belief in the importance of the individual which is independent of any
personal relations he has with the world. It is as if a man had been
withdrawn from the earth and dedicated to condensing and embodying this
eternal idea--the value of the individual soul--so vividly, so vitally,
that his words could not die, yet in such illusive and abstract forms
that by no chance and by no power could his creed be used for purposes
of tyranny. Dogma cannot be extracted from it. Schools cannot be built
on it. It either lives as the spirit lives, or else it evaporates and
leaves nothing. Emerson was so afraid of the letter that killeth that he
would hardly trust his words to print. He was assured there was no such
thing as literal truth, but only literal falsehood. He therefore
resorted to metaphors which could by no chance be taken literally. And
he has probably succeeded in leaving a body of work which cannot be made
to operate to any other end than that for which he designed it. If this
be true, he has accomplished the inconceivable feat of eluding
misconception. If it be true, he stands alone in the history of
teachers; he has circumvented fate, he has left an unmixed blessing
behind him.

The signs of those times which brought forth Emerson are not wholly
undecipherable. They are the same times which gave rise to every
character of significance during the period before the war. Emerson is
indeed the easiest to understand of all the men of his time, because his
life is freest from the tangles and qualifications of circumstance. He
is a sheer and pure type and creature of destiny, and the
unconsciousness that marks his development allies him to the deepest
phenomena. It is convenient, in describing him, to use language which
implies consciousness on his part, but he himself had no purpose, no
theory of himself; he was a product.