compare it with the contemporary Frenchman's saying: "The
analytical faculties can give us no realities."

Let us next hear Emerson himself, first in an early letter to his
brother Edward: "Do you draw the distinction of Milton,
Coleridge, and the Germans between Reason and Understanding? I
think it a philosophy itself, and, like all truth, very
practical. Reason is the highest faculty of the soul, what we
mean often by the soul itself: it never reasons, never proves, it
simply perceives, it is vision. The understanding toils all the
time, compares, contrives, adds, argues; near-sighted, but
strong-sighted, dwelling in the present, the expedient, the
customary." And in 1833, after he had left the Unitarian pulpit,
Emerson made in his diary this curious attempt to reconcile the
scriptural language of his ancestral profession to the new
vocabulary of Transcendentalism: "Jesus Christ was a minister of
the pure Reason. The beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount are
all utterances of the mind contemning the phenomenal world . . .
. The understanding can make nothing of it. 'Tis all nonsense.
The Reason affirms its absolute verity . . . . St. Paul marks the
distinction by the terms natural man and spiritual man. When
Novalis says, 'It is the instinct of the Understanding to
contradict the Reason,' he only translates into a scientific
formula the doctrine of St. Paul, 'The Carnal Mind is enmity
against God.'"

One more quotation must suffice. It is from a poem by a forgotten
Transcendentalist, F. G. Tuckerman.

"No more thy meaning seek, thine anguish plead;