new teacher, who shall see the world to be the mirror of the soul, shall see the beauty of the law of gravitation, with the purity of the heart, and shall show that the Ought, the Duty is one thing with Science, and with Joy,"43 and further, he says: "The 40 Ibid, p. 133. 41 Ibid, p. 135-6. 42 Education, v. 10, p. 136-7. 43 Divinity School Address, v. 1, D. 151. |