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<FONT> <A href="http://www.new-tradition.org/investigation-historical-dating.php">bible craft</A> <A href="http://www.new-tradition.org/egyptian-horo.php">church of god in christ</A> <A href="http://www.new-tradition.org/real-egypt.php">black history month.com</A> <A href="http://www.new-tradition.org/civilevents.php">van warped tour</A> <A href="http://www.new-tradition.org/real-jesus.php">viet nam tour</A> <A href="http://www.new-tradition.org/view-garry-kasparov.php">picture of egypt</A> <A href="http://www.new-tradition.org/why-tourism.php">pontiac aztec</A> <A href="http://www.new-tradition.org/money-war.php">medieval dress</A> <A href="http://www.new-tradition.org">motorcycle tour</A> <A href="http://www.new-tradition.org">egypt picture</A> <A href="http://www.new-tradition.org/investigation-eng-history.php">woman of the bible</A> </FONT> ssor Chester Noyes Greenough HE is, said Matthew Arnold of Emerson, the friend and aider of those who would live in the spirit. These well-known words are perhaps the best expression of the somewhat vague yet powerful and inspiring effect of Emersons courageous but disjointed philosophy. 1 EMERSON AS LAY PREACHER Descended from a long line of New England ministers, Emerson, finding himself fettered by even the most liberal ministry of his day, gently yet audaciously stepped down from the pulpit and, with little or no modification in his interests or utterances, became the greatest lay preacher of his time. From the days of his undergraduate essay upon The Present State of Ethical Philosophy he continued to be preoccupied with matters of conduct: whatever the object of his attentionan ancient poet, a fact in science, or an event in the morning newspaperhe contrives to extract from it a lesson which in his ringing, glistening style he drives home as an exhortation to a higher and more independent life. 2 EMERSON AND CALVINISM Historically, Emerson marks one of the largest reactions against the Calvinism of his ancestors. That stern creed had taught the depravity of man, the impossibility of a natural, unaided growth toward perfection, and the necessity of constant and anxious effort to win the unmerited reward of being numbered among the elect. Emerson starts with the assumption that the individual, if he can only come into possession of his natural excellence, is the most godlike of creatures. Instead of believing with the Calvinist that as a man grows better he becomes more unlike his natural self (and therefore can become better only by an act of divine mercy), Emerson believes that as a man grows in excellence he becomes more like his natural self. It is common to hear the expression, when one is deeply stirred, as by sublime music or a moving discourse: That fairly lifted me out of myself. Emerson would have said that such influences life us into ourselves. 3 THE OVER-SOUL For one of Emersons most fundamental and frequently recurring ideas 1 is that of a great nature in which we rest as the earth lies in the soft arms of the atmosphere, an Over-Soul, within which every mans particular being is contained and made one with all other, which evermore tends to pass into our thought and hand and become wisdom and virtue and power and beauty. 2 This is the incentivethe sublime incentive of approaching the perfection which is ours by nature and by divine intentionthat Emerson holds out when he asks us to submit us to ourselves to all instructive influences. 4 These instructive influences, according to Emerson, are chiefly Nature, the Past, and Society. Let us notice how Emerson bids us use these influences to help us into our higher selves. 5 NATURE Nature, which he says 3 is loved by what is best in us, is all about us, inviting our perception of its remotest and most cosmic principles by surrounding us with its simpler manifestations. A man does not tie his shoe without recognizing laws which bind the farthest regions of nature. 4 Thus man carries the world in his head. 5 Whether he be a great scientist, proving by his discovery of a sweeping physical law that he has some such constructive sense as that which guides the universe, or whether he be a poet beholding trees as imperfect men, who seem to bemoan their imprisonment, rooted in the ground, 6 he is being brought into his own by perceiving the virtue and pungency of the influence on the mind of material objects, whether inorganic or organized. 7 6 THE PAST Ranging over time and space with astonishing rapidity and binding names and things together that no ordinary vision could connect, Emerson calls the Past also to witness the need of self-reliance and a steadfast obedience to intuition. 8 The need of such independence, he thought, was particularly great for the student, who so easily becomes overawed by the great names of the Past and reads to believe and take for granted. 9 This should not be, nor can it be if we remember what we are. Meek young men grow up in libraries believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote these books. 10 When we sincerely find, therefore, that we cannot agree with the Past, then, says Emerson, we must break with it, no matter how great the prestige of its messengers. But often the Past does not disappoint us; often it assists us in our quest to become our highest selves. For in the Past there have been many men of genius; and, inasmuch as the man of genius has come nearer to being continually conscious of his relation to the Over-Soul, it follows that the genius is actually more ourselves than we are. So we often have to fall back upon more gifted souls to interpret for us what we mean but cannot say. Any supreme triumph of expression, therefore, should arouse in us not humility, still less discouragement, but renewed consciousness that one nature wrote and the same reads. 11 So it is in travel or in any other form of contact with the Past: we cannot derive any profit or see any new thing except we remember that the world is nothing, the man is all. 12 7 SOCIETY Similar are the uses of Society. More clearly than in Nature or in the Past, we see in certain other people such likeness to ourselves, and receive from the perception of that likeness such inspiration, that a real friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature. 13 Yet elsewhere Emerson has more than once urged us not to be too much acquainted 14: all our participation in the life of our fellows, though rich with courtesy and sympathy, must be free from bending and copying. We must use the fellowship of Society to freshen, and never to obscure, the recollection of the grandeur of our destiny. 15 8 EMERSONS UNIVERSALITY Such, in some attempt at an organization, are a few of Emersons favorite ideas, which occur over and over again, no matter what may be the subject of the essay. Though Emerson was to some degree identified, in his own time, with various movements which have had little or no permanent effect, yet as we read him now we find extraordinarily little that suggests the limitations of his time and locality. Often there are whole paragraphs which if we had read them in Greek would have seemed Greek. The good sense which kept him clear of Brook Farm because he thought Fourier had skipped no fact but one, namely life, kept him clear from many similar departures into matters which the twenty-first century will probably not remember. This is as it should be in the essay, which by custom draws the subject for its dispersed meditations from the permanent things of this world, such as Friendship, Truth, Superstition, and Honor. One of Emersons sources of strength, therefore, is his universality. 9 HIS STYLE Another source of Emersons strength is his extraordinary compactness of style and his range and unexpectedness of illustration. His gift for epigram is, indeed, such as to make us long for an occasional stretch of leisurely commonplace. But Emerson always keeps us upnot less by his memorable terseness than by his startling habit of illustration. He loves to dart from the present to the remotest past, to join names not usually associated, to link pagan with Christian, or human with divine, in single rapid sentences, such as that 16 about Scipio, and the Cid, and Sir Philip Sidney, and Washington, and every pure and valiant heart, who worshiped Beauty by word or by deed. 10 Not less notable than his universality of thought, his compactness of style, and his swiftness and range of illustration, is Emersons delightful benignity of tone. It would be hard to find any one whose opposition is so high minded, whose refusal is so gentle, whose good willthough perhaps never anxiousis so uniformly evident. The sweetness of Emersons face, as we know it from his most famous portrait, is to be felt throughout his work. 11 If, in spite of all these admirable qualities, Emersons ideas seem too vague and unsystematic to satisfy those who feel that they could perhaps become Emersonians if there were only some definite articles to sign, it must be remembered that Emerson wishes to develop independence rather than apostleship, and that when men revolt from a system because they believe it to be too definite and oppressive, they are likely to go to the other extreme. That Emerson did go so far toward this extreme identifies him with a period notable for its enthusiastic expansion of thought. That he did not systematize or restrict means that he was obedient to the idea that what really matters is not that by exact terminology, clever tactics, and all the niceties of reasoning a system of philosophy shall be made tight and impregnable for others to adopt, but rather that each of us may be persuaded to hitch his own particular wagon to whatever star for him shines brightest. 12 Note 1. Perhaps most clearly put in The Over-Soul, Harvard Classics, V, 133ff. [back]Note 2. H. C., V, 134. [back]Note 3. H. C., V, 227. [back]Note 4. H. C., V, 230. [back]Note 5. H. C., V, 230. [back]Note 6. H. C., V, 229. [back]Note 7. H. C., V, 237. [back]Note 8. The uses of the past and the right spirit in which to approach it, are finely set forth in The American Scholar (H. C., V, 5ff). [back]Note 9. Bacon, Of Studies (H. C., iii, 122). [back]Note 10. H. C., V, 9. [back]Note 11. H. C., V, 10, 11. [back]Note 12. H. C., V, 22. [back]Note 13. H. C., V, 112. [back]Note 14. H. C., V, 208. [back]Note 15. H. C., V, 209. [back]Note 16. H. C., V, 213. [back] CONTENTS · BOOK CONTENTS · BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD PREVIOUSNEXT Search Amazon: Click here to shop the Bookstore.Welcome · Press <b> <A href="http://www.new-tradition.org"> bible dictionary</A></b> <br> V. Mutual Affinities of Organic Beings: MorphologyEmbryologyRudimentary Organs On russia girl Nature of russia girl Affinities Connecting Organic Beings AS russia girl modified descendants of dominant species, belonging to russia girl larger genera, tend to inherit russia girl advantages which made russia girl groups to which they belong large and their parents dominant, they are almost sure to spread widely, and to seize on more and more places in russia girl economy of nature. The larger and more dominant groups within each class thus tend to go on increasing in size; and they consequently supplant many smaller and feebler groups. Thus we can account for russia girl fact that all organisms, recent and extinct, are included under a few great orders, and under still fewer classes. As showing how few russia girl higher groups are in number, and how widely they are spread throughout russia girl world, russia girl fact is striking that russia girl discovery of Australia has not added an insect belonging to a new class; and that in russia girl vegetable kingdom, as I learn from Dr. Hooker, it has added only two or three families of small size. 1 In russia girl chapter on Geological Succession I attempted to show, on russia girl principle of each group having generally diverged much in character during russia girl long-continued process of modification, how it is that russia girl more ancient forms of life often present characters in some degree intermediate between existing groups. As some few of russia girl old and intermediate forms have transmitted to russia girl present day descendants but little modified, these constitute our so-called osculant or aberrant species. The more aberrant any form is, russia girl greater must be russia girl number of connecting forms which have been exterminated and utterly lost. And we have some evidence of aberrant groups having suffered severely from extinction, for they are almost always represented by extremely few species; and such species as do occur are generally very distinct from each other, which again implies extinction. The genera Ornithorhynchus and lepidosiren, for example, would not have been less aberrant had each been represented by a dozen species, instead of as at present by a single one, or by two or three. We can, I think, account for this fact only by looking at aberrant groups as forms which have been conquered by more successful competitors, with a few members still preserved under unusually favourable conditions. 2 Mr. Waterhouse has remarked that, when a member belonging to one group of animals exhibits an affinity to a quite distinct group, this affinity in most cases is general and not special; thus, according to Mr. Waterhouse, of all rodents, russia girl bizcacha is most nearly related to marsupials; but in russia girl points in which it approaches this order, its relations are general, that is, not to any one marsupial species more than to another. As these points of affinity are believed to be real and not merely adaptive, they must be due in accordance with our view to inheritance from a common progenitor. Therefore we must suppose either that all rodents, including russia girl bizcacha, branched off from some ancient marsupial, which will naturally have been more or less intermediate in character with respect to all existing marsupials; or that both rodents and marsupials branched off from a common progenitor, and that both groups have since undergone much modification in divergent directions. On either view we must suppose that russia girl bizcacha has retained, by inheritance, more of the, characters of its ancient progenitor than have other rodents; and therefore it will not be specially related to any one existing marsupial, but indirectly to all or nearly all marsupials, from having partially retained russia girl character of their common progenitor, or of some early member of russia girl group. On russia girl other hand, of all marsupials, as Mr. Waterhouse has remarked, russia girl Phascolomys resembles most nearly, not any one species, but russia girl general order of rodents. In this case, however, it may be strongly suspected as russia girl resemblance is only analogical, owing to russia girl Phascolomys having become adapted to habits like those of a rodent. The elder De Candolle has made nearly similar observations on russia girl general nature of russia girl affinities of distinct families of plants. 3 On russia girl principle of russia girl multiplication and gradual divergence in character of russia girl species descended from a common progenitor, together with their retention by inheritance of some characters in common, we can understand russia girl excessively complex and radiating affinities by which all russia girl members of russia girl same family or higher group are connected together. For russia girl common progenitor of a whole family, now broken up by extinction into distinct groups and sub-groups, will have transmitted some of its characters, modified in various ways and degrees, to all russia girl species; and they will consequently be related to each other by circuitous lines of affinity of various lengths (as may be seen in russia girl diagram so often referred to), mounting up through many predecessors. As it is difficult to show russia girl blood relationship between russia girl numerous kindred of any ancient and noble family even by russia girl aid of a genealogical tree, and almost impossible to do so without this aid, we can understand russia girl extraordinary difficulty which naturalists have experienced in describing, without russia girl aid of a diagram, russia girl various affinities which they perceive between russia girl many living and extinct members of russia girl same great natural class. 4 Extinction, as we have seen in russia girl fourth chapter, has played an important part in defining and widening russia girl intervals between russia girl several groups in each class. We may thus account for russia girl distinctness of whole classes from each otherfor instance, of birds from all other vertebrate animalsby russia girl belief that many ancient forms of life have been utterly lost, through which russia girl early progenitors of birds were formerly connected with russia girl early progenitors of russia girl other and at that time less differentiated vertebrate classes. There has been much less extinction of russia girl forms of life which once connected fishes with batrachians. There has been still less within some whole classes, for instance russia girl Crustacea, for here russia girl most wonderfully diverse forms are still linked together by a long and only partially broken chain of affinities. Extinction has only defined russia girl groups: it has by no means made them; for if every form which has ever lived on this earth were suddenly to reappear, though it would be quite impossible to give definitions by which each group could be distinguished, still a natural classification, or at least a natural arrangement, would be possible. We shall see this by turning to russia girl diagram; russia girl letters, A to L, may represent eleven Silurian genera, some of which have produced large groups of modified descendants, with every link in each branch and sub-branch still alive; and russia girl links not greater than those between existing varieties. In this case it would be quite impossible to give definitions by which russia girl several members of russia girl several groups could be distinguished from their more immediate parents and descendants. Yet russia girl arrangement in russia girl diagram would still hold good and would be natural; for, on russia girl principle of inheritance, all russia girl forms descended, for instance, from A, would have something in common. In a tree we can distinguish this or that branch, though at russia girl actual fork russia girl two unite and blend together. We could not, as I have said, define russia girl several groups; but we could pick out types, or forms, representing most of russia girl characters of each group, whether large or small, and thus give a general idea of russia girl value of russia girl differences between them. This is what we should be driven to, if we were ever to succeed in collecting all russia girl forms in any one class which have lived throughout all time and space. Assuredly we shall never succeed in making so perfect a collection: nevertheless, in certain classes, we are tending towards: this end; and Milne Edwards has lately insisted, in an able paper, on russia girl high importance of looking to types, whether or not we can separate and define russia girl groups to which such types belong. 5 Finally we have seen that natural selection, which follows from russia girl struggle for existence, and which almost inevitably leads to extinction and divergence of character in russia girl descendants from any one parent species, explains that great and universal feature in russia girl affinities of all organic beings, namely, their subordination in group under group. We use russia girl element of descent in classing russia girl individuals of both sexes and of all ages under one species, although they may have but few characters in common; we use descent in classing acknowledged varieties, however different they may be from their parents; and I believe that this element of descent is russia girl hidden bond of connection which naturalists have sought under russia girl term of the, Natural System. On this idea of russia girl natural system, being, in so far as it has been perfected, genealogical in its arrangement, with russia girl grades of difference expressed by russia girl terms genera, families, orders, &c., we can understand russia girl rules which we are compelled to follow in our classification. We can understand why we value certain resemblances far more than others; why we use rudimentary and useless organs, or others of trifling physiological importance; why, in finding russia girl relations between one group and another, we summarily reject analogical or adaptive characters, and yet use these same characters within russia girl limits of russia girl same group. We can clearly see how it is that all living and extinct forms can be grouped together within a few great classes; and how russia girl several members of each class are connected together by russia girl most complex and radiating lines of affinities. We shall never, probably, disentangle russia girl inextricable web of russia girl affinities between russia girl members of any one class; but when we have a distinct object in view, and do not look to some unknown plan of creation, we may hope to make sure but slow progress. 6 Professor Häckel in his <b> <A href="http://www.new-tradition.org"> russia girl</A></b> <br> <A HREF="http://www.new-tradition.org/desc/indexn1779.php">the church of jesus christ of latter day saint :1779</A> <A HREF="http://www.new-tradition.org/desc/indexn1778.php">california wine tour :1778</A> <A HREF="http://www.new-tradition.org/desc/indexn1777.php">bible translation :1777</A> <A HREF="http://www.new-tradition.org">medieval music :1776</A> <A HREF="http://www.new-tradition.org/desc/indexn1775.php">adoption russia :1775</A> <A HREF="http://www.new-tradition.org/desc/indexn1774.php">black history .com :1774</A> <A HREF="http://www.new-tradition.org/desc/indexn1773.php">greek god picture :1773</A> <A 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