permits. Consider it as the work of a great and beneficent and
progressive necessity, which, from the first pulsation in the first
animal life up to the present high culture of the best nations, has
advanced thus far....

"The conservative party in the universe concedes that the radical
would talk sufficiently to the purpose if we were still in the
garden of Eden; he legislates for man as he ought to be; his theory
is right, but he makes no allowance for friction, and this omission
makes his whole doctrine false. The idealist retorts that the
conservative falls into a far more noxious error in the other
extreme. The conservative assumes sickness as a necessity, and his
social frame is a hospital, his total legislation is for the present
distress, a universe in slippers and flannels, with bib and
pap-spoon, swallowing pills and herb tea. Sickness gets organized as
well as health, the vice as well as the virtue."

It is unnecessary to go, one by one, through the familiar essays and
lectures which Emerson published between 1838 and 1875. They are in
everybody's hands and in everybody's thoughts. In 1840 he wrote in his
diary: "In all my lectures I have taught one doctrine, namely, the
infinitude of the private man. This the people accept readily enough,
and even with commendation, as long as I call the lecture Art or
Politics, or Literature or the Household; but the moment I call it
Religion they are shocked, though it be only the application of the same
truth which they receive elsewhere to a new class of facts." To the
platform he returned, and left it only once or twice during the
remainder of his life.

His writings vary in coherence. In his early occasional pieces, like the