lesser ends. In the realization that they are essential parts of
the greater values, he does not confuse them with each other. He
remains undisturbed except in rare instances, when the lower
parts invade and seek to displace the higher. He was not afraid
to say that "there are laws which should not be too well obeyed."
To him, slavery was not a social or a political or an economic
question, nor even one of morals or of ethics, but one of
universal spiritual freedom only. It mattered little what party,
or what platform, or what law of commerce governed men. Was man
governing himself? Social error and virtue were but relative.
This habit of not being hindered by using, but still going beyond
the great truths of living, to the greater truths of life gave
force to his influence over the materialists. Thus he seems to us
more a regenerator than a reformer--more an interpreter of life's
reflexes than of life's facts, perhaps. Here he appears greater
than Voltaire or Rousseau and helped, perhaps, by the centrality
of his conceptions, he could arouse the deeper spiritual and
moral emotions, without causing his listeners to distort their
physical ones. To prove that mind is over matter, he doesn't
place matter over mind. He is not like the man who, because he
couldn't afford both, gave up metaphysics for an automobile, and
when he ran over a man blamed metaphysics. He would not have us
get over-excited about physical disturbance but have it accepted
as a part of any progress in culture, moral, spiritual or
aesthetic. If a poet retires to the mountain-side, to avoid the
vulgar unculture of men, and their physical disturbance, so that
he may better catch a nobler theme for his symphony, Emerson
tells him that "man's culture can spare nothing, wants all
material, converts all impediments into instruments, all enemies
into power." The latest product of man's culture--the aeroplane,