"'A New World': Philosophical Idealism in America"1 Lecture I (Draft. Please do not quote without permission.) 1.

Introduction to the lectures as a whole I've taken my title for these lectures from a letter by Samuel Johnson: not, I hasten to say, the Samuel Johnson, but the American Samuel Johnson. ("Not the fill-in-the-blank, but the American fill-in-the-blank" is a refrain you may be hearing from me very often in the coming weeks.) You'll recall, many of you, that the Samuel Johnson responded to Berkeley's idealism with impatient physicality: he kicked a large stone and rebounded from it. (That the stone was large enough to push him backwards, and not a pebble he sent flying, will be important later on.) The response of the American Samuel Johnson, who was writing to Berkeley himself, was appreciative wonderment, culminating in a plea: You will forgive the confusedness of my thoughts and not wonder at my writing like a man something bewildered, since I am, as it were, got into a new world amazed at everything about me. These ideas of ours, what are they?2 The metaphor of entry into a new world, or at least into a new and wilder or more rustic country, was one that Berkeley had already made his own. He promised readers of his Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous a "Return to the simple Dictates of Nature," but it would come, he said, only after a circuit through "the wild Mazes of Philosophy." In the end, he assured them, it would not be unpleasant. "It is like coming home from a long Voyage: a Man reflects with Pleasure on the many Difficulties and Perplexities he has passed through, sets his Heart at ease, and enjoys himself with more Satisfaction for the future."3 Time spent in a new world, he thought, would make us more comfortable and secure in our possession of the old. These lectures will be a circuit through two "new worlds": the new world (or worldsystem) that bewildered Johnson, and the new worldthe Americain which he lived. I haven't published a word about American philosophy, or said very much about it outside my classroom (where I've taught it for some years now), and I imagine that the Berlin electors had British topics in mind when they approached me. It took me some time to settle on a topic so far removed from my own establishing competence, and from the concerns of present-day Oxford, at least in philosophy. After making my choice, I've been recalling with some nervousness the example of another American connected with the University of Texas (he was a faculty member, I'm a graduate) who came to England as a visiting professor. J. Frank Dobie was at Cambridge and lectured, I've always understood, on Texas longhorn cattle (not English longhorn cattle, but Texas longhorn cattle).4 Dobie was a great folklorist and his distinctly American topic was probably not unexpected. I feel sure he wasn't disappointing. I can only hope that I won't be, and that my own circuit through America, however unexpected, won't be unpleasant. Unlike Berkeley, though, I won't be returning you home. I'll be leaving you over there: in the mid-twentieth-century America of Martin Luther King, who was (though he's little known for it) the most influential recent representative of the idealist tradition whose course I will be tracing.5 I really will begin in the wilderness, with a writerone who became, in my view, the greatest English-language writer, before G. E. Moore, of analytical philosophical prosewhose most famous book was completed while he was a missionary to one tribe of Indians and living under the threat of attack by another. But first I need to take care of some preliminaries. I need

2 to say somethinga good deal, actuallyabout some of the idealist theses I'll be examining, and then I want to say a few words about my method and motivations. The founding text of the idealist tradition is a passage from Plato's Sophist, where the Eleatic Stranger speaks of a "quarrel about reality" that he compares to a "battle of gods and giants."6 "How so?," young Theaetetus asks. F. M. Cornford, whose translation of the Stranger's answer I now quote, calls it a battle between "idealists" (the party of the gods) and "materialists" (the party of the giants): STRANGER: One party is trying to drag everything down to earth out of heaven and the unseen, literally grasping rocks and trees in their hands, for they lay hold upon every stock and stone and strenuously affirm that real existence belongs only to that which can be handled and offers resistance to the touch. They define reality as the same thing as body, and as soon as one of the opposite party asserts that anything without a body is real, they are utterly contemptuous and will not listen to another word. THEAETETUS: The people you describe are certainly a formidable crew. I have met quite a number of them before now. STRANGER: Yes, and accordingly their adversaries are very wary in defending their position somewhere in the heights of the unseen, maintaining with all their force that true reality consists in certain intelligible and bodiless forms. In the clash of argument they shatter and pulverize those bodies which their opponents wield, and what those others alleged to be true reality they call, not real being, but a sort of moving process of becoming. On this issue an interminable battle is always going on between the two camps. The Stranger's sympathies, and Plato's, are with the gods. As the entry on idealism in James Mark Baldwin's monumental Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology reports, "the first historical system to which the name of idealism is applied by common consent is that of Plato."7 The idealist thesis most emphasized by Plato is metaphysical: bodies possess a diminished reality, a reality less "true"less realthan that of the impalpable unseen. This is the first, and probably the most basic, of the idealist theses we'll be contemplating. It is not the more extreme and perhaps more familiar thesis that bodies have no existence or reality at all. Certainly Berkeley held no such view, and I'm doubtful that it was seriously entertained by any of the idealists I will examine.8 Josiah Royce, in his first great idealist treatise, did write:9 "The world of dead facts is an illusion. The truth of it is a spiritual life." This is what philosophical idealism says. But I think Royce was speaking loosely.10 Perhaps by "illusion" he meant only "appearance." The more extreme idealist thesis is, at any rate, a limit case of the Platonic one: according to it, the reality of bodies is so radically diminished that it comes to nothing. Our first idealist thesis is deliberately vague. It doesn't identify (or identify with precision) what it is that has undiminished reality, and it doesn't give us any useful information, apart from their respective rankings in the great chain of being, about the relationship between beings with undiminished reality and their more impoverished bodily counterparts. America's idealists don't tend to agree about these matters. But like post-Platonic idealists elsewhere, they're skeptical of the undiluted Platonic conviction that intelligible and bodiless forms are absolutely fundamental. They may be Platonists, but if so they are neo-Platonists. They reenact the movement of thought that first made it possible to reconcile the Platonism of Plato with the God of the Bible: they suppose that Plato's intelligible and bodiless forms depend for their existence on a

3 mind that perceives or knows them. Plato and many later idealists joined our first idealist thesis, the Diminished Reality of Body (and the Fundamental Reality of Mind), to a second, Time's Subordination to Eternity. In Plato's case the thought was roughly this: bodies change, come to be, and pass away, and are in that sense in time; the bodiless and unseen forms are unchanging and everlasting, and are are in that sense outside of timethough it may actually be Plato's view that no temporal predicates, not even "unchanging" and "everlasting," can strictly be applied to the forms, in which case those predicates are serving as markers of atemporal eternity. From the fact that bodies have diminished reality, together with the fact that bodies are in flux, it doesn't of course follow that everything in flux has reality of lower grade; minds or souls, after all, also seem to change, and their degree of reality has not so far been addressed. I speak of time's subordination to eternity, rather than of its diminished reality, partly to take account of this, but also to leave room for the possibility that time's subordination to eternity is not, at bottom, a matter of metaphysics. Time's subordination to eternity may be typological: temporal facts may be signs or images of eternal facts without losing full reality, metaphysically understood. I do think that if the signification relation is not going to run in both directionsif the temporal is to become, as Royce suggests, "the symbol and the likeness of the eternal," without the eternal's becoming the symbol (however much it must remain the likeness) of the temporaltemporal facts will have to be denied a kind of value.11 Idealism concerning value is something I do intend to discuss, but I'm going to leave it aside for now. The battle of Plato's party with its faithful-to-the-earth opponents resounds throughout the subsequent history of philosophy. The theses I've extracted from the Stranger's elaborate metaphor are metaphysical, but they're often taken to broad epistemological implications, which are hinted at by the Stranger himself.12 If real existence belongs, as the giants contend, only to bodies that can be touched or handled, two things may seem to follow: first, that the contents of the mind, if it aspires to knowledge of the real, must be derived from bodies; and second, that the mind can acquire these contents only by passive perception, by the impact of bodies upon it. (The second thesis may commonly be inferred from materialism, but there's really no reason why a materialist can't also be a nativist. So long as innate knowledge is physically realized, physically caused, and physically sustained, its existence is compatible with the Fundamental Reality of Body. So perhaps the second thesis should be modified to say that the mind, once formed, can acquire contents only by the impact of bodies upon it. The modified statement of the thesis leaves open the possibility that the mind might acquire contents by affecting itself, and this may be a good thing. I see no reason why a materialist has to say that the mind is wholly passive in perception. By virtue of its innate or intrinsic nature, the mind may collaborate in producing its perceptual states, and some of those states might be produced by the mind alone. In that case the mind will have to include more than its perceptual states or contentsonly then could some of its own ingredients be the cause of its perceptual states of contentsbut I don't see why that's a problem.) If however the gods are rightif true reality belongs to intelligible and bodiless formsthen if a conception of true reality is within our grasp, bodily impacts can have little to do with our achieving it. Bodies may stir or prompt the mind, but they can't engender a content that isn't somehow present in those bodies to begin with. (Here philosophers will recognize the crucial premiss of Descartes's highly Platonic Third Meditation proof of God's existence. Descartes was an idealist in both the metaphysical and epistemological senses I'm delineating. The Cartesian Malebranche, by denying causal power to bodies, diminished their reality further, thereby becoming more of an idealist than Descartes had been. And the Cartesian Berkeleyif we follow what was perhaps the fashion in late nineteenth-century Cambridge, Massachusetts, and denominate him a Cartesianbecame more of an idealist still.)13 That our knowledge, or the best of it, is not rooted in sensation is my third idealist thesis, the Displacement of the Senses.

The epistemological significance of membership in Plato's party is brought out very clearly by Leibniz, in a famous passage from his commentary on Locke's Essay, the New Essays on Human Understanding. Echoes of this passage, first published in the middle of the eighteenth century, could still be heard in nineteenth-century America. Allying himself with Plato, Leibniz situates Locke, in company with Aristotle, closer to the party of the giants:14 Although the author of the Essay says hundreds of fine things which I applaud, our systems are very different. His is closer to Aristotle and mine to Plato. Our disagreements concern points of some importance. There is the question whether the soul in itself is completely blank like a writing table on which nothing has yet been writtena tabula rasaas Aristotle and the author of the Essay maintain, and whether everything which is inscribed there comes solely from the senses and experience; or whether the soul inherently contains the sources of various notions and doctrines, which external objects merely rouse up on suitable occasions, as I believe and as do Plato and even the Schoolmen. Plato's battle of gods and giants, as re-enacted by the "idealist" Leibniz and the "empiricist" Locke, was the subject of John Dewey's first philosophical book, written when Dewey himself was an idealist, and not the pragmatist he later became.15 But the great articulator of the metaphysical and epistemological stakes in Plato's battle, the writer who set the terms for much of American philosophy from the second quarter of the nineteenth century onwards, was not Leibniz but Kant. Like Plato's Stranger, Kant comes forward as witness to a "stage of conflict."16 He identifies three distinct points of contention, of which I'll mention only two. With respect to "the object of all of our rational cognitions," the "sensual philosophers," led by Epicurus, "asserted that reality is in the objects of the senses alone, and that everything else is imagination." To say that "everything else is imagination" is to say, I think, that everything else is merely imagined or nonexistent. Epicurus and his school stand with the party of the giants. The second school, the "merely intellectual philosophers," was according to Kant led by Plato himself. They stand with the Stranger's gods, maintaining, according to Kant, "that in the senses there is nothing but semblance, and that only the understanding"which Kant is here contrasting with the sense-based power of imagination"cognizes that which is true." Here Kant, mixing the metaphysical with the epistemological, tracks the Stranger fairly closely, but he lays more emphasis on the epistemologicalon what I've called the Displacement of the Senses. The second point of disagreement is expressly epistemological, and here Kant follows Leibniz, whose New Essays he clearly has in mind. (The New Essays were completed in 1703 or 1704, but when he learned of Locke's death in 1704, Leibniz decided not to publish them. They did not appear until 1756, when Kant's career as a writer was already well underway. For Kant and his contemporaries, Leibniz's voice was not distant but near.) "With regard to the origin of pure cognitions of reason, whether they are derived from experience or, independent of it, have their source in reason," Kant writes, Aristotle can be regarded as the head of the empiricists, Plato that of the noologists. Locke, who in recent times followed the former, and Leibniz, who followed the latter (although with sufficient distance from his mystical system), have nevertheless not been able to bring this dispute to any decision. (A 854/B 882) The combatants on Kant's stage are theoreticians, debating theoretical issues. Ralph Waldon Emerson and William James both draw on Kant's descriptions, but widen them in characteristic ways. For Emerson, the issues at stake are practical as well as theoretical; for James,

5 who accepts Emerson's wider view of the issues, the debates engage not only the intellect, but the full character or temperament of anyone who enters into them. In his 1842 lecture on "The Transcendentalist," Emerson describes two sects in which human beings as thinkers have always been divided:17 What is popularly called Transcendentalism among us, is Idealism; Idealism as it appears in 1842. As thinkers, mankind have ever divided into two sects, Materialists and Idealists; the first class founding on experience, the second on consciousness; the first class beginning to think from the data of the senses, the second class perceive that the senses are not final, and say, the senses give us representations of things, but what are the things themselves, they cannot tell. The materialist insists on facts, on history, on the force of circumstances, and the animal wants of man; the idealist on the power of Thought and of Will, on inspiration, on miracle, on individual culture. These two modes of thinking are both natural, but the idealist contends that his way of thinking is in higher nature. He concedes all that the other affirms, admits the impressions of sense, admits their coherency, their use and beauty, and then asks the materialist for his grounds of assurance that things are as his senses represent them. But I, he says, affirm facts not affected by the illusions of sense, facts which are of the same nature as the faculty which reports them, and not liable to doubt; facts which in their first appearance to us assume a native superiority to material facts, degrading these into a language by which the first are to be spoken; facts which it only needs a retirement from the senses to discern. James sees the whole history of philosophy as "to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments."18 The clash is between "rationalist" and "empiricist": "'empiricist' meaning your lover of facts in all their crude variety," he tells the audience of his lectures that became Pragmatism, "'rationalist' meaning your devotee to abstract and eternal principles." "No one," James says "can live an hour without both facts and principles, so it is a difference rather of emphasis; yet it breeds antipathies of the most pungent character between those who lay the emphasis differently." He adds to each of the two headings "some secondary qualifying characteristics," with the caution that the list is "to a certain extent arbitrary." "I select types of combination that nature offers very frequently," he says, "but by no means uniformly." Here are the field marks he assembles: Historically we find the terms 'intellectualism' and 'sensationalism' used as synonyms of 'rationalism' and 'empiricism.' Well, nature seems to combine most frequently with intellectualism an idealistic and optimistic tendency. Empiricists on the other hand are not uncommonly materialistic, and their optimism is apt to be decidedly conditional and tremulous. Rationalism is always monistic. It starts from wholes and universals, and makes much of the unity of things. Empiricism starts from the parts, and makes of the whole a collectionis not averse therefore to calling itself pluralistic. Rationalism usually considers itself more religious than empiricism, but there is much to say about this claim, so I merely mention it. It is a true claim when the individual rationalist is what is called a man of feeling, and when the individual empiricist prides himself on being hard- headed. In that case the rationalist will usually also be in favor of what is called free-will, and the empiricist will be a fatalistI use the terms most popularly current. The rationalist finally will be of dogmatic temper in his affirmations, while the empiricist may be more sceptical and open to discussion. He then arrays his identifying traits in two columns, headed the "tender-minded" and the "toughminded."

THE TENDER-MINDED

THE TOUGH-MINDED

Rationalistic (going by 'principles'), Intellectualistic, Idealistic, Optimistic, Religious, Free-willist, Monistic, Dogmatical.

Empiricist (going by 'facts'), Sensationalistic, Materialistic, Pessimistic, Irreligious, Fatalistic, Pluralistic, Sceptical.

To the first list we might add, "like a hedehog," and to the second we might add, "like a fox." There is a great deal in James's left-hand column, and in the Emersonian inventory that anticipates it, that goes beyond the three theses I've stated. I'll touch on some of those other entries from time to time, but my three stated theses will occupy most of our attention, along with a fourth thesis that may not seem, at first, to be idealist at all. It was, however, explicitly called idealist, for example by Benjamin Peirce, the great Harvard mathematician who was Emerson's friend and the father of the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. "In every form of material manifestation," writes Peirce the elder, "there is a corresponding form of human thought, so that the human mind is as wide in its range of thought as the physical universe which it thinks. The two are wonderfully matched."19 This, you may say, is not idealism, but merely a philosophically non-committal sort of optimism. My expectation is that when we press it, as Emerson for example did, we'll find that it comes to something more. I will call it the thesis of Correspondence. For now, I'll say no more about what idealism means. As the lectures go on I'll be clarifying the theses I've stated and exploring relations among them. I'll also be adding at least one more thesisidealism concerning valueto the list. I want to conclude these introductory remarks with the brief words I promised on my method and my motivation. Although I'm a professor of philosophy I've tried not to take the title of this lecture series lightly: my lectures will be, I hope, contributions to the history of ideas, meaning at least that I'll seek to recover the intended meanings of the writers I'll be discussing, having paid (if not in the lectures themselves, then at least in my preparation for them) the kind of attention to context that such recovery requires. No philosopher, though, can embark on the history of ideas without recalling Sir Isaiah Berlin's famous decision, as recounted for example in the preface to his Concepts and Categories, to turn from philosophy to history. Sir Isaiah had, I feel sure, a clearer mind than mine, but I believe that he was facing, in the Oxford of the 1940's, a more austere philosophical environment than the one I'm facing now. My hope is that I can philosophize while historicizing, and that I can do so without offending against prevailing standards: that I can persuade you of the philosophical interest of the idealist arguments I'll be examining (though there will not, I warn you, be arguments in every lecture); that I can offer reasonable solutions to some of the interpretive puzzles they present; that I can make some useful criticisms of them; and that I can draw from them some lasting philosophical lessons. I don't know how familiar this audience will be with the definition of the word "berlin" in The Philosophical Lexicon, a joke dictionary of philosophical terms of art created (by Daniel Dennett and others) out of famous proper names. A berlin, says the dictionary, is "an old fashioned stage coach, filled with international travelers, all talking rapidly and telling anecdotes of vivid life elsewhere." "As the berlin came through town," reads the sample sentence, "one could hear many accents one had never heard before, and

7 delightful tales." No historian of ideas excels Sir Isaiah in providing both present delight and lasting value. I'll do my best to give you something approaching this, but the smooth Europeans speaking many languages will have to give way to rustic Americans speaking only one. And I will allow myself, when the need arises, to be philosophical or even "technical," confident, or at least hopeful, that the demarcation line between history and philosophy isn't patrolled as aggressively here as it may have been in the 1940's. However that works out, anecdotes of vivid life elsewhere I'll certainly try to give you. Emerson quotes Montesquieu's confession that he was "always charmed with Plutarch," because "in his writings are circumstances attached to persons, which give great pleasure."20 The philosophers I'll be taking up in these lectures will be as "circumstanced" as I can conveniently make them. At times, you may need to grasp the circumstances to appreciate the arguments, but I also hope you'll find them entertaining. In commenting on my method, I've said at least something about my motivations. William James once described the study of literature as "an appreciative chronicle of human masterstrokes," and bringing good things to your attention is certainly one of the items on my agenda.21 (That chronicle will be, as Royce said of his own lectures on idealism, selective and "illustrative" rather than exhaustive.)22 I'm also eager to correct the impression that the history of pragmatism is the history of American philosophy, though American idealism often aspires to be practical, as we'll see. I hope there will not only be some lessons here for philosophers, but possibly larger lessons for peopleand I suspect there are manywho sympathize with some or all of the idealist theses I've stated. I admit I've made it easy: had I required idealists to stipulate that bodies do not exist at all, I would have lost many more of you than I perhaps already have. Despite the antique and implausible character of some of the arguments for idealism, and the apparent absence of argument in many of the passages in which it's most compellingly asserted or intimated, the belief that the inward has some sort of priority over the outward, and that in our inwardness we make contact with a world less fugitive and more valuable than the world of sense, is not an easy one to shake. It is worth inquiring how successful a certain tradition was in bringing clarity to the thought, and in making it defensible and practical. What I've just said makes me realize that there's another preliminary I must attend to. Many of you will have been mulling over my idealist theses and thinking something along the lines of what Berkeley's Hylas thought when Philonous clarified idealism for him: "What! this no more than I and all Christians hold; nay, and all others too who believe there is a God, and that he knows and comprehends all things" (Second Dialogue, Works 2: 212). Hylas was on target; it's no coincidence that many of my subjects will be Christians or theists. But we'll also be looking at some non-believers. (Joel Porte calls Thoreau, for example, a "dangerous heretic." I suspect he had his tongue in cheek as he wrote this, but the basic thought is just about right.)23 I won't ignore the religious beliefs of some of my subjects, but I'll be seeking out arguments with nontheistic premisses, and when argument is absent, for writing with energies that are not necessarily theistic in their origins, however theistic they may sometimes be in their upshots.

2. The idealism of Edwards It would be perfectly fair to begin my story with Berkeley. Samuel Johnson's 1729 letter was addressed to Berkeley in what is now Middletown, Rhode Island, where Berkeley was waiting for the funds, pledged by King and Parliament, for his projected college on the island of Bermuda. Berkeley's exchange of letters with Johnson is certainly the most familiar document in the early history of American idealism. In the course of the exchange, Johnson worked his way through the bewilderment he expressed in the letter I began by quoting. He became a loyal convert to Berkeley's cause. His Elementa Philosophica of 1752, printed in Philadelphia by Benjamin Franklin

8 and his partner David Hall, was the first American idealist testament. (Johnson dedicated the book to Berkeley, who was then living in Oxford, but Berkeley died before the presentation copy sent to him by Johnson could arrive.) I'm going to begin, though, with what is more truly the beginning of idealism in America. I'm going to begin in 1716, more than a decade before Berkeley landed in Rhode Island, at a small Puritan college in Connecticut. Johnson, an Anglican convert by the time he wrote to Berkeley, was then a tutor there. (Perhaps I'll have time to tell you the dramatic story of Johnson's conversion and his journey to England for a proper ordinationall of it part of the "great apostasy" of September 12, 1722.) And among his pupils was a young man, son of a minister and grandson of a minister on his mother's side, named Jonathan Edwards. When Edwards arrived at what came to be called Yale College he was thirteen. He read Locke (if we can trust his earliest biographers) by the time he was fourteen and Newton not long after that.24 Like Johnson, Edwards felt that his reading placed him on the threshold of a philosophical America. If we inquire after causes and seek out new and strange phenomena, he wrote, "it's probable we may be led into a New World of Philosophy."25 When he was sixteen, he asked his father (at the instigation of Timothy Cutler, the new rector of the college who was slated to become his tutor, Johnson having been pushed aside after students rebelled against his poor teaching) whether he could provide him with a copy of the widely used Cartesian logic, The Art of Thinking by Arnauld and Nicole.26 (At some point, I should tell the story of the "great apostasy" of September 12, 1722. On that daycommencement dayRector Cutler ended the service with words from the Anglican prayer book: "And let all the people say, Amen." He then announced his conversion to the Church of England. He was acting in concert with other ministers, Samuel Johnson among them, who had been studying and talking together. Johnson was one of several who went to England for a proper ordination.) Edwards probably also read Malebranche, whose Search after Truth was included, along with books by Locke and Newton, in the collection Jeremiah Dummer gave to the school in 1717.27 Edwards read, in other words, many of the same books that a somewhat more seasoned George Berkeley read when he was a pupil, about ten years earlier, at another provincial institution of higher learning, Trinity College Dublin. And Edwards came, as we'll now see, to pretty much the same conclusions. I'll start by stating them. They'll cause many of you to wonder whether Edwards borrowed from Berkeley, who published the Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge in 1710 and the Three Dialogues in 1713. But the consensus among Edwards scholars is that he came to these conclusions independently. They say this partly because Edwards (in the passages I'll quote) never refers to Berkeley. Normally an argument from silence wouldn't carry much weight, but no one has been able to find a single American library that held a copy of either of Berkeley's books in the years when Edwards came to these conclusions.28 My quotations will come from manuscripts that Edwards never published, though he added to them over many years. "Of Atoms," the whole of which may have been written in 1721, is probably the earliest. "Of Being" was begun in the same year; its last paragraph was probably added in 1732 (Anderson, Scientific and Philosophical Writings, pp. 183, 185, 190). Edwards began work on "The Mind" in 1723; the manuscript was enlarged in both 1724-5 and 1726-7 (Anderson, pp. 326-7), and Edwards may have returned to it in 1728 (p. 328). He indexed the existing manuscript of "The Mind" in 1747 or 1748 (p. 328); further additions were made as late as the 1750's, in the final decade of his life (p. 329). The last of the passages I'll display also dates from the 1750's. It comes not from "The Mind," but from a single, untitled sheet at the Beinecke Library in New Haven, now catalogued as "Rough notes on his idealism." (I should say that by the 1740's and 1750's, at least, Edwards had read Berkeley.) I offer the range of dates as evidence of Edwards's enduring commitment to idealism, despite his decision not to publish. Edwards never published anything that we would now describe as primarily scientific or philosophical. All of his

9 published works have a direct religious purpose. (Even in his published writings, Edwards is nervous about appearing too metaphysical. A paragraph in Original Sin begins as follows: "On the whole, if any don't like the philosophy, or the metaphysics (as some perhaps may choose to call it) made use of in the foregoing reasonings . . . " (p. 409).) He once intended to publish some of his early metaphysical writings, though, and before I present you with some of the passages of philosophical substance, I thought you might like to see some accounts of his plans. They are winning expressions of his youth, self-conscious provincialism, and literary craft: The world will expect more modesty because of my circumstancesin America, young, etc. Let there be a superabundance of modesty, and though perhaps 'twill otherwise be needless, it will wonderfully make way for its reception in the world. Mankind are by nature proud and exceeding envious, and ever jealous of such upstarts; and it exceedingly irritates and affronts 'em to see 'em appear in print. Yet the modesty ought not to be affected and foolish, but decent and natural. (Scientific and Philosophical Writings, p. 193) Before I venture to publish in London, to make some experiment in my own country; to play at small games first, that I may gain some experience in writing. First to write letters to some in England, and to try my [hand in] lesser matters before I venture in great. (p. 194) If I publish these propositions that are so metaphysical that 'tis probable will be very strange to many learned divines and philosophers, to propound 'em only by way of question, as modestly as possible, and the reasons for 'em; not as if I thought them anything well demonstrated, but only as worthy to bring the matter into consideration. Entirely submit 'em to the learned . . . and if it be possible, to conceal my determination. (p. 194) To bring in those things that are very much out of the way of the world's thinking as little as possible in the beginning of a treatise. It won't do, for mayhap it will give an ill prejudice and tincture to the readers' mind in reading the treatise. Let them be given a good opinion of the others first, and then they will more easily receive strange things from me. If I tell it at first, it will look something like affectation of telling something strange to the world. They must be pleased with seeing what they believed before cleared up before they will bear to see their opinions contradicted. Let the way be so paved . . . . (p. 194) I can't resist pointing out that even here, in these very personal memoranda, there are uncanny echoes of the young George Berkeley who, disappointed with the reception of the Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, published in Dublin, went to London to publish the Three Dialogues: I am young, I am an upstart, I am vain, very well. I shall Endeavour patiently to bear up under the most vilifying appelations the pride & rage of man can devise. (Notebooks 465) I imagine whatever doctrine contradicts vulgar and settled opinion had need been introduced with great caution into the world. For this reason it was I omitted all mention of the non-existence of matter in the title-page, dedication, preface, and introduction, that so the notion might steal unawares on the reader, who possibly would never have meddled with a book that he had known contained such paradoxes. (Letter to Percival, September 6, 1710)

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I must not pretend to promise much of Demonstration, I must cancell all passages that look like that sort of Pride, that raising of Expectation in my Readers. (Notebooks 858) The similarities to Edwards are striking, and it may be worth observing that although Berkeley's philosophical works were apparently unknown to the young Edwards, Berkeley did figure in his wider education. One of Edwards's most cherished booksthe one he lent to family and friends more often than any otherwas The Ladies Library, a three-volume collection of advice and wisdom for women said on its title page to be written "by a Lady" and "published" by Sir Richard Steele. The young Edwards modeled his literary efforts on the six rules for writing presented in volume 1 (pp. 144-52), which were lifted from Mary Astell's A Serious Proposal to the Ladies. Steele was, as I've said, named as publisher on the title page, but the actual compiler of the miscellany was his friend Berkeley. 29 Here at last is a representative selection of idealist pronouncements by Edwards: Nothing has existence anywhere else but in consciousness. No, certainly nowhere else, but either in created or uncreated consciousness. ("Of Being," p. 204 in Scientific and Philosophical Works) Those beings which have knowledge and consciousness are the only proper and real and substantial beings, inasmuch as the being of other things is only by these. From hence we may see the gross mistake of those who think material things the most substantial beings, and spirits more like a shadow; whereas spirits only are properly substances. ("Of Being," p. 206) The substance of bodies at least becomes either nothing, or nothing but the Deity acting in that particular manner in those parts of space where he thinks fit. So that, speaking most strictly, there is no proper substance but God himself (we speak at present with respect to bodies only). ("Of Atoms," p. 215) How truly then is it in him that we love, move and have our being. ("Of Atoms," p. 216) Nothing else has a proper being but spirits, and . . . bodies are but the shadow of being. ("The Mind," p. 337) We have . . . shewn that all existence is mental, that the existence of all exterior things is ideal. ("The Mind," p. 341) Though we suppose that the existence of the whole material universe is absolutely dependent on idea, yet we may speak in the old way, and as properly and truly as ever. ("The Mind," p. 353) That there is no such thing as material substance truly and properly distinct from all those that are called sensible qualities. ("Notes on Knowledge and Existence [Rough notes on his idealism]," p. 398) How real existence depends on knowledge or perception. ("Notes," p. 398)30 The Diminished Reality of Body is explicit in most of these passages and the Displacement of the Senses is implicit in many of them. In passages I haven't quoted, Edwards warns against the

11 traps into which our sense-based faculties may lure us, for example on p. 204 in "Of Being," where he plaintively observes that "it is our imagination hurts us." A short piece I haven't yet mentioned, intended as a "lemma to the whole" of a projected treatise on natural philosophy that was to include "Of Being," is directed against the prejudices of sense-based imagination. "Of all prejudices," Edwards writes there, "no one fights with natural philosophy, and prevails more against it," than these (p. 196). "'Tis that which makes the vulgar so roar out upon the mention of some very rational philosophical truths" (p. 196). Edwards's hope is that his paper will "put every man clean out of conceit with his imagination" (p. 198). In a passage added to "The Mind" in the 1750's, Edwards quotes Ralph Cudworth's restatement of Plato's parable of the cave, in which prisoners who could, as Edwards puts it, "see nothing but the shadows (of certain Substances behind them)," wrongly took those shadows to be "the only Substances and Realities" (p. 359). Edwards's case for idealism has many sides, and I cannot do justice to all of them here. At least five or six deserve separate mention, and towards the end of this afternoon's lecture, I'll begin to examine the most developedwhat might be called Edwards's voluntarist argument for the Diminished Reality of Bodyin considerable detail. The voluntarist argument was of greater importance to the mature Edwards than any of the others, but the argument, or the structure of thought on which it rests, produced tensions in his thinking that he never successfully resolved. I hope that you will begin to feel those tensions by the time we end today. In next week's lecture I plan to explain them more fully as well as to intensify them, so that by Lecture III, you'll be able to sympathize with the nineteenth-century readers of Edwards who found them intolerable. These readers, among them William Ellery Channing, the greatest figure in the early history of American unitarianism, sought a purified idealisman idealism freed of the tensionsthat came to be known as transcendentalism. The first youthful argument we'll examineand please keep in mind that these are youthful arguments, hasty, over-bold, diverse and even opportunistic in their strategies, sometimes obviously fallacious, but richly suggestive and, in places, flashing with literary brillianceis not strictly an argument for idealism, though Edwards later links it to one. It is an answer to the question that according to a well-known observation by Leibniz (in the Principles of Nature and Grace), first presents itself, to anyone who accepts the principle of sufficient reason, as Edwards did throughout his life.31 Why is there something rather than nothing? Edwards's bold reply is that there is something rather than nothing because it is impossible for there to be nothing. That there should absolutely be nothing at all is utterly impossible. The mind can never, let it stretch its conceptions ever so much, bring itself to conceive of a state of perfect nothing. It puts the mind into mere convulsion and confusion to endeavor to think of such a state, and it contradicts the very nature of the soul to think that it should be; and it is the greatest contradiction, and the aggregate of all contradictions, to say that there should not be. 'Tis true we can't so distinctly show the contradiction by words, because we cannot talk about it without speaking horrid nonsense and contradicting ourselves at every word, and because "nothing" is that whereby we distinctly show other particular contradictions. But here we are run up to our first principle, and have no other to explain the nothingness or not being of nothing by. Indeed, we can mean nothing else by "nothing" but a state of absolute contradiction. And if any many thinks that he can think well enough how there should be nothing, I'll engage that what he means by "nothing" is as much something as anything that ever [he] thought in his life; and I believe that if he knew what nothing was it would be intuitively evident to him that it could not be. (p. 202 in Scientific and Philosophical Writings, p. 9 in the Reader)

12 A state of absolute nothing is a state of absolute contradiction. Absolute nothing is the aggregate of all the absurd contradictions in the world, a state wherein there is neither body, nor spirit, nor space: neither empty space nor full space, neither little nor great, narrow nor broad, neither infinitely great space not finite space, nor a mathematical point; neither up nor down, neither north nor south (I don't mean as it is with respect to the body of the earth or some other great body, but no contrary points nor positions nor directions); no such thing as either here or there, this way and that way, or only one way. When we go about to form an idea of perfect nothing we must shut out all of these things. We must shut out of our minds both space that has something in it, and space that has nothing in it. We must not allow ourselves to think of the least part of space, never so small, nor must we suffer our thoughts to take sanctuary in a mathematical point. When we go to expel body out of our thoughts, we must be sure not to leave empty space in the room of it; and when we go to expel emptiness from our thoughts we must not think it squeeze it out by anything close, hard and solid, but we must think of the same thing that the sleeping rocks dream of; and not till then shall we get a complete idea of nothing. (p. 206 in Writings, p. 13 in the Reader) Now it may run counter to Edwards's intentions to extract an argument from these paragraphs, because the first seems to insist that no such argument is possible. We've "run up" to a first principle, and there is, according to the paragraph, no prior premiss to which we might appeal. But the second paragraph suggests a line of reasoning: a thought without content is no thought at all (no more a thought than the dreams of sleeping rocks); a thought of absolute nothing would be a thought without content; and it would be a thought without content because it could not make use of any predicates. Against this it can of course be objected that it's at most been shown that absolute nothing is unthinkable, not that it's impossible. (Perhaps faith in what I've called Correspondence made Edwards less sensitive than he should have been to the difference between inconceivability and impossibility.) But the line of reasoning is still worth exploring. When Edwards challenges us to conceive of absolutely nothing, is he asking us to contemplate only the absence of things, or the further absence of their predicates or properties? Our second paragraph suggests the latter. There Edwards seems to be assuming that all positive predicates fall into what I'll call ranges, in which predicates and their complements (of which there may be one or several, also positive) exhaust a certain domain. (Edwards doesn't say explicitly that all of the predicates he has in mind are positive, and "emptiness"one of the predicates surveyed in the second paragraphis arguably negative, but I'm not sure that Edwards thinks of its as negative, and it seems to me that the paragraph as a whole shies away from complements formed by negation, and does so as a matter of policy.) Within one domain, everything must be little or great. Within a second, everything must be here or there. Within a third, everything must be body, spirit, or space. Perhaps no one of these domains encompasses absolutely everything (though I suspect that in Edwards's view, the last one mentioned does). But if we take all of them together, Edwards seems to think, they supply us with the tracks along which all of our thinking inevitably moves. To think is to move along these tracks. To form a thought is to place something against the background of one or more of these ranges. If all such backgrounds are removed, as the thought of absolute nothing seems to require, then no thought seems possible at all. That the thought of absolute nothing excludes, for Edwards, predicates no less than things seems confirmed by the paragraph that follows the one last quoted:32 A state of nothing is a state wherein every proposition in Euclid is not true, nor any of those self-evident maxims by which they are demonstrated; and all other eternal truths

13 are neither true nor false. (p. 206 in Scientific and Philosophical Writings, p. 13 in the Reader) The young Edwards accepts the correspondence theory of truth. (We'll learn more about this very soon.) He would have encountered Cartesian versions of the theoryversions in which the vehicles of truth are ideas, or propositions constructed out of ideasin two of his textbooks: the Port-Royal Logic, and the Compendium logicae secundum principia D. Renati Cartesii by William Brattle, a New England Puritan divine and a teacher at Harvard College. (Brattle was an admirer of the Port-Royal Logic.) Brattle for example defines truth as the conformity of our ideas to things (p. 13 in the Compendium [Boston, 1735]). The young Edwards takes this to mean that all truths require actually existing truthmakers. If we suppose that he understands "things" (res) to be realities, and to embrace properties as well as "things" in the narrower sense in which I've used that term so far, we can easily understand why he thought that a state of absolute absence would topple even the eternal truths. This gives us a separate argument against the possibility of absolute nothing: the eternal truths are necessarily true; they would not be true (not false either, but not true) if there were absolutely nothing; hence it is impossible for there to be absolutely nothing. But there is an objection to the line of reasoning we've been tracing, even if we grant that a state of absolute absence excludes properties as well as things, narrowly understood: the absence of ranges may rule out all positive thoughtsall "placements" of a thing against a positively contentful backgroundbut why should it rule out the wholly negative thought that there is nothing at all? Could Edwards reply that if it were to be true, even the proposition "there is nothing" would require an absolutely existing truthmaker, perhaps because there are, at bottom, no negative facts, all negative truths being rendered true by something positive? Perhaps so, but there is no account of negative truths in Edwards's youthful manuscripts. From the claim that it's impossible there should be absolutely nothing, Edwards infers that "it is necessary some being should eternally be." By this he seems to mean not that being or entity, absolutely considered, must eternally be, but that some particular being must eternally be. (It won't surprise you to learn that this being is eventually identified as God, and the fact is that Edwards's conception of God suffersor profitsfrom a perplexing duality. Edwards speaks of God both as a particular being, and as being itself: as being without restriction or limitation. If God is thought of as a particular being, Edwards's inference is fallacious. [Locke's proof of God's existence, which Edwards presumably studied, commits precisely this fallacy.] If God is thought of as being absolutely considered, it is not. I hope to return to this duality in my next lecture.) Edwards takes himself to have shown, then, not just that there cannot always be absolutely nothing, but that there cannot ever be absolutely nothing, and that at every moment when there isn't absolutely nothing, there is, rather than one of a succession of distinct and transient things, some one eternal thing. He also infers that this eternal being must be omnipresent, because the impossibility of there being absolutely nothing everywhere (at any time) means, he thinks, that there cannot be absolutely nothing anywhere (at any time) (p. 202, p. 9 in the Reader). This line of reasoning is not, as I've said, strictly an idealist one, but Edwards joins it up with another line of reasoning that is. After bringing us to the existence of a necessary, eternal, and omnipresent being by this via negativa, his thinking takes an affirmative turn. Edwards argues that one particular being is cognitively inevitable or inescapable. Space is this necessary, eternal, infinite and omnipresent being. We find that we can with ease conceive how all other things should not be. We can remove them out of our minds, and place some other in the room of them; but space is the very thing that we can never

14 remove and conceive of its not being. If a man would imagine space anywhere to be divided, so as there should be nothing between the divided parts, there remains space between notwithstanding, and so the man contradicts himself. And it is self-evident, I believe, to every man, that space is necessary, eternal, infinite and omnipresent. But I had as good speak plain: I have already said as much as that space is God. And it is indeed clear to me, that all the space there is not proper to body, all the space there is without the bounds of the creation, all the space there was before the creation, is God himself. And nobody would in the least stick at it, if it were not because of the gross conceptions that we have of space. (p. 203) On the assumption that the listed attributes of space are "incommunicable" or proprietary attributes of God, the stated argument is simple: space is necessary, eternal, infinite, and omnipresent, as Edwards's various thought-experiments show; these attributes are God's alone; therefore space is God. The stated argument suggests, though it does not directly say, that bodies depend on space for their existence. If so, and if God is, as Edwards certainly assumes, a spirit, we reach the conclusion that bodies have diminished reality insofar as they depend for their existence on mind. In this argument, Edwards seems to regard space substantivally, as a receptacle in which every body has a place. But he soon abandoned this conception, replacing it with one in which space is viewed as both relational and "mental."33 In "The Mind," where Edwards charts what Jasper Reid thinks of as his "mature" metaphysics (Reid, p. 385), the argument is cited with approval but with a crucial qualification: Space, as has been already observed [and here I follow Anderson, p. 203, in taking this to be a reference to the paragraph I've quoted from "Of Being"], is a necessary being (if it may be called a being); and yet we have also shewn that all existence is mental, that the existence of all exterior things is ideal. Therefore it is a necessary being only as it is a necessary ideaso far as it is a simple idea that is necessarily connected with other simple exterior ideas, and is, as it were, their common substance or subject. It is in the same manner a necessary being, as anything external is a being. (p. 341) If space is inevitable or necessary only in thought, and not in re, the entire force of this qualified argument is carried by the claim, also said to be already shown, that the existence of exterior things is ideal.34 If this too is a reference back to "Of Being," it must be to what might be called Edwards's cognitivist argument for Diminished Reality of Body, the third line of thought we will examine, which rests on his claim that "it is really impossible . . . that anything should be, and nothing know it" (p. 204). The cognitivist argument spans six paragraphs that were added to "Of Being" in 1723.35 Here is a short selection from them, and from an entry in Edwards's Miscellanies made around the same time: And how it doth grate upon the mind, to think that something should be from all eternity, and nothing all the while be conscious of it. Let us suppose, to illustrate it, that the world had a being from all eternity, and had many great changes and wonderful revolutions, and all the while nothing knew; there was no knowledge in the universe of any such thing. How is it possible to bring the mind to imagine? Yea, it is really impossible it should be, that anything should be, and nothing know it. Then you'll say, if it be so, it is because nothing has any existence anywhere else but in consciousness. No, certainly nowhere else, but either in created or uncreated consciousness. (pp. 203-4, p. 10 in the Reader)

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We fancy there may be figures and magnitudes, relations and properties, without anyone's knowing of it. But it is our imagination hurts us. We don't know what figures and properties are. (p. 204) For in what respect has anything had a being, when there is nothing conscious of its being . . . Thus for instance, supposing a room in which none is, none sees the things in the room, no created intelligence: the things in the room have no being any other way than only as God is conscious [of them]; for there is no color there, neither is there any sound, nor any shape. (Miscellanies, entry pp) In "The Mind," the immaterialism of these paragraphs is elaborated so as to account for apparent examples of bodies that are not objects of consciousness: That which truly is the substance of all bodies is the infinitely exact and precise and perfectly stable idea in God's mind, together with his stable will that the same shall gradually be communicated to us, and to other minds, according to certain fixed and exactly established methods and laws: or in somewhat different language, the infinitely exact and precise divine idea, together with an answerable, perfectly exact, precise and stable will with respect to correspondent communications to created minds, and effects on their minds. ("The Mind," p. 344) The existence of things . . . that are not actually in created minds, consists only in power, or in the determination of God that such and such ideas shall be raised in created minds upon such conditions. ("The Mind," p. 355) Since all material existence is only idea, this question may be asked: In what sense may those things be said to exist which are supposed, and yet are in no actual idea of any created minds? I answer, they exist only in uncreated idea. But how do they exist otherwise than they did from all eternity, for they always were in uncreated idea and divine appointment? I answer, they did exist from all eternity in uncreated idea, as did everything else and as they do at present, but not in created idea. But, it may be asked, how do those things exist which have an actual existence, but of which no created mind is consciousfor instance the furniture of this room when we are absent and the room is shut up and no created mind perceives ithow do these things exist? I answer, there has been in times past such a course and succession of existences that these things must be supposed to make the series complete, according to divine appointment of the order of things; and there will be innumerable things consequential which will be out of jointout of their constituted serieswithout the supposition of these. ("The Mind," pp. 356-7) Dispassionately viewed, the paragraphs I've taken from "Of Being" do no more than state or (as even Edwards seems to acknowledge) "illustrate" their fundamental claim, which is that nothing can exist that is not an object of consciousness. And even if we allow that every existing thing must be known by some mind or other, or that the whole system of existing things must be known by the mind of God, it doesn't follow that things exist "nowhere but in" the mind (p. 206), if the word "in" is meant to signal that they are dependent on the mind, and not merely the objects of its knowledge. Edwards may be aware of this. The first paragraph suggests that he may see the dependence of bodies on consciousness as the best explanation of their unavoidable presence to consciousness, rather than a deductive consequence of it. When wrapping up this argument, Edwards announces it to follow (as "Corollary 1") "that those beings which have knowledge and consciousness are the only proper and real substantial beings, in as much as the being of other

16 things is only by these" (p. 12 in the Reader, p. 206 in Scientific and Philosophical Writings). But the preposition "by" is no less tricky than "in." That exterior things depend on the mind, and exist "by" the mind in that sense, may be the best explanation of the necessity that they be known "by" the mind in another sense, but Edwards never undertakes to argue that this is so.36 Edwards's fourth argument proceeds from the nature of truth. Edwards conceives of truth as correspondence, and "in ordinary conversation," he suggests, there is no harm in following traditionin this case, a well-known sentence from Aristotle's Metaphysics (1011b25) recast in the language of ideas (in which form the young Edwards would have found it, as I've said, in both The Port-Royal Logic and Brattle's Compendium)and in defining truth as "the agreement of our ideas with the things as they are" ("The Mind," p. 342).37 But in an application of what William James would later call the pragmatic method, Edwards asks what this all-too-familiar formula really means. He insists that "it should be inquired, what is it for our ideas to agree with things as they are" (p. 342, emphasis mine). The clue to his anticipation of pragmatism is his observation that the idea of existencethe idea at the bottom of the formulais "a perfect abstract and mere idea of existence" (p. 345). "Abstract" was the word Berkeley had used for ideas that stand in need of what James (who cited Berkeley as an instructive predecessor) saw as pragmatic clarification, and here it functions similarly for Edwards. (Edwards also uses the word to signal the lifting of restrictions or limitations. In that sense, the idea of God is the most abstract. See "The Mind," p. 355.) His pragmatically inspired proposal is that vague talk of correspondence to things as they are should be cashed out as correspondence to ideas in the mind of God (pp. 345, 342).38 "Truth, in the general," he writes, "may be defined after the most strict and metaphysical manner" as "the consistency and agreement of our ideas with the ideas of God" (pp. 341-2). This cashed-out definition has, in Edwards's view, at least two advantages. The first, which Edwards does not make fully explicit, is that it condenses the nebulous notion of correspondence into the clearer notion of agreement in idea. Ideas are straightforwardly commensurate. And if we're already clear on what it means for ideas to agree, we don't need a further notion of correspondence in order to account for truth. A true idea concerning a contingent thing is nothing more than an idea that is "consistent with the series of ideas that are raised in our minds by, according to, the order of nature" (p. 342). Edwards is more explicit about the second advantage. He thinks that his theocentric correspondence theory gives us a fully general account of truth, one that applies not only to contingent truths but to eternal ones (p. 342). Consistency with a series of ideasthe course or order of naturecan account for contingent truths, but it cannot account for eternal ones. It is agreed, Edwards thinks, that the truth-makers for eternal truths are abstract ideas, rather than the concrete ones that will be impressed on us in the future. (Here, I think, abstract ideas are assuming the truth-making role that had been assigned, in "Of Being," to predicates and properties. This is arguably another instance of pragmatic clarification.) In "The Mind," Edwards struggles with the question of whether abstract ideas are (as his reading in Locke perhaps suggested) purely human creations.39 Early on he seems persuaded that they are. Accordingly, he seems to define abstract or eternal truth subjectively, as the agreement of our ideas with themselves: Truth as to abstract ideas is the consistency of our ideas with themselves, as when our idea of a circle, or a triangle, or any of their parts, is agreeable to the idea we have stated and agreed to call by the name of a circle of a triangle; and [thus] it may still be said [in eternal truths as in contingent truths] that truth is the consistency of our ideas with themselves. (p. 342) But even at this early point, before he fully appreciated that "there is great foundation in nature for those abstract ideas which we call universals" (p. 359), his understanding of eternal truth is not as subjective as it may seem.40 He immediately draws three conclusions he describes as

17 corollaries, and to me they seem at odds with a subjective reading of the passage: that God is truth itself; that truth consists in perfect and adequate ideas of things; and that certainty is the clear perception of this perfection (p. 342). I believe that "the idea we have stated and agreed to call by the name of a circle or of a triangle" isn't the idea we actually have but the idea we intend or aspire to have. It's the divine idea of a circle or triangle. Hence truth as to abstract ideas is the consistency of our ideas with their archetypes in God. (Insofar as we intend the divine idea we do in some sense "have" it. The further we progress in geometry, the truer to itself our idea of a triangle becomes.) If time permits I may want to discuss the following passage: Truth is the perception of the relations there are between ideas. Falsehood is the supposition of relations between ideas that are inconsistent with those ideas themsleves, not their disagreement with things without. All truth is in the mind, and only there. 'Tis ideas, or what is in the mind alone, that can be the object of the mind. And what we call "truth" is a consistent supposition of relations between what is the object of the mind. Falsehood is an inconsistent supposition of relations. The truth that is in a mind must be, as to its object, and everything pertaining to it, in that mind; for what is perfectly without the mind, the mind has nothing to do with. (p. 340)41 I conclude with a brief mention of a fifth immaterialist argument, according to which we can't conceive of body except in terms of mind. I'm sorry that I won't have time to discuss it. Our conception of body differs from our conception of space because we understand body to fill space. But what is the space-filling attribute? (See for p. 361 of "The Mind," where Edwards speaks of "that idea that filled space.") It cannot be color because color is agreed to be subjective. Edwards thinks it can only be solidity or resistance. ("It is intuitively certain that if solidity be removed from body, nothing is left but empty space," p. 377 of "The Mind.") But when one body resists another, he asks, "what is it that is resisted?" "It is not color," he answers, but then "what else is it?" "It is ridiculous to say that resistance is resisted. That does not tell us at all what is to be resisted. There must be something resisted before there can be resistance, but to say resistance is resisted is ridiculously to suppose resistance before there is anything to be resisted" ("The Mind," p. 351).42 So far, we've seen Edwards operating much more as a fox than as a hedgehog. You might expect to find the idealist Edwards squarely on the tender-minded side of the Jamesian dichotomy I quoted earlier. But he had plenty of tough-minded qualities, not the least of them his tendency to demand pragmatic clarification. (Despite the irenic claims James makes for the pragmatic method, to me it has always seemed more tough-minded than tender-minded.) Edwards's toughmindedness was, in fact, notorious: nineteenth-century readers saw him as America's most prominent defender of fatalism and Calvinist pessimism. One of those readers (an admirer and biographer of his friend Emerson, though he couldn't be called a transcendentalist himself) was Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. Holmes is now less well-known than his son Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., an influential justice on the United States Supreme Court, but in the middle of the nineteenth century, the elder Holmes was very nearly the official voice of cultivated New England. (The name of the magazine he helped to found, The Atlantic Monthly, and the name he came up with for the State House in Boston, "the hub of the solar system"still in use, especially among headline writers, as "the hub" or "the hub of the universe"give a pretty fair indication of the authority he took that voice to have.)43 Holmes wrote a very dismissive essay on Edwards, published in the International Review in 1880, that climaxed in this blunt account of Edwards's world-view: "Edwards's system seems, in the light of to-day, to the last degree barbaric, mechanical, materialistic, pessimistic." 44 We'll unpack this verdict in Lecture III, where we may

18 also have a chance to consider Holmes's partial explanation of Edwards's intellectual and spiritual shortcomings: "If he had lived a hundred years later, and breathed the [post-revolutionary] air of freedom," Holmes speculated, "he could not have written with such old-world barbarism as we find in his volcanic sermons. . . . We cannot have self-government and humane laws without its reacting on our view of Divine administration." In presenting his voluntarist argument, Edwards operates more as a hedgehog, and it will take us until the end of next week's lecture to sort the argument out. It rests on a consideration of what "makes up what we call body" ("The Mind," p. 351), and on the assumptionembraced, Edwards says, by "every knowing philosopher"that "colors are not really in the things, no more than pain is in a needle" (p. 351). The ad hominem turn in Edwards's reasoningits exploitation of assumptions granted by his audienceis, as we'll see, a recurring feature:45 For what idea is that which we call by the name of body? I find color has the chief share in it. 'Tis nothing but color, and figure which is the termination of this color, together with some powers such as the power of resisting, and motion, etc., that wholly makes up what we call body. And if that which we principally mean by the thing itself cannot be said to be in the thing itself, I think nothing can be. If color exists not out of the mind, then nothing belonging to body exists out of the mind but resistance, which is solidity, and the termination of this resistance with its relations, which is figure, and the communication of this resistance from space to space, which is motion, though the latter are nothing but modes of the former. There, there is nothing out of the mind but resistance. ("The Mind," p. 351) He maps out a similar line of reasoning in "Of Atoms," another paper in his natural philosophy project, where he identifies solidity or resistance as the very essence of body: Since . . . solidity is the resisting to be annihilated, or the persevering to be of a body, or, to speak plain, the being of itfor being and persevering to be are the same thing, looked upon two a little different waysit follows that the very essence and being of bodies is solidity; or rather, that body and solidity are the same. If here it shall be said, by way of objection, that body has other qualities besides solidity, I believe it will appear to a nice eye that it hath no more real ones. What do you say, say they, to extension, figure, and mobility. As to extension, I say, I am satisfied it has none more than space without body, except what results from solidity. As for figure, it is nothing but a modification of solidity, or of the extension of solidity; and as the mobility, it is but the communicability of this solidity from one part of space to another. (pp. 211-12) Solidity is, as Edwards says elsewhere in his papers on natural philosophy, a primary quality of body, "a quality so primary that the very being of the thing depends on it" (p. 290). Gravity is also an essential and primary quality of body, "but there is this difference: the one [solidity] is essential in order to the very existence, the other in order to the harmonious existence, of body" (p. 290).46 So far, Edwards's argument may seem no more voluntarist than those we've already reviewed. But the argument takes a voluntarist turn when Edwards asks what it is that's responsible for solidity. His answer begins with another ad hominem postulation. He recalls the case of gravity, which is "by all . . . confessed to be immediately from some active influence" (p. 377). "Being a continual tendency in bodies to move," he reflects, "and being that which will set them in motion though before at perfect rest, it must be the effect of something acting on that body" (p. 377). It is, furthermore, "as clear and evident that action is as requisite to stop a body that is already in motion, as in order to set bodies a-moving that are at perfect rest." But the

19 stopping of bodies already in motion is one of solidity's characteristic signs. "We get the idea and apprehension of solidity only and entirely from the observation we make of that ceasing of motion, at the limits of some parts of space [by which I assume he means parts of space cordoned off by solid matter], that already is, and that beginning of motion that till now was not, according to a certain constant manner" (pp. 377-8). And "why," he concludes by asking on p. 378, "is it not every whit as reasonable that we should attribute this action or effect to the influence of some agent, as that other action or effect which we call gravity, which is likewise derived from our observation of the beginning and ceasing of motion according to a certain method?" The reference to "a certain method" is crucial here. It is not the sheer beginning or ending of motion that bespeaks an active agent, but the beginning or ending of motion that takes place according to law. These laws are "perfectly arbitrary," meaning that they could be otherwise (p. 378). They are, as Edwards says explicitly, in "no way necessary of themselves" (nor are they dictated by anything we can discover in the nature of body), which entails that the laws of motion are not eternal truths of either of the two kinds he identifies on p. 388 of "The Mind": those whose denials are contradictory, and those whose terms are "invincibly" though non-analytically connected (terms that are necessarily connected, as Kant might have said, though neither is contained within the other). It is, however, "agreed on all hands that there is something there that supports . . . resistance" (p. 378). Because the law of its effects is arbitrary, this cause or ground "must be intelligent and voluntary" (p. 378). "There is," Edwards goes on to say, no reason in the nature of the thing itself why a body, when set in motion, should stop at such limits more than at any other. It must therefore be some arbitrary, active and voluntary being that determines it. (p. 378) Solidity's cause or ground, in other words, must be spirit. And in view of the infinite scope and utter inviolability of nature's laws, it must be a spirit who is infinite. That spirit is, in fact, the very substance of solid bodies: The reason why it is so exceedingly natural to men to suppose that there is some latent substance, or something that is altogether hid, that upholds the properties of bodies, is because all see at first sight that the properties of bodies are such as need some cause that shall very moment have influence to their continuance, as well as a cause of their first existence. All therefore agree that there is something that is there, and upholds these properties; and it is must true, there undoubtedly is. But men are wont to content themselves in saying merely that it is something; but that "something" is he by whom all things consist. (p. 380) As he writes in "Of Atoms," "the substance of bodies at last becomes either nothing, or nothing but the Deity acting in that particular manner in those parts of space where he thinks fit. So that, speaking most strictly, there is no proper substance but God himself (we speak at present with respect to bodies only). How truly, then, is he said to be ens entium [the being of beings]" (p. 215)and how truly is it that "in him we live, move and have our being" (p. 216).47 Divine power, "or rather the constant exercise of it," is "the very substance of the body itself" (pp. 350-1). This voluntarist argument for the Diminished Reality of Body doesn't seem open to the kind of objection we brought against Edwards's cognitivist argument, because the necessity of being caused by mind, unlike the necessity of being known by it, is a genuine form of dependence. To this it can of course be objected that the argument confuses causal dependence with ontological dependence, but as we'll see next week, although the distinction between causal and

20 ontological dependence can certainly be insisted upon, Edwards does not confuse them: he has a reason for thinking that they must boil down to one. There is, however, an obvious objection to the argument: why can't some property of body uphold solidity? It's true that Edwards's inventory of body's propertiesan inventory that is, in its spareness, typical of the early modern periodgives us little or nothing to work with.48 But couldn't there be an unknown property of body that is a locus not only of power, but of arbitrary poweran arbitrarily acting yet unthinking cause? Edwards has, as we'll see in my next lecture, two related reasons for hesitating to accept thisand in both cases, we find the reasons developed in his published works. The first has to do with the principle of sufficient reason. The second, to which Edwards devotes far more attention, has to do with his doctrines of causation and creation. Edwards turns out to have an argument that no body can exert any causal power at all. In response, Edwards lodges all of the causal power normally assigned to bodies to his omnipresent God, who brings about change in the physical world by continuously recreating that world in revised versions. The basic vision is present in another of his unpublished early papers on natural philosophy, though the argumentative structure is not quite what it will be when he comes to publish:49 Since, as has been shewn, body is nothing but an infinite resistance in some part of space caused by the immediate exercise of divine power, it follows that as great and as wonderful a power is every moment exerted in the upholding of the world, as at first was to the creation of it; the first creation being only the continuation or the repetition of this power every moment to cause this resistance. So that the universe is created out of nothing every moment; and if it were not for our imaginations, which hinder us, we might see that wonderful work performed continually, which was seen by the morning stars when they sang together. (pp. 241-2) It is here, though, that we can begin to feel the tensions I mentioned earlier. In a passage I've already quoted, Edwards declares that "there is no proper substance but God," but he is careful to add in parentheses, "we speak at present with respect to bodies only" (p. 215). He wants to leave room in the world for substantial finite spirits. In next week's lecture we'll see why, but can he legitimately do so? The same line of reasoning that deprives bodies of causal power seems to be no less damaging to the credentials of finite spirits, as Edwards himself points out in an early memorandum on God's existence: The mere exertion of a new thought is a certain proof of God. For certainly there is something that immediately produces and upholds that thought; here is a new thing, and there is a necessity of a cause. It is not antecedent thoughts, for they are vanished and gone; they are past, and what is past is not. But if we say 'tis the substance of the soul (if we mean that there is some substance besides that thought, that brings that thought forth), if it be God, I acknowledge; but if there be meant something that has no properties, it seems to me absurd. If the removal of all properties, such as extendedness, solidity, thought, etc. leaves nothing, it seems to me that no substance is anything but them; for if there by anything besides, there might remain something when these are removed. (Miscellanies 267) Due perhaps to the sway of this line of thought, the parenthetical qualification I've emphasized seems to vanish: "as to bodies," Edwards writes at one point in "The Mind," we have shewn in another place that they have no proper being of their own; and as to spirits, they are the communications of the great original Spirit. And doubtless, in metaphysical strictness and

21 propriety, he is, as there is none else" (pp. 364-5). This is idealism as I've generously defined it, but it's veering towards a very tough-minded pantheism. Edwards himself is uneasy about it, I think, and next time we'll see what he can make of it. Meanwhile, I trust that the philosophers among you will be recalling the parity objection that Berkeley's Hylas puts to Philonous. To repudiate material substance while embracing spiritual substance is not, complains Hylas, "fair dealing." "To act consistently," he tells Philonous, one must "either admit matter or reject spirit" (Third Dialogue, Works 2: 232). In notes Edwards wrote in the 1750's, he raised a very similar concern: MATERIAL SUBSTANCE. Answer to that objection, that then we have no evidence of immaterial substance. Unlike Berkeley, whose Philonous is anxious to divide the two cases, Edwards seems willing to bite the bullet: Answer: True; for this is what is supposed, that all existence is perception. What we call body is nothing but a particular mode of perception; and what we call spirit is nothing but a composition and series of perceptions, or an universe of coexisting and successive perceptions connected by such wonderful methods and laws. (p. 398) Next week we'll be asking how far this tough-minded answer can be taken.

Kenneth P. Winkler January 19, 2012

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This is the text of the first in a series of six lectures, honoring Isaiah Berlin, delivered at Oxford University in January and February, 2012. For the opportunity to give them, I'm grateful to the benefactors and electors of the Sir Isaiah Berlin Visiting Professorship in the History of Ideas, to the Faculty of Philosophy, and to Corpus Christi College. The present lecture was delivered on January 17. This document isn't an actual transcript of my talkit was prepared before I spoke (and lightly edited afterwards), and contains far more than I was actually able to coverbut it is written as if to be spoken. It is more loosely structured than a formal paper would be, and the notes sometimes contain reminders to myself. It is, above all, a draft piece of work, and I hope that it won't be quoted or cited without my express permission.
2

This is from Johnson's first letter to Berkeley, written in 1729. From the Preface to Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous.

My long-standing sense of Dobie's syllabus was a bit off the mark, as it turns out. His topics were indeed Americanhe was occupying the university's only professorship in American historybut more conventional (see A Texan In England [Boston: Little Brown, 1945], pp. 4-5). But it's likely he said at least a little something about longhorns ("I asked . . . if it would be all right for me to mention Texas cattle," p. viii), the topic of a popular book he published two years before he arrived in Cambridge.
5

I don't mean to be saying that the tradition has ended altogether; Marilynne Robinson seeks to perpetuate it in the essays collected in The Death of Adam and especially in her Terry Lectures, Absence of Mind. But Robinson is best known as a novelist. For professional philosophers in America, idealism is an option showing few signs of life. Of the journals originally intended to carry on the tradition of Boston personalism that King represented, The Personalist long ago became the Pacific Philosophical Quarterly; the Personalist Forum has been recently refashioned as The Pluralist; and Idealistic Studies, though it retains its name, also has a new and more spacious identity. "Established . . . as a vehicle for American Personalism and post-Kantian Idealism," its publisher's website explains, "the journal's purview now includes historically earlier expressions, as well as the inheritance of that past in the developments of late 19th to mid-20th century philosophy. The journal has also become a venue for a number of philosophical movements that share Idealism in their genealogies, including Phenomenology, Neo-Kantianism, Historicism, Hermeneutics, Life Philosophy, Existentialism, and Pragmatism. The mission of Idealistic Studies is to provide a forum for writing that recognizes the defining significance of consciousness and mind in the concerns of philosophy and other expressions of high culture" (<http://secure.pdcnet.org/ pdc/bvdb.nsf/journal? openform&journal=pdc_idstudies>, accessed on July 22, 2010).
6

The passage begins at 246a.

Volume 1 was published in New York and London in 1901 (though printed at Oxford University Press while the American editor was living in Oxford; see p. xv); the passage quoted appears on p. 500. The quoted entry was written by Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison of the University of Edinburgh, but because the volume, edited by a Princeton philosopher, marks the coming of age

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(and the emerging worldwide reach) of professional philosophy and psychology in America, with Dewey and James joining Sidgwick and Stout as consulting editors, and Royce and Peirce joining Bonsanquet and Moore as contributors, I think it deserves a place in my American story. (The appearance of the dictionary was also an important event in the creation of an Atlantic philosophical culture.) For signs of Baldwin's professional self-consciousness see for example pp. vii-viii of his editor's preface. For more on Plato as the standard-bearer of idealism see for example Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1912): "Emerson was an idealist in the Platonic sense of the word, a spiritualist as opposed to a materialist" (p. 391). Holmes then says that Emerson believes that "the soul makes its own body," and comments that "this of course involves the doctrine of preexistence." (I should perhaps take account of Terryl Givens's remarks on transcendentalism in his recent book on preexistence.)
8

G. Watts Cunningham, in The Idealist Argument in Recent British and American Philosophy (New York: Century, 1933), a close observer of the scene on both sides of the Atlantic, offers confirmation: "The assertion that idealism denies the existence of matter does not apply, in its prima facie meaning, to any of the thinkers whose views we have been studying; they are not idealists in that sense. One and all insist that matter in some sense is and that its nature must find satisfactory explanation in any philosophy which demands serious consideration. If, however, what is meant is that idealism denies, not the existence of matter, but its existence out of any implicative relationship to mind or spirit, then the assertion would apply without exception; in this sense they are all idealists. Against, it is not true that idealism affirms the reality only of mind or spirit, if this is taken to be equivalent to the denial of the existence of matter as distinguished from its absolute or independent existence. The assertion is true, however, in the sense in which it means that idealism analytically resolves matter into a system within which mind or spirit is held to be of basal logical significance. All of the thinkers we have studied are idealists in this sense" (p. 338).
9

The Religious Aspect of Philosophy: A Critique of the Bases of Conduct and of Faith (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1885), p. 333.
10

Later he was more careful. In the Preface to The Spirit of Modern Philosophy: An Essay in the Form of Lectures (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1892), p. xiii, he borrows a definition of metaphysical idealism from Richard Falckenberg, who defines it, in Royce's translation, as "belief in a spiritual principle at the basis of the world, without the reduction of the physical world to a mere illusion" (from Falckenberg's Geschichte der Neueren Philosophie [Leipzig: Veit, 1886]; Royce cites p. 476 in what must be the first edition. The passage Royce quotes appears in the second edition [Leipzig: Veit, 1892] on p. 508). There Falckenberg gives a definition of ethical idealism that may be useful to me later on: "in ethics," he says, idealism is exemplified "by all those views that locate the end of human beings in something higher than the satisfaction of sensual desire and selfish needs." This is very much along the lines of Hugo Mnsterberg's definition of idealism in Science and Idealism (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906). Emerson, he says, was no "technical scholar, but not one stood more warmly, more luminously, more wholeheartedly for the deepest convictions of idealistic philosophy: he believed in the freedom of man and in the absolute value of man's ideals" (p. 5). I'll say more about this Axiological Idealism in later lectures. Edwards is also an idealist in this sense; I'm sorry that I won't have time to discuss the ethical idealism of his book True Virtue.
11

The Royce quotation is from his posthumously published Lectures on Modern Idealism, edited by J. Loewenberg (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1919), p. 259.

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12

I should point out that even the metaphysical thesis is expressed in epistemological terms: bodies are the things we see and touch.
13

On Berkeley as a Cartesian see The Harvard University Catalogue, 1876-77 ([Cambridge: Harvard University, 1876], p. 55), announcing George Herbert Palmer's course on "Cartesianism." The figures to be examined were Descartes, Malebranche, and Berkeley. It is possible that Palmer offered Berkeley as a critic of Cartesianism, but for various reasons I think that's doubtful.
14

I quote from the Preface in the translation by Peter Remnant and Jonathan Bennett, pp. 47-9. This passage doesn't bring out the metaphysical disagreements that Leibniz had with Locke, and for that reason I may want to add to it. John Dewey quotes a revealing letter, one of the inspirations for S. Nicholas Jolley's recent study of the New Essays (Leibniz and Locke [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987]), in which those disagreements are front and center: "Above all," Leibniz writes there, "I have laid it upon myself the save the immateriality of the soul, which Locke leaves doubtful" (quoted on pp. 69-70 of volume 1 in Dewey, Leibniz's New Essays concerning the Human Understanding: A Critical Exposition (Chicago: S. C. Griggs, 1888)).
15

For Leibniz as an idealist see volume 2, p. 272 ("the objective idealism of Leibniz"); for Locke as an empiricist see volume 1, pp. 68, 75. Dewey does say, intriguingly, that "idealism must be in some ways arbitrary and superficial to him who has not had a pretty complete course of empiricism" (p. 69), a comment to which I will return.
16

Critique of Pure Reason A 853/B 881.

17

I quote from the first paragraph of the lecture. I've left off the final sentence, which I hope to take up in Lecture III: "Every materialist will be an idealist; but an idealist can never go backward to be a materialist."
18

All quotations are from the second lecture in Pragmatism. Quoted in Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America, p. 156. Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Introduction" to Goodwin's edition of Plutarch's Morals (1870), p. x. James's comment is from "The Social Value of the College-Bred," delivered in 1907. Lectures on Modern Idealism, p. 4. Consciousness and Culture: Emerson and Thoreau Reviewed, p. xvii.

19

20

21

22

23

24

For early testimony and other relevant evidence see Wallace E. Anderson's introduction to Jonathan Edwards, Scientific and Philosophical Writings (The Works of Jonathan Edwards, volume 6) (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), pp. 10-19. It is Samuel Johnson himself who reports that during Edwards's time at the college, Johnson and a fellow tutor "introduced the study of Mr. Locke and Sir Isaac Newton as fast as they could" (Scientific and Philosophical Writings, p. 15).

25

25

Quoted in Sereno Edwards Dwight, The Life of President Edwards, p. 50. This letter is quoted by Dwight.

26

27

This is Jeremiah Dummer, Jr. His father, Jeremiah Dummer, Sr. was a prominent silversmith. His "Wrentham Beaker" is now (2010) on display in the Sackler Museum at Harvard.
28

Edwards became aware of Berkeley's Principles (entry 318 in his "Catalogue" of Reading) and New Theory of Vision (entry 319) sometime between 1726 and 1728; see Edwards, Catalogues of Books, edited by Peter J. Thuesen (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), p. 184. The catalogue is not a record of Edwards's reading, but of books that came to his attention. Berkeley's Alciphron (entry 350, p. 192) joined the catalogue in the early 1730's. Wallace E. Anderson has plausibly conjectured that by 1729 or soon after, Berkeley had probably read the New Theory of Vision; see his Editor's Introduction to the Scientific and Philosophical Writings, pp. 36 and 102-3. Edwards was also familiar with two books, published by Richard Steele, in which Berkeley had a hand, though Edwards had no way of knowing that: The Guardian and The Ladies Library. Edwards owned both books and lent The Ladies Library more frequently than any other book in his collection ("Account Book," pp. 331-2 and 335-6 in Catalogues of Books). As I'll explain in the main text in just a moment, though the title page of The Ladies Library says that it was "published by Mr. Steele," it was actually compiled by Berkeley.
29

Since Edwards's memoranda were written under the influence of Astell's rules for writing, it's worth considering whether the two young men had internalized the same idealsand the same sense of publication's dangers.
30

In the Beinecke Library, this sheet is now catalogued as "Rough notes on [his?] idealism."

31

The principle of sufficient reason is especially important to the argument of Freedom of the Will. In Original Sin, Edwards's declaration that "no cause can produce effects in a time and place on which itself is not" (p. 240 in the Reader) presumably rests on the PSR. (It would be interesting to consider this declaration in light of Edwards's final conception of space.)
32

Other passages are more ambiguous, for example this one from p. 13 in the Reader: There is such a thing as nothing with respect to this ink and paper. There is such a thing as nothing with respect to you and me. There is such a thing as nothing with respect to this globe of earth, and with respect to this created universe. There is another way besides these things having existence. But there is no such thing as nothing with respect to entity or being, absolutely considered. And we don't know what we say, if we say we think it possible in itself that there should not be entity.

Does "entity or being" include properties or predicates? The examples leading up to it suggest that the answer is no. But the argument seems more persuasive if the answer is yes.

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33

On Edwards's transition from a substantival to a relational view of space, see Jasper Reid, "Jonathan Edwards on Space and God," Journal of the History of Philosophy 41 (2003), pp. 385403.
34

Should I discuss the motives behind Edwards's revised conception of space? Reid is helpful on this, but I suspect that Edwards's thoughts about the "place of minds," provoked by Essay concerning Human Understanding II xxiii (see Anderson's notes on article [2] of "The Mind"), are a neglected part of the story. Spirits, Edwards explains in "The Mind," are in space "in this sense only": "they have clearer and more strongly impressed ideas of things in one place than in another" (meaning, I take it, that the things are in those places), or "can produce effects here and not there" (Scientific and Philosophical Writings, p. 338). "As this place alters, so spirits move." Hence "the soul may be said to be in the brain, because ideas that come by the body immediately ensue only alterations that are made there, and the soul most immediately produces effects nowhere else" (p. 339). "No doubt," he adds, "all finite spirits, united to bodies or not, are thus in place; that is, . . . they perceive or passively receive ideas only or chiefly of created things that are in some particular place at a given time." When a finite mind is disembodies or "separate," though (p. 339), the "rule[s]" by which bodies cause ideas in us, or by which we cause changes in bodies, won't run, as they now do, through changes in the brain. These things will take place according to some rule, "only we know not what." God is omnipresent, because each of his ideas is wholly clear and his immediate efficacy is universal. If this analysis captures the only way in which minds (infinite or finite, embodied or "separate") are in space, it is hard to think of their presence in space as containment. God will not be contained in space (nor will God be space), and if God's spatial presence is not containment, it's not easy to see how ours could be, since the two are so similar in kind. But does this, by itself, give us reason to doubt that bodies exist in a substantival space? This is something I need to think more about.
35

This is the same year in which Edwards commenced work on "The Mind," which makes all but certain that Edwards is referring to "Of Being" in the paragraph we've been discussing.
36

Edwards also has a moral argument for the existence of minds in his idealist quiver, which I hope to touch on in a later lecture. The rough idea is that a world in which everything is known is better than a world in which the same things exist without being known. It suffers from the same basic problem as the cognitivist argument: even if a body must be an object of consciousness, it doesn't follow that it exists only insofar as it is an object of consciousness. Why are there minds at all? They magnify (or multiply) excellency. "This is an universal definition of excellency: The consent of being to being, or being's consent to entity. The more the consent is, and the more extensive, the greater is the excellency" (p. 26). "Pleasedness in perceiving being always arises, either from a perception of consent to being in general, or of consent to that being that perceives" (p. 26). "Agreeableness to entity must be agreeable to perceiving entity" (p. 26). The existence of minds gives creation an enormous boost in excellency: minds consent to the consent of body to body, thereby magnifying the excellency of already existing instances of consent; they consent to one another; they consent to their consent to one another (to their own consent, and to the consent of others); they consent to their consent to their consent . . . . This is worth comparing to a famous argument of G. E. Moore: consciousness of beauty has more intrinsic value than beauty itself. "As nothing else has a proper being but spirits, and as bodies are but the shadow of being, therefore, the consent of bodies to one another, and the harmony that is among them, is but the shadow of excellency. The highest excellency, therefore, must be the consent of spitis one to

27

another. But the consent of spirits consists half in their mutual love one to another, and the sweet harmony between the various parts of the universe is only an image of mutual love."
37

Aristotle writes that "to say of what it is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what it that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true."
38

A passage from pp. 344-5 deserves to be quoted in full: TRUTH. After all that has been said and done, the only adequate definition of truth is the agreement of our ideas with existence. To explain what this existence is, is another thing. In abstract ideas, it is nothing but the ideas themselves; so their truth is their consistency with themselves. In things that are supposed to be without us, 'tis the determination, and fixed mode of Gods exciting ideas in us. So that truth in these things is an agreement of our ideas with that series in God. 'Tis existence, and that is all that we can say. 'Tis impossible that we should explain and resolve a perfectly abstract and mere idea of existence; only we always find this, by running of it up, that God and real existence are the same. Corol. Hence we learn how properly it may be said that God is, and that there is none else, and how proper are the names of the Deity: "Jehovah" and "I Am That I Am."

I think these paragraphs enact the same line of thought I follow in the main text. There is an "adequate" or philosophically proper definition of truthoriginating with Aristotle, but now cast in modern termsaccording to which truth is the agreement of our ideas with "existence." But the idea of existence is "perfectly abstract." We can say that truth is correspondence with existence, but such talk doesn't really make our meaning clear. By "running of it up"by pursuing this abstract meaning to its concrete sourcewe find that God and real existence are the same. Royce's idealist "argument from error," the topic of Lecture V, is another argument of just this sort. Royce's came to see his argument as a deliberate application of the pragmatic method. For other anticipations of pragmatism in Edwards see "Of Atoms," p. 215, Corollary 11, and "The Mind," p. 345. For more on definition, see "The Mind," p. 367: "That is not always a true definition that tends most to give us to understand the meaning of a word, but that which would give anyone the clearest notion of the meaning of the word, if he had never been in any way acquainted with the thing signified by that word." Edwards's thought here isn't perfectly clear, but he illustrates it with a reductive definition of motion: "Motion is a body's existing successively in all the immediately contiguous parts of any distance without continuing any time in any."
39

I think he finally concludes that they are not.

40

For more cautions against assuming that abstract ideas are all subjective see [37] on p. 355 of "The Mind": "Genus and species indeed is a mental thing. Yet, in a sense, nature has distributed many things into species without our minds. That is, God evidently designed such particulars to be together in themind, and in other things. But 'tis not so indeed with respect to all genera. Some therefore may be called 'arbtitrary' genera, others 'natural.' Nature has designedly made a distribution of some things; other distributions are of a mental original." It seems clear that triangles and circles are not in view here, though.

28

41

Here a further idealist consideration is intimated but left undeveloped: the claim that the only objects of the mind must be in (or dependent on) the mind. I need to think more about this, and about an intriguing passage on p. 388 of "The Mind": Concerning a two-fold ground of assurance of the judgment: a reducing things to an identity or contradiction as in mathematical demonstrations, and by a natural invincible inclination to a connection, as when we see any effect, to conclude a cause; an opposition to believe a thing can begin to be without a cause. This is not the same with the other and cannot be reduced to a contradiction. That we humans have two grounds of assurance does not mean that there are two kinds of (eternal) truths, but if it does, there will be three relations among the ideas in the mind of God: contingent relations; unchangeable and inescapable relations reducible to identity; and unchangeable and inescapable relations not reducible to identity. The first will be known to us by experience; the second by demonstration; and the third by invincible conviction.
42

In a fuller discussion I'd have to consider whether a sense-based conception of solidity or resistance (or the sort advocated by Locke in the Essay) might get around the difficulty raised here. In "Of Being," Edwards seems to agree that any conception of solidity isand must besensebased. In "The Mind," he seems to be asking for something more, for something approaching rational articulation.
43

The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table: Every Man His Own Boswell (Boston: Phillips, Sampson and Company, 1858), p. 143.
44

The passage is taken from Holmes's Pages from an Old Volume of Life: A Collection of Essays, 1857-1881, fourth edition (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1884), pp. 361-401. It dramatically conveys the change in atmosphere between western Massachusetts in the time of Edwards and eastern Massachusetts in the time of Emerson, a change I'll say more about in Lecture III.
45

In its ad hominem character, Edwards's reasoning is intriguingly similar to closely related arguments by Berkeley (see Principles 15) and Hume (see Treatise 1.4.4 and Enquiry 12).
46

He adds that "though gravity itself between the continuous parts is necessary in order to the existence, the mind does not so intuitively see how." I believe that Edwards is reflecting here on the coherence of the solid parts of body, but this is a complication I'll ignore. It raises a delicate question: if gravity is responsible for the coherence of solid particles, which is more fundamental, solidity or gravity? It can be argued on the one hand that solidity is more basic, because the pieces joined by gravity are already solid. But it can be argued on the other hand that the even the smallest parts owe their coherence and hence their "indiscerpibility" (see "Of Atoms," p. 208) to gravity. I suspect that in the end, Edwards has no real need to face the question, since both solidity and gravity are resolved into divine activity.
47

Acts 17: 28 was also a favorite passage of Berkeley.

48

Color is out, at least in the opinion of Edwards and his contemporaries, and other sensible qualities (associated, perhaps, with the "sensations by the sense of feeling" to which Edwards

29

refers on pp. 379-80 of "The Mind") may be out for similar reasons. Resistance itself would seem to be unavailable, because it is resistancewhether it is conceived as a mere power, or as something actual (on which see "Of Being," p. 205, and "The Mind," p. 351)whose cause or ground we are seeking.
49

Although I won't be able to examine it here, Edwards's mention of "infinite resistance" is telling. He argues in "Of Atoms" that solidity is an infinite power: that a solid atom of matter can resist the entry of any other body, regardless of size, into the space the atom occupies (see p. 208). This affords Edwards another idealist argument. Because solidity is an infinite power, it must be the work of God.

"'A New World': Philosophical Idealism in America"1 Lecture II (Draft. Please do not quote without permission.) 1. Recapitulation I hope those of you who were here last week left the room feeling less than completely comfortable with Edwards. (When I say this, I don't mean to be suggesting that Edwards generally aimed to make his readersor his congregantscomfortable. Readers of his terrifying sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" will know that he did not. When he first delivered that sermon, fainting parishioners had to be carried from the pews.) I'll begin today by doing what I can to put the newcomers among you into the same uneasy state. I'll say less than I did last week about the idealist argument with which our troubles began, but more about the structure of thought that underlies itand more, too, about the intuitive convictions that the structure puts in danger. What I called Edwards's voluntarist argument makes a case for the Diminished Reality of Body and the Fundamental Reality of Mind. These are the foundational claims of idealism, as I (along with many in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries) understand it. The argument takes what seems to be the very essence of bodythe solidity or resistance that differentiates it from empty spaceand identifies it with the will of God. Last week I spoke of God's will as what upholds solidity, or as what serves as its cause or ground. That way of speaking is perhaps misleading, because it may suggest that solidity is a property that God formally confers on body a power that is actually present in them, though God remains its ultimate cause. This is a possibility that Edwards seeks to foreclose. In his view, solidity (as opposed to the bodily behavior expressive of it) is nothing but the will of God, or a particular policy of that will: a standing volition (from the divine perspective) and a law of nature (from our own). If the very essence of body stands outside it, the reality of body is very much diminished. It seems to lose substantiality, in favor of the mind or spirit in which its essence is truly to be found.2 Alienated from its essence, body ceases to have "proper being," or being of its own, because its what it is to be is lodged outside it. The voluntarist argument, as we saw, depends on the assumption that only a mind can be responsible for the behavior characteristic of solid bodies. Edwards thinks this behavioral profile is "arbitrary"that we can easily imagine alternatives to itand that its only possible cause is a mind or spirit who has freely chosen it. But this raises, as we saw, an obvious objection: couldn't there be something in bodysomething presumably unknownthat gives rise, perhaps inevitably, to this apparently arbitrary pattern? If we knew it, perhaps that pattern would be revealed as necessary: as something demanded by the very nature of body, rather than as one among several available options imposed on body from without. In closing last week's lecture I said that Edwards has a reply to this objection. It lies in the structure of thought I mentioned a moment ago. That structure, which we'll be excavating today, deprives bodies of all causal power whatsoever. There is, according to Edwards, nothing that a body can do. It can't act deliberately to bring about an arrangement to which we can imagine alternatives, and it can't act brutely or blindly to bring about an arrangement that's necessitated. It cannot act at all. The difficulty, and the source of the uneasiness of which we had a taste last week, is that this structure of thought is no less hostile to our acting than it is to body's acting. We can save the Diminished Reality of Body and the Fundamental Reality of Mind, but it seems that

2 we can do so only by diminishing our own reality. We can retain our idealism, but only at the price of something that seems very much like pantheism, the view that God is the only substance worthy of the name. It is here that we run up against the intuitive convictions to which I alluded as I began. It isn't hard to believe that we're far less powerful than God, but we nonetheless believe that we have some powers, and that our standing as moral agents depends on this. These are intuitive convictions that Jonathan Edwards seems to share. Each of us has, he insists, a will: a "faculty or power or principle of mind by which [we are] capable of choosing."3 Each of us is furthermore free, at least at times, meaning that we sometimes enjoy a "power," as he himself calls it, to do as we please and not otherwise (Reader, p. 204, from Freedom of the Will). (Edwards is an uncompromising deterministdeterminism being, as he sees it, an inescapable consequence of the principle of sufficient reasonbut the central contention of Freedom of the Will is that freedom is compatible with the strictest determinism.) If we had no power we would have no will, and if we had no will, we would not even be candidates for what Edwards defines as virtue, a beauty belonging only, as he says, "to beings that have perception and will" (Reader, p. 244, from The Nature of True Virtue). Virtue is, in fact, a quality of the will, or what Edwards also calls "the heart" (Reader, p. 244, from True Virtue). He writes that "virtue is the beauty of the qualities and exercises of the heart, or those actions with proceed from them." So to ask after the nature of true virtue is to ask, in his view, "what that is which renders any habit, disposition, or exercise of the heart"that is, any habit or exercise of the will"truly beautiful?" (Reader, p. 244, from True Virtue). If we are as powerless and insubstantial as body, we cannot have habits or dispositions, or engage in any active exercise.4 Our question for today then is this: can our will, our freedom, and our eligibility for virtueour personhood, in shortsurvive in the idealist world that Edwards invites us to inhabit?

2. A word on sources In last week's lecture, we confined ourselves to Edwards's youthful unpublished manuscripts. I do not know why he left them unpublished, though it's certainly worth reminded ourselves that he never published anything that we would now describe as primarily scientific or philosophical. All of his published works have a direct religious purposes. 5 He certainly thought of publishing some of the manuscripts at one time, as the memoranda I quoted in last week's lecture illustrate. In today's lecture we will be moving away from the manuscripts of Edwards's youth to some of the published works of his maturity. Most of the structure of thought we'll be excavating, in fact, is put together in a book that appeared in 1758, the same year in which Edwards, six weeks after arriving in Princeton, New Jersey to assume the presidency of the college there, died from an inoculation against smallpox. Last time I gave you evidence that Edwards never grew out of his idealism. If I'm rightand I ask you to accept this, at least for the duration of today's lecturethen the structure of thought I'll be exhibiting is one Edwards must have understood as backing for his idealism, even if he refused to draw idealist conclusions in print. As we'll see, the structure of thought and the voluntarist argument fit together neatly, just as if they were made for each other.

3. Continuous Creation: the early modern background

3 I'm now going to leave Edwards for a time, so that we can consider, in its wider early modern setting, a doctrine now known as Continuous Creation. It is the central piece in the Edwardsian structure of thought that I want to show you. It is as readers of Descartes's Meditations that most of us first encounter the doctrine. "A lifespan," Descartes explains in the Third Meditation, "can be divided into countless parts, each completely independent of the others, so that it does not follow from the fact that I existed a little while ago that I must exist now, unless there is some cause which as it were creates me afresh at this momentthat is, which preserves me." It is, he continues, "quite clear" from the nature of time "that the same power and action are needed to preserve anything at each individual moment of its duration as would be required to create that thing anew if it were not yet in existence. Hence the distinction between preservation and creation is only a conceptual one, and this is one of the things that are evident by the natural light" (CSM 2: 33, AT 7:49). What the Third Meditation seems to tell us is that the power needed to preserve a thing in any part of time is the same, in measure or extent, as the power needed to bring it into existence in the first place, and that the "action" (or exercise of power) needed to achieve the first is the same as the action needed to achieve the second. This doesn't merely permit us to regard conservation as continuous creation. It encourages us to think that conservation or preservation really is continuous creation. The passage does imply, however, that this statement is reversible: that it's equally true that continuous creation really is conservation or preservation. I believe that the unreversed version strikes most of us as more informative than the other, I suppose because we have, pre-theoretically, a healthier respect for the power required to initiate existence than we do for the power required to sustain it. The unreversed version seems to "inflate" conservation, whereas the reversal, were we to insist on it, would "deflate" or diminish creation. In my own experience as a teacher, at least, the doctrine seems to make students more wide-eyed about conservation, rather than more gimlet-eyed about creation. The points I've just reviewed, which may just be matters of psychology, account (I think) for our tendency to think that the Third Meditation passage, if true, reveals an important fact about divine conservation: that it "really" a creative act, exerted or enforced in every part of time. When understood in this way, the doctrine of continuous creation nurtures a powerful sense of our dependence on God, and thereby provides a discursive basis for a range of profound religious feelings. One is the feeling of "absolute dependence" that Schleiermacher took to be the core of all specifically religious sentiment. This feeling can be a source of comfort, as it was for example for Wittgenstein, who reported, in his own attempt to clarify religious sentiment, that he sometimes felt "absolutely safe." (What can better promote a feeling of safety that a vivid sense of one's dependence on an omnipotent and throughly benevolent God?) But it can also be a source of anxiety, as it was presumably for Kierkegaard, who described himself as in perpetual danger, floating free above twenty-thousand fathoms. (What can better promote a feeling of insecurity than a vivid sense of one's dependence on an omnipotent and absolutely unrestrained God?) The fact that the doctrine of continuous creation makes some sense of these opposed feelings is, I think, a central component of its hold over usa hold that isn't completely weakened, so far as I can tell, by religious disbelief. "Yes," I can imagine atheists saying. "Continuous creation is what remaining in existence would require if there were a God." An atheist might even take pride in enduring a discursively based feeling of absolute contingency: a feeling that every subsequent moment of his or her life is no more securely grounded than the first. This feeling of absolute contingency or ungroundednessof feeling of absolute independencecan, like its religious counterpart, be a source of joy and creative energy (as it was for Nietzsche and Sartre), or a source of anxiety, fear, and despair (as it was, or should have been, for the victims of illusion and bad faith they criticized).

Berkeley affirms continuous creation in a letter to his friend Samuel Johnson. There writes that those who have all along contended for a material world have yet acknowledged that natura naturans (to use the language of the Schoolmen) is God; and that the divine conservation is equipollent to, and in fact the same thing with, a continued repeated creation: in a word, that conservation and creation differ only in the terminus a quo ["point from which": the circumstance in which the two acts take place]. These are the common opinions of the Schoolmen, and Durandus, who held the world to be a machine like a clock, put in motion by God, but afterwards continuing to go of itself, was therein particular, and had few followers. . . . The Stoics and Platonists are everywhere full of the same notion. I am not therefore singular in this point itself, so much as in my way of proving it. . . . For aught I can see, it is no disparagement to the perfection of God to say that all things necessarily depend on Him as their Conservator as well as Creator, and that all nature would shrink to nothing, if not upheld and preserved in being by the same force that first created it. (Letter to Johnson, November 25, 1729; see also PHK 46) To say that conservation is "equipollent" to creation is to say that it demands the same degree of power as creation. Berkeley goes on to make what he evidently takes to be the stronger point that they are "in fact the same thing," which can again mean the same in number, or exactly the same intrinsically. To say they differ only in their termini a quo is to say they differ only extrinsically. Berkeley assures Johnson that in affirming this doctrine, he is aligning himself with a long tradition. His only innovation lies, he claims in his way of defending it. For Berkeley, as opposed to the tradition, bodies bottom out in ideas caused by God. Ideas are, on anyone's view (at least as Berkeley sees things), "fleeting and dependent" beings, with no inherent tendency to persist. For Berkeley, these fugitive beings are all there is to body. For a Berkeleyan body to exist over time, then, is for ideas of sense to be created in one moment and other ideas to be created in the next. Berkeley's understanding of the continuous creation doctrine is faithful to the scholastic tradition as represented by Suarez, for whom the merely conceptual distincton between creation and conservation is a difference in what Berkeley, adhering closely to scholastic vocabulary, calls their termini a quo.6 According to Suarez, it is easy to understand the conceptual distinction between creation and conservation. For the very difference between the relevant ways of speaking indicates that there is at least a conceptual distinction here, given that an entity (i) is not said to be conserved at the first instant at which it is created and (ii) is not said to be created at the first instant during the rest of the time in which it is conserved. Therefore, there is at least some sort of conceptual distinction between the two. This distinction is none other than the one mentioned above, namely that 'creation' connotes a denial of previously possessed esse, whereas 'conservation,' to the contrary, connotes the possession of the same esse that was previously had. (Disputation 21, section 2, 7, translated by A. J. Freddoso, in his On Creation, Conservation, and Concurrence: Metaphysical Disputations 20-22 [South Bend: St. Augustine's Press, 2002]) The previous possession of esse or being is one terminus a quo; the absence of its previous possession is another. Whether or not esse is possessed at an earlier moment is extrinsic to the divine act responsible for esse at a later moment. Hence, Suarez urges, the difference between conservation and creation is not intrinsic or real, but extrinsic or merely conceptual. Suarez's

5 reasoning was later endorsed by Leibniz, a closer student of scholasticism than Berkeley, who admitted there is no reason why God's conservation "should not be called production, or even creation, if one will: for the dependence being as great afterwards as at the beginning, the extrinsic designation of being new or not does not change the nature"that is, I assume, the intrinsic nature"of that action" (Theodicy 385, p. 356 in the Huggard translation). Suarez goes on to reinforce the point by what he calls "an analogy derived from the terminus," but the terminus he has in mind isn't the terminus a quo Berkeley mentions (since there is plainly a more-thanconceptual distinction between the presence of esse and its absence), but the effect or terminus ad quem: the "point to which" the causal process tends. "'Creation,'" Suarez explains, connotes a denial of previously possessed esse, whereas 'conservation', to the contrary, connotes the possession of the same esse that was previously had. Now the claim that this is only a conceptual difference seems evident per se and is made readily obvious by an analogy derived from the terminus itself. For the created effect itself qua existing at the first moment can only be conceptually distinguished from itself qua existing in the whole of the subsequent time. Despite his assurance that the merely conceptual distinction between conservation and creation is self-evident, Suarez seems to think that the merely conceptual distinction between the associated effects or termini is one his readers are likely to find more readily accessible or "obvious."

4. Continuous Creation in Edwards As we saw last week, Continuous Creation comes to the surface at several points in Edwards's early manuscripts and miscellanies. His 1758 defense of the doctrine of original sin, the published work I mentioned earlier, both states the doctrine and argues for it:7 That God does, by his immediate power, uphold every created substance in being, will be manifest, if we consider, that their present existence is a dependent existence, and therefore is an effect, and must have some cause: and the cause must be one of these two: either the antecedent existence of the same substance, or else the power of the Creator. But it can't be the antecedent existence of the same substance. For instance, the existence of the body of the moon at this present moment, can't be the effect of its existence at the last foregoing moment. For not only was what existed the last moment, no active cause, but a wholly passive thing; this also is to be considered, that no cause can produce effects in a time and place on which itself is not. 'Tis plain, nothing can exert itself, or operate, when and where it is not existing. But the moon's past existence was neither where nor when its present existence is. In point of time, what is past entirely ceases, when present existence begins; otherwise it would not be past. The past moment is ceased and gone, when the present moment takes place; and does no more coexist with it, than does any other moment that had ceased twenty years ago. Nor could the past existence of the particles of this moving body produce effects in any other place, than where it then was. But its existence at the present moment, in every point of it, is in a different place, from where its existence was at the last preceding moment. From these things, I suppose, it will certainly follow, that the present existence, either of this, or any other created substance, cannot be an effect of its past existence. The existences (so to speak) of an effect, or thing dependent, in different parts of space or duration, though every so near one to another, don't at all coexist one with the other; and therefore are as truly different effects, as if those parts of space and duration were every so far asunder: and the prior existence can no more be the proper cause of the new existence, in the next moment, or next part of

6 space, than if it had been in an age before, or at a thousand miles distance, without any existence to fill up the intermediate time or space. Therefore the existence of created substances, in each successive moment, must be the effect of the immediate agency, will, and power of God. (pp. 400-1) As Edwards explains a bit later, "the existence of each created person and thing, at each moment of it, [must] be from the immediate continued creation of God," from which "it will certainly follow" that "God's preserving created beings is perfectly equivalent," as Suarez, Descartes, Leibniz, and Berkeley had all affirmed, "to a continued creation, or to his creating those things out of nothing at each moment of their existence. If the continued existence of created things be wholly dependent on God's preservation, then those things would drop into nothing, upon the passing of the present moment, without a new exertion of the divine power to cause them to exist in the following moment" (pp. 401-2). It cannot even be said that created things concur with God in producing some part of their own future. "The supposing, that its antecedent existence concurs with God in efficiency, to produce some part of the effect, is attended with all the very same absurdities, which have been shown to attend the supposition of its producing it wholly" (p. 402)the absurdities of an agent's acting when and where it does not exist. Of course nature isn't a piece of clockwork, running on it own for as long as there's tension in its springs. In Edwards's view, it cannot so much as assist God in moving the hands on its dial plate. Deism is thereby repudiated, but concurrentism is repudiated too. We're left with what is now known as occasionalismwith God, in Edwards's words, as "the only cause of all natural effects" (p. 401). Divine causation, moreover, is in every case equivalent to creation, as we've already seen. God, Edwards writes, produces every effect "as much from nothing, as if there had been nothing before" (p. 402). Hence the effect, as Suarez, Leibniz, and Berkeley had all said in other words, "differs . . . from the first creation . . . only," in Edwards's helpful phrase, "circumstantially." This merely circumstantial difference is a difference in what we, following Berkeley, called the terminus a quo. Edwards explains, "in first creation there had been no such act and effect of God's power before; whereas, his giving existence afterwards, follows preceding acts and effects of the same kind, in an established order" (p. 402). In the first case, the terminus a quo is non-being (or a state of affairs that does not include an instane of the kind of thing in question); in the second case, it is another being of the same kind. Conservation is interpreted as continuous creation in a leading handbook of Puritan theology, William Ames's Marrow of Sacred Divinity, published in 1642. Of everything in creation, God is either the immediate cause or the mediate cause. His conservation of things of the first kind is equivalent to their creation (article 18): Some things are conserved immediatly, namely such as are subjected unto God only. This conservation is in very deed the same with Creation, differing only in reason, in that Creation includes a certaine newnes which conservation excludes, & Creation excludes a precedent existence which conservation includes, so that that conservation is nothing else then as it were a continued Creation, and therefore it is joyned with Creation. Neh. 9. 6. Thou hast made, and thou preservest all these things. (p. 48) When God is the mediate cause of a thing, Ames describes its immediate cause as "secondary." It isn't completely clear to me whether Ames wants the doctrine of continuous creation to apply to things with secondary causes. But he does make it clear that that secondary causes are at best instrumental, and do not compromise God's sovereignty (articles 25 and 26, p. 50): By force of this Gubernation all second causes, are in a certaine manner determined afore, that is, First, they are stirred up, to worke, by an influence, or previous motion, in regard

7 that (beside the communicating of strength, and sustentation of the same) there is some such thing required necessarily to bring forth that into act which before was in the power of the Creature. Secondly, they are applied to a certaine object, about which they are exercised in working. Ezech. 21, 21, 22: &c. 2. Sam. 16. 10. Also by force of the same government they are ordered, that is, 1. Limits, and bounds are set to their actions: Job 1. 12. & 2, 6. & 38, 10. 2. Some good is drawn out of their action, Gen. 50. 20. Because the exercise of that strength which is in the Creatures depends upon the Will of God; hence it is that we trust in God alone, & not in those Creatures, by which the kindnesse of God is derived to us. Ames does say that "the very cessation of Divine conservation, would without any other operation presently reduce every Creature into nothing" (p. 42).8

5. Sufficient Reason Edwards's argument from continuous creation to the Diminished Reality of Body (and the Fundamental Reality of Mind) rests on the principle of sufficient reason, in application to everything that come to be. Edwards's commitment to the principle is most evident in his famous treatise on Freedom of the Will, which appeared in 1754, four years before Original Sin.9 In defining the word "cause," Edwards makes it absolutely clear that a genuine cause always functions as a reason. A cause, he says, has "truly the nature of a ground or reason why some things are, rather than others; or why they are as they are, rather than otherwise" (Reader, p. 209). A cause can therefore be defined as "any antecedent, either natural or moral, positive or negative, on which an event, either a thing, or the manner and circumstance of a thing, so depends, that it is the ground and reason, either in whole, or in part, why it is, rather than not; or why it is as it is, rather than otherwise; or in other words, any antecedent with which a consequent event is so connected, that it truly belongs to the reason why the proposition which affirms that event, is true; whether it has any positive influence, or not" (p. 210). Edwards then asserts that "nothing ever comes to pass without a cause." In the context he has created, this is an affirmation of Sufficient Reason, applied to every event and to each thing that comes to be. What is self-existent, he goes on to explain, "must be from eternity, and must be unchangeable: but as to all things that begin to be," they are not self-existent, and therefore must have some foundation of their existence without [that is, outside or distinct from] themselves. That whatsoever begins to be, which before was not, must have a cause why it then begins to exist, seems to be the first dictate of the common and natural sense which God hath implanted in the minds of all mankind, and the main foundation of all our reasonings about the existence of things, past, present, or to come. (p. 210) Not only must everything that comes to be have a cause "without" it; the cause must, as Edwards next explains, be "proportionable and agreeable" to it. "There cannot be more in the effect than in the cause," because the surplus would then have no ground or reason. There is a sense, of course, in which an effect is always something "more" than its cause, just because it is distinct from it. But for Edwards, the word "more" here has to do not with the number of beings, but with the quantity of being, abstractly considered, that any one individual might possess. The word has to do, in other words, with what he calls, in True Virtue (originally published posthumously, in 1765), "degrees of existence":

One being may have more existence than another, as he may be greater than another. That which is great has more existence, and is further from nothing, that that which is little. One being may have everything positive belonging to it, or everything which goes to its positive existence (in opposition to defect) in an higher degree than another; or a greater capacity and power, greater understanding, every faculty and every positive quality in an higher degree. An archangel must be supposed to have more existence, and to be every way further removed from nonentity, than a worm or a flea" (from True Virtue, p. 249 in the Reader).

6. Consequences of Sufficient Reason Nothing, in Edwards's view, can act where or when it is not.10 As he says, "no cause can produce effects in a time and place on which itself is not." It is plain, he writes, that "nothing can exert itself, or operate, when and where it is not existing." I take it that for Edwards, this is a direct consequence of Sufficient Reason. Note, in this connection, the presence of the word "then" ("why it then begins to exist") in my recent quotation from p. 210. There Edwards implies that there must be a sufficient reason why a thing arises at the time it does (a reason why it exists then)and, we can presume, a sufficient reason why it arises in the place it does (a reason why it exists there). In things that come to be me, presence is always local presence, and as such it calls for a cause that is present at the very same locations. It is the presence of a cause at a particular time and place that renders it "proportionable and agreeable" to what happens then and there. If a cause were able to act across an unmediated temporal or spatial distance, there would be no ground or reason for its effect's emergence at one point rather than another. My exhaled breath might as easily disperse over Port Meadow, or in a neighboring quad, as it does in my cottage in north Oxfordshire. Sufficient Reason calls not only for a cause existing at at the same temporal and spatial location as its alleged effect, but for a cause that is "without" its effect or distinct from it. Hence the moon's past existence has, at first glance, at least a fair chance of qualifying as the cause of its present existence. For Edwards, an object's past existence and its present existence are clearly two distinct things. But "what is past entirely ceases," declares Edwards, "when present existence begins. "Otherwise," he says in clinching the point, "it would not be past." But couldn't an object's past overlap with its present for a brief moment? The problem is that the overlap could only be partial: in order to be distinguish itself from the object's present, the object's past would have to reach farther back. But if the moon's past existence mounts the world stage before its present existence does, why didn't its past existence bring about its present existence then, before the hypothesized moment of overlap? If the past existence of the object is ever sufficient to bring about the object's present existence, it must be no less sufficient when it makes its first appearance. For similar reasons, the object's present can never occupy a time that is, from the perspective of its past existence, future. If it did, that extra bit of present life would be left floating, without the support that the rest of the object's present is acknowledged to require. We are thereby threatened with the collapse of an object's lifetime into a single, densely featured moment: a block universe in miniature.11 This small block of being will be, furthermore, without a cause. The present existence of a second object will not serve, even though it meets the distinctness condition, because it would have to occupy the very same space as the present existence of the first object, and in that case, even if it wouldn't be arbitrary to claim that they are two (they might, for example, be of different kinds), Sufficient Reason would not allow each to be the cause of the other (that would amount to a roundabout violation of the distinctness condition), and in the absence of further argument, it would be arbitrary to single out either of

9 them as the uniquely effective member of the partnership. The same kind of argument seems to apply, moreover, on a grand scale. Setting aside God (as we're now doing), the past state of the universe is the most plausible natural cause of its present state, but the earlier can cause the later, we've discovered, only if the one isn't really earlier and the other isn't really later. It follows that every state in the history of the universe must coincide in time with every other. But if each is a universal whole of which every lesser object is a part, they don't merely coincide but coalesce. For what, apart from their contents or their times, could differentiate them? The argument's upshot is that every state of every finite creature is caused entirely by God. Earlier I described this argument as a case for the Diminished Reality of Body. I regard it, more specifically, as an argument against the substantiality of body, but Edwards's language in Original Sin suggests that he sees things differently. Even at the climax of his presentation (see the final sentence of the long quotation from pp. 400-1 above), he speaks of "the existence of created substances." He doesn't present himself as a radical who denies the existence of created substances, but as a sober analyst who is telling us what their existence comes to. Although I certainly cannot prove it, my view is that Edwards is speaking with the vulgar while thinking with the learned. In his unpublished manuscripts, he generally draws a direct line between the loss of self-sustaining causal power and the loss of substancehood. It is because God is upholds the very essence of body that the substance of body is either God himself or nothing. "The substance of bodies at last becomes either nothing, or nothing but the Deity acting in that particular manner in those parts of space where he thinks fit," from which he infers that speaking with respect to bodies only, "there is no proper substance but God himself" (Scientific and Philosophical Writings, p. 215). "The very substance of body itself, . . . is nothing but the divine power, or rather the constant exertion of it" ("The Mind," pp. 350-1). The argument I've just reviewed resembles the voluntarist argument of Lecture I in its concern with causation and explanation, but it is far more general: it applies not only to solid and resisting bodies, but to anything at all that comes to be. It applies not only to atoms and constructions out of atoms, but to us. I suspect that it is what lies behind Edwards's confession, in the final sheets of "The Mind," that "it is [divine] laws that constitute all permanent being in created things, both corporeal and spiritual" (Scientific and Philosophical Writings, p. 391, my emphasis). Of course, the diminished reality of bodies and finite spirits will still follow from the argument, even if the substantiality of one or the other survives it. Even in published writing, as we've seen, Edwards links the greater "capacity and power" of a being with a higher "degree of existence" (Reader, from True Virtue, p. 249). Anyone who, like Edwards, sympathizes with the old Platonic equation of being and power, as many of us do, will see the argument just reviewed as an argument for the Diminished Reality of Body. But if they're alert, they will also see it as an argument for the Diminished Reality of Finite Mind. This is a problem, as I think we've already acknowledged, and it is a problem that's going to get worse before we can begin to ask how to make it better. For in the chapter of Original Sin that we've been examining, Edwards argues not only that bodies and finite spirits can at best be occasional causes, but that they have no intrinsic identity over time. What we call a body or a finite spirit is, according to Edwards, a succession of inherently distinct beings, combined into one only by arbitrary acts of divine institution. This gives us a second reason to doubt the substantiality of body (good news, for the idealist), but it gives us an equally good reason to doubt the substantiality of finite mind (bad news for the idealist, if he or she hopes to steer clear of pantheism).

10 7. Edwards on the metaphysics of identity, stage one: the distinctness of things "simply considered," or "considered in themselves It is now time to acknowledge the polemical purpose of Original Sin. Edwards aim in the treatise is to show that it needn't be unjust for God to hold Adam's posterity responsible for Adam's sin, because the divine will can render us one with Adam, leaving us no less responsible for our forbear's transgressions than he was. The objection that I am "wholly distinct" from Adam, and that it would therefore be improper, "as implying falsehood," to penalize me for what he's done, is, as even Edwards admits, "specious" or intuitively plausible (Original Sin, p. 397). But it is "really founded on a false hypothesis, and wrong notion of what we call sameness or oneness, among created things." "The seeming force of the objection arises," Edwards proposes, "from ignorance or inconsideration of the degree, in which created identity or oneness with past experience, in general, depends on the sovereign constitution and law of the Supreme Author and Disposer of the universe" (p. 397). After Edwards gives created identity the consideration it calls forafter he completes his theory of creaturely identityhe discovers that there is no place to stand, beyond the reach of God's will, from which it can be justly criticized. Edwards's theory of creaturely identity rests on the assumption that "some things, most simply considered, are entirely distinct, and very diverse" (p. 397). By "simply considered" he means "considered in themselves" (p. 398). These beings are inherently or intrinsically distinct. They are several, rather than one, just by virtue of being what they are. The moon's past and its present are presumably distinct in just this way. The same seems true of what Edwards calls "atoms," or at least of their temporal slices, atoms being perfect solids (Scientific and Philosophical Writings, pp. 192, 213) or primary particles (Freedom of the Will, p. 110) which, though they are extended, will never be "torn asunder"at least not into spatial parts (Scientific and Philosophical Writings, p. 214).12 For the moment I will suppose that atoms qualify as intrinsically distinct beings, and that the same holds for contextures of atoms. A contexture of atoms a, b, and c will be intrinsically distinct from a contexture of atoms d, e, and f. Edwards does not confront intermediate casesa contexture, say, of a, b, and dbut this is a complication I will ignore.13 I will also assume that simple immaterial souls (or at least their temporal slices) are inherently or intrinsically distinct. Edwards conveys the inherent distinctness of (the temporal slices or stages) of his most basic entities (simple immaterial souls, actually unbreakable atoms) with the following striking image: The matter may perhaps be in some respects still more clearly illustrated by this. The images of things in a glass, as we keep our eye upon them, seem to remain precisely the same, with a continuing perfect identity. But it is known to be otherwise. Philosophers well know, that these images are constantly renewed, by the impression and reflection of new rays of light; so that the image impressed by the former rays is constantly vanishing, and a new image impressed by new rays every moment, both on the glass and on the eye. The image constantly renewed, by new successive rays, is no more numerically the same, than if it were by some artist put on anew with a pencil, and the colors constantly vanishing as fast as put on. And the new images being put on immediately or instantly, don't make 'em the same, any more than if it were done with the intermission of an hour or a day. The image that exists this moment, is not at all derived from the image which existed the last preceding moment: as may be seen, because, if the succession of new rays be intercepted, by something interposed between the object and the glass, the image immediately ceases; the past existence of the image has no influence to uphold it, so much as for one moment. Which shows, that the image is altogether new-made every moment;

11 and strictly speaking, is in no part numerically the same with that which existed the moment preceding. And truly so the matter must be with the bodies themselves, as well as their images: they also cannot be the same, with an absolute identity, but must be wholly renewed every moment, if the case be as has been proved, that their present existence is not, strictly speaking, at all the effect of their past existence; but is wholly, every instant, the effect of a new agency, or exertion of the power, of the cause of their existence. If so, the existence caused is every instant a new effect, whether the cause be light, or immediate divine power, or whatever it be. (Original Sin, p. 404 in the Works)

8. Edwards on the metaphysics of identity: the second stage Edwards now proposes what he thinks no one can deny: intrinsically distinct beings are sometimes "so united by the established law of the Creator, in some respects and with regard to some purposes and effects, that by virtue of that establishment it is with them as if they were one" (p. 397). I'll say more later on about how this remark (and others like it) might be interpreted. For now I take note of the following features: Edwards says that things are unified in one or another respect (or in several, or many); he takes their unification to be purpose-relative; he says that it becomes as if the united things are one, and that they are dealt with or (as he says in other passages that we'll come to in a moment) treated as one. One thing is clear: what Edwards calls "sameness" or "oneness," the state produced by the acts of divine unification he's now describing, is not what we, nowadays, ordinarily understand to be identity. That is why I can't be punished for my parent's sins, or for yours, even if I can be punished for Adam's (on which see Original Sin, p. 408). If you and I were both identical (in our usual sense) to Adam, we'd then be identical to each other. But we are not, because neither of us is identical to Adam. Each of us is one with Adam, but sameness or oneness, apparently because it is sameness or oneness in some respect, or for some particular purpose, doesn't exhibit transitivity.14 (Edwards often compares the human nation to a tree with Adam at its root. Each branch or twig can be, in some way, one with its root without being one, in the same way, with every other branch or twig.) Edwards uses several examples to support and illustrate his claim. A great tree, for example, is one plant with a small sprout. The tree and the sprout may not have even "one atom the very same," but in virtue of "an established law of nature," by which "many of the same qualities, and important properties" of each being "in a constant succession" are communicated to the being that follows it, a union is constituted among them, "naturally leading us to look upon all as one" (pp. 397-8). His next example concerns the body of an infant and the body of a man at forty: So the body of a man at forty years of age, is one with the infant body which first came into the world, from whence it grew; though now constituted of different substance, and the greater part of substance probably changed scores (if not hundreds) of times; and though it be now in so many respects exceeding diverse, yet God, according to the course of nature, which he has been pleased to establish, has caused, that in a certain method it should communicate with that infantile body, in the same life, the same senses, the same features, and many the same qualities, and in union with the same soul; and so, with regard to these purposes, 'tis dealt with by him as one body. (p. 398) The union of soul and body is a synchronic instance of the same fundamental phenomenon:

12 Again, the body and soul of a man are one, in a very different manner, and for different purposes. Considered in themselves, they are exceeding different beings, of a nature as diverse as can be conceived; and yet, by a very peculiar divine constitution or law of nature, which God has been pleased to establish, they are strongly united, and become one, in most respects; a wonderful mutual communication is established; so that both become different parts of the same man. But the union and mutual communication they have, has existence, and is entirely regulated and limited, according to the sovereign pleasure of God, and the constitution he has been pleased to establish. (p. 398) This is an especially helpful example, because it very clearly indicates that sameness or oneness is not (or not always) identity. The absolute distinctness of soul and body isn't canceled or compromised by God's decrees. Soul and body are joined, but in a way that respects their distinctness, "simply considered" or "considered in themselves."

9. The third stage: personal identity Edwards now comes to the case of personal identity, which is, he suggests, more grist for his mill. "Though this be not allowed to consist wholly in that which Mr. Locke places it in, i.e. same consciousness," he says, "yet I think it can't be denied, that this is one thing essential to it."15 It is evident, he continues, that the communication or continuance of the same consciousness and memory to any subject, through successive parts of duration, depends wholly on a divine establishment. There would be no necessity, that the remembrance and ideas of what is past should continue to exist, but by an arbitrary constitution of the Creator. (pp. 398-9) Edwards acknowledges the objection that "the very nature of the soul" might account for the continuation of the same consciousness, but points out that this is an objection that his theological opponents, represented by John Taylor, cannot make, because they share the view that "the course of nature, separate from the agency of God, is no cause, or nothing" (p. 399). "From these things it will clearly follow," Edwards writes in concluding his remarks on this example, that identity of consciousness depends wholly on a law of nature; and so, on the sovereign will and agency of God; and therefore, that personal identity, and so the derivation of pollution and built of past sins in the same person, depends on an arbitrary divine constitution: and this, even though we should allow the same consciousness not to be the only thing which constitutes oneness of person, but should, besides that, suppose sameness of substance requisite. For if same consciousness be one thing necessary to personal identity, and this depends on God's sovereign constitution, it will still follow, that personal identity depends on God's sovereign constitution. (p. 399) Here two observations are called for. First, if Edwards does embrace the three-step process, this passage underdescribes God's role. It is not enough for God to transmit the same consciousness from one being to the next in a succession. It must also be the case that this transmission makes them one person. We may say this is the work of the concept of a person, but earlier passages indicate that the relevant conceptor the array of "purposes" and "respects" that attend itis also God's work, and that this work goes beyond mere communication or transmission. My second observation is that Edwards is faithful to Locke's distinction between the concept person and the concept substance. But this is not all. Like other readers of Locke's Essay,

13 beginning perhaps with Locke's eighteenth-century editor Edmund Law, Edwards supposes that a Lockean person needn't be identified with its associated substance. Although it is Edwards's view that for sameness of person, sameness of substance is requisitewhich is why, as he earlier indicated, personal identity does not consist "wholly in that which Locke places it in, i.e. same consciousness"the underlying substance is perhaps not identical to the person.16 A substance is a physical beingand here I'm using "physical" in a now discarded sense, in which it is synonymous with "natural" or naturally constitutedand a person is a moral one, and the existence of the physical being will insure the existence of the moral being only if certain "moral" conditions are met. The distinction between moral and physical entities was a traditional one, made for example by Samuel Pufendorf, and in a long footnote earlier in the chapter from Original Sin, Edwards works it out at some length. There he compares Adam to the root of a tree whose branches are his descendants, or to a head of whose bodies we are the members. Adam and his progeny, he writes, constitute "one complex person, or one moral whole" (p. 391). He quotes the Institutiones Theologiae Polemicae Universae of Johann Friedrich Stapfer, who says, in Edwards's English translation, that although "the fall of Adam cannot be physically"that is, naturally"one with the sin of his posterity," Adam and "all his posterity constitute but one moral person" (p. 392).17 As Pufendorf understands it, the creation of a moral being depends on acts of imputation, either human or divine. Even in the divine case, these imputations are subsequent to the divine decrees that bring physical creatures into being. This Pufendorfian background lends support to my suggestion that Edwards accepts the three-step process, and that at times he underdescribes God's role. At this point in his exposition, we should suppose that God, in creating a person, does several things: he creates a simple immaterial substance; he insures that the consciousness of the substance as it exists at one moment will be transmitted (perhaps along with other psychological features, such as the habits Edwards mentions on p. 405) to the substance as it exists at the next, thereby encouraging us to look upon the successive states of the substance as one thing; and he underwrites or ratifies our view of it, by a further act of institution. The first two acts are "physical" and the third is "moral." Do we now have a case of divinely instituted identity, as opposed to mere sameness or oneness?

10. The fourth and final stage: created substancesatoms or souls We arrive now at the final level of the analysis. Here we consider "created substance" itself, by which Edwards seems to mean either material atoms, or the simple immaterial souls immaterial atoms, as it werethat give rise, under the appropriate divine decrees, to persons: And with respect to the identity of created substance itself, in the different moments of its duration, I think, we shall greatly mistake, if we imagine is to be like that absolute independent identity of the first being, whereby "he is the same yesterday, today, and forever." Nay, on the contrary, it may be demonstrated, that even this oneness of created substance, existing at different times, is a merely dependent identity; dependent on the pleasure and sovereign constitution of him who worketh all in all. This will follow from what is generally allowed, and is certainly true, that God not only created all things, and gave them being at first, but continually preserves them, and upholds them in being. This being a matter of considerable importance, it may be worthy here to be considered with a little attention. (pp. 399-400) What comes next is the occasionalist argument we have already surveyed, from which Edwards derives the following conclusion:

14

If the existence of created substance in each successive moment, be wholly the effect of God's immediate power, in that moment, without any dependence on prior existence, as much as the first creation out of nothing, then what exists at this moment, by this power, is a new effect; and simply and absolutely considered, not the same with any past existence, though it be like it, and follows it according to a certain established method. And there is no identity or oneness in the case, but what depends on the arbitrary constitution of the Creator; who by his wise sovereign establishment so unites these successive new effects, that he treats them as one, by communicating to them like properties, relations, and circumstances; and so, leads us to regard and treat them as one. (pp. 402-3) "All dependent existence," he adds in a passage recalling Plato's battle of gods and giants, "is in constant flux, ever passing and returning" (p. 404). To say that creatures are in constant flux, in perpetual genesis rather than in being, is accurate; to say that they return is misleading. What exists at any moment is, absolutely considered, distinct from what exists at any other moment. In that sense, it can never return. What "returns" is really what persists, and the persistence of a being is nothing over and above what is captured by what I'll describe, tentatively, as a three-step process. We have a series of absolutely distinct states (created by God at the first step), exhibiting certain properties and standing in certain relations (instituted by God at the second step). (The first and second steps are only analytically distinct, because God presumably creates the states with their properties and relations.) Then, in a third and perhaps final step, God "treats" these related steps as constituting a single thinga whole plant, body, person, atom, or soul of which those states are (as we now say) passing stages or temporal parts. By the time he declares victory over his Pelagian antagonist ("it appears that this objection is built on a false hypothesis: for it appears, that a divine constitution is the thing which makes truth, in affairs of this nature," p. 404), Edwards makes the need for the last step in the three-step process more clear: There are various kinds of identity and oneness, found among created things, by which they become one in different manners, respects and degrees, and to various purposes; several of which differences have been observed; and every kind is ordered, regulated, and limited, in every respect, by divine constitution. Some things, existing in different times and places, are treated by their Creator as one in one respect, and others in another; some are united for this communciation, and others for that; but all according to the sovereign pleasure of the Fountain of all being and operation. (p. 405) In a footnote Edwards asks why the author of nature may not "have established such an union between the roots and branches of [a] complex being, as that all should constitute one moral whole; so that by the law of union, there should be a communion in each moral alteration, and that the heart of every branch should at the same moment participate with the heart of the root, be conformed to it and concurring with it in all its affections and acts, and so jointly partaking in its state, as part of the same thing?" (pp. 405-6). The communion described here seems to be the work of the second step. Perhaps the need for a third step is made more clear in the passage to which the footnote is attached: I am persuaded, no solid reason can be given, why God, who constitutes all other created union or oneness, according to his pleasure, and for what purposes, communications, and effects he pleases, may not establish a constitution whereby the natural posterity of Adam, proceeding from him, much as the buds and branches from the stock or root of a tree,

15 should be treated as one with him, for the derivation, either of righteousness and communion in rewards, or of the loss of righteousness and consequent corruption and guilt. (p. 405) Even "simple" created substancessubstances with no spatial partshave a constituted or imputed identity. Edwards began by showing that no created substance has any causal bearing on its future; we now learn that its future is imputed. The reality of the substance is further attenuated. And finite spirits suffer this attenuation as much as bodies do.18

11. Is Edwards an "identity voluntarist"? But what is it for God to take the third step? What is it for God to "treat" distinct things as one, especially when they are taken to constitute a single (persisting) person, or a single (persisting) soul or atom? Is Edwards, as Mark Johnston suggests, an "identity voluntarist"? "We have," according to Edwards as Johnston reads him, "no natural capacity to continue to exist. It is to God that we owe our persistence through time" (p. 121). We are not, in other words, autonomously identical.19 "To this," Johnston writes, "Edwards adds that it is entirely up to God how to constitute a persisting person out of such momentary stages." This is Identity Voluntarism. According to Johnston, Edwards seems to be endorsing something like the view that "'created substances" persist by perduring, that is, by having distinct momentary stages at the various times at which they exist. So, once again, we are to think of a body as a cross-temporal sum of momentary body stages united by a certain genidentity condition, that is, a condition that bundles together those momentary stages into a persisting whole. (p. 123) What bundles the stages together, in Edwards's view? Nothing but the will of God, Johnston answers: "God wills that these body stages and only these body stages make up a body!" Johnston objects that Identity Voluntarism severs identity "from any real conception of justice" (p. 123):20 If I am told that the fact that I was that body holds just in virtue of "arbitrary divine constitution," that is, just in virtue of God's deciding to bundle together the stages of the mischievous boy with the rest of the stages of my life, then I am taken aback. The fact that it was I who did it is now being claimed to consist in the fact about God's arbitrary and sovereign will. How then can I justly be asked to take my lumps for the acts of that mischievous boy? God has, as it were, just foisted those acts on me; so also for "my" good acts. (p. 124)21 I've assumed for many years that the desperate view Johnston attributes to Edwards is the one he has in mind. The main reason for thinking so is that the polemical aim of Original Sin seems to require it. The Pelagian objection to original sin "is built," Edwards insists, "on a false hypothesis"a failure to realize "that a divine constitution is the thing which makes truth, in affairs of this nature (Original Sin, p. 404). But the text of Original Sin is dismayingly unruly. Why does Edwards say that God treats or deals with things as if they are one? Does a more moderate view lie behind these ways of speaking, or is Edwards, at most, an identity voluntarist who sometimes loses his nerve?

16 What does it mean to treat two things as one? Is it simply to endow them with the qualities and relations mentioned in my description of step two? Is it merely for God to regard them as one, in the confident expectation that we will do the same? (Identity would then be "subjective." It would be something like what Hume calls a "fiction"but in this case, a divinely instituted fiction.) Is it for God to adopt a certain schedule of punishments and rewards (a schedule based on the qualities and relations of step two)? Or is it to make them one in fact?22 The text offers some support for all of these possibilities, but the following passages speaks powerfully in favor of the last: The sin of the first apostacy . . . , in reality and in propriety, shall become their sin; by virtue of a real union between the root and branches of the world of mankind (truly and properly availing to such a consequence) established by the Author of the whole system of the universe; to whose establishment is owing all propriety and reality of union, in any part of that system . . . . And therefore the sin of the apostacy is not theirs, merely because God imputes it to them; but it is truly and properly theirs, and on that ground, God imputes it to them. (Original Sin, pp. 407-8) If it is to make them one in fact, how is this oneness achieved? Is it brought about by concepts or eternal truths independent of God's will, or are the relevant concepts or truths divinely instituted? It seems that there are two ways of understanding God's role in the metaphysical construction now underway. One one view God is engaged in a two-step process. In step one he creates inherently distinct beings, and in step two he institutes various relations among them. He then sits back and folds his hands. At that point what we would call conceptsand what Edwards might call eternal truthskick in. These concepts are truths are independent of God's will, and they go to work, as it were, on the distinct but related beings that God has created, making it the case that a sequence of distinct beings, so related, count as one "continued" thing. On the second view God's participation comes in three steps. In step one, as before, he brings distinct "states" or "stages" into being. In step two, again as before, he institutes relations among them. But then there's a third step, in which God decrees that distinct entities, appropriately related, constitute one thingnot a thing of the same kind as its constituent states or stages, of course, but a thing (a plant, a body, a human being) nonetheless. More is asked of God in the three-step process, because there are, in the view of that process, no concepts or truths independent of his will that can finish the job for him. He has to pronounce the final sentence on his own.23 In the three-step process, God has sovereignty even over concepts; in the two-step process he doesn't. The conceptual "work" in the two-step process is carried out effortlessly, by concepts whose constitution is independent of anyone's will, even that of God. Each of these conceptions of God's role receives some support from the texts I've quoted, but in the end I'm inclined to think that the metaphysically bolder three-step process is the one that Edwards most often has in mind. The three-step process makes better sense of several things: for example, the observation that God "treats" several things as one (as we do in turn); and the recurring appeal to the "purposes" God has in view or the "respects" that he finds salient. The three-step process also harmonizes with the broadly Augustinian spirit of Edwards's writing.24 But the practice of interpretive charity perhaps favors the less daring two-step process, as does the deference paid to divine wisdom in a passage from later in the chapter:25 And there is no identity or oneness in the case, but what depends on the arbitrary constitution of the Creator; who by his wise sovereign establishment so united these successive new effects, that he treats them as one, by communicating to them like properties, relations, and circumstances; and so, leads us to regard and treat them as one. When I call this an arbitrary constitution, I mean, that it is a constitution which depends

17 on nothing but the divine will; which divine will depends on nothing but the divine wisdom. (pp. 402-3) I suppose my main reason for preferring the three-step process is that a source has to be found for the concepts that finish off the two-step process. I see only two possibilities: the source can be in God or in ourselves. For various reasonshis occasionalism being one of themthe second possibility is not, for Edwards, really distinct from the first. But if the operative concepts have their source in God, they are either ideas in his intellect or products of his will.26 To say they are products of his will is to embrace the three-step process. So defenders of the two-step process must locate the relevant concepts (or eternal truths) in the mind of God. This is, in itself, a familiar enough viewLeibniz for example held itbut I find it hard to square with Edwards's strongly voluntarist language. To my ear, the assurance that concludes the passage I last quoted "which divine will depends on nothing but the divine wisdom"does not ring true. If the properties, relations, and circumstances that God imposes on successive beings actually unite them, due to an eternal truth that is independent of his will, why doesn't Edwards simply say so? Why does he insist on saying that God treats them as one, and that we do the same?27 To say that we "regard and treat them as one" is to imply that they are not really one, but on the two-step process, it seems to me that they would be.28 If I'm right in thinking that Edwards has he three-step process in view, then after God establishes "mutual communication" between (say) the human soul and the human body, soul and body are not yet united. Had he stopped with that, soul and body would not compose one human being, no matter how incessantly they were communicating. Making them one requires a separate divine act in which they are (as he says) "dealt with . . . as one." There must a purpose for which, or a respect in which, they count as one. The purpose can be brought to bear, or the respect made authoritative, only after God, after opening their channels of communication, does something further.

12. Edwards's unintended pantheism Now we can take stock. Edwards's voluntarist argument for the Diminished Reality of Body, which we traced in last week's lecture, is open to the objection that solidity might result from a deeper but unknown cause in body. Edwards, as we've seen, has a way of propping his argument up. There is an elaborate platform that he erects beneath it. The weight-bearing elements of the platform include Continuous Creation, occasionalism, and (perhaps) "Identity Voluntarism."29 The original voluntarist argument is saved, because bodies, it turns out, can't be responsible for anything: not for particular effects, not for general patterns, not even for their own identities. Measured against the standards of Edwards's early idealist manuscripts, bodies, for all these reasons, are not substances. So far, perhaps, so good. The problem is that if bodies fall short of substancehood for these reasons, so do we. We can't be responsible for anything; nor, it seems, can we be fairly be held responsible for anything. We are no more substantial than bodies are. (If Edwards is an identity voluntarist, we lose the most elementary mark of substance. Apart from God's arbitrary institutions, we are not subjects capable of receiving contraries.) God is the only substance, and the finite world is reduced to what William James, in "The Dilemma of Determinism," called a "gnosticism."30 As Renan puts it, in a passage James quotes, "this universe is a spectacle that God gives to himself." Renan urges us "to serve the purposes of this great chorus-master [or perhaps "stage-manager"?] by helping to render the spectacle as brilliant, as varied as possible."31 But even this is more than we can hope for if Edwards is correct. To help is to concur, and according to Edwards even that is beyond us. We are altogether bereft of power.

18 We'll see, next week, what some nineteenth-century idealists made of all this.32

Kenneth P. Winkler January 25, 2012

19

This is the text of the second in a series of six lectures, honoring Isaiah Berlin, delivered at Oxford University in January and February, 2012. For the opportunity to give them, I'm grateful to the benefactors and electors of the Sir Isaiah Berlin Visiting Professorship in the History of Ideas, to the Faculty of Philosophy, and to Corpus Christi College. The present lecture was delivered on January 24. This document isn't an actual transcript of my talkit was prepared before I spoke (and lightly edited afterwards), and contains more than I was actually able to coverbut it is written as if to be spoken. It is more loosely structured than a formal paper would be, and the notes sometimes contain reminders to myself. It is, above all, a draft piece of work, and I hope that it won't be quoted or cited without my express permission.
2

Lecture I never really explains why the divine conferral of solidity isn't an acceptable option. When I revise the lecture I may need to say something about this. At the very least I need to acknowledge that there may be a second hole in Edwards's reasoningthough I expect that something can be done to plug it.
3

A Jonathan Edwards Reader, p. 193. Later I'll have to introduce footnotes to Ramsay's edition of Freedom of the Will, where I may find texts that are even more appropriate as illustrations.
4

I'm sure I won't neglect the following possibility: that without God's grace, there were be no habits of the heart, that a natural man is never truly free, even on Edwards's anti-Arminian conception of freedom.
5

I don't count proving God's existence as such a purpose, though it may not be easy to explain why. Edwards certainly wouldn't expect his intended audience (of divines, mainly: here a look at his subscribers would be in order) to find such a proof of much use. Even in his published writings, Edwards is nervous about appearing too metaphysical. A paragraph in Original Sin begins as follows: "On the whole, if any don't like the philosophy, or the metaphysics (as some perhaps may choose to call it) made use of in the foregoing reasonings . . . " (p. 409).
6

For a brief summary of the role played by the notions of terminus a quo (traditionally a privation) and terminus ad quem (traditionally a form) in scholastic natural philosophy, see Dennis Des Chene, Physiologia: Natural Philosophy in Late Aristotelianism and Cartesian Thought (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), p. 63. Pierre Bayle gives a brisk characterization, less encrusted with specifically scholastic commitments, in his Systme abrg de philosophie: "The agent is the cause from which the action proceeds. The patient is the subject in which the action is received. The terminus a quo is what is lost by the action. The terminus ad quem is what is acquired by the action" (p. 231 in Oeuvres de Mr. P. Bayle, volume 4 [The Hague: Compagnie des Libraires, 1737], my translation).
7

Did Edwards, like most of the rest of us, come across the doctrine of continuous creation as he worked his way through the Third Meditation? According to Thuesen, the editor of the Catalogue of Books in volume 26 of Edwards's Works, there is no documentary evidence that Edwards actually read Descartes, even though Descartes is listed in the Catalogue. But as Thuesen explains, Edwards had access to Descartes's writings, included in the Dummer gift to Yale and in the library of Solomon Stoddard (p. 75 in volume 26).

20

Perry Miller brings Ames to bear on the theology of Edwards in "Jonathan Edwards to Emerson," New England Quarterly 13 (1940), pp. 589-617, p. 597.
9

Edwards himself doesn't speak of "the principle of sufficient reason," but he quotes, with evident approval, the following words from Isaac Watts: "nothing is, or comes to pass, without a sufficient reason why it is, and why it is in this manner rather than another" (Freedom of the Will, p. 186).
10

For other endorsements of this consequence, at least with respect to place, see p. 267 in the Scientific and Philosophical Writings and Sermons Series II, 44: "nothing Can act where it is not." This sermon also contains a vivid statement of continuous creation, applied to both bodies and spirits. Other endorsements can be found (unsurprisingly) in the "Original Sin" Notebook. See WJE Online, volume 34. See also the Scientific and Philosophical Writings, p. 257, for a passage strongly suggesting that spatial and temporal distance are on a par: that causal power cannot reach across an unmediated interval in either case.
11

It was a fear of this collapse that led Hume to insist, in the Treatise, that a cause must be prior in time to its effect. Edwards cannot of course say that a cause must be prior in time to its effect, and in "The Mind," his official definition of cause neatly skirts the issue: "CAUSE is that, after or upon the existence of which, or the existence of it after such a manner, the existence of another thing follows." The effect comes after or upon the occurrence of the cause, and its following may be explanatory rather than temporal.
12

I say "at least not into spatial parts" because, as we'll see later, Edwards thinks a persisting atom can be divided into temporal parts. (It would be interesting to consider how "thin" the slice of an atom can beto see how little time it can take upand to compare its minimum extent to the minimum extent of a mind or person. Could this be a way of investing more reality in mind than in matter?)
13

There is, in Edwards's treatment of examples (such as the tree and sprout that I come to just below), some evidence that he accepts Locke's account of the identity of masses, in which case it may be his view that the contexture of a, b, and d is intrinsically distinct from each of the other two.
14

Could absolute identity be sameness or oneness in every respect, or for every purpose? This is a difficult question, for at least two reasons. First, although Edwards thinks that respects and purposes can be numbered, there's no reason to suppose that he takes their number to be limited. Second, I do not know whether considering a thing "simply," or "in itself," is to consider itself in a respect, or for a purpose. Perhaps absolute identity is exhibited only by the most basic items. Each such item will then be absolutely identical to itself, and absolutely distinct from every other. Other cases of sameness or oneness will then be relative or conditioned (indexed to some respect or purpose) rather than absolute.
15

It was Edwards's view, I believe, that another thing essential to personal identity is sameness of immaterial soul. I think this is what lies behind his treatment of two counter-examples to Locke's theoryreplication and fissionthat he considers in "The Mind" (pp. 385-6 in Scientific and Philosophical Writings):

21

[Replication] It is a mistake that it consists in sameness or identity of consciousness, if by sameness of consciousness be meant having the same ideas hereafter that I have now, with a notion or apprehension that I had had them before, just in the same manner as I now have the same ideas that I had in time past by memory. It is possible without doubt in the nature of things for God to annihilate me, and after my annihilation to create another being that shall have the same ideas in his mind that I have, and with the like apprehension that he had had them before in like manner as a person has by memory; and yet I be in no way concerned in it, having no reason to fear what that being shall suffer, or to hope for what he shall enjoy. [Fission, or, perhaps more accurately, double replication] Can anyone deny that it is possible, after my annihilation, to create two beings in the universe, both of them having my ideas communicated to them with such a notion of their having had them before, after the manner of memory, and yet be ignorant one of another? And in such case, will anyone say that both these are one and the same person, as they must be if they are both the same person with me? It is possible there may be two such beings, each having all the ideas that are now in my mind in the same manner that I should have by memory if my own being were continued, and yet these two beings not only be ignorant one of another, but also be in a very different state, one in a state of enjoyment and pleasure and the other in a state of great suffering and torment. Yea, there seems to be nothing of impossibility in the nature of things, but that the Most High could, if he saw fit, cause there to be another being who should begin to exist, in some distant part of the universe, with the same ideas I now have after the manner of memory, and should henceforward coexist with me, we both retaining a consciousness of what was before the moment of his first existence in like manner, but thenceforward should have a different train of ideas. Will anyone say that he, in such a case, is the same person with me, when I know nothing of his sufferings and am never the better for his joys?
16

Later in the chapter, on p. 405, Edwards suggests that the continuance of habits may be another constituent of personal identity.
17

Tiguri: Heidegger, 1757. Edwards first quotes from volume 1, p. 236, and then from volume 4, pp. 514-15. (These volumes are available through Google Books.) In the second passage Stapfer says that Adam cannot be "physice unus" with the sins of his posterity, but that the two can "unicam moralem constituant Personam" (p. 514). Stapfer probably studied in Marburg with Wolff (his younger brother Johannes Stapfer did), so it may be possible to trace a route from Stapfer back to Pufendorf. Certainly Wolff was very strongly influenced by Pufendorf's writings.
18

There's a nice idealist twist to all this, though I'm not sure how best to put it. When we peer inside of entities that appear to be physically one, we discover that they are morally one. Nature is "moralized." I think, incidentally, that I need to attend more closely than I have to the way in which the creation of kinds may enter into the institution of genidentity relations.
19

When I delivered this lecture, Paul Lodge and Peter Forrest rightly objected that created substances do have their own identities, because they have certain intrinsic featuresfeatures God

22

had in view when he created them. I think what I want to say is that nothing (myself included) is autonomously genidentical (to use David Kaplan's old expression).
20

Johnston is actually addressing a somewhat more specific view: Identity Voluntarism in application to resurrected bodies.
21

The word "foisted" isn't exactly right, unless by "me" we mean a momentary stage. But must we? Why couldn't the stage before us be referring to its cross-temporal sumto a perduring person? And why couldn't the perduring person be using the word "me"? (The perduring person might be using the word, or having the associated I-thoughtand having it instead of the stage or having it along with it.) Note too that in practicewhen he actually stands before GodJohnston (the momentary stage) may not be taken aback: he may remember the act, regret it, and feel that he deserves to pay for it. (There is an interesting footnote in Original Sin on the extent to which we may have feelings such as these.)
22

Yet another possibility I may want to take up later: can God's bringing about of unity be construed as the creation of a new entityas the creation of (say) a person, distinct from the simple substances that underlie it?
23

For simplicity's sake I've ignored what may be an additional step that may be required no matter which view we adopt, in which God brings our conceptions of identity over time into line with those implied by the relevant concepts or truths, or into line with those implied by his arbitrary institutions.
24

The three-step process, if Edwards accepts it, commits him to a special case of the divine creation of eternal truths, as it was understood by Descartes. According to the three-step process, eternal truths of the form "if x and y stand in relation R, then x and y constitute one thing," are divine creations. This comparison, though plausible, raises questions, most of them having to do with the very notion of the divine creation of truth. Truth, to begin with, can be created directed or indirectly. When it comes to contingent truths, creation may have to be indirect: to make p true, I have to bring about the fact to which p corresponds. Once that's done, the truth of p is taken care of. On this score, creating eternal truths calls for less in the way of heavy lifting: once God decrees, in the empty air, that q is true, then q is true, and no other (or prior) creative work is called for. On, now, to identity. God could simply decree that one stage and a later stage add up to one thing. That is, he could establish, by arbitrary institution, a particular identity. But it's clear that this isn't what Edwards has in mind. God creates a general truth, one that covers many possible cases. But must this truth be necessary? Perhaps it's enough for it to be general: a contingent general truth. But can God make it true directly? If he canif the truth can hold even in the "empty air"perhaps it has to be necessary. The question, I suppose, is whether truths without existential import must be necessary. Another question: should the divine creation of analytic truth be distinguished from the divine creation of eternal or necessary truth? Do we create analytic truths? (A question for Ayer: if we did not propose to use symbols in a certain way, could there be truths that record our determination so to use them?)
25

See, though, the following passage from p. 406, where Edwards's conception of divine wisdom is partially explicated: "The wisdom, which is exercised in these constitutions, appears in these two things. First in a beautiful analogy and harmony with other laws and constitutions, especially

23

relating to the same subject: and secondly, in the good ends obtained, or useful consequences of such a constitution."
26

What happens if we say that they reside in both?

27

A possible answer to my question: to say that God "treats" them as one is simply to say that he endows them with the properties and relations they would have if they were one. Imagine what Hume calls a "steadfast object." It lasts a long time but never changes. But this can't be exactly what Edwards has in mind. Even a Humean steadfast object is, for Edwards, a succession of distinct beings. Still, Edwards thought may be that if x and y are really one, they have all of their properties, relations, and circumstances in common. If, then, God takes two things that are not really one and endows them with a fair share of common properties, relations, and circumstances, he treats them as if they were one. On such an understanding, God would be treating distinct things as one in the second step of the process. Saying that he treats them as one would simply sum up the fact that he endows them with similarities possessed by things that are one inherently.
28

As I've already suggested, perhaps it is wrong to assume that when process ends, the interrelated states actually compose one thing. Perhaps we follow God's lead and treat them as one thing, even though they are, simply and truly considered, a succession of distinct beings. The view would then resemble Hume's in Treatise 1.4.6, but the relevant fictions would be God's work, rather than the work of our imagination. Perhaps Edwards's remarks, in "The Mind," on abstract (or eternal) truths should be considered here. Also potentially relevant are Edwards's remarks on the signification of words in chapter 8 of True Virtue. "The signification of words is determined by use, yet that which governs the use of terms is general or common use" (p. 626). But our use of words must be consistent, and it won't be unless we call only those things right or wrong "which truly deserve praise or blame." Those who act unjustly "are capable of being convinced that they use these terms inconsistently, and abuse language in it, and so having their mouths stopped."
29

Surviving Death (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).

30

On pantheism as a danger for Edwards see (in addition to the remarks by William Ellery Channing that I quote in Lecture III) David Lyttle, "Jonathan Edwards on Personal Identity," Early American Literature 7 (1972), pp. 163-71, p. 166.
31

The Renan quotation does not seem to appear in every version of "The Dilemma."

32

If Edwards doesn't have a substance metaphysics, as Sang Hyun Lee and Stephen H. Daniel both think, will that reduce or eliminate our difficulties?32 I am not inclined to think so. I'm doubtful, first of all, that Edwards is not a substance metaphysician.32 I grant, however, that if he isn't, it won't be easy to speak of him as a pantheist. But we can still complain that he's diminished our reality too far, and that he leaves all of us without wordly backing for the kind of things that even he would like to say.

"'A New World': Philosophical Idealism in America, 1700 to 1950"1 Lecture III (Draft. Please do not quote without permission.) Riding one September day near his home in Northampton, Massachusetts in 1748, Jonathan Edwards ran into a young minister, Joseph Emerson, from the eastern part of the state. Emerson, who was twenty four, was returning home from the commencement of the college in New Haven.2 Jonathan invited Joseph to spend the night at his home. There Joseph fell deeply in love with Esther, Jonathan's sixteen-year-old daughter. He returned to Northampton two months later to court her, but he was disappointed. "I could not obtain from the young Lady the least Encouragement to come again . . . . I hope the disappointment will be sanctified to me, and that the Lord will by his Providence order it so that this shall be my companion for Life," he wrote in his diary.3 I tell this touching storytouching in part because of young Joseph's determination that his rejection should teach a religious lessonto indicate how close, in one way, the New England transcendentalists of the nineteenth century were to the New England Puritans of the eighteenth. The Joseph of my story was Ralph Waldo Emerson's great uncle. Seventy five or a hundred years, measured in generations, is not that long a time. Jonathan Edwards sold many of his books by subscription. Joseph Emerson of Pepperell was on board for the Life of David Brainerd, Freedom of the Will, and Original Sin, as was his father, Ralph Waldo's great grandfather, Joseph Emerson of Malden. In Edwards's day, the great leader of the Puritan churches in eastern Massachusetts, which were even then more liberalin, for example, their view of the prerequisites for full church membershipthan their sister congregations in the west, was Charles Chauncy, minister of the First Church in Boston. Chauncy's great work was a defense of universal salvation.4 William Emerson, Ralph Waldo's grandfather, was minister in that same church, and Ralph Waldo's younger brother, Charles Chauncy Emerson, who died of tuberculosis in his twenties, was named after him.5 (Charles is memorialized in chapter five of Nature, the work by Emerson that I will mainly be discussing in this lecture.) More important than these external marks of closeness, of course, were the internal ones, inhabiting the consciousness of later generations. Colm Tibn, in his novel of the life of Henry James, explains what these inward marks were like for some. Henry's Aunt Kate is describing the struggles of Henry's father.6 Henry Sr. was the Swedenborgian author of Substance and Shadow and a member, with his friend Emerson, of Boston's Saturday Club. When Emerson visited Henry Sr.'s home, he stayed in what the James brothers and their sister called "Mr. Emerson's room." There was a battle going on, Aunt Kate used the same words each time, between his own sweetness and the heavy Puritan hand which his father, old William James of Albany, had placed on his shoulder. Everywhere he went, she said, Henry James Senior saw love and the beauty of God's plan, but the old Puritan teaching would not let him believe his eyes. Daily, within him, the battle went on. He was restless and impossible, but he was also, in his searching, innocent and easily enraptured. Jonathan Edwards was one of the few religious writers of whom Henry Sr. approved.7 Looking over Ralph Waldo Emerson's own shoulder was his aunt Mary Moody Emerson.8 This is from an entry, composed three years after her death, in Emerson's journal for 1866:9

2 Read M.M.E.'s mss yesterdaymany pages. They keep for me the old attraction . . . . They make the best example I have known of the power of the religion of the Puritans in full energy, until fifty years ago in New England. The central theme of these endless diaries, is, her relation to the Divine Being; the absolute submission of her will, with the sole proviso, that she may know it is the direct agency of God, (& not of cold laws of contingency &c) which bereaves and humiliates her. But the religion of the diary, as of the class it represented, is biographical: it is the culture, the poetry, the mythology, in which they personally believed themselves dignified, inspired, judged, & dealt with, in the present & in the future. And certainly gives to life an earnestness, & to nature a sentiment, which lacking, our later generation appears frivolous. In the long list of resolutions made by the young Jonathan Edwards, the following still stirs meand would have stirred Emerson: "Resolved, to live with all my might, while I do live."10 Emerson's great uncle Joseph also lived by resolution, as we've seen, and though he may never have stated it, he lived by this resolution in particular. Here is the conclusion of his diary for 1748:11 read some & studied some. the year is now concluded and I may well finish my Journal as Ames does his Almanack Another year now is gone, but ah! how little have we done. alas! how little have I done for God, for my own soul, for the souls of my people committed I find a great deal Amiss, I would fly to the grace of Christ to pardon my defects and to his strength to enable me to do more for him this year if he should please to spare my Life. In lectures he gave in Boston in 1839-40, Emerson asked his audience a broad question that he could have been asking about the diaries of his own Puritan ancestors: "Who can read the pious diaries of the Englishmen in the time of the Commonwealth and later without a sigh that we write no diaries today?"12 (Emerson actually kept a diary, from 1820 until 1877, thought it is usually called a "journal," and it is, by present-day standards, more journal-like than diary-like. On first meeting Thoreau, Emerson asked him, do you keep a journal? Thoreau answered no, and started his journal that evening.)13 "How richly this old stream of antique faith descended into New England," Emerson says later in the lecture, "the remembrance of the elder portion of my audience I am sure will bear witness" (p. 194). He continued: The depth of the religious sentiment as it may still be remembered in individuals imbuing all their genius and derived to them from hoarded family traditions, from so many godly lives and godly death of sainted kindred was itself an Education. It raised every trivial incident to a celestial and religious dignity. (p. 194) Reading the diary of his great-grandfather inspired similar reflections: In reading last night this old diary of Joseph Emerson of Malden ending in the year 1726, one easily sees the useful egotism of our old puritan clergy. The minister experienced life for his flock. He gave prominence to all his economy & history for the benefit of the parish. All his haps [his son's later romantic disappointment, for example] are providences. If he keeps school, marries, begets children, if his house burns, if he buys a negro, & Dinah misbehaves, if he buys or sells his chaise, all his adventures are fumigated with prayer & praise, he preaches next Sunday on the new circumstances and the willing flock are contented with his consecration of one man's adventures for the benefit of them all, inasmuch as that one is on the right level & therefore a fair representative.

3 Emerson concludes the recollection with the kind of down-to-earth turn of speech"piquant," he would have called itthat is one of his greatest charms as a writer: His cow & horse & pig did duty next Sunday . . . . (Selected Journals 1841-1877, p. 384) "If his house burns" is an allusion to the following story about his great-grandfather told to Emerson by his aunt and shared with the audience I mentioned earlier: "One of this venerable line, the minister of Malden, Massachusetts, whilst his house was burning, stood apart with some of his church and sang, 'There is a house not made with hands'" ("The Present Age," p. 193). So much for signs of closeness.14 The signs of distance are more obvious and more dramatic; to turn one's gaze from western Massachusetts in the middle of the eighteenth century to eastern Massachusetts in the first quarter of the nineteenth century is to whip through one of the greatest transformations in American history. The biographer Megan Marshall calls it a "revolution [that] would transform the nation from a parochial theocracy, in which governors still declared statewide 'Fast Days' for religious observance and towns taxed their citizens to support a parish minister, to a modern, seculiar democracy, in which the lecture platform replaced the pulpit as the source of wisdom and revelation."15 Emerson did more than anyone else to give the lecture platform its prestige. He became the junior pastor in Boston's Second Church in 1829, but he resigned in 1832. He began lecturing the next year, giving his final sermon in 1839. It isn't surprising that when he addressed the graduates of Harvard Divinity School in 1838, the faculty was shocked by his serene repudiation of historical Christianity. What is surprising is that most of the dismayed faculty, its dean included, though they were only two generations removed from the young Joseph Emerson, were Unitarians. (When Emerson met him in 1833, Coleridge declaimed, pausing only to take breath, on "the folly and ignorance of Unitarianism." Emerson "interposed that, 'whilst I highly valued all his explanations, I was bound to tell him that I was born and bred a Unitarian" [English Traits, p. 771 in Essays].) In Lecture I we encountered Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.'s condescending assessment of Edwards. Elsewhere in the same essay, Holmes states that Edwards, for any ordinary person, would nowin the nineteenth centurybe impossible to listen to, much less to follow: "It is impossible that people of ordinary sensibilities," he writes, "should have listened to his torturing discourses without becoming at last sick of hearing of infinite horrors and endless agonies." Emerson himself, after telling the stories of his great-grandfather and others like him, testifies that divines such as Edwards could no longer be read by most of his contemporaries. "In the departure of this faith a vast body of religious writing which came down to this generation as an inestimable treasurethe whole body I mean of English and early American sermons and practical divinity," he laments, "have been suddenly found to be unreadable" ("The Present Age," p. 194). There is a story about young Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, testifying to that unreadability. Harriet's father was Lyman Beecher, an "Old Calvinist" who had studied at Yale with Timothy Dwight, the grandson of Jonathan Edwards. One evening, Lyman was reading to his children from Edwards's terrifying sermon, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. Harriet turned redder and redder as the reading went on. She finally rushed from the room, saying that she could not bear staying to hear her God slandered. In the end, all of Lyman's children left his Calvinism behind. They became liberal reformers. Harriet's sister Catherine became not only a prominent writer on household management but a philosopher, author of a respected refutation of Edwards on freedom of the will. Was is the American Revolution that accounted for this dramatic change in attitude, as Holmes surmised? Perhaps so, but if we consider what nineteenth-century reformers actually said about Edwards, we'll see that the freedom they were saving from Calvinism was, in the first place, not political but metaphysical. (This was true not only of Catherine Beecher, but of another

4 prominent reforming critic of Edwards, Rowland G. Hazard.)16 I can't say that anyone in the nineteenth century cast Edwards aside because they discerned all of the consequences I tried to draw in my last lecture. But their impression of Edwards, allowing for its lower degree of resolution, was very much the same as mine. In Edwards they saw someone who, in exalting God, had too much diminished man. William Ellery Channing, probably the most influential Unitarian minister of the first quarter of the nineteenth century (and one of the founders, in 1816, of Harvard Divinity School), provides an instructive example. Channing was an idealist. He acknowledged the Diminished Reality of Body, the Subordination of Time to Eternity, and the Displacement of the Senses. It was, he told Elizabeth Peabody, Richard Price's Dissertations on Matter and Spirit that had "saved [him] from Locke's philosophy."17 He gave me the Platonic doctrine of ideas, and like him I always write the words Right, Love, Idea, etc. with a capital letter. His book, probably, moulded my philosophy into the form it has always retained, and opened my mind into the transcendental depth. And I have always found in the accounts I have read of the German philosophy in Madame de Stael, and in these later times, that it was cognate to my own. Channing was repelled not by Edwards's idealism but by his diminishment of manmore particularly, by his occasionalist denial that we share in causal power.18 Occasionalism, Channing argued, carries one inevitably to pantheism:19 Calvinism will complain of being spoken of as an approach to Pantheism. It will say that it recognizes distinct minds from the Divine. But what avails this, if it robs these minds of self-determining force, of original activity; if it makes them passive recipients of the Universal Force; if it sees in human action only the necessary issues of a foreign impulse. The doctrine that God is the only Substance, which is Pantheism, differs little from the doctrine that God is the only active power of the universe. For what is substance without power? It is a striking fact that the philosophy which teaches that matter is an inert substance, and that God is the force which pervades it, has led me to question whether any such thing as matter exists: whether the powers of attraction and repulsion which are regarded as the indwelling Deity, be not its whole essence. Take away force, and substance is a shadow, and might as well vanish from the universe. Without a free power in man, he is nothing. The divine agent within him is every thing. Man acts only in show. He is a phenomenal existence, under which the One Infinite Power is manifested: and is this much better than Pantheism? One of the greatest of all errors is the attempt to exalt God, by making him the sole cause, the sole agent in the universe, by denying to the creature freedom of the will and moral power, by making man a mere recipient and transmitter of foreign impulse. This is, in essentials, the verdict on Edwards that I urged you to accept in Lecture II. It is, I think, a verdict that Emerson seems to sharea verdict, you may suppose, that must be shared by America's great promoter of self-trust, self-dependence, and self-reliance. But whether Emerson has a right to share it is actually a delicate question, to which I hope to return as this lecture concludes.

1. Nature: introduction and chapter one

5 This afternoon I will be giving you a reading of Emerson's first book, Nature, published in 1836. It is, by far, the most overtly idealist of his works. In later writings, his idealism is by many accounts chastened or transformed. As I conclude, I hope I can consider how significant that transformation was. You should by now have in your hands a detailed floorplan of Nature. Emerson said of one of his essays that after completing the house, he realized too late that he had omitted the stairs. In Nature a stairway is included, in the form of a four-paragraph introduction. It is followed by eight "chapters," all of them quite brief. (Nature is always called a book, because it was originally published in a single volume. The first edition came to 95 uncrowded pages. Thrown onto the densely packed sheets of the Library of America edition of Emerson's Essays and Lectures, it comes down to a forty-two page essays: Emerson's longest by a fair measure, but still an essay.) Chapter one, which is entitled "Nature," is a second stairwayone that belongs, in the opinion of some, to a different houseand I will discuss it in some detail. The most prolonged argument of the book (David Van Leer calls it "the lower argument") begins in chapter two and runs through chapter five. 20 "Commodity," the subject of chapter 2, is the first of four "ends" or human "uses" of nature that Emerson identifies. The others are "Beauty" (the subject of chapter three), "Language" (the subject of chapter four), and "Discipline" (the subject of chapter five). Chapter six, "Idealism," will be, for us, the first floor's focal room. We'll linger there for some time. We'll then be climbing upstairs to the second story, and if the essay has its intended effect, we'll soon be climbing even higher than that, with the help of chapters entitled "Spirit" (chapter seven) and "Prospects" (chapter eight). On the handout, I've given you generous excerpts from the introduction and each of the eight chapters. My expectation is that most of you won't be familiar with Emerson. One of my aims in today's lecture is to communicate my love for his writing, and the best way of arranging for that is to let you hear him speak. Emerson was greatest as a writer of essays, and my love for his writing has something to do with the freedom or unconfinement of the essay form. We philosophers are, of course, very familiar with the essay. It's been our standby genre for a long time, and some of usLocke comes to mindhave made good use of the freedom of permits. But even in Locke, and even more so in the professional essays or "articles" of today, there is always an external purpose, definable independently of the performance. In Emerson's case that isn't true. An Emerson essay is a materialization of "man thinking," and what the man thinks can't be defined in independence of it. Within this spacious formunconfined by plot or character, or by the narrow rules of verse he (who looked forward to a freer kind of poet) had internalizedEmerson creates, out of raw material that any one of us could quarry from a dictionary, something altogether unexpected. There are unfamiliar words, familiar words used in unfamiliar ways, prepositions that seem to lie between their usual use and the usual use of some other one (producing in me, at least, something like the effect, simultaneously grating and pleasant, of a double-bowing fiddle), startling metaphors, rangings from high to low, and abrupt, even wrenching, transitions. (We suffer the kind of "perpetual suggestions and provocations" that come to us when we read a foreign language that we imperfectly understand.21 But we are reading English.) The essays thereby become enactments of idealism; their material (which is, I admit, only words) is worked up by a sovereign mind into something greater than its parts and wholly new. Yet despite this strangeness and novelty, and despite the fact that the reader's mind is often made to oscillate between interpretations whose differences are strongly felt, even though their competing contents can't easily be verbally articulated (not, at least, without repeating Emerson's very words, in which case a single yet shifting embodiment ends up serving for them all), everything seems to be as it should be. Emerson says somewhere that a genius is someone able to discern, within his private self, a public or universal truth. His essays are works of genius in exactly this sense. Despite their "character of illimitable freedom" (Journals, 1: 590 in the

6 Rosenwald edition)their strangeness and idiosyncrasythey strike me (often enough) as universally just or true. William James was responding to much the same thing when he told his brother Henry that reading "the divine Emerson[,] volume after volume"he was preparing lecture to celebrate Emerson's centenary"has done me a lot of good, and, strange to say, has thrown a strong practical light on my own path. The incorruptible way in which he followed his own vocation, of seeing such truths as the Universal Soul vouchsafed to him from day to day and month to month, and reporting them in the right literary form, and thereafter kept his limits absolutely, refusing to be entangled with irrelevancies however urging and tempting, knowing both his strength and its limits[,] . . . seems to me a moral lesson to all men who have any genius, however small, to foster" (letter of May 3, 1903). That means it is a moral lesson to all of us, because Emersonian genius, as Stanley Cavell says, isn't "something certain people are" (not usually, anyway), but "something each person has."22 I'll be giving Emerson's Nature the kind of meticulous attention we usually reserve for poetry. I'll be assigning numbers to chapters and paragraphs as if they were stanzas and lines. Throughout, I'll be trusting that what Emerson said of your forbears a century and a half agothat "a stanza in the song of nature the Oxonian has no ear for, and . . . does not value the salient and curative influence of intellectual action, studious of truth, without a by-end"is no longer true, if it ever was.23 I'd like to make two preliminary comments. The first is that Emerson's idealism was not an innovation of his post-pastoraland, at least in my view, emphatically post-Christian and "unChurched"transcendentalism.24 It was, at first, part and parcel of his Christianity. It is present, for example, in Emerson's very first sermon, where he says that it has been one of the best uses of the Christian religion to teach, that the world of spirits is more certain and stable than the material universe. Every thoughtful man has felt, that there was a more awful reality to thought and feeling, than to the infinite panorama of nature around him.25 To suppose otherwise, he warnsto assign "greater fixture and certainty to the material world" is "a great practical error." Here you may be reminded of Hylas's surprise at Philonous's declaration of idealism"What! this is no more than I and all Christians hold" (Second Dialogue, Works 2: 212)but even if Hylas is right so to generalize, we have no reason to trivialize what Emerson is saying here. He accepted the Diminished Reality of Body and the Displacement of the Senses before he became a transcendentalist. My second preliminary comment is a warning: do not expect, even in Emerson's most overtly idealist work, the kind of patient analysis and rigorously linear argument presented to us by Edwards. Very early on, Emerson recognized that his talents did not lie in this direction. "A logical mode of thinking & speaking," he confessed to his journal in 1824he was not yet twentyone"I do not possess, & may not reasonably hope to attain" (Journals [Library of America], volume 1, p. 110). "My reasoning faculty is proportionately weak, nor can I ever hope to write a Butler's Analogy or an Essay of Hume" (1: 110). Nine years later there had been no change (or, if you prefer, no improvement): "my comprehension of a question in technical metaphysics [is] very slow" (1: 223). It is the judgment of many of his readers that Emerson excelled most as a writer of sentences, and that he was less successful at putting them in orderthis despite the fact that putting them in order, after culling them from his journals, may have been his most arduous labor as a writer for publication.26 His friend Bronson Alcott said of his essays, "you may begin at the last paragraph and read backwards."27 Of Nature in particular, Elizabeth Peabody, who admired it, observed that "it wants connection," to which Emerson replied, "I thought it resembled the

7 multiplication table"a remark that has always left me wondering whether he was confirming Peabody's verdict or repudiating it.28 His last book of essays (published in 1876) was really put together not by him (his capacities as a lecturer and writer had been declining for at least six years), but by his daughter Ellen and his amanuensis (and literary executor) James Eliot Cabot. One reviewer noticed that the essays had more of a plan than usual, and wondered whether someone else"a daughter, perhaps?"had a hand in them.29 "Expect nothing more of my powers of construction," Emerson wrote to Thomas Carlyle: "no shipbuilding, no clipper, smack, nor skiff even, only boards and logs tied together" (from the correspondence with Carlyle, quoted in Rosenwald, p. 72). Worse, Emerson seems to doubt the imperative value of consistency. He advised Charles Woodbury not to "concern yourself about consistency. The moment you putty and plaster your expressions to make them hang together, you have begun a weakening process. Take it for granted that the truths will harmonize; and as for the falsities and mistakes, they will speedily die of themselves. If you must be contradictory, let it be clean and sharp, as the two blades of scissors meet."30 He cherished ellipticality. "The most interesting writing is that which does not quite satisfy the reader. Try and leave a little thinking for him . . . . A little guessing does him no harm, so I would assist him with no connections" (quoted in Richardson, p. 36). An author's proper aim is not to tell the truth but to suggest it (Journals 1: 415). "The unsaid part is the best of every discourse" (1: 416). All this makes it natural to wonder whether Emerson can fairly be called a philosopher. (At least at times, Emerson himself had no doubts: "I was," he writes, comparing himself to several contemporaries, all of them Harvard professors, "the true philosopher" [Journals 1: 321]). Wilfrid Sellars defined philosophy as the attempt "to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term." Emerson's own definition of philosophy is remarkably similar. It is, he writes in his character study of "Plato, or, the Philosopher," "the account which the human mind gives to itself of the constitution of the world" (Essays [Library of America], p. 637). Many of us would be inclined to stipulate, though, that to qualify as philosophical, any understanding of how things hang togetherany synoptic vision of the world's constitutionmust be achieved by argument, and therefore by cultivating allegiance to the virtues of argument (coherence, consistency, a readiness to distinguish and to render explicit) of which Emerson seems to be so careless.31 "Plato is philosophy," he says, "and philosophy, Plato" (Essays, p. 633), but Plato makes Socrates identify argument as the "philosopher's instrument most of all" (Republic 582d). Stanley Cavell is the greatest present-day advocate of Emerson-asphilosopher, and even he admits that "no one should rest easy at the idea of philosophy abandoning the business of argument."32 Emerson's standing as a philosopher was not, in mid-nineteenth-century America, the debatable matter that it is (for some at least) today.33 For many educated people in those times, Emerson was the very model of a philosopher.34 It was the professionalization of philosophy, which began in the late nineteenth-century and came to perfection in the twentieth, that made Emerson's standing a concern; in 1903, when the one-hundredth anniversary of his birth led some of the recently-founded journals to meditate on his importance, the question became a natural one for perhaps the first time.35 Emerson was not, to be sure, a "technical scholar," Hugo Munsterberg admitted, but in lending his name to what he described as Harvard's "noble" and "monumental . . . home for philosophy" (p. 3), its "house of wisdom" (p. 5), Harvard had, in his view, done just the right thing.36 By "choosing the name of Ralph Waldo Emerson," Munsterberg suggested, Harvard was indicating that "the philosophy of our time ought to be guided by the spirit of idealism." "No one," he continued, "stood more warmly, more luminously, more whole-heartedly for the deepest convictions of idealistic philosophy: he believed in the freedom of man and in the absolute value of man's ideals" (pp. 5-6).

8 Present-day philosophers aren't the only ones who hesitate to classify Emerson as a philosopher. Harold Bloom writes that Emerson "is not a transcendental philosopher. This obvious truth always needs restating."37 But if he is not a transcendental philosopher, it's hard to see him as a philosopher of any other kind.38 I myself want to count Emerson as a philosopher, simply because he satisfies Sellars's (and his own) definition, but it must be acknowledged that what Plato regarded as philosophy's foremost instrument is one that Emerson leaves unused, unhandled, and very nearly untouched.39 I think nonetheless that we can find things of philosophical interest in Emerson, and that is my reason for taking himand Nature in particularup in these lectures. In Nature, as Charles Eliot Norton (Harvard's first professor of the history of art and the son of Divinity School professor Andrews Norton, Emerson's fiercest early critic) informed an audience in Concord in 1903, there is "no systematic philosophy," yet we find there "an . . . interpretation of the universe, and of the life of man as a part of that universe."40 Although it skims too easily over the surface, ignoring the sometimes turbulent currents beneath, Norton's rendering of that interpretation is not a bad place to begin: The essence of his spiritual teaching seems to me to be comprised in three fundamental articles,first, that of the Unity of Being in God and Man; second, that of the creation of the visible, material world by Mind, and of its being the symbol of the spiritual world; and third, that of the identity and universality of moral law in the spiritual and the material universe. Nature appeared in two editions, the first in 1836 and the second in 1849, some years after both Essays: First Series (published in 1841) and Essays: Second Series (published in 1844). Although Joel Porte describes the second edition as "heavily revised," the changes strike me as rather slight.41 The most obvious is the substitution of a new motto. The original, displayed on the title page (which did not include the author's name), ran as follows:42 "Nature is but an image or imitation of wisdom, the last thing of the soul; nature being a thing which doth only do, but not know." PLOTINUS One of Emerson's customs was to put quotation marks around words that don't actually appear in the writings of the author (or any respectable translation of the author) he names. We may see other examples later on. In this case, the quoted words aren't taken directly from Plotinus, but from his seventeenth-century inheritor, Ralph Cudworth:43 How doth wisdom differ from that which is called nature? Verily in this manner, that wisdom is the first thing, but nature the last and lowest; for nature is but an image or imitation of wisdom, the last thing of the soul, which hath the lowest impress of reason shining upon it; as when a thick piece of wax is thoroughly impressed upon by a seal, that impress, which is clean and distinct in the superior superficies of it, will in the lower side by weak and obscure; and such is the stamp and signature of nature, compared with that of wisdom and understanding, nature being a thing which doth only do, but not know. That nature acts without knowledge was a prominent theme in Cudworth's System. He saw matter as altogether passive.44 The active principle in nature wasn't matter itself, but a "plastic" power or form (or set of such forms), a sort of go-between that brought God's will to bear on the material creation. "The plastic reason or form acts or works in matter," Cudworth wrote, "and that which acts naturally is not intellection nor vision, but a certain power of moving matter, which doth not know, but only do."45 We tend to suppose that nature (or its animating power) acts from intellection or vision, but this is, Cudworth warns, a projective error:

That in the works of nature there is neither prudence nor understanding, but only it seems so to our apprehensions, who judge of these Divine things of nature according to our own arts and faculties; and patterns borrowed from ourelves; as if the active principles of nature did produce their effects in the same manner as we do our artificial works. Wherefor we conclude, agreeably to the sense of the best philosophers, both ancient and modern, that nature is such a thing, as, though it act artificially, and for the sake of ends, yet it doth but ape and mimic the Divine art and wisdom, itself not understanding those ends which it acts for, nor the reason of what it doth in order to them; for which cause also it is not capable of consultation or deliberation, nor can it act electively, or with discretion. (p. 224 in the Birch edition) Although it's a mistake to suppose that nature is an understanding or reasoning agent, in which case it would be capable of free choice or "election," it's not a mistakeit is, in fact, necessaryto interpret it teleologically. Nature acts for the sake of ends, even if it doesn'tand can'thave those ends in view. This teleological conception, which pervades Cudworth's System, also pervades the opening chapters of Emerson's Nature. It gives Emerson's work a starting point that can might be described as idealistic. The ultimate reason why things in nature proceed as they do, according to the opening chapters, is that a guiding spirit of unfailing efficacy intended that they go that way. Efficient causation rests on final causation, and there would (in the view of the opening chapters) be no final causation if some spirit did not conceive of the ends towards which natural agents blindly fly.46 Emerson's teleological conception rises to the surface in the second paragraph of Nature, but let me begin with the first. Here Emerson is doing what he does so often: joyfully anticipating new worlds, and the new men and women who will occupy them. (I do not agree with Barbara L. Packer, for whom the paragraph brims with "satire and scorn."47) Our age is restrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poety and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to actions proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship. (Essays and Lectures [Library of America], p. 7) This passage has a broad philosophical background, in the doctrine of continuous creation of which Edwards made so much. According to the doctrine, our relation to the universe is no less original than Adam's, because our world is as much a new creation as his was. As Emerson wrote to his aunt, ten years before he published Nature: It is one of the feelings of modern philosophy, that it is wrong to regard ourselves so much in a historical light as we do, putting Time between God & us; and that it were fitter to account every moment of the existence of the Universe as a new Creation, and all as a revelation proceeding each moment from the Divinity to the mind of the observer.48

10 I will pursue this doctrine and its consequenceswhich caused trouble for Emerson, as they did for Edwardslater. For now I want to remain with Emerson's teleology, which, as I've said, reveals itself in paragraph two: Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable. We must trust the perfection of the creation so far, as to believe that whatever curiosity the order of things has awakened in our minds, the order of things can satisfy. Every man's condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth. In like manner, nature is already, in its forms and tendencies, describing its own design. Let us interrogate the great apparition, that shines so peacefully around us. Let us inquire, to what end is nature? (p. 7) We are asked here to trust in the perfection of creation, and to conceive of its perfection as a perfection of design. Its design, moreover, is centered upon us. The parts of any good design must be mutually adjusted; in this case, the whole of nature must be arranged to satisfy our curiosity. This is a version of Correspondence, as I called it in Lecture I. And when our curiosity moves us to ask the grandest question we can, a question so grand that Emerson can introduce it without, at first, specifying its contentthe first question that would occur to anyone who is blankly "interrogating" nature, and a question whose answer would give us the kind of satisfaction that no other answer couldEmerson frames the question teleologically. If we know the end of nature, he suggests, we'll know by far the most important thing about it. In the fourth paragraph of Nature, the concluding paragraph of its brief introduction, nature is defined: Philosophically considered, the universe ["universe" being Emerson's most general word for all of being] is composed of Nature and the Soul. Strictly speaking, therefore, all that is separate from us, all which Philosophy distinguished as the NOT ME, that is, both nature and art, all other men and my own body, must be ranked under this name, NATURE. (p. 8) When nature is opposed to art, it is being used in what Emerson goes on to call "the common [as opposed to the "philosophical"] sense" of the word, in which it "refers to essences unchanged by man." Art, by contrast, is "the mixture of his will with the same things." "His operations taken together are so insignificant," Emerson explains, "a little chipping, baking, patching, and washing, that in an impression so grand as that of the world on the human mind, they do not vary the result." So the introduction concludes. It's been declared beyond our power to disturb nature in the philosophical sense, but even if our operations are in that way insignificant, we are not. Emerson is seeking the end or purpose of nature, and that end or purpose is its end or purpose for us, as chapters two, three, four, and five, to which I'll soon turn, make clear.49 Chapter two, which begins the lower argument, opens as follows: Whoever considers the final cause of the world, will discern a multitude of uses that enter as parts into that result. They all admit of being thrown into one of the following classes; Commodity; Beauty; Language; and Discipline. (p. 12) To consider the final cause of the world is to ask, with paragraph two of the introduction, "to what end is nature?" Against this background, chapter one, which is entitled "Nature," at first appears an interruption. David Van Leer goes farther. He thinks that the introduction and chapter one at "at odds." The introduction, he writes,50

11

pretends to ask the purpose the nature but actually depicts a world so "grand" that it is largely intransigent, indifferent to the minor influences man might have upon it. A parallel tyrrany is depicted in the experiential first chapter, "Nature," where man's feeling of relationship to the natural world collapses into a subjectivism so total that the world becomes wholly phenomenal. I find myself disagreeing with pretty much everything Van Leer says here. Nature's intransigence is no direct objection to its servitude: it may serve us by being intransigent. And although the world of Nature eventually becomes "phenomenal" (it does so in chapter six, "Idealism"), it does not become phenomenal in chapter one, whose theme, as the introduction anticipates, is the adjustment between human beings and the nature they are powerless to change. Chapter one begins by explaining, in paragraph one, how nature serves us in our solitude. To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds, will separate between him and what he touches. One might think the atmosphere was made transparent with this design, to give man, in the heavenly bodies, the perpetual presence of the sublime. (p. 9) We are told in paragraph two that "the stars awaken a certain reverence, because though always present, they are inaccessible." Yet "all natural objects make a kindred impression, when the mind is open to their influence. Nature never wears a mean appearance" (p. 9). "When we speak of nature in this manner," Emerson explains in the third paragraph of the chapter, "we have a distinct but most poetical sense in the mind"a sense Emerson had passed over when, in the introduction, he distinguished (exhaustively, it had seemed) between the common and philosophical senses of "nature." In the third, poetical sense, "we mean the integrity of impression made by manifold natural objects" (p. 9).51 Here, the manifold natural objects are "natural" in the philosophical sense, as the rest of paragraph three, which counts farms as natural objects, indicates: It is this [the integrity of impression] which distinguishes the stick of timber of the woodcutter, from the tree of the poet. The charming landscape which I saw this morning, is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet. This is the best part of these men's farms, yet to this their warrantydeeds give no title. (p. 9) The man whose eye can integrate the landscape is the poet. But does that make everyone a poet, since each of us has an integrating eye? The eye, for Emerson, is indeed an integrating organ, and therefore a poetic one. Echoing Cudworth yet again, Emerson explains in chapter three that "such is the constitution of all things, or such the plastic power of the human eye, that the primary forms, as the sky, the mountain, the tree the animal, give us a delight in and for themselves, a pleasure arising from outline, color, motion, and grouping" (p. 14). Emerson's "or" isn't a sign of uncertainty, but of correction or clarification. The achievement of delight or pleasure, he concludes in the very next sentence, "seems partly owing to the eye itself. The eye is the best of artists. By the mutual actual of its structure and of the laws of light, perspective is produced, which integrates every mass of objects, of what character soever, into a well colored

12 and shaded globe, so that"returning us now to the treatment of the landscape in chapter one "where the particular objects are mean and unaffecting, the landscape which they compose, is round and symmetrical" (p. 14). The eye may be the best of artists (or, as he says a bit later, "the best composer"), but in integrating such elements as outline, color, motion, and grouping into what Emerson calls "primary forms"forms that are, of course, secondary in the perceptual process, though they are primary as formsthe eye, like Cudworth's plastic power, acts without knowing.52 The eye, which as part of the body falls within the philosopher's NOT ME, acts mechanistically or automatically, without either freedom or discretion. Is it true, then, that each of us is a poet? Emerson, in the fourth paragraph of chapter one, answers no: To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child. (p. 10) To my ear, Emerson's talk of "persons" has a stilted and awkward ring. I suspect that he speaks awkwardly because he is taking care not to confuse the organic eye (part of the NOT ME; in chapter six, Emerson calls it "the animal eye" [p. 33]) with the spiritual I (the ME or "person"). Joel Porte declares that "the 'eye' is the 'I,'" but this identity can only be figurative.53 In the terms Emerson lays down in chapter four of Nature, the eye is a natural fact emblematic of a spiritual one (p. 20). Its seeing is therefore emblematic of our seeing, but its seeing is, ironically, bereft of what Cudworth called "intellection or vision." The eye no more sees than a camera sees. Its seeing is a superficial seeing, and it is not our own. The eye is indeed a poetic organ, but few of us become poets, because few of us see with what Emerson calls "the heart." The poet achieves more integration than the bare eye, as Emerson affirms in what has become the most notorious passage in his book. Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhiliration. I am glad to the brink of fear. In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake its slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years. In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life,no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground,my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God. The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental: to be brothers, to be acquaintances,master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance. I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty. In the wilderness, I find something more dear and connate than in streets or villages. In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature. In a contemporary cartoon by fellow-transcendentalist Christopher Cranch, Emerson's eyeball is a long-legged, barefoot, top-hatted dandy in bespoke morning coat. I appreciate the

13

joke ("a perennial festival is dressed," and the well-turned-out eyeball is ready for it), but for me , Emerson's image hasn't lost its power.54 The eye, as I proposed before, is a sign or symbol of the personthe I or ME. The organic eye lies, as always, outside the visual field, but by making it transparent, Emerson assures us that it was never the sort of thing that could be seen. The visual field is thereby rendered totalnothing visible escapes itand so comes to signify the unlimited field of the poet's heartfelt vision, and the absolute integration of which the poet is, at least in theory, capable.55 The following paragraph, number five in the first chapter, gives us what Lawrence Buell describes as an "equally freakish image"that of a secret accord between man and plant:56 The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister, is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them. The waving of the boughs in the storm, is new to me and old. It takes me by surprise, and yet it not unknown. Its effect is like that of a higher thought or a better emotion coming over me, when I deemed I was thinking justly or doing right. (p. 11) The image may be freakish, but it is practically demanded by all we have been told so far. The tree and its boughs are "primary forms"; their "integrity of impression," which makes them

14 natural objects in the poetic sense, is at least to some extent our work. When (in chapter three) Emerson analyzes the integrating power of the eye, he is tentative in deeming it responsible for our delight, which "seems," he says, "partly owing to the eye itself" (p. 14, my emphasis). But in the sixth and final paragraph of chapter one, he is in no doubt about the personal I's centrality in generating the greatest delight that nature can occasion. He declares it "certain that the power to produce this delight, does not reside in nature, but in man, or in a harmony of both" (p. 11, my emphasis). There is no tyrrannical subjectivism here; Emerson's preferred hypothesis is one of harmony between subject and object.57 There is an occult relationpreviously hidden and now exposedbetween the personal I and the integrated objects in its purview. These objects exist at every level of organization (bough, tree, woodlot, landscape), up to that of nature itself. At every level, these objects, all of them inhabitants of nature in the poetic sense, depend on the integrating or unifying activity of the mind. There are no wholly natural individuals, and no wholly natural kinds. But these kinds and individuals also depend on what is given, on what Emerson calls, in chapter three, the "mass" or "constitution" of all things (p. 14). Nature in the poetic sense is poetized or made, but it is not made from nothing. It is worked up out of the NOT ME. We do not yet have idealism, because our making, though it penetrates far, does not reach "all the way down." It hasn't been shown that the reality of body depends on mind. Had Emerson argued that there are no pre-existing grounding elementsthat even outline, color, motion, and grouping depend on us for their existencea case for idealism would already have been made. But he makes no such argument. It might reasonably be objected that when Emerson speaks of "the integrity of impression made by manifold natural objects" (p. 9), he has in mind something mental, an integrity of impression rather than of an object natural or real. If so, nature in the third sense is not objective, but there is still an occult relation between objective nature and man, because objective nature complies with our impression-forming tendencies. When we form an impression of a tree, the NOT MEthe treenods in assent, or at any rate raises no objection. (The word "impression," in Emerson's writing, doesn't always convey passivity, as it does for example in Hume's.) In writing about both Thoreau and Emerson, Stanley Cavell calls attention to a pregnant sentence from Walden: "The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions."58 What is true of Thoreau's universe is also true of Emerson's nature. In a moment, we'll see in more detail how nature cooperates with our attempts to unify or integrate it.

2. Nature's uses (the "lower argument") There is a world of fascinating detail in chapters two through five of Nature, on the ends or human uses of nature, but I will have to pass most of them by, so that we can arrive before too long at "Idealism" (chapter six). "Commodity" (chapter two) is Emerson's first general heading; under it falls "all those advantages which our senses owe to nature" (p. 12), meaning everything in nature that meets our material needs, as well as our desires. Emerson devotes a scant few pages to it. Thoreau considers it at much greater length, with particular reference to the difference between needs and desires, in the longest chapter of Walden, under the telling heading of "Economy," and we'll hear more about it next week. Nature's material benefits are "temporary and mediate," not "ultimate" (p. 12). The beauty of nature, the subject of chapter three, serves a "nobler want of man," performing a "service" not to the body but "to the soul" (p. 12). The rewards of beauty are "ultimate" in a psychological sense: there is nothing else for the sake of which we love what beauty gives us.

15 Emerson identifies three aspects of beauty: "natural forms," whose "simple perception" is "a delight" (p. 14); beautiful settings that enhance or heighten spiritual or moral beauty ("are not . . . heroes," he asks, "entitled to add the beauty of the scene to the beauty of the deed?" [p. 17]); and the beauty of nature's "absolute order," as it becomes an object of the intellect (p. 18). In our response to nature's beauty in each of these three aspects, it is "Taste" that is at work (p. 18). Some have this taste or "love of beauty" in abundance. "Not content with admiring, they seek to embody it in new forms." This creation, says Emerson, is "Art," in which "nature work[s] throught the will of a man filled with the beauty of her first works" (p. 19). The desire of beauty is an "ultimate end" in the psychological sense of which I've already spoken (p. 19). "No reason can be asked or given why the soul seek beauty." But beauty is not ultimate in the ethical sense. "It is the herald of inward and eternal beauty, and is not alone a solid and satisfactory good. It must stand as a part, and not as yet the last or highest expression of the final cause of Nature" (p. 19). "Language," Emerson writes in chapter four, "is a third use which Nature subserves to Man" (p. 20). It is, he explains, "the vehicle of thought," and that in three ways: words are signs of material facts (indeed, "every word which is used to express a moral or intellectual fact, if traced to its root, is found to be borrowed from some material appearance" [p. 20]); "every natural [or material] fact is a symbol of some spiritual [or moral] fact" (p. 20) (for example, "the blue sky in which the private earth is buried, the sky with its eternal calm, and full of everlasting orbs, is the type of Reason" [p. 21]); and "the whole of nature,""the entire circuit of natural formsthe totality of nature" (p. 18)is a metaphor"the aptest metaphor"of the human mind" (p. 24).59 "Through Nature," Emerson had written in a journal entry plotting the course of his book, "there is a striving upward," and there is an upward movement throughout all of these early chapters. "Commodity points toward a greater good," the entry continues. "Beauty is not until the spiritual element. Language refers to that which is to be said." "Finally, Nature is a discipline" an education"& points to the pupil & exists for the pupil. Her being is subordinate; his is superior. Man underlies Ideas. Nature receives him as her god."60 In this journal entry, Emerson frankly announced his idealism. In the actual version of chapter five, entitled "Discipline," he is more cautious. "In view of the significance of nature," he begins, "we arrive at once at a new fact, that nature is a discipline" (p. 26). In the first edition he had said "this significance of nature," making it clear that the chapter's starting point isn't nature's importance in general, but its signifying power (or semiotic potential) in particular. This fourth "use of the world"the kind of ameliorating use to which Joseph Emerson tried to turn his rejection by Esther Edwards"includes the preceding uses, as parts of itself," because nature, as commodity, beauty, or language, imparts lessons. It also educates or disciplines the faculties. At first, Emerson mentions only two such faculties: "the Understanding and the Reason" (p. 26). In distinguishing between understanding from reason, he follows Samuel Coleridge. Coleridge conceives of the understanding as a discursive faculty. It moves to conclusions from premisses, and its premisses are referred, as Coleridge explains, "to some other faculty as its ultimate authority." Characteristically, that authoritative faculty is sense. "The Judgments of the Understanding," he writes, "are binding only in relation to the objects of the Senses, which we reflect"that is, recover or reproduce"under the forms of the Understanding," those forms being nothing more than images of what the senses first deliver. Reason, by contrast, is a self-sufficient power of insight. Its forms or "ideas" are not derived from any other facultycertainly not from sense. They are innate, and the truths they embody are not inferred, but immediately known. "In all its decisions [reason] appeals to itself as

16 the ground and substance of their truth," writes Coleridge. Reason is "a direct Aspect of Truth, an inward Beholding, having a similar relation to the Intelligible or Spiritual, as Sense has to the Material or Phenomenal."61 When Emerson writes that a true theory of nature "will be its own evidence," he's looking forward to the kind of self-dependent validation that only reason can provide. (Sense too can provide self-dependent validation, but only within a severely limited domain, as we will see.) Reason's recognition of truth is what Emerson calls intuition. Chapter five is divided in two numbered parts, the first on the discipline of the understanding, the second on the discipline of reason. Nature, we're told in part one, is "a discipline of the understanding in intellectual truths." It is an opportunity for "constant exercise in the necessary lessons of difference, of likeness, of order, of being and seeing, of progressive arrangement; of ascent from particular to general; of combination to one end of manifold forces" (p. 26). Among its fruits are the sciences of "Light, Heat, Electricity, Magnetism, Physiology, [and] Geology" (p. 27). Nor is "the interest of natural science . . . likely to be soon exhausted" (p. 28). With this promise of a continuing education of the understanding, we seem ready to move on to reason. But in the last two paragraphs of the first numbered part of chapter five, Emerson introduces a new and unexpected division. "Passing by many particular of the discipline of nature," he says, "we must not omit to specify two" (p. 28). The second is the discipline of reason, the topic of the second numbered part. Number one is the discipline of the will. "The excise of the Will or the lesson of power is taught in every event" (p. 28). "Nature," Emerson continues, is thoroughly mediate. It I made to serve. It receives the dominion of man as meekly as the ass on which the Saviour rode. It offers all its kingdoms to man as the raw material which he may mould into what is useful. Many is never weary of working it up. He forges the subtile and delicate air into wise and melodious words, and gives them wing as angels of persuasion and command. One after another, his victorious thought comes up with and reduces all things, until the world becomes, at least, only a realized willthe double of the man. (p. 28) This is a puzzling passage on several counts, and I'm doubtful I can unravel all its mysteries. If nature is as docile and compliant as the passage suggests, is it imposing much of a discipline at all? And why is the will being brought in here, under the heading of the understanding? I can do better with the second question than with the first. Emerson takes up the will here because he cannot fairly take it up in the section he's assigned to reason. Reason, as the early Emerson understands it, has no real commerce with the will. Intuitions, even moral intuitions, are, in Emerson's view, non-voluntary and impersonal.62 Descartes taught that every judgment is a collaboration between the understanding (construed broadly, so as to include what Emerson calls reason) and the will. The understanding, like a chief executive introducing a bill to a legislature, puts forward a proposition for the will's consideration. The will, like the legislature, votes up or down, yea or nay. In the case of what Descartes called clear and distinct perceptions, the will's assent is extorted. It chooses to say yes, but it cannot help but do so. In intuition, as it was understood by the early Emerson and many of his contemporaries, the willthe individual or personal willis not involved at all. The perception of the truth is its affirmation. This is made especially clear by Emerson's cousin, George Ripley, in his Discourses on the Philosophy of Religion, published in the same year as Nature (and by the same Boston publisher):63 Reason . . . gives us the immediate perception of Truth. It is the ultimate standard, in judging on all subjects of human inquiry. . . . There are certain points on which the judgment of all men is alikecertain propositions, which every one would pronounce true, certain others which all would declare false. We are compelled to this by the nature

17 of our Reason. It is not subject to the control of our will. We cannot say, that we choose to have two and two appear equal to five, and therefore they are so in the sight of Reason; but this faculty exercises its own judgment, announces its own decisions, enforces its own authority, from which there is no appeal. Emerson places the will beneath the understanding because they are educated together. Space and time teach the understanding lessons in difference. They exist so that "man may know that things are not huddled and lumped, but sundered and individual" (p. 27). The understanding learns that "a bell and a plough have each their use, and neither can do the office of the other. Water is good to drink, coal to burn, wool to wear; but wool cannot be drunk, nor water spun, nor coal eaten." These lessons all make reference to action and the will. The sheer perception of difference may not call upon the will, but when the understanding advances fartherwhen it begins to order, arrange, ascend, and combine (p. 26)the will is again implicated. Reason, by contrast, offers the will neither instruction (except insofar as it reminds the will of its limits) nor opportunity for exercise. In an outburst recorded by Emerson during his first trip to England, Coleridge proposed that "the will [is] that by which a person is a person"that by which each of us differs from every otherbecause "if he should put me in the street & so I should force the man next me into the kennel I should at once exclaim to the sufferer 'I did not do it sir,' meaning it was not done with my will" (Journals 1: 390; later incorporated in English Traits, p. 771). When I affirm the laws of mathematics, the laws of nature, or the laws of right and wrong, I am the same with every other man or woman, because my individuating will has been suppressed. The lessons of reason are lessons in radical unitylessons the will cannot easily apply. These lessons are spelled out in the second numbered part of chapter five. The same laws run through all of nature. In this, nature's unity is "especially apprehended": All the endless variety of things make an idential impression. Xenophanes complained in his old age, that look where he would, all things hastened back to Unity. He was weary of seeing the same entity in the tedious variety of forms. The fable of Proteus has a cordial truth. A left, a drop, a crystal, or moment of time is related to the whole, and partakes the perfection of the whole. Each particle is a microcosm, and faithfully renders the likeness of the world. (pp. 29-30) In this first passage, a report of fable and pre-Socratic science, it's not yet clear that nature's unity is nomological. That point is made plainer in the following passage, where the unity apprehended by reason is extended beyond nature to the "universe," which sometimes serves as Emerson's term for absolutely everything:64 The river, as it flows, resembles the air that flows over it; the air resembles the light which traverses it with more subtle currents; the light resembles the heat which rides with it through Space. Each creature is only a modification of the other; the likeness in them is more than difference, and their radical law is one and the same. A rule of one art, or a law of one organization, holds true throughout nature. So intimate is this Unity, that, it is easily seen, it lies under the undermost garmet of nature, and betrays its source in Universal Spirit. For, it pervades Thought also. (p. 30) Emerson's step from nature to spirit is of utmost importance. The contrast between nature and spirit is implicit in the motto of the first edition: blind nature acts, but only spirit thinks or knows. It is implicit also in Emerson's definition of nature in the philosophical sense ("[p]hilosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul" [p. 8]), but its official introduction is postponed until chapter four, and left to a passage I haven't yet quoted:

18 "That which, intellectually considered, we call Reason, considered in relation to nature, we call Spirit. Spirit is the Creator" (p. 21). "Spirit," Emerson adds, "hath life in itself," implying that whatever life we find in nature is secondary or derived. In a later essay entitled "Nature," published in 1844 in Essays: Second Series, Emerson marks the same distinction with scholastic vocabulary.65 Spirit is natura naturans, "the quick cause" that "publishes itself in creatures" ("Nature," p. 546). Nature is natura naturata, or "nature passive" (p. 545). When reason recognizes that all of nature is united by a single set of laws, its vision achieves a high degree of integration. When it recognizes that spirit is united to nature by the same lawswhen it "transfers all these lessons into its own world of thought, by perceiving the analogy that marries Matter and Mind" (p. 26)that integration radiates outward to everything there is. The laws binding the universe are simultaneously natural and moral ("every natural process," we are reminded in chapter five, "is a version of a moral sentence" [p. 29]), and the perception of unity is, in its impersonality, an instance of both mathematical insight and poetic inspiration. We are now on the threshold of "Idealism." In truth, we're already there. Nature and spirit are officially united in the paragraphs just reviewed, but priority is given to spiritthe "quick" or genuinely active cause. As chapter six begins, though, Emerson at first turns away from spirit, and redirects our attention to nature.

3. "A noble doubt": Emerson's conception of idealism The argument of chapter six begins by insinuating a "noble doubt" about the end of discipline, to which (it has been shown) "all parts of nature conspire" (p. 32): A noble doubt perpetually suggests itself, whether this end be not the Final Cause of the Universe; and whether nature outwardly exists. It is a sufficient account of that Appearance we call the World, that God will teach a human mind, and so makes it the receiver of a certain number of congruent sensations, which we call sun and moon, man and woman, house and trade. In my utter impotence to test the authenticity of the report of my senses, to know whether the impressions they make on me correspond with outlying objects, what different does it make, whether Orion is up there in heaven, or some god paints the image in the firmanent of the soul? The relations of parts and the end of the whole remaining the same, whether land and sea interact, and worlds revolve and intermingle, without number or end,deep yawning under deep, and galaxy balancing galaxy, throughout absolute space,or, whether, without relations of time and space, the same appearances are inscribed in the constant faith of man? Whether nature enjoy a substantial existence without, or is only in the apocalypse of the mind, it is alike useful and alike venerable to me. Be what it may, it is ideal to me, so long as I cannot try the accuracy of my senses. (p. 32) "The frivolous," he immediately adds, "make themselves merry with the Ideal theory, as if its consequences were burlesque; as if it affected the stability of nature. It surely does not." And it does not, Emerson explains, because the permanence of nature's laws is, even on the ideal theory, "sacredly respected." "The wheels and springs of man," he continues, are all set to the hypothesis of the permanence of nature. We are not built like a ship to be tossed, but like a house to stand. It is a natural consequence of this structure, that, so long as the active powers predominate over the reflective, we resist with indignation any hint that nature is more short-lived or mutable than spirit. (pp. 32-3)

19 But "whilst we acquisce entirely in the permanence of natural laws, the question of the absolute existence of nature still remains open. It is the uniform effect of culture on the human mind, not to shake our faith in the stability of particular phenomena, . . . but to lead us to regard nature as a phenomenon, not a substance; to attribute necessary existence to spirit; to esteem nature as an accident and an effect" (p. 33). I've quoted these paragraphs at some length (though somewhat selectively) because I want to take issue with what seems to be a standard reading of them. David Van Leer contends that the arguments of chapter six are "clearly" Kantian (Emerson's Epistemology, p. 27), and that the "noble doubt" paragraph in particular ("a sophisticated Kantian formulation," he calls it [p. 46]) expresses Emerson's "essentially Kantian orientation" (p. 29). In this it seems he has been often followed.66 My own feeling is that up to this point in chapter six, the terms of Emerson's discussion are not Kantian but Berkeleyan. Indeed, as I'll now try to show, they are deliberately Berkeleyan.67 Emerson is responding not to Kant (which isn't to say that Emerson's reading in Kantor, more likely, Kant's expositorsdid nothing to shape the quoted paragraphs I've quoted; it may have led to a little chipping here and a little patching there), but to Berkeley and the Scottish philosophers who replied to him. (When he detects what might be Berkeleyan "overtones," Van Leer steers us away from them. See p. 35.) My reasons are several.68 (i) First, Emerson tells us that the frivolous make merry with the ideal theory. It was Berkeley who had, by then, become a figure of fun, not Kant. As Stephen Spender observes when he recalls, in World within World, his Oxford education in philosophy (an "Obstacle Race," he calls it, in which "the whole field of human thought is set out with logical obstructions and the students watch the philosophers race around it"), "Kant was wrong, but he was also so difficult that no one could be sure of catching him out."69 For the same reason, no one could safely make him the butt of any jokes. (ii) The topics of the paragraphs are thoroughly Berkeleyan.70 That our discipline or education is the final cause of nature is one of Berkeley's greatest themes. It is Berkeley who insists that God's will to instruct us is a sufficient account of the appearance of the world. That God makes us receive congruent sensations we call sun and moon is Berkeley's theory of the physical world. It is Berkeley who argues, in sections 18-20 of the Principles, that we can't prove that sensations are caused by mind-independent objects. And it is Berkeley who, above all, insists that this makes no difference whatsoever. As he says, the books are in the study, the horse is in the stable as before. The noble doubt paragraph does mention absolute space, as Van Leer points out, but Berkeley discusses absolute space at great length. "Whether nature enjoy[s] a substantial existence without, or is only an apocalypse of the mind" is a florid way of stating Berkeley's central question. That the laws of nature are stable is another Berkeleyan theme. He does not say (and perhaps denies) that we have an instinctive belief in the absolute existence of nature, but that we have such a belief was a point made against him (in different tones and for different purposes) by Hume, Thomas Reid, and Dugald Stewart. (iii) Later in chapter six, Emerson names Berkeley (he never names Kant): [Religion and ethics] both put nature under foot. The first and last lesson of religion is, "The things that are seen, are temporal; the things that are unseen, are eternal." It puts an affront upon nature. It does that for the unschooled, which philosophy does for Berkeley and Viasa. (p. 38)

20 And now does philosophy, for Berkeley, put nature under foot? By suggesting the noble doubt. (iii) The paragraphs are not at all Kantian. (I admit that at this point, my quarrel with Van Leer becomes, as Emerson might say, lubricious, and I don't like lubricity any more than Emerson did [for his low opinion, to which I may return, see "Prudence," p. 357 in Essays]. We're asking about a Kant who's at work beneath Emerson's paragraphs. But is it the historical Kant, a Kant who has first passed through the hands of Coleridge, or an invention of Emerson's own mind?) Kant himself thought that the "noble doubt" was ignoble: a scandal to be done away with, rather than an attitude to be celebrated or an insight on which we might build. The paragraphs all lead to the conclusion that "the absolute existence of nature still remains open" (p. 33). Later, in chapter seven, Emerson repeats the point: "Idealism," he says there, "acquaints us with the total disparity between the evidence of our own being, and the evidence of the world's being. The one is perfect; the other, incapable of any assurance" (pp. 40-1). This was, for Emerson, a lasting lesson, to which he returns in a lecture on "Love" that he delivered in both 1839 and 1840, as well as in English Traits, where it is explicitly traced to Berkeley.71 "In strict philosophy," Emerson says in the lecture, there is a quite infinite distance between our knowledge of our own existence and the evidence we have for the existence of nature including that of persons. In Logic the position of the Idealist is inexpugnable who persists in regarding men as appearances and phantoms merely which represent to him his own ideas in the masquerade of forms like his own. Kant emphatically denies these claims of disparity, distance, and imperturbability. He does so in a stretch of his Critique of Pure Reason actually emphasized by Van Leer, the "Refutation of Idealism." There, as Van Leer explains, "Kant attacks the . . . argument that the existence of objects in space is indemonstrable," contending that "empirical self-consciousness requires the existence of objects in space" (p. 30). "[P]ace Descartes and Berkeley," Van Leer asserts on Kant's behalf, "the consciousness of self is necessarily bound up with the existence of things" (p. 30). If so, Emerson is either ignorant of Kant's argument or unimpressed with it. In deeming the mind better known than the body, Emerson sides not with Kant, but with Descartes and Berkeley. There are many other anti-Kantian elements in the noble doubt paragraph and the rest of chapter six, but I'll quickly mention two. First, a Kantian physical object is not a "certain number of congruent sensations," passively received (Emerson's Epistemology, p. 32). Second, a Kantian appearance does not exist "without relations of time and space" (Emerson's Epistemology, p. 32). My worry in each of these cases isn't just that Kant fails to say these things, but that he labors long and hard to establish just the opposite. (Will it be said that Emerson is simply making use of Kant as he understood him? This takes us back to the kind of question I raised above. If Van Leer isn't saying something about the historical Kant, I don't know how to evaluate his contentions. He's given me no way of understanding them.) (iv) There is no foundation in the text of chapter six for the distinction between transcendental idealism and empirical realism that Van Leer attributes to Emerson. Emerson can accept a "quite specific 'transcendental idealism'" (Emerson's Epistemology, p. 29) only if he accepts an equally specific empirical realism. For Van Leer, Emerson is an empirical realist simply because he affirms the stability of nature and loves it as a child (Nature, p. 38). But Berkeley or Hume can do the same.72 Later in chapter six, Emerson writes that "The problem of philosophy," according to Plato, "is, for all that exists conditionally, to find a ground unconditioned and absolute." (p. 36)

21

This is actually a quotation from Coleridge, as Van Leer notes (pp. 3, 210; for further discussion see Wellek, "Emerson and German Philosophy," p. 42). According to Van Leer, in the quoted passage Emerson "attributes to Plato the explicitly Kantian definition of philosophy as the attempt to find a conditioned ground for the conditional" (p. 3). This is a Kantian definition, insofar as it makes use of Kantian vocabulary, but it is not Kant's. It's Kant's definition of dogmatic philosophy. But Emerson treats it as a definition of philosophy, and after attributing it to Plato, he accepts it himself. For the evidence see pp. 36-7 of Nature, where the Platonic aim of "the true philosopher" is made to coincide with that of "the true poet." Like Berkeley, and like Fichte as Van Leer portrays him (p. 29), Emerson is simply not a Kantian (that is, a critical) transcendental idealist. He is, throughout chapter six (and in chapter seven as well), an unapologetic dogmatist. (v) Van Leer never explains why, in chapter seven, Emerson characterizes idealism as "a useful introductory hypothesis" (p. 41). I think he has no good way of doing so. My reading permits as very natural explanation, as I'll try to show later. As an illustration of nature's role in signifying spiritual facts, Emerson writes at one point that "broad noon shall be my England of the senses and the understanding; the night shall be my Germany of mystic philosophy and dreams" (p. 15). I'll argue that there is, in chapter six, a subtle but crucial shift from noon to night. It is a shift from England to Germany, or from the introductory idealism of Berkeley to the deeper spiritualism of Fichte or Schelling. (vi) I should consider two possible objections. The noble doubt paragraph and the two that follow it are succeeded by another, which does not seem particularly Berkeleyan: To the senses and the unrenewed understanding, belongs a sort of instinctive belief in the absolute existence of nature. In their view, man and nature are indissolubly joined. Things are ultimates, and they never look beyond their sphere. The presence of Reason mars this faith. The first effort of thought tends to relax this despotism of the senses, which binds us to nature as if we were a part of it, and shows us nature aloof, and, as it were, afloat. Until this higher agency intervened, the animal eye sees, with wonderful accuracy, sharp outlines and colored surfaces. When the eye of Reason opens, to outline and surface are at once added, grace and expression. Those proceed from imagination and affection, and abate somewhat of the angular distinctness of objects. If the Reason be stimulated to more earnest vision, outlines and surfaces become transparent, and are no longer seen; causes and spirits are seen through them. The best moments of life are these delicious awakenings of the higher powers, and the reverential withdrawing of nature before God. (p. 33) A good deal of this is, perhaps, unBerkeleyan. But it is far more remote from Kant than it is from Berkeley, who had this to say in Siris: The perceptions of sense are gross: but even in the senses there is a difference. Though harmony and proportion are not objects of sense, yet the eye and the ear are organs, by means whereof she may apprehend both the one and the other. By experiments of sense we become acquainted with the lower faculties of the soul; and from them, whether by a gradual evolution or ascent, we arrive at the highest. Sense supplies images to memory. These become subjects for fancy to work on. Reason considers and judges of the imaginations. And these acts of reason become new objects to the understanding. In this scale, each lower faculty is a step that leads to one above it. And the uppermost leads to the Deity, which is rather the object of intellectual knowledge than even of the discursive faculty, not to mention the sensitive. There runs a chain throughout the whole system of

22 beings. In this chain one link drags another. The meanest things are connected with the highest. The calamity therefore is neither strange nor much to be complained of, if a low sensual reader shall, from mere love of the animal life, find himself drawn on, surprised, and betray'd into some curiosity concerning the intellectual. (303) There is according to Plato properly no knowledge, but only opinion concerning things sensible and perishing, . . . because they do not in strict truth exist at all, being always generating or in fieri, that is, in a perpetual flux, without any thing stable or permannet in them to constitute an object of real science. . . . And indeed nothing is more evident, than the apparent sizes and shapes, for instance, of things are in a constant flux, ever differing as they are view'd at different distances, or with glasses more or less accurate. As for those absolute magnitudes and figures, which certain Cartesians and other moderns suppose to be in things, that must seem a vain supposition, to whoever considers, it is supported by no argument of reason, and no experiment of sense. (304; see also articles 255 and 264) I cannot say with certainty that Emerson read Siris.73 But I do think that familiarity with Siris is the easiest way of accounting for Berkeley's appearance in this appreciative paragraph from English Traits:74 The influence of Plato tinges the British genius. Their minds loved analogy; were cognisant of resemblances, and climbers on the staircase of unity. 'Tis a very old strife between those who elect to see identity, and those who elect to see discrepancies; and it renews itself in Britain. The poets, of course, are of one part; the men of the world, of the other. But Britain had many disciples of Plato;More, Hooker, Bacon, Sidney, Lord Brooke, Herbert, Browne, Donne, Spenser, Chapman, Milton, Crashaw, Norris, Cudworth, Berkeley, Jeremy Taylor. (English Traits, p. 896 in Essays) (vii) Emerson asks (p. 32) what difference it would make whether, "without relations of time and space, . . . appearances are inscribed in the constant faith of man?" Berkeley's appearances, it seems fair to say, exist without relations of space, but do they also exist without relations of time? Here I have several observations to offer. First, Emerson is setting the ideal theory off against a view in which worlds revolve and intermingle "throughout absolute space." When he says that the appearances of the idealist exist apart from time, he probably means that they exist apart from absolute time. Berkeley agrees: we have, he says, no idea of time, "abstracted from the succession of ideas in my mind, which flows uniformly, and is participated by all beings" (A Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, section 98).75 Second, Dugald Stewart, one of Emerson's most trusted sources on the ideal theory, reports that Berkeley denied "the independent existence both of space and of time."76 (Stewart points out that this would "put an end at once to [Samuel Clarke's] celebrated argument a priori, for the existence of God."77) So Emerson's saying that the idealist's appearances exist "without relations of time and space" marks no departure from Berkeley, as Emerson is likely to have understood him.78

4. Motives of idealism "It is not metre, but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem," Emerson says ("The Poet," p. 450 in Essays). "But where," asks John Jay Chapman of Emerson's poetry, acknowledging the reliable excellence of its prologues and overtures, "is the argument?" (Emerson and Other Essays, p. 91).79 After the prologue of the noble doubt paragraph and the overture of the paragraphs on the earnest vision of the eye of Reason, the argument of chapter six commences.80

23 But it doesn't provide us with the reasonsthe evidenceyou're like to be expecting. Instead, Emerson draws our attention to "the effects of culture" (p. 33). He's interested less in what we should believe, than in what culture makes us believe. His concerns (almost without exception) aren't normative but causal.81 As he's already informed us, "it is the uniform effect of culture on the human mind, not to shake our faith in the stability of particular phenomena, as of heat, water, azote; but to lead us to regard nature as a phenomenon, not a substance; to attribute necessary existence to spirit; to esteem nature as an accident and an effect" (p. 33). In the argument of "Idealism," this effect is documented and its motives identified. Why does Emerson give us what is largely a study in causes? I think there is a clue in the sentence I've just quoted, where he acknowledges, as he does elsewhere, the dogmatic tendencies that instilled in us by nature. Nature's sway over our opinions is the core of the Scottish reply to Berkeley, as it appears not only in Reid and Stewart but in Hume, who concludes that Berkeley's arguments, though they admit of no answer, produce no conviction. "Their only effect," he states, "is to cause that momentary amazement and irresolution and confusion, which is the result of scepticism" (Enquiry concerning Human Understanding 12). Emerson disagrees. He thinks Berkeley's argument has a lasting result. The Scottish case against Berkeley has been made, and in chapter six of Nature, Emerson sets out to level the field. Somewhat as a skeptic might, he sets pro and con in opposition, but the forces going toe to toe are causal rather than evidential. Nature may take a stand against idealism, but culture stands united with it, and neither is content with second place. If nature is driving us in one direction and culture in another, what is the resultant? I hope eventually to answer this question, but let me first look at the five motives that Emerson uncovers. To each he devotes a numbered section. The first he calls a "hint from nature herself" (p. 33), but it is actually imparted by nature and culture in collaboration: Nature is made to conspire with spirit to emancipate us. Certain mechanical changes, a small alteration in our local position apprizes us of a dualism. We are strangely affected by seeing the shore from a moving ship, from a balloon, or through the tints of an unusual sky. The least change in our point of view, gives the whole world a pictorial air. A man who seldom rides, needs only to get into a coach and traverse his own town, to turn the street into a puppet-show. The men, the women . . . are unrealized at once, or, at least, wholly detached from all relation to the observer, and seen as apparent, not as substantial beings. . . . In thse cases, by mechanical means, is suggested the difference between the observer and the spectacle,between man and nature. Hence arises a pleasure mixed with awe; I may say, a low degree of the sublime is felt from the fact, probably, that man is hereby apprized that, whilst the world is a spectacle, something in himself is stable. (p. 34) The terms are reminiscent of arguments from perceptual relativity, but Emerson isn't arguing that we immediately perceive only our own ideas, or that surrounding objectsmen and women includedare nothing but ideas. He is pointing to the effect, no less affective than intellectual, that objects have on us as we (for example) rush past or see them at a distance. (Why does this apparently "natural" effect fall under the heading of "culture"? I think it's because the coach, the ship, and the balloonas well as the camera obscura, which he mentions in lines I've omitted are artifacts. Nature and culture collaborate in bringing about the effect he mentions. But I don't know what to do with the tints of the sky. They are altogether natural.)

24 The second force belongs to the poet, who can "dwarf the great" and "magnify the small" (p. 35).82 Like movement or distance, but by imagination rather than by mechanism, poetry makes us aware "that magnitude of material things is relative, and all objects shrink and expand" to serve the poet's passion. The concluding paragraph of this second numbered section of chapter six indicates that idealism is not defended here but presupposed. Emerson has just quoted lines of Shakespeare in which the understanding of frenzied men begins to swell, filling "the reasonable shores / That now lie foul and muddy" (p. 36). The perception of real affinities between events (that is to say, of ideal affinities, for those only are real), enables the poet thus to make free with the most imposing forms and phenomena of the world, and to assert the predominance of the soul. In the third numbered section Emerson quotes Plato's statement of the problem of philosophy, as formulated by Coleridge. Philosophy proceeds, Emerson explains, "in the faith that a law determines all phenomena, which being known the phenomena can be predicted. That law, when in the mind, is an idea. Its beauty is infinite. The true philosopher and the true poet are one, and a beauty, which is truth, and a truth, which is beauty, is the aim of both. A "spiritual life" is imparted to nature by both poetry and philosophy (which now includes science). "The solid seeming block of matter has been pervaded and dissolved by a thought." "This feeble human being has penetrated the vast masses of nature with an informing soul, and recognized itself in their harmony, that is, seized their law" (pp. 36-7). "Thus even in physics, the material is degraded before the spiritual. The astronomer, the geometer, rely on their irrefragable analysis, and disdain the results of observation. The sublime remark of Euler on his law of arches, 'This will be found contrary to all experience, yet is true;' had already transferred nature into the mind, and left matter like an outcast corpse." A similar view can be found in Schelling:83 The highest consummation of natural science would be the complete spiritualizing of all natural laws into laws of intuition and thought. The phenomena (the matter) must wholly disappear, and only the laws (the form) remain. Hence it is, that the more lawfulness emerges in nature itself, the more the husk [like Emerson's corpse] disappears, the phenomena themselves become more mental, and at length vanish entirely. . . . Nature's highest goal, to become wholly an object to herself, is achieved only through the last and highest order of reflection, which is none other than man; or, more generally, it is what we call reason, whereby nature first completely returns into herself, and by which it becomes apparent that nature is identical from the first with what we recognize in ourselves as the intelligent and the conscious. The considerations offered here do take us beyond Berkeley, for whom the laws of nature are empirical.84 Emerson makes a series of points: that nature, considered in itself, is formless; that it is nonetheless lawful; that its lawfulness, generally considered, is satisfying to the mind; that its particular laws are not only satisfying, but beautiful and just; and their beauty and justice gives us an a priori reason to accept them. As Emerson writes much later in English Traits, the mind's sudden response to these laws is an evidence "superior . . . to empirical demonstrations" (Essays, p. 898). It is also suggestedthough not saidthat the best explanation of nature's compliance is to suppose, with Kant, that nature is formed after a plan laid down by the mind: that the mind lends form to nature, thereby asserting its ontological privilege over it. Cudworth's plastic powers were intended to mediate between matter and God, his thought being that brute and inactive matter could not heed God's laws. That matter is deada mere corpse or huskis not, perhaps, reason to question its existence. But it can certainly cause us to doubt we have a need for it.

25 This doubt is pursued under Emerson's fourth heading. "Intellectual science," he writes, "has been observed to beget invariably a doubt of the existence of matter. Turgot said, 'He that has never doubted the existence of matter, may be assured he has no aptitude for metaphysical inquiries'" (p. 37). Intellectual science "fastens the attention upon immortal necessary uncreated natures, that is, upon Ideas; and in their presence, we feel that the outward circumstance is a dream and a shade. Whilst we wait in this Olympus of gods, we think of nature as an appendix to the soul. We ascend into their region, and know that these are the thoughts of the Supreme Being" (p. 37). "Intellectual science" seems to be the science of morals. (Later, on p. 38, it is set off against "physical" science.)85 As Emerson writes in the second and final paragraph of section 4, Whilst we behold unveiled the nature of Justice and Truth, we learn the difference between the absolute and the conditional or relative. We apprehend the absolute. As it were, for the first time, we exist. We become immortal, for we learn that time and space are relations of matter, that, with a perception of truth, or a virtuous will, they have no affinity. (pp. 37-8) Intellectual science seems to be a matter of vision or perception only. Under his fifth heading Emerson turns to religion and ethics, which he defines as "the practice of ideas" or their "introduction . . . into life." (Religion, he says, "includes the personality of God; Ethics does not.") These have "an analogous effect with all lower culture, in degrading nature and suggesting its dependence on spirit" (p. 38). Emerson concludes that "motion [which is most compelling as a motive of idealism when technologically assisted; section 1], poetry [section 2], physical and intellectual science [sections 3 and 4], and religion [section 5], all tend to affect our convictions of the reality of the external world" (p. 38). The Scottish philosophers are perhaps right to say that nature instructs us to believe in matter, but a formidable array of cultural forces imparts a different lesson. With his next breath, though, Emerson confesses that "there is something ungrateful in expanding too curiously the particulars of the general proposition, that all culture tends to imbue us with idealism." I have, he confesses, no hostility to nature, but a child's love to it. I expand and live in the warm day like corn and melons. Let us speak her fair. I do not wish to fling stones at my beautiful mother, nor soil my gentle nest. I only wish to indicate the true position of nature in regard to man, wherein to establish man, all right education tends; as the ground to which to attain is the object of human life, that is, of man's connection with nature. Culture inverts the vulgar views of nature, and brings the mind to call that apparent, which it uses to call real, and that real, which it uses to call visionary. (p. 38) There is an apology of sorts in these sentences, but it is carefully qualified. The earlier sentences make persistent reference to childhood and untutored growth. (I have a child's love; I expand like a melon; I wish neither to insult my mother nor to soil the nest she has created for me.)86 But when takes up nature's "true position," it is in regard to the man rather than the child. And so the paragraph concludes with the suggestion that childhood may have been left behind: Children, it is true, believe in the external world. The belief that it appears only, is an afterthought, but with culture, this faith will as surely arise on the mind as did the first. (pp. 38-9)

26

In the final paragraph of chapter six, Emerson suggests that there are reasons for accepting idealism, though he does not present them. He also restates idealism so as to harmonize it with Berkeley, rather than with Kant: The advantage of the ideal theory over the popular faith, is this, that it presents the world in precisely that view which is most desirable to the mind. It is, in fact, the view that Reason, both speculative and practical, that is, philosophy and virtue, take. For, seen in the light of thought, the world always is phenomenal; and virtue subordinates it to the mind. Idealism sees the world in God. It beholds the whole circle of persons and things, of actions and events, of country and religion, not as painfully accumulated, atom after atom, act after act, in an aged creeping Past, but as one vast picture, which God paints on the instant eternity for the contemplation of the soul. (p. 39)

5. Idealism (introductory) and spiritualism (intermediate or advanced) Nature, says Emerson in chapter seven, puts three questions to the mind, and idealism answers only to the first: Three problems are put by nature to the mind; What is matter? Whence is it? and Whereto? The first of these questions only, the ideal theory answers. Idealism saith: matter is a phenomenon, not a substance. Idealism acquaints us with the total disparity between the evidence of our own being, and the evidence of the world's being. The one is perfect; the other, incapable of any assurance; the mind is a part of the nature of things; the world is a divine dream, from which we may presently awake to the glories and certainties of day. Idealism is a hypothesis to account for nature by other principles than those of carpentry and chemistry. Yet, if it only deny the existence of matter, it does not satisfy the demands of the spirit. It leaves God out of me. It leaves me in the splendid labyrinth of my perceptions, to wander without end. Then the heart resists it, because it balks the affections in denying substantive being to men and women. Nature is so pervaded with human life, that there is something of humanity in all, and in every particular. But this theory makes nature foreign to me, and does not account for that consanguinity which we acknowledge to it. (pp. 40-1) Here Emerson papers over some distinctions worth making: between disclosing the nature of matter and denying its existence; and between denying its existence and discerning that its existence is merely less certain than my own. But Emerson's carelessness doesn't have to cause us much concern. To exhibit the nature of matter as phenomenon is to deny its existence as substance. And to deny its existence as substance is, perhaps, the best way of accounting for the evidential disparity that is the most secure deliverance of idealism. If we accept, as Emerson seems to, Benjamin Peirce's anthropocentric principle of Correspondence, we can infer that if matter's foothold in the world were as firm as our ownif matter were substance, as we areits existence would be known as well as ours is. Since matter's existence is more doubtful, matter is not substance but phenomenon. In documenting his passage beyond idealism, Emerson relies on variously shaded denominations of subjectivity or personhood. He begins by speaking, sparely and abstractly, of "the mind." When, for the first time, this abstract subject proclaims the truth of idealism, Emerson's verb of choice is not an everyday "says" but an oracular "saith." A moment later, though, Emerson's subject is rendered more concrete: we are now acquainted with an evidential

27 disparity, leaving us expectant, or at least hopeful, that we may soon awaken from a dream that is our own. When a complaint is first lodged against idealism, it is on behalf of an abstract subject: idealism, Emerson tells us, fails to meet the demands of "the spirit." But the concrete subject is restored in the next sentence, now singular rather than plural ("it leaves God out of me"), its singularity reminding us that nature, speaking strictly or philosophically, is opposed not to US but to ME.87 "The heart," third in a succession of abstract subjects, then beats in protest against idealism, but when its protest is verbally articulated, the concrete subject returns, this time in the plural: idealism, says the heart, denies "substantive being to men and women." At first this accusation comes as a surprise, but it is, we should recall, perfectly in accord with Emerson's initial terminological resolutions: as he had stipulated in the introduction, "all other men and my own body, must be ranked under this name, NATURE" (p. 8). Hence any man or woman (including even my own self, considered as a man or woman) is, for idealism, as phenomenal and insubstantial as the air, a river, or a leaf. As the paragraph concludes, the concrete I is alienated from what had been its humanity. Emerson (or that concrete I) is being threatened here with something like the loss that threatened Edwards: everything, or everything other than the ME, who no longer takes up space in the world of body, is now in God. And God, as Emerson stresses, is not me. I quoted much earlier from Emerson's first sermon. Here is a second passage from that sermon, in which the threat of pantheism takes a familiar form: Do you not know that . . . the minds of men are not so much independent existences, as they are ideas present to the mind of God; that he is not so much the observer of your actions, as he is the potent principle by which they are bound together; not so much the reader of your thoughts, as the active Creator by whom they are aided into being; and, casting away the deceptive subterfuges of language, and speaking with strict philosophical truth, that every faculty is but a mode of his action; that your reason is God, your virtue is God, and nothing but your liberty, can you call securely and absolutely your own? (The Shaking Tent, pp. 29-30) According to the idealism of Emerson's Nature, the I, strictly understood, is immune to the dangers enumerated here. I remain an independent existence, a substance to which (or to whom) a world is represented. But everything else (including my own humanity) is now part of my representation. It is for this reason, I think, that Emerson classifies idealism not as the final truth, but as "a useful introductory hypothesis, serving to apprize us of the eternal distinction between the soul and the world" (p. 41).88 Notice the return of the abstract subject: it is now "the soul" that is set off against the worlda point to which I will return. In the penultimate paragraph of chapter seven, Emerson faces the questions that idealism left unanswered. It is precisely here, in my view, that we move from a largely Berkeleyan idealismfrom the "broad noon" that is Emerson's "England of the senses and the understanding" to an idealism more akin to Schelling's. Only now do we inhabit "the night" that shall be our "Germany of mystic philosophy and dreams" (p. 15): But when, following the invisible steps of thought, we come to inquire, Whence is matter? and Whereto? many truths arise to us out of the recesses of consciousness. [The word "recesses" is itself a clue that we have moved from daylight into night.] We learn that the highest is present to the soul of man, that the dread universal essence, which is not wisdom, or love, or beauty, or power, but all in one, and each entirely, is that for which all

28 things exist, and that by which they are; that spirit creates; that behind nature, throughout nature, spirit is present; one and not compound, it does not act upon us from without, that is, in space and time, but spiritually, or through ourselves: therefore, that spirit, that is, the Supreme Being, does not build up nature around us, but puts it forth through us, as the life of the tree puts forth new branches and leaves through the pores of the old. As a plan upon the earth, so a man rests upon the bosom of God; he is nourished by unfailing fountains, and draws, at his need, inexhaustible power. Who can set bounds to the possibilities of man? Once inhale the upper air, being admitted to behold the absolute natures of justice and truth, and we learn that man has access to the entire mind of the Creator, is himself the creator in the finite. This view, which admonishes me where the sources of wisdom and power lie, and points to virtue as to "The golden key Which opes the palace of eternity," carries upon its face the highest certificate of truth, because it animates me to create my own world through the purification of my soul. (pp. 41-2) The truths intuited here are not argued for. They are self-certifying. The idealist distinction between "the world" and "the soul" is preserved, but the soul is no longer the ME. It is Goda God who is, after all, NOT ME. This God is Emerson's "Over-Soul" or "central soul" (Journals 1: 469). It is the "Self"the word's capital letter, as Whicher says (Freedom and Fate, p. 51), always understoodon which we are urged (in "Self-Reliance") to rely. Its perpetual influence upon us is what Emerson, in one of the last pieces he prepared for publication, called "the central fact""the superhuman intelligence pouring into us from its unknown fountain, to be received with religious awe, and defended from any mixture of our will" (Introduction to Plutarch's Morals, p. xv). In the closing paragraph of chapter seven, Emerson gives us what appears to be his final account of nature: The world proceeds from the same spirit as the body of man. It is a remoter and inferior incarnation of God, a projection of God in the unconscious. But it differs from the body in one important respect. It is not, like that, now subject to the human will. Its serene order is inviolable by us. It is, therefore, to us, the present expositor of the divine mind. (p. 42) But then the paragraph takes a sudden and alarming turn. Nature is at first described, somewhat neutrally, as "a fixed point whereby we may measure our departure." So far, so good: to say we may measure our departures by nature is not to say that any departures have occurred. But in the very next sentence we learn that they have: As we degenerate, the contrast between us and our house is more evident. We are as much strangers in nature, as we are aliens from God. We do not understand the notes of birds. The fox and the deer run away from us; the bear and the tiger rend us. We do not know the uses of more than a few plants, as corn and the apple, the potato and the vine. Is not the landscape, every glimpse of which hath a grandeur, a face of him? Yet this may show us what discord is between man and nature, for you cannot freely admire a noble landscape, if laborers are digging in the field hard by. The poet finds something ridiculous in his delight, until he is out of the sight of men. (p. 42) This is a description of fallen man, laboring outside the garden, at odds with nature and with God.

29

We can soften the shock by noticing that what I described as Emerson's apparently final account of nature is in fact his account only of its whence. He's yet to take up its whereto, but he is telling us, as chapter seven concludes, what that whereto isn't: he's telling us it isn't thisthe life we life now. Emerson doesn't prepare the way for this verdict because he thinks it goes without saying. His positive account of the whereto comes in chapter eight, "Prospects."

6. Prospects "A guess," Emerson writes in the first paragraph of chapter eight, "is often more fruitful than an indisputable affirmation, and . . . a dream may let us deeper into the secret of nature than a hundred concerted experiments" (p. 43). In the next paragraph, the optimism of earlier chapters seems restored. Instead of a "discord" between man and nature (as in the concluding paragraph of chapter seven, p. 42), there is now a "wonderful congruity" between man and the world, "of which he is the lord" (p. 43). Emerson quotes from George Herbert's "Man":89 For us, the winds do blow, The earth doth rest, heaven move, and fountains flow; Nothing we see, but means our good, As our delight, or as our treasure; The whole is either our cupboard of food, Or cabinet of pleasure. .... More servants wait on man Than he'll take notice of . . . Man is one world, and hath Another to attend him. (pp. 44-5) Emerson then concludes with "some traditions of man and nature, which a certain poet," later described as "Orphic" (p. 46), "sang to me" (p. 45). "A man is a god in ruins," the poet sings. "When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and pass into the immortal" (pp. 45-6). "Man is the dwarf of himself. . . . If his law is still paramount, if still he have elemental power, if his word is sterling yet in nature, it is not conscious power, it is not inferior but superior to his will. It is instinct" (p. 46). Emerson now interprets the poet's song, as follows: At present, man applies to nature but half his force. He works on the world with his understanding alone. . . . [Yet] there are not wanting gleams of a better light, occasional examples of the action of man upon nature with his entire force,with reason as well as understanding. (p. 46) [There are] examples of Reason's momentary grasp of the sceptre; the exertions of a power which exists not in time or space, but an instantaneous in-streaming causing power. The difference between the actual and the ideal force of man is happily figured by the schoolmen, in saying, that the knowledge of man is an evening knowledge, vespertina cognitio, but that of God is a morning knowledge, matutina cognition. (p. 47)

30 The problem of restoring the world original and eternal beauty, is solved by the redemption of the soul. . . . The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is, because man is disunited with himself. (p. 47) The poet then sings a final time: [We shall, says Emerson, speaking for a moment in his own voice] come to look at the world with new eyes. It shall answer the endless inquiry of the intellect,What is truth? and of the affections,What is good? by yielding itself passive to the educated Will. Then shall come to pass what my poet said; 'Nature is not fixed but fluid. Spirit alters, mounts, makes it. The immobility or bruteness of nature, is the absence of spirit; to pure spirit, it is fluid, it is volatile, it is obedient. Every spirit builds itself a house; and beyond its house a world; and beyond its world, a heaven. Know then, that the world exists for you. For you is the phenomenon perfect. What we are, that only can we see. All that Adam had, all that Caesar could, you have and can do. Adam called his house, heaven and earth; Caesar called his house, Rome; you perhaps call yours, a cobler's trade; a hundred acres of ploughed land; or a scholar's garret. Yet line for line and point for point, your dominion is as great as theirs, though without fine names. Build, therefore, your own world. As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its great proportions. A correspondent revolution in things will attend the influx of the spirit. So fast will disagreeable appearances, swine, spiders, snakes, pests, madhouses, prisons, enemies, vanish; they are temporary and shall no more be seen. The sordor and filths of nature, the sun shall dry up, and the wind exhale. As when the summer comes from the south; the snow-banks melt, and the face of the earth becomes green before it, so shall the advancing spirit creates its ornaments along its path, and carry with it the beauty it visits, and the song which enchants it; it shall draw around its way, until evil is no more seen. The kingdom of man over nature, which cometh not with observation,a dominion such as now is beyond his dream of God,he shall enter without more wonder than the blind man feels who is gradually restored to perfect sight.' (pp. 48-9) It's hard to know what to make of these audacious promises. They will seem less audacious if we suppose that the fluid, cleansed, and compliant nature being described here is nature in Emerson's third, poetic sense. (It is being described, after all, by a poet.) I'm far from sure we should suppose this, but I'd like to see what follows if we do. We should then expect that "after the revolution," the objective world will have the same familiar face that it has now. This expectation is in harmony with the scriptural source for the book's final sentence. The kingdom of man, the poet advises, "cometh not with observation." He is recalling Luke 17:20: "And when he was demanded of the Pharisees, when the kingdom of God should come, he answered them and said, The kingdom of God cometh not with observation."90 This answer receives its explication in the verse that follows: "Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there!, for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you." Thus in Jeremy Taylor's influential paraphrase, "cometh not with observation" becomes "cometh without outward significations."91 If the same is true of the poet's kingdom of man, its coming will be an inward or interior event, like the restoration of a blind man's sight. There may be support for this modest reading in the motto Emerson used for the second edition of Nature, published in 1849. It's a poem of his own composition: A subtle chain of countless rings The next unto the farthest brings; The eye reads omens where it goes, And speaks all languages the rose;

31 And, striving to be man, the worm, Mounts through all the spires of form. (Essays and Lectures, p. 5) Generations of commentators on Nature have, perhaps, overestimated the significance of this new motto. I do not see, in either the new poem or the 1849 text of Nature, a retraction of the distinction between nature and spirit that was implied in the 1836 motto. Chapter four continues to say that "Reason, considered in relation to nature, [is] Spirit," and that this spirit is both the Creator and life itself (p. 21). There's no more to the Cudworth motto than this. In the new motto, and especially its last two lines, many commentators find a doctrine of organic evolution. "Here," writes William Torrey Harris, "is the doctrine of evolution substantially set forth" (p. 354).92 Harris endows the alleged doctrine with religious significance"if nature is so constituted that left to its own laws it does evolve and can evolve only rational creatures as the fittest, evidently the absolute Being must be rational" (p. 355)and then wonders how this "thoroughly optimistic" doctrine, in which nature begets "new spirits, [thereby] increasing the number of blessed beings" (p. 357), can be reconciled with the theory of "Lapse," or "Descent of the Soul," put forward in chapter eight (p. 356). (The theory of the lapse is akin to the doctrine of the fall. Harris finds the lapse in a passage I haven't quoted, where Emerson says that after filling nature with "his overflowing currents," man's "waters retired," reducing him "to a drop" [p. 46]. Here too I prefer an interior interpretation, in which our lost glory isn't an actual past state, but a figure for our highest aspirations.) Harris knew Emerson fairly well, I think, so I realize I should tread carefully here, but this reading strikes me as a fantasy.93 Richard Lee Francis is more cautious than Harris, but he also seems to me to go too far.94 "'The spires of form,'" Francis writes, "if they make sense at all," relate more specifically to an evolutionary concept rather than some Platonic model. To that extent Emerson shifted the emphasis of the essay as he now confronted it from the static focus of the original motto to the dynamic dimensions of the present one. . . . The dynamism of the original essay is man-centered. The thrust of the new model is to suggest that man is the paradigm for vast activity within other sensate forms like the worm. Thus the new model reflects the enlarged, more complex structure that had emerged in the evolving essays [that is, in the Essays of 1841 and the Essays: Second Series of 1844], with their concerns for the sphere of daily existence and the politics and reform of society. My concern here lies with the opposition between "an evolutionary concept" and the "Platonic model." What no one has noticed is that Emerson's second motto also has a precedent of sorts in Cudworth, who writes that "as well . . . might a worm complain that he is not a Man, as Man that he is not an Angel, or Creature of the very highest order."95 Cudworth doesn't want us agitating for a higher place in the Great Chain of Being. Emerson does. (Emerson's omissions from Herbert's poem suggest exactly that.) But Cudworth's remark reminds us of a simple Emersonian truth (as clear to Emerson in 1836 as it was in the 1840's, when he came under the influence of works such as Vestiges of the History of Creation) that the new motto may be meant to convey. The motto doesn't state the truth but takes us to the very brink of it. The truth is that it's man who strives to mount through all the spires of form. (The worm, a caterpillar I suppose, is then a metaphor for the manthe dwarfwho is striving to become man.) Nineteenth-century theories of evolution and progress are a murky sea into which I cannot wade this afternoon.96 My suggestion is simply that it needn't be the evolution of lower organisms that is Emerson's concern in the second edition of Nature, but the spiritual evolution of men and womentheir striving towards lives of "the very highest order."97 This is Emerson's explicit theme throughout "Prospects," in both the first and second editions. The new motto, then, fits the text of 1836 very well. (If it

32 didn't fit 1836 it wouldn't fit 1849, as Whicher is perhaps acknowledging in his remarks on the mottoes in Selections, p. 472.) In 1836 and again in 1849, Emerson is writing about a human evolutionary process, one that is, I believe, inward or interior rather than organic or biological.98

7. After Nature99 Robert D. Richardson, Jr. observes that Emerson's Nature is "intended to be self-validating. We are not asked to take it on faith, or on authority, or in a historical context. It is not argued or defended, just presented."100 I sympathize with everything that Richardson is saying here, but I wonder whether he has things exactly right. The author of Nature does refuse to argue, but it isn't clear that his truths are actually "presented" to the reader. Emerson may think that they can't be presented, because an author can do no more than provoke readers into sharing his perceptions. "Not thanks, not prayer seem quite the highest or truest name for our communication with the infinite,but glad and conspiring reception" ("The Method of Nature," p. 116). If Emerson receives his truths from the infinite, can the rest of us receive them from a finite, second-hand source? "I cannot,nor can any manspeak precisely of thing so sublime . . . . It is beyond explanation. When all is said and done, the rapt saint is found the only logician. Not exhortation, not argument becomes our lips, but paens of joy and praise" ("The Method of Nature," pp. 11617). This presents a daunting challenge to a writer. As a perceiver of truth, a writer is receptive. And if he's at his receptive best, he'll be restraining his will. But the act of composition is an act of will, as Emerson acknowledges in "Intellect": The thought of genius is spontaneous; but the power of picture or expression, in the most enriched and flowing nature, implies a mixture of will, a certain control over the spontaneous states, without which no production is possible. It is a conversion of all nature into the rhetoric of thought, under the eye of judgment, with a strenous exercise of choice. (p. 423)101 Composition seems to be the understanding's work. Writing is a discursive task (from the Latin discurerre, a "running to and fro") that calls for planning, arranging, and the calculation of effect. Does it follow that writing might damage one's powers of perception? "I would not quite forget," Emerson writes in "Man the Reformer, "the venerable counsel of the Egyptian mysteries, which declared that 'there were two pairs of eyes in man, and it is requisite that the pair which are beneath should be closed, when the pair that are above them perceive, and that when the pair above are closed, those which are beneath should be opened'" (p. 142). Such counsel leads Emerson to wonder whether he might not be better off without the drudgery of composition. "It often, perhaps usually, happens, that where there is a fine organization apt for poetry and philosophy, that individual finds himself compelled to wait on this thoughts, to waste several days that he may enhance and glorify one; and is better taught by a moderate and dainty exercise, such as rambling in the fields, rowing, skating, hunting, than by the downright drudgery of the farmer and the smith" ("Man the Reformer," p. 142). I think the fairest way of meeting these difficulties is to admit that the writer is striving willfully for effect, his aim being to prepare the reader for reception. "The aim of the author is not to tell the truththat he cannot do, but to suggest it. He has only approximated it himself, and hence his cumbrous embarrassed speech: he uses many words, hoping that one, and not another, will bring you as near to the fact as he is" (quoted in Richardson, First We Read, p. 50). "The thing uttered in words is not therefore affirmed. It must affirm itself, or no forms of logic or of oath can

33 give it evidence" ("Spiritual Laws," p. 316). In a corresponding journal entry, he says that the thing set down "must affirm itself or no forms of grammar & no verisimilitude can give evidence; & no array of arguments" (1: 412; see also 1: 220). Given this, it makes perfect sense for Emerson to steer clear of argument, at least up to a point. I say "up to a point" because there are two different claims of authority that reason might make against the understanding. Reason might say, on the one hand, that the understanding can't dispute the truth of its declarations. As Emerson asks in "Worship," "why should I give up my thought, because I cannot answer an objection to it?" (p. 1070). I take it that objections are products of the understanding, as it makes a willful effort to dissuade. To say that the perceptions of reason are self-validating is to say that any such objection can be safely brushed aside. But the understanding might be less aggressive. Instead of objecting to the deliverances of reason, it might try to make them comprehensible. It might accept that they are true and simply ask how this is possible. Emerson tells us that spirit or natura naturans "publishes itself in creatures." Here I quote from his 1844 essay "Nature" (p. 546), but he says the same, as we've seen, in his book of 1836, and the thought is repeated in every other book he published. "I get no further," he wrote in a journal of the following year, "than my old doctrine that the Whole is in each man" (1: 549 in Rosenwald). "In all my lectures," he reflected in 1840, "I have taught one doctrine, namely the infinitude of the private man" (1: 735 in Rosenwald). "The central fact," he wrote in an 1870 introduction to Plutarch that I've already quoted, "is the superhuman intelligence pouring into us from its unknown fountain, to be received with religious awe, and defended from any mixture of our will" (p. xv). It is, then, a truth of reason that the infinite published or expresses itself in the finite. Let's suppose that a docile understanding elects not to contest this teaching. Can the understanding still be curious about it? Can it wonder how to reconcile this perception with other things it knows or thinks it knows? The second and more radical demand that reason might place on the understanding is that it extinguish all such curiosity. "Not only must you accept every truth I deliver," reason may say, "but you must also refrain from asking how these truths hang together with whatever you may accept on other grounds."102 We're now circled back to the generous definition of philosophy that I took from Wilfrid Sellars, which suddenly seems less capacious.103 Often Emerson doesn't seem to be asking how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term, because he places the truths of reason so far above the others that they needn't hang together with them at all. I realize that I may be understanding "hanging together" in too narrow a sense. And I understand that the truths of reason must, in Emerson's view, be truths that we can live by: that "the true romance which the world exists to realize, [is] the transformation of genius into practical power" ("Experience," p. 492). But the understanding is part of life, and the transformation Emerson hopes for may be impossible if the understanding isn't encouraged to exercise the kind of non-disruptive curosity I've been trying to describe. Emerson says that the infinite expresses itself in the finite. Does he mean to say that it expresses itself only in the finite? (It's hard to say, but the answer may be yes. In a journal entry for 1845 he writes that "the necessity by which Deity rushes into distribution, into variety & particles, is not less divine than the unity by which all begins. Forever the Demiurgus speaks to the junior gods as in the old tradition of the Timaeus, 'Gods of gods that mortal natures may subsist & that the Universe may be truly all, convert (or distribute) yourselves according to your nature to the fabrication of animals' &c &c" [2: 232 in Rosenwald].) This is the sort of curious question that the understanding finds itself wanting to ask. Emerson writes that "Heaven is the name we give to the True State, the World of Reason not of the Understanding, of the Real, not the Apparent. It exists always . . . . It is, as Coleridge said, another world but not to come" (Journals, 1: 414 in the Rosenwald edition). He had quoted Coleridge in a journal entry of the year before: "'The world in which I exist is another world indeed but not to come.' Coleridge" (1:

34 358). It follows (though the journals themselves do not connect this conclusion with Coleridge) "that Within and Above are synonyms" (1: 374). "A pert and flippant orator remarked to the meeting last Sunday, that the World could stand without linch pins & that even if you should cut all the ropes & knock away the whole underpinning, it would spring & poise perfectly for the poise was in the globe itself. But this is Transcendentalism" (1: 688). In "Essential Principles," a lecture delivered in 1862 (but based on a journal entry of 1842, 2: 76 in Rosenwald), Emerson is even more blunt: Other world! there is no other world. God is one and omnipresent: here or nowhere is the whole fact. All the universe over, there is but one thing,one Creator, one mind, one right. (Selected Lectures, p. 276; see also 2: 76 in Rosenwald.) He returns to this in a journal entry of 1861: Other world! there is no other world. The God goes with you,is here in Presence. What is here, that is there. & it is by his only strength that you lift your hand. (2: 756) But if the infinite expresses itself only in the finite, how is this to be understood? Has the finite always existed? If so, is the infinite even capable of separate existence? If it is, what form does its separate existence take? And what about us? We are relatively recent arrivals. "The fossil strata show," as Emerson reports in his essay "Culture" (p. 1033 in Essays and Lectures), "that Nature began with rudimental forms, and rose to the more complex, as fast as the earth was fit for their dwelling-place; and that the lower perish, as the higher appear." Were our pre-existing souls injected into fitly organized bodies at just the right moment, or was there an abiding central soul from which particular souls were derived? And is there now a separate central soul, or does it exist only in and through ourselves? In Emerson these questions are never squarely faced. Indeed they're hardly raised. He supposed, I think, that their answers were beyond him.104 But if his writings after Nature don't provide us with answers, they do convey, ever more intensely, the lived experience of which these questions are, arguably, the intellectualized expressions. The thesis of Whicher's influential book is that over time, Emerson's early, optimistic transcendentalism "gave way" to a more realistic "basic empiricism" (Freedom and Fate, p. 97). This has been called "Whicher's paradigm,"105 and it's proven very durable. It's been retained even by some of the recent writers who've given us portraits of a "pragmatist" or "de-Transcendentalized" Emerson.106 According to the paradigm, as his empiricism became more assertive, Emerson felt more oppressed by the B sidethe materialist sideof various dualisms. I list some those dualisms here, with the idealist or A side in first place: infinite v. finite; one v. many; God v. nature; natura naturans v. natura naturata; spirit v. nature; mind v. matter; absolute v. relative; form v. matter; law v. fact; freedom v. fate; power v. circumstance; principle v. whim; principle v. mood; principle v. temperament (which is itself opposed to whim, at least at times); impersonal v. personal; Self v. self; potential self v. actual self; reason v. sense and understanding. Yet as Whicher contends, the mounting pressures of the B side were never enough to crush the A side. "I am Defeated all the time," Emerson wrote in a journal entry that Whicher quotes more than once (for example on p. 168), "yet to Victory I am born."107 Emerson's idealism persisted.108 It never gave way entirely. As doctrine, in fact, it never gave way at all.109 This returns us to the question of whether the A and B sides can be reconciled. I feel sure that Emerson would disapprove, but I'll hastily assemble a very rough answer, using material from Emerson's essays and journals.110

35 My general outline will also be borrowed, from Mark Johnston's contrast between panentheism and pantheism. Panentheism, he explains, should be carefully distinguished from the pantheistic identification of God and the natural realm. Against such a pantheistic identification, the panentheist will assert that God is partly constituted by the natural realm, in the sense that his activity is manifest in and through natural processes alone. But his reality goes beyond what is captured by the purely scientific description of all the events that make up the natural realm. Nothing in the natural realm lies outside God, and God reveals himself in the natural realm by disclosing in religious experience an ultimate form of the world, one that is in no way at odds with the form of the natural realm disclosed by science: that is, a causal realm closed under natural law. (Saving God [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009], pp. 11920) If we allow for "unChurched" readings of both "God" and "religious," this may fit Emerson fairly well. It's not yet a trim fit, but a few quick alterations might make it right. According to the panentheistic schema, God is consituted by Nature + x, where the x is what James called "the overlapping thing." Now what, for Emerson, might x be? "What is there," as Johnston asks, "in addition to the natural realm, such that when we put it together with the natural realm then we have something whose overarching form could motivate serious talk of God?" (p. 128)or talk of God as serious as Emerson is willing to accept? A possible Emersonian answer is one that Johnston himself takes to be a dead end (p. 127). It is that God is constituted by Nature + mind. For Johnston, this is a dead end partly because "the concept of a nonnatural mental realm is bankrupt" (p. 127). But let's not assume that mind is non-natural. Let's understand nature simply as the NOT MEor, better, the NOT US. This leaves us with God is constituted by Nature + finite minds, where sum's second term isn't really a new addition, but a spelling out of something already contained within the first. We're now getting close, I think, to what Emerson describes in his Journals: As a spiritual truth needs no proof but is its own reason, so the Universe needs no outer cause but exists by its own perfection and the sum of it all is this, God is. (1: 458) But we aren't yet finished, because we've left no place for law. There's a place for what Emerson calls the "law-receiver," but there's not yet a place for the law-giver. "Nature is good," Emerson writes in "Plato," "but intellect is better: as the law-giver is before the law-receiver" (Essays and Lectures, pp. 645-6). But the law-giver can no more be ourselves than it can be nature, which hummed along perfectly well before we arrived. An obvious remedy is to say that God is constituted by Nature + finite minds + an infinite mind.

36 But now it seems that the infinite mind popping up at the end of the formula should be God, rather than one among many constituents of God. I however think (with Emerson's friend and Unitarian critic Henry S. Ware) that the infinite mind, as Emerson understands it, is impersonal.111 It is not a person with understanding and will who lays down the law, but the law itself, natural as well as moral. In that case the panentheistic schema can be filled out as follows: God is constituted by Nature + finite minds + law, natural and moral. Finite minds will remain "special," on this view, because even if they are (like bare matter) obedient to natural law, they are uniquely capable of knowing the law. When, if ever, these minds come to know the law in full, history will, in a sense be at an end, because law will have at last been brought to consciousness. (In the infinite mind, the laws do not abide as objects of consciousnessas things knownbut merely as operative principles.) It's in our perception of lawa joyful or loving perception that's no less affective than intellectualthat our inwardness consists.112 We also avoid the kind of pantheism Channing saw in Edwards. Emerson himself saw something similar in the views of Henry James, Sr. "The logical basis of his book [is] a certain pure & absolute theism:there is but one Actor in the Universe,there is no self but devil;all must be surrended to ecstasy of the present Deity" (2: 819). In an earlier entry Emerson has said that "it is by magnifying God, that men become Pantheists; it is by piously personifying him, that they become idolaters" (1: 409). It may remain true that nature (ourselves included) is "constant creation" (Early Lectures, volume 3, p. 22), and that we live therefore "in succession, in division, in parts, in particles" ("The Over-Soul," p. 386), as Edwards believed. So long as God is not a person, Emerson needn't conclude that we are unfree, or that we have no persisting identities, even if he is unable to explain how it is that identity or freedom is achieved. Each person's life will be a "perpetual revelation" (1: 647). Here, are some of the many passages exhibiting the panentheistic tendencies I've tried to describe: In "Nature" (1836): p. 36 (on myself as part and particle of God); p. 43 (on the universal soul "within or behind" individual life); p. 57 (on law, mind, matter, and soul); p. 59 (on idealism); p. 61 (on the Supreme Being); p. 62 (on the world as an incarnation of God); and p. 67 (on the kingdom of man over nature). In the Divinity School Address: pp. 131-2 (on man as Providence to himsel); p. 132 (on the law of laws); p. 138 (on man as an infinite soul); p. 142 (on the infinitude of man, and on man and deity); and p. 145 (on a new revelation). In "Self-Reliance": p. 225 (on being one with God). "The Method of Nature": p. 118: "In the divine order, intellect is primary; nature, secondary; it is the memory of the mind. That which once existed in intellect as pure law, has now taken body as Nature. It existed already in the mind in solution; now, it has bene precipitated, and the bright sediment is the world. We can never be quite strangers or inferiors in nature." "Lecture on the Times: p. 168: "The law and the perception of the law are at last one."

37

"We are . . . immortal with the immortality of this law." "History": p. 237: "There is one mind common to all individual men." "Of the universal mind each individual man is one more incarnation." p. 255: "The mind is One, and . . . nature is its correlative." "The Over-Soul": pp. 385-6: "that Unity, the Over-soul, within which every man's particular being is contained and made one with all other; that common heart." p. 386: "We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE." "I desire . . . to report what hints I have collected of the transcendent simplicity and energy of the Highest Law." p. 390: "The third party or common nature is not social; it is impersonal; is God." p. 393: "The nature of these revelations is the same: they are perceptions of the absolute law." p. 400: "I am born into the great, the universal mind." "Nature" (1844): p. 546: "Let us not longer omit our homage to the Efficient Nature, natura naturans, the quick cause, before which all forms flee as the driven snows, itself secret, its works driven before it in flocks and multitudes." "It publishes itself in creatures" "Swedenborg": p. 685: "I doubt not he was led by the desire to insert the element of personality of Deity. But nothing is added." "Fate": pp. 967-8: "Let us build to the Beautiful Necessity, which makes men brave in believing that he cannot shun a danger that is appointed, nor incur one that is not; to the Necessity which rudely or softly educates him to the perception that there are no contingencies; the Law rules throughout existence, a Law which is not intelligent but intelligence,not personal nor impersonal,it disdains words

38 and passes understanding; it dissolves persons; it vivifies nature; yet solicits the pure in heart to draw on all its omnipotence." "Worship": pp. 1065-6: "We owe to the Hindoo Scriptures a definition of Law, which compares well with any in our Western books. 'Law it is, which is without name, or color, or hands, or feet; which is smallest of the least, and largest of the large; all, and knowing all things; which hears, without ears, sees without eyes, moves without feet, and seizes without hands." p. 1076: "The nameless Thought, the nameless Power, the superpersonal Heart, he shall repose alone on that. . . . The Laws are his consolers, the good Laws themselves are alive, they know if he have kept them, they animate him with the leading of great duty, and an endless horizon." In the Journals: I say that I cannot find when I explore my own consciousness any truth in saying that God is a Person, but the reverse. I feel that there is some profanation in saying He is personal. To represent him as an individual is to shut him out of my consciousness. (1: 580) I deny Personality to God because it is too little not too much. Life, personal life is faint & cold to the energy of God. (1: 588) I see profound need of distinguishing the First Cause as superpersonal. . . . There is no passive reception: the receive to receive must play the God also. God gives, but, it is God, or, it takes God, also, to receive. (2: 815) Finite minds or selves remain a mystery, because their individuation isn't simply the result of their embodiment.113 Other things, says Emerson, have no insides.114 We do.115 Our own existenceall existenceis an enigma. ("No power of genius has ever yet had the smallest success in explaining existence. The perfect enigma remains" ["Plato," p. 653; see also Society and Solitude, p. 161].) What of immortality? Emerson writes in "Experience" that "it is not what we believe concerning the immortality of the soul, or the like, but the universal impulse to believe, that is the material circumstance, and is the principal fact in the history of the globe" (p. 486). Could immortality be nothing more than the appreciative perception of timeless truth? Emerson suggests so at times, but his last published words on the subject, in his essay "Old Age," can't be dealt with so reductively. In one of the truest entries in his Journals, Emerson, who was then the age that I am now, writes that "Within, I do not find wrinkles & used heart, but unspent youth" (2: 829 in the Rosenwald edition). In "Old Age," the continued spending of these youthful energies"hiving knowledge, hiving skill,at the end of life just ready to be born" (p. 300)gave him a kind of argument for immortality (see also Journals 1: 134 and 2: 299). "The mode of it baffles our wit," he wrote, "and no whisper comes to us from the other side" (p. 299). If my panentheistic story were the whole truth, our wit wouldn't have to be baffled, and there could be no real hope that whispers from the other side might tell us more than we know now.

Appendix: On "Experience"

39 I want to conclude with a few remarks about Emerson's essay "Experience." I'll simply lay them down here. I hope I can develop them later. (i) Idealism is a central theme in "Experience." This is granted, I think, by the commentators I've read or glanced at: Packer, in Emerson's Fall, pp. 148-99; Porte, Representative Man, pp. 191-8; Van Leer, Emerson's Epistemology, pp. 143-87; and Cameron, Impersonality, pp. 53-78. Porte's take on the essay is the most optimistic of the lot. In this respect his reading resembles that of William Torrey Harris in "The Dialectic Unity in Emerson's Prose," Journal of Speculative Philosophy 18 (1884), pp. 195-202. Harris sees the essay as thoroughly Platonic: as a record of what he elsewhere calls the soul's ascent. He also detects some significant similarities to Nature, as I do (see (iv) below). (ii) One of those similarities is in the treatment of mood. In Nature, Emerson takes up the laws of the eye, but his physiology stops there. In "Experience" he carries these laws inward, to the core of the body or the brain. Our moods now have their laws, just as the perspectival visions of the eye have theirs. This is certainly presents a more "pessimistic" picture of our operations. But it isn't altogether pessimistic. So far as I can see, our perceptions remain untouchedwhich isn't to say that Emerson has a firm way of drawing the line. (iii) I think there's more to say about the manner in which grief will make us idealists (p. 473). I think Emerson is doing to grief (and to all our internal impressions) what he had earlier done to our external impressions. In Nature the idealism was introductory or preliminary. Here it seems more terrifying, for reasons I think I can explain. I wonder whether Emerson's discussion was influenced by Swedenborg or by his English translator, James John Garth Wilkinson. Emerson was filled with admiration for Wilkinson. He credits him with "a coequal vigor of understanding and imagination comparable only to Lord Bacon's" (Essays and Lectures, p. 670). His "admirable preliminary discourses" to his English translations of Swedenborg "throw all the contemporary philosophy of England into shade" (p. 671). (Henry James, Sr. was another admirer of Wilkinson. His son "Wilky" was named after him.) Wilkinson is celebrated by Emerson again in English Traits, where he's honored for the "native vigor" he brings to metaphysics and to physiology, "with a catholic perception of relations, equal to the highest attempts, and a rhetoric like the armory of the invincible knights of old" (p. 902). Wilkinson's "Introductory Remarks" to Swedenborg's The Philosophy of the Infinite; or, Outlines of a Philosophical Argument on the Infinite (Boston: Otis Clapp, 1848) is a blistering attack on what Wilkinson calls "Transcendentalism." The upshot of transcendentalism, he explains, was "to regard all sensation, knowledge, and thought, as subjective, and to make the individual believe all the manifestations of God, nature, or humanity, which are made to his mind, as so many presentations of his own being. In this way, each man becomes shut in the case of an opaque and impenetrable selfhood, which not only absorbs, and destroys all outward truth, but makes it impossible to have any confidence in the existence of our brother man" (p. 5). The most striking thing about Wilkinson's presentation is that he thinks this dangerous Kantian view, which "had the greatest influence in England, into which it was slowly introduced by Coleridge and others, long after it ceased to animate any particular school in Germany" (p. 5), is directed against the reality of the "inner" no less than the reality of the "outer" (p. 6). "The consequence is, that both spiritual and natural experience are shaken to the base, and all scientific vision of the deeper parts of nature, is set down as a dream" (p. 6). In Swedenborg's writings, by contrast, "the outward spiritual world itself, independent of our perceptions, like the natural world, becomes a direct object of human knowledge" (p. 6). (As has been said of Swedenborg, he described visits to heaven as if they were strolls down the avenues of Stockholm.) As Swedenborg conceives of them, "all the intellectual faculties are likewise senses," and their objects are "real, outward, forcible,

40 and impressive, like those of the visible world" (pp. 6-7). He thereby lifts that "dense, 'intellectual cataract'" that "prevents all direct contact between man and his field of alteration and improvement, viz., the outward and inward creations of God, in which he is a part, among parts, a body, among bodies, a spiritual form, among spiritual forms" (p. 7). I'd like to consider the possibility that the early pages of "Experience" are giving voice to the same concern. Wilkinson says related things in his introduction to The Animal Kingdom, a work (published in 1843) to which Emerson refers. This was early enough to influence "Experience," and Swedenborg's texts were, in any case, available to Emerson in other editions long before that. I'm fairly confident that Emerson's word "angular," applied to corporeal appearances or body, derived from Swedenborg. It is, in early English translations, Swedenborg's word for the most basic, corporeal forms in his hierarchy of forms. (iv) Nature and "Experience" are in some ways alike in structure. "Experience" is divided into eight parts, separated by white space (and in one case by asterisks). The first five "lords of life" (pp. 468, 491)Illusion, Temperament, Succession, Surface, and Surprisepass by in the first five sections. Then comes Reality, in which Emerson reasserts his idealism (pp. 484-7). (I don't think it needs to be argued that idealism is reasserted here. Reality is the "unbounded substance," the "ineffable cause" that refuses to be named (p. 486). "In our more correct writing," Emerson writes on p. 486, "we give to this generalization the name of Being, and thereby confess that we have arrived as far as we can go." But he says a bit more: it is a "vast-flowing vigor," "the mighty Ideal" (p. 486), "a great and crescive self" (p. 487). In the poem that is the essay's motto, Reality is "the inventor of the game / Omnipresent without name (p. 469). Emerson says that he "dare[s] not give their order" (p. 491), but as inventor and cause, Reality comes first. In the seventh section comes "the Fall of Man" (p. 487), which turns out to be nothing more than "Subjectiveness," the existence of man as thinking subject. (The cogito, then, is itself a signal of the fall of man. But compare the Early Lectures, volume 3, p. 215: "A man may say I, and never refer to himself as an individual.") This is very much like the sudden fall that comes at the end of "Spirit." And the final section of "Experience" resembles "Prospects" in its optimism. "Never mind the ridicule, never mind the defeat: up again, old heart!it seems to say, there is victory yet for all justice; and the true romance which the world exists to realize, will be the transformation of genius into practical power" (p. 492). In the end I may not want to tackle "Experience." When I began work, I was under the impression that recent critics saw it as an abandonment idealismas a work at odds with the benign image of the transcendentalist sage presented in the nineteenth century (or at the turn of the twentieth) by writers such as William Torrey Harris, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Charles Eliot Norton. But critics like Packer and Cameron don't dispute Emerson's idealism. (Indeed, Packer has especially good thing to say about it, on pp. 159-6.) These critics are simplyand very appropriatelyinterested in other things. In "Experience," the B side of things is more deeply felt than the A side. Its floating and mysterious prose is disorienting but convincing. We can't help but ask ourselves how someone so well acquainted with the B side could continue to affirm the A side. But it doesn't cause Emerson a moment's hesitation. He does it, and does it easily, even cheerfully. "I affirm the divinity of man; but, . . . I know how well how much is my debt to bread, & coffee, & flannel, & heated room" (Journals 2: 499; see also 2: 32-3).116

Kenneth P. Winkler February 2, 2012

41

This is the text of the third in a series of six lectures, honoring Isaiah Berlin, delivered at Oxford University in January and February, 2012. For the opportunity to give them, I'm grateful to the benefactors and electors of the Sir Isaiah Berlin Visiting Professorship in the History of Ideas, to the Faculty of Philosophy, and to Corpus Christi College. The present lecture was delivered on January 31. The present document is not transcript of my talkit was prepared before I spoke and only lightly edited afterwardsbut it is written as if to be spoken. It contains far more than I was actually able to cover in the lecture, it is more casually structured than a formal paper would be, and the notes and even the main text sometimes contain directions or reminders to myself. This text is more sprawling and less disciplined than the two I've already posted. It is very much a draft piece of work, and I hope that it won't be quoted or cited without my permission.
2

He reports that "all things were carried on with the utmost decency, they came very little behind Cambridge its self" ("Joseph Emerson's Diary, 1748-1749," p. 266 in Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 44 [1911], pp. 262-82). Joseph Emerson was a Harvard man. Yale audiences will be interested to see that before they were keeping score in football, the colleges competed in the decorousness or decency of their commencements. I suppose Emerson could have chosen the word "decency" in light of the notorious Yale commencement of 1722, the "Great Apostasy." That September, Timothy Cutler (the president of the college, who had replaced Samuel Johnson as Jonathan Edwards's tutor in philosophy), shocked his audience by concluding the Puritan ceremony with a form of words that came, as they knew, from the Anglican book of common prayer. Cutler had been studying with Johnson in the months leading up to the ceremony. After commencement, they and others announced that they would be joining the English church. Johnson and James Wetmore (who is mentioned in Berkeley's correspondence with Johnson) were among those who sailed to England for an indisputably valid ordination.
3

"Joseph Emerson's Diary, 1748-1749," p. 271. Esther later married Aaron Burr: not the famous Aaron Burr, third president of the United States, but the president of the College of New Jersey (Jonathan Edwards's predecessor in that office) who was the father of the famous Aaron Burr.
4

The full title gives an overview of his argument: The mystery hid from ages and generations, made manifest by the gospel-revelation: or, the salvation of all men the grand thing aimed at in the scheme of God, as opened in the New-Testament writings and entrusted with Jesus Christ to bring into effect, in three chapters, the first, exhibiting a general explanation of this gloriously benevolent plan of God.the second, proving it to be the truth of scripture, that mankind universally, in the final issue of this scheme, shall reign in happy life for ever.the third, largely answering objections (London: Charles Dilly, 1784). The title page identifies Chauncy simply as "one who wishes well to the whole human race." The contrast with the eschatology of Edwards couldn't be more plain. Edwards is never named, but on p. xi of the preface, Chauncy acknowledges a special debt to John Taylor's Scripture Doctrine of Original Sin (1740-1)the book targeted on the title page of Edwards's Original Sin. In chapter three, intensifying the contrast with Edwards, Chauncy rejects determinism and affirms liberty of indifference. God, he speculates, "could, doubtless, in point of power, represent Hell to the view of sinners in such a striking light, even supposing the torments of it were not endless [as in Chauncy's view they are not], as that they should be irresistibly stopped in their wicked pursuits: But such a method of dealing with men would not comport with their free agency. No room, in this case, would be left for the trial of their virtue. The discouragement, that sin would carry with it, would so overpower the mind, as to give no opportunity for choice. The motive could not be withstood" (pp. 344-5). In his journal, Emerson reports an exchange that sets

42

Chauncy against the revivalism of Edwards and the itinerant preacher George Whitfield. (The passage is quoted by Porte in Representative Man, p. 118.) "'Where are you going Mr. Whitfield? said Dr. Chauncy. 'I'm going to Boston, sir.'I'm very sorry for it," said Dr. C. 'So is the Devil' replied the eloquent preacher."
5

John Jay Chapman aptly observes that the transcendentalists "were essentially the children of the Puritans" ("Emerson," in his Emerson and Other Essays [New York: Moffat, Yard, and Company, 1909; originally published in 1898], p. 58).
6

The Master: A Novel (New York: Scribner, 2004), p. 133.

Robert D. Richardson, William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), p. 52.
8

Other Puritans may have been looking over Emerson's shoulders as he composed Nature. The following description of the study at the Old Manse, a family home where Emerson lived and worked in 1834, is by a later resident, Nathaniel Hawthorne: There was, in the rear of the house, the most delightful little nook of a study that ever offered its snug seclusion to a scholar. It was here that Emerson wrote "Nature;" for he was then an inhabitant of the Manse, and used to watch the Assyrian dawn and the Paphian sunset and moonrise, from the summit of our eastern hill. When I first saw the room [which would have been in 1842, during Hawthorne's first visit to Concord], its walls were blackened with the smoke of unnumbered years, and made still blacker by the grim prints of puritan ministers that hung around. These worthies looked strangely like bad angels, or, at least, like men who had wrestled so continually and so sternly with the devil, that somewhat of his sooty fierceness had been imparted to their own visages. They had all vanished now; a cheerful coat of paint, and golden tinted paper hangings, lighted up the small apartment; while the shadow of a willow-tree, that swept against the overhanging events, attempered the cheery western sunshine. In place of the grim prints, there was the sweet and lovely hear of one of Raphael's Madonnas, and two pleasant little pictures of the Lake of Como. The only other decorations were a purple vase of flowers, always fresh, and a bronze one containing graceful ferns. ("The Old Manse," p. 3 in Mosses from an Old Manse, volume 1 [London: Wiley and Putnam, 1846]. See p. 28 for an interesting comment on Emerson as a philosopher.) Unfortunately, it turns out that this charming account of the origins of Nature is probably untrue; the case against Hawthorne is made in Merton M. Sealts, Jr., "The Composition of Nature," in Sealts and Alfred R. Ferguson (eds.), Emerson's Nature: Origin, Growth, Meaning, second edition, enlarged (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969), pp. 175-93. Even if Hawthorne's story is a fiction, my basic point stands: Emerson worked in that study with Puritan forbears overlooking hima fitting metaphor for his relation as a writer to his local past.
9

p. 846 in Ralph Waldo Emerson, Selected Journals 1841-1877, edited by Lawrence Rosenwald (New York: The Library of America, 2010). Emerson said of his aunt's journal that it "marks the precise time when the power of the old creed yielded to the influence of modern science and humanity" (quoted by Perry Miller in "Jonathan Edwards to Emerson," New England Quarterly 13

43

[1940], pp. 589-617, p. 614). For another acknowledgment of nineteenth-century New England's debt to "that old religion," see Emerson's "The Method of Nature," p. 130 in Essays and Lectures.
10

p. 275 in A Jonathan Edwards Reader. There are many echoes of this resolution in later American writing. They are probably clearest and most emphatic in Thoreau, but they can also be heard in William James: "Live energetically; and whatever you have to do, do it with your might" (quoted in Richardson, William James, p. 327).
11

"Joseph Emerson's Diary," p. 275.

12

"The Present Age," p. 192 in The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, volume 3, 1838-1842 (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1972). Check the corresponding passage in "Boston," Works 12, p. 194.
13

For the story behind Thoreau's decision to begin a journal see Robert D. Richardson, First We Read, Then We Write (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2009), p. 20.
14

In the opinion of Stephen E. Whicher, Emerson's Puritan background is "the most important single thing about him." See his Freedom and Fate: An Inner Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: A. S. Barnes and Company, 1961; originally published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 1953), p. viii. Emerson's deeply ingrained Puritanism is a major theme in George Santayana's essay "Emerson."
15

The Peabody Sisters, p. xv. This is Rowland G. Hazard (1801-88), grandfather of Caroline Hazard. I'm quoting from Elizabeth Peabody's volume of Channing's recollections.

16

17

18

Channing was also repelled by what he saw as the moral consequences of Calvinism. His "Moral Argument against Calvinism" was widely read, even late in the nineteenth century.
19

This is from p. 4 of Channing's Works, in introductory remarks dated April 18, 1841. By this time, Channing may have known of Edwards's idealism, because Edwards's early manuscripts had been published a dozen years before by Sereno Edwards Dwight. (Could Channing have learned about it from Hopkins, Edwards's student, who was his summer neighbor in Newport?) On Channing's dissatisfaction with Calvinist pantheism see Miller, "Jonathan Edwards to Emerson," p. 610.
20

David Van Leer gives the notion of a "lower argument" currency in his Emerson's Epistemology: The Argument of the Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), chapter two. He borrows the term "lower" from Stephen E. Whicher (ed.), Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson: An Organic Anthology (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960). Whicher says that Emerson's "farewell" to his brother Charles, in the final sentences of chapter five, ends "the first or lower half of the book" (p. 474). Whicher suggests that that Emerson's customary method is "to begin 'low'" and "to carry the subject by stages as high" as his audience will allow (pp. 353-4).

44

21

The quoted words are from Walden, p. 97 in "Reading": "It is worth the expense of youthful days and costly hours, if you can learn only some words of an ancient language, which are raised out of the trivialness of the street, to be perpetual suggestions and provocations." Emerson is constantly raising words up in just this way. No youthful drilling is required, only tolerance and effort in the present.
22

Emerson's Transcendental Etudes, edited by David Justin Hodge (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 217.
23

English Traits, p. 906.

24

Joel Porte describes Emerson as "unChurched," in Representative Man. But the word "unchurch" is Emerson's, in English Traits, p. 889, where it's coupled (contrary to Porte's intention, at least) with unspiritualization.
25

"Pray Without Ceasing," p. 24 in Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Shaking Tent, edited by Laurence A. Green (Waltham, Massachusetts: Back Pages Publishers, 2009). The following quotation appears on p. 25.
26

I gather this from Richardson, First We Read, and from his biography Emerson: The Mind on Fire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).
27

Quoted in Lawrence Rosenwald, Emerson and the Art of the Diary (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 72. Rosenwald's source for Alcott's comment is Buell, Literary Transcendentalism, p. 160. It comes ultimately from Alcott's Concord Days (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1872), p. 33 in "Emerson" (a diary entry dated April 1869), pp. 25-40. A grouchy further thought: in his opaque and opinionated "Emerson and a Poetry Yet to be Written," in The Anatomy of Influence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), pp. 209-17, Harold Bloom repeats Alcott's joke (without citing Alcott) and then proceeds to spoil it, by dutifully taking note of an exception: "His essays (except for 'Experience') can be read back-to-front without too much loss" (p. 210). Now at last we have a serious interpretive thesis! Try reading Nature back-to-front, and you'll appreciate the wisdom in Alcott's lighter touch.
28

Rosenwald, p. 72. I should probably look at the other letters Rosenwald cites there.

29

The reviewer has been identified as J. B. Holland. See Ronald A. Bosco's "Historical Introduction" in volume eight of The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Letters and Social Aims, edited by Glen M. Johnson and Joel Myerson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010). The quoted words are taken from p. xxvii. Bosco surmises that Holland must have had some inside information on the text's manner of production.
30

Robert D. Richardson, First We Read, pp. 36-7. John Jay Chapman makes some helpful remarks on Emerson's apparent inconsistency in "Emerson," in his Emerson and Other Essays, pp. 36 and 367. "From the point of view of Emerson there is no such thing as inconsistency. Every man is each day a new man. Let him be to-day what he is to-day. It is immaterial and waste of time to consider what he once was" (p. 36). "Emerson's method is, not to give a generalization and trust to our making the allowance, but to give two conflicting statements and leave the balance of truth

45

to be struck in our own minds on the facts. There is no inconsistency in this. It is a vivid and very legitimate method of procedure" (pp. 36-7). For a more exasperated response see Sharon Cameron, Impersonality: Seven Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), pp. 54-5 and 221-3.
31

"All this polemics, syllogism, & definition is so much wastepaper & Montaigne is almost the only man who has never lost sight of this fact" (Journals 1: 419). "A systemgrinder hates the truth" (Journals 1: 426).
32

Emerson's Transcendental Etudes, p. 45.

33

Partly for this reason, I find it hard to enter, with any joy, enthusiasm, or expectation of illumination or improvement, into the debate over Emerson as a philosopher. "Debate" is probably the wrong word. No one in philosophy is actively excluding Emerson. He is simply being ignored, as (for exampleI've plucked the names almost at random), Montaigne, Henry More, Cudworth, Swedenborg, and Victor Cousin are being ignored. Emerson is, like Montaigne (but unlike More, Cudworth, Swedenborg, and Cousin) claimed by othersin Emerson's case, by critics and Americanistswhich makes it easier to ignore him in good conscience. I doubt that the philosophers who ignore Emerson have developed reasons, or even developable reasons, for doing so. And not so long ago, for thinkers who are, even now, philosophers uncontroversially (James and Dewey, for example), Emerson was a philosopherperhaps, even, a paradigmatic philosopher. I should look back at Bruce Kuklick's on the turn-of-the-century survey of Harvard graduate students in philosophy. My recollection is that several of themCharles Hartshorne, for examplecite Emerson as an inspiration. These were, as I recall, students for whom the most urgent philosophical theme was the bearing of science on religion. (The indications are, incidentally, that in the early or mid-nineteenth century, Emerson was ruled out of philosophy by those who taught it at HarvardFrancis Abbott, for example. On this see Kuklick.)
34

We have Josiah Royce's testimony for this. See his "William James and the Philosophy of Life," a Phi Beta Kappa oration delivered in 1911: "Fifty years since, if competent judges were asked to name the American thinkers from whom there had come novel and notable and typical contributions to general philosophy, they could in reply mention only two menJonathan Edwards and Ralph Waldo Emerson" (p. 3 in William James and Other Essays in the Philosophy of Life [New York: Macmillan, 1912]). The thesis of Royce's essay is that they Edwards and Emerson have now been joined by James.
35

See the opening paragraph of Charles M. Bakewell's "The Philosophy of Emerson" (Philosophical Review 12 [1903], pp. 525-36): "If to be a philosopher means to have a closely reasoned system of metaphysics, then doubtless Emerson was not a philosopher. But there is a far more general, and equally valid, sense in which we use the term in philosophy, where it implies an attitude, whether reasoned, intuitive, or instinctive, toward life as a whole" (p. 525). Emerson's standing as a philosopher is also the first question John Dewey addresses in his "Emerson: The Philosopher of Democracy," Ethics 13 (1903), pp. 405-13. Emerson himself would perhaps not agree that the professionalization of philosophy had to wait until the late nineteenth century. In his "Introduction" to Goodwin's edition of Plutarch's Morals, published in 1870, he compares Plutarch with his contemporary Seneca. "Plutarch is genial, with an endless interest in all human and divine things; Seneca, a professional philosopher, a writer of sentences, and, though he keep a sublime path, is less interesting, because less humane; and when we have shut his book, we forget

46

to open it again" (p. xviii). (William Watson Goodwin, a professor of classics at Harvard, was Emerson's neighbor in Concord.)
36

Quotations are from Hugo Munsterberg, Science and Idealism (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906). The cornerstone of Emerson Hall was laid on Emerson's birthday, May 25, 1903.
37

"Mr. America," New York Review of Books 31 (1984), section 1.

38

Bloom proceeds to observe that Emerson is "the principal source of the American difference . . . in pragmatic postphilosophy." I'm not sure what this means, but it can't, by itself, make Emerson into a philosopher.
39

Chapmannot very convincingly, to my mindfound argument only in Emerson's poetry. "He seeks in his verse to do the very thing which he avoids doing in his prose: follow a logical method" ("Emerson," in his Emerson and Other Essays, p. 92).
40

The Social Circle in Concord, The Centenary of the Birth of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Concord: The Social Circle and Riverside Press, 1903), p. 49.
41

"Note on the Texts," p. 1135 in his Library of American edition of Essays and Lectures. For a catalogue of the substantive differences between the two editions see Sealts and Ferguson (eds.), Emerson's Nature: Origin, Growth, Meaning, pp. 68-71.
42

I'm using the fascimile edition of Nature published in Boston by the Beacon Press in 1985, with an introduction by Jaroslav Pelikan.
43

John S. Harrison, The Teachers of Emerson (New York: Sturgis and Walton, 1910), p. 34. The passage I go on to quote, from Cudworth's True Intellectual System of the Universe, is quoted as it appears in Harrison's book.
44

This view was characteristic of Cambridge Platonism, which probably influenced Newton, who had been a student at Cambridge. In Newton's view, the only power that we can safely say is inherent in matter is inertial power, which is not active but passive. It is the passive power of a body to remain in its present state, so long as nothing external intervenes.
45

I'm quoting from the Birch edition of the System, though I don't have the page reference at the moment.
46

By the end of Nature, final causation is no longer thought to require a personal God.

47

The Transcendentalists (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007), p. 47. This survey was first published as a chapter in The Cambridge History of American Literature, volume 2, Prose Writing 1820-1865, edited by Sacvan Bercovitch (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
48

The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, volume 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), p. 174. The letter is quoted in Whicher, Freedom and Fate, p. 18.

47

49

Nature is a radically anthropocentric work, as Whicher for example observes (Freedom and Fate, p. 142). In this respect, it very much resembles Thoreau's Walden, as I'll argue next week.
50

Emerson's Epistemology, p. 24.

51

My acquaintance with the literature on Nature isn't broad, but I have the feeling that this third sense of the word "nature" has gone unremarked. (For example, Kenneth Marc Harris, in his careful delineation of Emerson's understandings of "nature" [in "Emerson's Second Nature," pp. 3348, in Joel Porte (ed.), Emerson: Prospect and Retrospect, Harvard English Studies 10 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982)], takes no notice of it.) Is that because the passage is read as saying that we have a distinct but most poetical sentiment (or sentimental susceptibility) in the mind? It seems quite clear that Emerson is talking about the sense of a word or verbal expression. He says that when we speak of nature in the manner described, we have a distinct sense in the mind, and that when we do, we mean the integrity of impression made by manifold natural objects.
52

The primary forms are later called "the individual forms," of which Emerson offers a long list: "the acorn, the grape, the pine-cone, the wheat-ear, the egg, the wings and forms of most birds, the lions' claw, the serpent, the butterly, sea-shells, flames, clouds, buds, leaves, and the forms of many trees, as the palm" (p. 14). Their primacy as forms has something to do with their "endless imitation" in our arts and crafts (p. 14).
53

Representative Man: Ralph Waldo Emerson in His Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988; original edition New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 3. See also Barbara L. Packer, Emerson's Fall: A New Interpretation of the Major Essays (New York: Continuum, 1982), p. 79, and Paul Grimstad, "Emerson's Adjacencies: Radical Empiricism in Nature," in Branka Arsi and Cary Wolfe (eds.), The Other Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), pp. 251-70, especially pp. 262-3.
54

For less favorable views see Jonathan Bishop, Emerson on the Soul (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964), pp. 10-15, and Packer, Emerson's Fall, p. 27.
55

There are some remarks on landscape in George Santayana's Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe (Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature, volume 1 [Cambridge: Harvard University, 1910]) that recall this part of Nature. "To cry 'The All is One,' and to perceive that all things are in one landscape and form a system by their juxtaposition," he writes, "is the rude beginning of wisdom in natural philosophy" (p. 22). See also the remarks on Wordsworth on pp. 59-61. The similarities between Emerson's handling of landscape in Nature and the opening pages of Thoreau's "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For," in Walden, are even closer. See pp. 78-9 in Walter Harding's annotated edition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1995).
56

Lawrence Buell, Emerson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 94.

57

Buell thinks Emerson's exploration of the occult relation terminates in a "shoulder-shrugging conclusion as to whether this impression comes from nature, from man, or from 'a harmony of both'" (Emerson, p. 94). I see Emerson's affirmation of the relation as an implicit embrace of the

48

third and final answer. For discussion of an important journal entry suggesting that Emerson was too absorbed by the mystery to shrug his shoulders, see Packer, Emerson's Fall, p. 41.
58

"Thinking of Emerson," New Literary History 11 (1979), pp. 167-76, p. 168.

59

Swedenborg and his theory of "correspondence" are often cited, probably with some justice, as a crucial influence on chapter three of Nature, but it should be remembered that a doctrine of correspondence was a settled piece of Puritan theology. Edwards (in Images of Divine Things, on p. 16 of A Jonathan Edwards Reader) observes, "that the things of this world are ordered [and] designed to shadow forth spiritual things, appears by the Apostle's arguing spiritual things from them. I. Cor. 15-36." The following quotations are from p. 17: We see that even in the material world God makes one part of it strangely to agree with another; and why is it not reasonable to suppose he makes the whole as a shadow of the spiritual world. The silkworm is a remarkable type of Christ, which, when it does, yields us that of which we make such glorious clothing. Ravens that with delight feed on carrion seem to be remarkable types of devils who with delight prey upon the souls of the dead. It is with many of these images as it was with the sacrifices of old. They are often repeated, whereas the antitype is continual and never comes to pass but once. They are repeated often, but the antitype is but once. The contrast between type and antitype, many and one, is straight Puritan doctrine, and it contributes to Samuel Johnson's eagerness to find a doctrine of archetypes behind Berkeley's theory of ideas. See William Ames, Marrow of Sacred Divinity, p. 28: " The Idea or platforme, as it is absolutly considered in God, is only one, but as it includes divers respects to the Creatures, it becomes manifold."
60

The entry is from March 27, 1836. It is presented in Sealts and Ferguson, Emerson's Nature, p. 43.
61

All quotations from Coleridge are from p. 10 of Lawrence Buell (ed.), The American Transcendentalists. Buell is quoting from James Marsh (ed.), Aids to Reflection (Burlington: Chauncey Goodrich, 1829).
62

Hence they are exempt from what Stanley Cavell calls Emerson's "epistemology of moods." Intuition is moodless or unmodified. Its impersonality consists in that. I think it's clear that Emerson never let go of intuition. It remained his means of access to the "central fact" (Introduction to Plutarch's Morals, p. xv).
63

(Boston: James Munroe, 1836), pp. 35-6. Ripley goes on to ask whether this does not show that "Reason though with us is not created by us; though belonging to human nature, originates in

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a higher nature; though shining in the mind of man, is an emanation from the mind of God." The motto on Ripley's title page is from Coleridge, and on p. 11 he points out that "the word Reason is used . . . through these Discourses, not as the power of reasoning, of evolving derivative truth from admitted premisses; but in its highest philosophical sense, as the faculty of perceiving primitive, spiritual truth. I am justified in this use of the term by the authority of some of the older English writers, and by a similar use of the corresponding term in the philosopical literature of Europe." The sources to which he alludes here are also Emerson's.
64

For this use of "universe" see p. 8 of the introduction: "Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul."
65

It is fair to detect echoes of Spinoza in Emerson's use of natura naturata and natura naturans, but Emerson himself attributes it to the "schoolmen" (Essays, p. 545), as Berkeley does when he makes use of the distinction in one of his letters to Johnson. Spinoza's Ethics may be our own likeliest source for the distinction, but it may not have been for Emerson and others in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is, in any case, misleading to say that in Nature, "Emerson explicitly refers to [a particular] type of expressionist philosophy by using Spinoza's distinction between natura naturans (creating infinite nature) and natura naturata (created finite modes)" (Branka Arsi, "Brain Walks: Emerson on Thinking," in Arsi and Wolfe, The Other Emerson, pp. 59-97, p. 95; see also her On Leaving: A Reading in Emerson [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010], pp. 352-3).
66

Or so I infer Grimstad's reaffirmation of Van Leer's findings in "Emerson's Adjacencies" (pp. 2578 and 268 in The Other Emerson), and from the tone of David Greenham's brief remarks in "The Skeptical Deduction: Reading Kant and Cavell in Emerson's 'Self-Reliance,'" ESQ 53 (2007), pp. 253-81, pp. 259-60. I may be harking back to an older view, on which see John Michael, Emerson and Skepticism: The Cipher of the World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), pp. 358, particularly his remarks on Gay Wilson Allen.
67

The idealism of chapter six is not, however, steadfastly Berkeleyan. As I will acknowledge later on, the later argument of chapter six includes some non-Berkeleyan material. But I think chapter seven gives us reason to regard this as an intrusion into chapter six of considerations that more properly belong in chapter seven. Here it may be worth recalling a remark Emerson made in a letter to Margaret Fuller (quoted in Barbara L. Packer, Emerson's Fall, p. 159): "I know but one solution to my nature & relations, which I find in the remembering the joy with which in my boyhood I caught the first hint of the Berkleian philosophy, and which I certainly never lost sight of afterwards."
68

My arguments line up well, in my view, with the facts adduced by Ren Wellek in "Emerson and German Philosophy," New England Quarterly 16 (1943), pp. 41-62. See in particular pp. 41-2 and 44-8. See also Stephen E. Whicher's way of sorting out the four meanings that idealism held for Emerson in his Selections, p. 487. Whicher thinks that these meanings are inconsistent; I am not so sure.
69

(New York: The Modern Library), p. 44.

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70

They're worth comparing to the account of Berkeley in Josiah Royce's The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982), p. 92, where Royce falls naturally into talk of discipline: "Matter . . . is [God's] manifested will, his plan for our education, his voice speaking to us, warning, instructing, guiding, amusing, disciplining, blessing us, with a series of orderly and significant experiences."
71

p. 56 in Robert E. Spiller and Wallace E. Williams (eds.), The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, volume 3 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972). In English Traits, Emerson includes "the theory of Berkeley, that we have no certain assurance of the existence of matter" among "a few generalizations [that] always circulate in the world, . . . which astonish, and appear to be avenues to vast kingdoms of thought, and . . . are in the world constants, like the Copernican and Newtonian theories in physics" (Essays, p. 898).
72

Richardson tells the following story. "Once when a wagonload of firewood arrived at Emerson's Concord home while he was indoors talking with his usual gaggle of idealist friends, Emerson looked out the window and, rising from his chair, said, 'we must deal with this just as if it were real'" (First We Read, p. 23). In "Experience," Emerson gives makes a similar appeal on behalf of the belief in other people.
73

There's is no documentary evidence that he did so, but I sometimes wonder whether we know too much about Emerson's reading for our own good. Our evidence is so extensive that we may not consider sources that haven't been documented by Kenneth Walter Cameron. But Emerson surely read more than we know of. I'm reminded of Emerson's rueful confession to an admirer: that if he'd read as much as Emerson had, he wouldn't think Emerson was so smart.
74

Nowadays, Berkeley is seen as an empiricist rather than a Platonist. But Kant himself saw Berkeley as a Platonist (as I argue in "Berkeley and Kant," in Daniel Garber and Batrice Longuenesse (eds.), Kant and the Early Moderns [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008], pp. 142-171, 231-4), as did Emerson's friend Bronson Alcott. In Alcott's view, Berkeley's idealism is "the purest which the British Isles have produced." "Platonic as were Cudworth, Norris, Henry More," Berkeley's Platonism is, he suggests, more authentic and pristine: Berkeley "dealt face to face with ideas as distinguished from scholastic fancies and common notions, and thus gave them their place in the order of the mind; and this to exhaustive issues, as his English predecessors in thought had failed to do" (p. 236 in Concord Days). Cudworth, Norris, and More (whose prose was more clotted and scholastic than Berkeley's) all appear on Emerson's own list of Plato's disciples in Britain. There was a copy of Berkeley's Siris in Alcott's library. See <http://oasis.lib.harvard.edu/oasis/deliver/~hou01478>. Although we have no external evidence that Emerson read or borrowed Siris from his neighbor Alcott, it's hard to imagine that he didn't know about it. Berkeley's advocacy of tar-water was one of the best-known facts about him.
75

Berkeley alludes here to Newton's Principia, where absolute time is said to flow uniformly (aequabiliter fluit).
76

Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, volume 2 (New York: Eastburn, Kirk, & Co., 1814), p. 65.

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77

Interestingly, Emerson cites "Doctor Samuel Clarke's argument for theism from the nature of space and time" as another of the astonishing avenues of thought along which the world always runs, in a list that also includes "the theory of Berkeley, that we have no certain assurance of the existence of matter" (English Traits, p. 898 in Essays). This is perhaps at odds with my earlier suggestion that Emerson, late in his career, took Berkeley's lesson to heart. But the possibility that matter does not exist is compatible with the validity, and even the soundness, of Clarke's argument, just as it is compatible with another of the constants, "Spenser's creed" that the soul makes the body. The idealistic verses of "the wise Spenser" are quoted in "The Poet," p. 452 in Essays and Lectures.
78

I'm also struck by Emerson's later description of the idealist's world as "not painfully accumulated, atom after atom, act after act, in an aged creeping Past, but as one vast picture, which God paints on the instant eternity, for the contemplation of the soul" (p. 39). This is a version of continuous creation. We live at the moment in a new world. In the next moment another will arise, also without a history.
79

Chapman says a bit later that Emerson "seeks in his verse to do the very thing which he avoids doing in his prose: follow a logical method" (p. 92).
80

I borrow the language of prologue, overture, and argument from Chapman, p. 91.

81

Because Emerson isn't arguing for idealism, he needn't worry about a criticism made by several of the book's reviewers. Francis Bowen for exampled complained that the author "has brought no positive arguments to disprove the existence of any thing exterior to mind. He has not shown, tha the common opinion involves any repugnancy or inconsistency in itself. The bridge on which we relied for support may be broken down [because the usual arguments for the "outward and independent existence of matter" are indeed "inconclusive"], but we are not whelmed in the waters beneath" (in Nature, edited by Sealts and Ferguson, p. 83, from a review originally publihsed in The Christian Examiner 21 [1837], pp. 371-85). In a warm and capable review in The Western Messenger 2 (1837), pp. 385-93, Samuel Osgood gives voice to the same dissatisfaction. "We are unable to perceive the bearing of the writer's argument, in proof of idealism, or to allow the advantage, which he claims for his theory. All his arguments, it seems, prove merely the superiority of mind over matter. And all the advantage, which he claims for Idealism, is owned by that common spiritual philosophy, which subordinates matter to mind. We own there is much fine thought and good writing in this chapter, little as the sentiments agree with our Eclecticism" (p. 391). By the standard of these lectures, what Osgood calls the common spiritual philosophy is just another version of idealism. The content of Osgood's eclecticism, which derives I assume from Victor Cousin, is left unclear.
82

I feel as if this motive deserves more discussion than I give it. I suppose one can see the poetry, or the emphasis on symbol and imagination, as a way of meeting a difficultythe stubbornness or stolidity of matter. We need some way of etherealizing it, some way of asserting the primacy of spirit. Poetry does that. (But science does it too.) At the very least we render the priority of spirit consistent with the stubborn persistence of matter. We needn't be grudging in our acknowledgement of matter. We can admit it genially. (Emerson would like that.) But then we assert ourselves. This certainly isn't a positive argument for idealism, certainly, but it's an promising idealist response to a difficulty. Sufficient reason may enter in as well, though at the moment I can't see exactly how.

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83

F. W. J. Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), translated by Peter Heath (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1978), p. 6. It's doubtful that Emerson read this work, which hadn't yet been translated into English, but it's mentioned and briefly described by Frederic Henry Hedge in a review of several works by Coleridge in The Christian Examiner, volume 14 (Boston: Charles Bowen, 1833), p. 125. Hedge quotes from the System again in an 1836 inaugural lecture at the Bangor Lyceum that I'll mention later on. (The lecture's themes overlap significantly with those of Emerson's Nature.) In a letter from 1845 quoted by Wellek ("Emerson and German Philosophy," p. 51), Emerson tells James Eliot Cabot that he had "never fairly engaged" with Schelling "until last week," when he studied Cabot's own translation of Schelling's Philosophical Enquiries into the Nature of Freedom.
84

I need to consider whether this threatens my overall reading of the work. I think not, because topic three seems to me to represent an intrusion of the German "spiritualism" of chapter seven into the more arid idealist atmosphere of chapter six. According to topic three, the laws of nature aren't merely known a priori by the mind, but "imparted" to nature by an "informing soul."
85

In volume 5 of the Journals, in a passage not included in the Rosenwald edition, Emerson speaks (p. 72) of a "cumulative moral & intellectual science," which seems to confirm my suspicion. "Intellectual science" is also linked with "ethical science" in volume 1 of the Journals (pp. 259, 258). When, in volume 1, Emerson rests his hopes for the advancement of intellectual science on the shoulder's of the clergy, it seems quite clear that it's ethics he has in mind. But "Intellectual science" may also be a synonym of "moral philosophy," as understood by such Scottish philosophers as Hutcheson, Hume, Reid, Stewart, and Thomas Brown. It will then be the science of human nature.
86

There's a nice treatment of Nature's figure of the child in Joel Porte, "Nature as Symbol: Emerson's Noble Doubt," New England Quarterly 37 (1964), pp. 453-76. See pp. 465-6.
87

That idealism "leaves God out of me" echoes a poem Emerson had written in 1832 (parts of which are included in Whicher, Selections, p. 11; the whole is in the Journals). "I will not live out of me. / I will not see with other's eyes; / My good is good, my evil ill. / I would be free; I cannot be / While I take things as others please to rate them." He resolves in these lines to follow his heart, which has, he says, never misled him. Where, he then asks, did the heart's "omniscient spirit" come from? His answer is, "From God it came. It is the Deity." If, in other words, I'm not to live "out of me," God himself must be within me.
88

In The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1892), Josiah Royce separates idealism into two moments that correspond almost exactly to Emerson's. The first of Royce's moments is Berkeleyan, and he describes it as "only preparatory." The second, "which gives us our notion of the absolute Self," is "the one which from Kant, until the present time, has formed the deeper problem of thought" (p. 351). I take up Emerson's influence on Royce in Lecture V. In On Leaving, p. 102, Arsi treats the whole of Nature is a vast introductory hypothesis. I see no basis for this in the text. I'm also perplexed by her suggestion that according to Nature, idealism "ruins" the world (p. 56), and by her sense of the work as enacting failure, disaster, double-dealing, and shipwreck (pp. 101, 102).

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89

Emerson omits several stanzas, but it is particularly telling that he drops the last, in which the poet prays that "as the world serves us, we may serve thee, And both thy servants be." In Emerson's more resolutely anthropocentric Nature, the buck passed up by servant nature ends with us. We are lord.
90

Both Porte and Packer have helpfully discussed Emerson's allusion to this text, but I do not think either has given us the last word. See Porte, Representative Man, pp. 92-3, and Packer, Transcendentalism, p. 51.
91

"Of Baptizing Infants," p. 126 in The Whole Works of . . . Jeremy Taylor, volume 1 (London: Westley and Davis, 1835).
92

"Emerson's Philosophy of Nature," in The Genius and Character of Emerson: Lectures at the Concord School of Philosophy, edited by F. N. Sanborn (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1885), pp. 33964. See also Oliver Wendell Holmes, Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1884), pp. 105-6. In Holmes's view, Emerson prefigures Darwin.
93

But see Journals 2: 232-3, where Emerson may be responding to the conflict that worries Harris.

94

"Completing the Sphere: Emerson's Revision of the Mottoes of 'Nature'," Studies in the American Renaissance (1979), pp. 231-7, p. 234. Francis goes on to say that Emerson's decision to omit the following first-edition sentence was another sign of his new conception of the natural world: "Thus nature is an interpreter, by whose means man converses with his fellow men." Francis hypothesizes that "the idea of Nature as an intermediary between men facilitating communications is, by 1849, not consistent with the complex concept of Nature that evolved in the essays. Man is the interpreter, as surely members of the Geologic Society impressed on Emerson. To conceive of Nature as interpreter is to insist on a limited role for Man and a proscribed role for Nature" (p. 234). I have several problems with this. The first is that the omitted sentence remains a perfectly fair summary of the important paragraph leading up to it. So omitting the sentence while retaining the paragraph doesn't meet the need that Francis identifies. The second is that Emerson may not have shared Francis's doggedly literal understanding of "interpreter." The third is that the motto's image of the multilingual rose comes very closedangerously close, if Francis is rightto the forbidden image of nature as interpreter. Finally, the closing paragraph of chapter seven continues to call nature "the present expositor of the divine mind." It seems to me that being an expositor goes hand in hand with being an interpreter, on one perfectly legitimate understanding of that word.
95

This is on p. 733 of chapter 11 in an abridgment of Cudworth's True Intellectual System. I need to locate the passage in the text of 1678. (Will it turn out to be in a different work by Cudworth?)
96

For a useful initial guide to these waters see William Rossi, "Evolutionary Theory," pp. 583-96 in The Oxford Handbook of Transcendentalism, edited by Joel Myerson, Sandra Harbert Petrulionis, and Laura Dassow Walls (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
97

I think I can do better with this than I do in the main text. The poem says that the eye reads omens where it goes. So the worm mounting through the spires of form may be a worm (a carterpillar) that we take to be a type of man: an "omen" of man's future possibilities.

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98

To describe it as inward or interior is not to deny that it has outward marks, or that its inward presence might even have outward "criteria" (in Wittgenstein's sense). For some passages in Emerson expressing something like the pragmatic conception of belief as a habit of action, see "Powers of the Mind" (p. 240 in Selected Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, edited by Ronald A. Bosco and Joel Myerson [Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005]), where Emerson declares that "thought exists to be expressed. That which cannot externize itself is not thought," and the following passages in the Journals (volume and page numbers are to the Rosenwald edition): "to think is to act" (1: 392); "making the abstractions of philosophers accessible & effectual" (1: 392); "any mind that thought so would have acted so" (1: 594); "the fish in the cave is blind; such is the eternal relation between power & use" (2: 377); "the scholar who abstracted himself with pain to make the analysis of Hegel is less enriched than when the beauty & depth of any thought by the wayside has commanded his mind & led to new thought and action" (2: 886). I'll say a bit more later on about the "pragmatic" or "de-Transcendentalized" Emerson.
99

I've outworn the fiction that this manuscript is the text of a lecture. If I were delivering this, text, I'd now be somewhere between hour two and hour three. The remaining pages of this "lecture" will therefore be more clipped and declamatory than the preceding ones. I'll give as clear an outline as I can of my overall view, quoting many of the texts that have been rattling around in my head for the past month or two, but I'll avoid close readings, and spend less time quarreling with other commentators.
100

Emerson: The Mind on Fire, p. 234.

101

There's another comment on willfulness in writing in a memorable journal entry quoted by Richardson in First We Read, p. 26: "Three or four stubborn necessary words are the pith and fate of the business; all the rest is expatiating and qualifying; three or four real choices, acts of will of somebody, the rest is circumstance, satellite, and flourish." Here the core choices are made (or so I assume) by an impersonal will, but the surrounding choices are the writer's. But see Arsi, "Brains Walks," p. 91 (as well as On Leaving, p. 165), for a different view.
102

C. S. Peirce is an instructive example of an idealist who gives the understanding a very wide berth. For him, intuition counts for nothing. The question is whether the idealist hypothesis has the kind of explanatory power that can gratify the understanding. "The one intelligible theory of the universe is that of objective idealism, that matter is effete mind, inveterate habits becoming physical laws," he writes. "But before this can be accepted it must show itself capable of explaining the tri-dimensionality of space, the laws of motion, and the general characteristics of the universe, with mathematical clearness and precision; for no less should be demanded of every philosophy."
103

Sellars's definition is foreshadowed by Santayana (p. 22 in Three Philosophical Poets): "[To speak of 'the world'] is to set the problem for all natural philosophy, and in a certain measure to anticipate the solution of that problem; for it is to ask how things hang together, and to assume that they do hang together in one way rather than another."
104

I should cite or quote some texts to this effect.

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105

See Michael Lopez, "De-Transcendentalizing Emerson," ESQ 34 (1988), pp. 77-139, p. 116.

106

Lawrence Buell, in his edition of The American Transcedentalists: Essential Writings ([New York: Modern Library, 2006], p. 565), criticizes Whicher for "discounting . . . Emerson's later 'pragmatic' phase," but I don't think this is altogether fair. In my view, Whicher quietly takes Emerson's pragmatism for granted. Emerson's pragmatism had already been acknowledged by Whicher's main secondary source (Henry David Gray, Emerson: A Statement of New England Transcendentalism as Expressed in the Philosophy of Its Chief Exponent [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1917], pp. 13-14; see p. viii of Freedom and Fate for Whicher's acknowledgment of Gray's influence), and by Eduard C. Lindeman, in an essay ("Emerson's Pragmatic Mood," American Scholar 16 [1946-7], pp. 57-64) to which Whicher approvingly alludes on p. 172. Recent writers who foreground Emerson's pragmatism or proto-pragmatism include Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989); David M. Robinson, Emerson and the Conduct of Life: Pragmatism and Ethical Purpose in the Later Work (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Richard Rorty, "Pragmatism and Romanticism," pp. 105-19 in Objectivity, Relativism and Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); and Buell himself in Emerson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), pp. 199-241. In The Pragmatic Test: Essays on the History of Ideas (San Francisco: Colt Press, 1941), Henry Bamford Parkes assesses Emerson as a pragmatic failure, but he does not read him as a pragmatist; see "Emerson," pp. 39-62. (Though he tests views by their consequences, Parkes himself disavows pragmatism. See his "Introduction," p. 4, and his essay "William James," pp. 72-94.) It was Buell who coined the term "de-Transcendentalization" (in "The Emerson Industry in the 1980's: A Survey of Trends and Achievements," ESQ [1984], pp. 117-36), but he grants (as does Lopez, "De-Transcendentalizing Emerson," p. 90), that Emerson never ceased to "transcendentalize"; in this respect, the label "de-Transcendentalization" is misleading. Emerson, it is often said, never called himself a transcendentalist, but I don't know how to interpret his forbearance. I'm not sure that he ever met a label that he liked. (Did Emerson ever call himself an abolitionist? He certainly was one.) Emerson does hold transcendentalism at arm's length in his 1842 essay "Transcendentalism," but that essay, intended as a Theophrastan character, maintains a steady neutrality and almost scientific even-handedness. In a briefer and less finely tuned note on "Transcendentalism," published that same year in the Dial, Emerson's transcendentalist allegiances are made quite clear, though the label is taken very broadly there, as standing for "the liberal thought of all men of a religious and contemplative habit" (The Dial: A Magazine for Literature, Philosophy, and Religion 2 [1842], pp. 382-4, p. 382). I can't fairly examine the pragmatist Emerson here, but I sympathize with much of Stanley Cavell's "What's the Use of Calling Emerson a Pragmatist?," (Emerson's Transcendental Etudes [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003], pp. 215-23). However we answer his title question, I think it's helpful to recall that decidedly "pragmatist" linkings of belief with action, or of truth with practical power, figure in the writings of several mid-century Unitarians and Unitarian renegades. See Frederic Henry Hedge, An Introductory Lecture Delivered at the Opening of the Bangor Lyceum (Bangor: Nourse and Smith, Duren and Thatcher, 1836), pp. 24 and 29, and Sampson Reed, Observations on the Growth of the Mind (Boston: Otis Clapp, 1838), pp. 21, 63, and 89.
107

Journals 8: 228. The entry was adapted in "New England Reformers," p. 608 in Essays and Lectures: "no matter, how often defeated, you are born to victory." See also Journals 5: 338: "A believer in Unity, a seer of Unity, I yet behold two," and p. 1052 in "Culture": "The chances seem infinite against success; and yet success is continually attained."

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108

Here I cite or exhibit some of the evidence of Emerson's lasting commitment to idealism. It includes "Literary Ethics," pp. 96, 97, 100 in Essays and Lectures; "The Method of Nature," p. 118, 130; "Lecture on the Times," p. 168; "History," pp. 237, 255 ("the mind is One, and . . . nature is its correlative"); "Compensation," p. 299; "Prudence," p. 357 ("the world of the senses is a world of shows; it does not exist for itself, but has a symbolic character"); the whole of "The Over-Soul," but especially pp. 385-6, 387, 390, 392, 393, and 399; "Circles," pp. 404, 405, 407-8 ("there are degrees in idealism . . . . the idealism of Berkeley is only a crude statement of the idealism of Jesus, and that again is a crude statement of the fact, that all nature is the rapid efflux of goodness executing and organizing itself"); p. 412 ("while the eternal generation of circles proceeds, the eternal generator abides. That central life is somewhat superior to creation, superior to knowledge and thought, and contains all its circles.); "The Poet," pp. 447-8, 452, 453; "Nature" (1844), p. 548, 555 ("nature is the incarnation of a thought, and turns to a thought again"); "New England Reformers," p. 607; "Uses of Great Men," p. 631; "Plato; or, The Philosopher," p. 638 ("it is soul,one in all bodies, pervading, uniform, perfect, preeminent over nature, exempt from birth, growth, and decay, omnipresent"), 639, 645-6, "Swedenborg; or, The Mystic," p. 668 ("in short, he was a believer in the Identity-philosophy, which he held not idly, as the dreamers of Berlin or Boston"); "Montaigne; or, The Skeptic," p. 709; English Traits, throughout chapter 14 (pp. 893907; "Fate," p. 956 ("thought dissolves the material universe, by carrying the mind up into a sphere where all is plastic"), 967-8 ("the Blessed Unity which holds nature and souls in perfect solution, and compels every atom to serve an universal end"; "let us build altars to the Beautiful Necessity, which secures that all is made of one piece"); "Worship," p. 1065 ("the law is the basis of the human mind. In us, it is inspiration; out there in Nature, we see its fatal strength. We call it the moral sentiment."); "Beauty," p. 1112; Society and Solitude (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1870), pp. 36, 43, 45, 114, 118, 263-4; Emerson's "Introduction" to Goodwin's edition of Plutarch's Morals (also published in 1870), pp. xv ("the central fact is the superhuman intelligence pouring into us from its unknown fountain . . . "), xvi; and his poem "Brahma," about which I'll say more in Lecture V. Similar sentiments flood Emerson's lectures and surface regularly in his Journals. Some typical example are 1: 449 in the Rosenwald edition of the Journals ("under the stupendous dominion of Ideas, individual interests, even personal identity, melt into the swelling surges of the Universal Humanity"), and 1: 450 ("I only aim to speak for the Great Soul; to speak for the sovereignty of Ideas"). (Ideas for Emerson are almost always Platonic rather than Cartesian or Lockean. Emerson dismisses Locke in a way that present-day students of philosophy would find surprising: for Emerson is he somehow "to whom the meaning of ideas was unknown" [English Traits, p. 899].) Emerson sometimes experiments with an "identity-philosophy" that he attributes to Schelling (as in the passage from "Swedenborg" quoted above; see also English Traits, p. 898, where his statement of the view"all difference is quantitative"is taken from Stallo's handbook; and Journals 2: 566). The identity-philosophy may well be form of neutral monism rather than a version idealism. Its status deserves more discussion that I can give it here, but my instinct is that at bottom, Emerson thinks of reality as law or lawfulness, and that for him, as for William Whewell, "law implies mind" (Astronomy and General Physics, considered with reference to Natural Theology [London: William Pickering, 1833], pp. 293-6), even if Emerson does not think of that mind as a person.
109

It gave way, in my view, only as an object of feeling or poetic attention.

110

Here I'll resist asking how vigorously Emerson might oppose what I'm attempting, but I'll quote a few suggestive passages. The first is from "Nominalist and Realist": "We must reconcile the contradictions as we can, but their discord and their concord introduce wild absurdities into our

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thinking and speech. No sentence will hold the whole truth, and the only way in which we can be just, is by giving ourselves the lie; Speech is better than silence; silence is better than speech;All things are in contact; every atom has a sphere of repulsion;Things are, and are not, at the same time;and the like. All the universe over, there is but one thing, this old Two-Face, creatorcreature, mind-matter, right-wrong, of which any proposition may be affirmed or denied" (p. 585 in Essays and Lectures). The second is from "Compensation": "An inevitable dualism bisects nature, so that each thing is a half, and suggests another thing to make it whole; as, spirit, matter; man, woman; odd, even; subjective, objective; in, our; upper, under; motion, rest; yea, nay" (p. 287). The third, from "Montaigne": "The astonishment of life, is, the absence of any appearance of reconciliation between the theory and practice of life. Reason, the prized reality, the Law, is apprehended, now and then, for a serene and profound moment, amidst the hubbub of cares and works which have no direct bearing on it;is then lost, for months or years, and again found, for an interval, to be lost again. If we compute it in time, we may, in fifty years, have half a dozen reasonable hours." The fourth, from "Fate": "What to do? By obeying each thought frankly, by harping, or, if you will, pounding on each string, we learn at last its power. By the same obedience to other thoughts, we learn theirs, and then comes some reasonable hope of harmonizing them. We are sure, that, though we know not how, necessity does comport with liberty, the individual with the world, my polarity with the spirit of the times" (p. 943). The last is from Society and Solitude, pp. 161-2 in "Works and Days": "The world is enigmatical,everything said, and everything known or done,and must not be taken literally, but genially [from genial, meaning of or pertaining to genius]. We must be at the top of our condition to understand anything rightly. You must hear the bird's song without attempting to render it into nouns and verbs. Cannot we be a little abstemious and obedient? Cannot we let the morning be." See also Journals 1: 809.
111

Ware was responding specifically to the Divinity School Address. See pp. 19, 20, 21, and 23 in The Personality of the Deity (Boston: J. Munroe, 1838). Ware was a professor of pulpit eloquence and pastoral care at the Divinity School, where his father was also a professor. Ware's sermon was delivered two months after Emerson's address. Sharon Cameron also notes that Emerson "disdained 'the personality of the deity'" (Impersonality, p. xv). She goes on to describe him as a pantheist.
112

See "The Over-Soul," p. 392: "In these communications, the power to see is not separated from the will to do, but the insight proceeds from obedience, and the obedience proceeds from a joyful perception." See also "Prudence," p. 366 and 1: 508 in Rosenwald's edition of the Journals.
113

I should quote or cite some texts affirming the "antagonism" ("Fate," p. 953) and "doubleconsciousness" (p. 966) within the self, and the "amphibious" character of human beings ("Nominalist and Realist," p. 577). In "Plato," p. 641, Emerson recognizes a "union of impossibilities" in all things, and says that it is "transferred entire to the consciousness of a man." I regret that I can't take up the puzzles of Emerson's individualism (raised for example by 1: 145 in the Journals, where Emerson describes the finite self as occupying a patch of ground untenanted before). There's a stimulating discussion of some of these puzzles in Cameron, "The Way of Life by Abandonment: Emerson's Impersonal," pp. 79-107 in Impersonality. I think Emerson would have appreciated Josiah Royce's resolution "to become infinite in my own way" (quoted on p. 290 in John Clendenning, The Life and Thought of Josiah Royce, revised and expanded edition [Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1999]).

58

114

See "Experience," p. 481 ("the new molecular philosophy shows astronomical interspaces betwixt atom and atom, shows that the world is all outside; it has no inside"), and the corresponding journal entry at 2: 111. Emerson may have learned this from Coleridge, who writes in Biographia Literaria that "matter has no inward. We remove one surface but to meet with another. We can but divide a particle into particles; and each atom comprehends in itself the properties of the material universe" (emphasis in original).
115

I'm in sharp disagreement with Cameron on this. See her Impersonality, p. x. For passages affirming our interiority, conceived as the capacity for perception or consciousness, see Journals 1: 587 and 2: 190, 327, and 565.
116

In this lecture, I haven't addressed the possibility that Emerson's idealism is no more than ethical. This is the view Porte takes in Representative Man. I consider a strictly ethical idealism in connection with Thoreau in Lecture IV. For an attempt to draw out a long train of distinctively Emersonian consequences from a single ethical premissthat the one thing of value is an active soul ("The American Scholar," p. 57)see Russell Goodman's "Paths of Coherence through Emerson's Philosophy: The Case of 'Nominalist and Realist,'" pp. 41-58 in The Other Emerson.

"'A New World': Philosophical Idealism in America, 1700 to 1950"1 Lecture IV (Draft. Please do not quote without permission.) When Emerson gave his eulogy for Thoreau, he recalled that "it was said of Plotinus that he was ashamed of his body." "'Tis very likely," Emerson speculated, that "he had good reason for it,that his body was a bad servant, and he had not skill in dealing with the material world, as happens often to men of abstract intellect." "But Mr. Thoreau," he said, "was equipped with a most adapted and serviceable body."2 Thoreau was also skilled in dealing with the material world.3 In fact his mechanical skills were almost magical, as Emerson goes on to illustrate: He could pace sixteen rods more accurately than another man could measure them with rod and chain. He could find his path at night, he said, better by his feet than his eyes. He could estimate the measure of a tree very well by his eye; he could estimate the weight of a calf or a pig, like a dealer. From a box containing a bushel or more of loose pencils, he [the son of a pencil maker and, in his own right, an innovator in pencil design and manufacture] could take up with his hands fast enough just a dozen pencils at every grasp. He was a good swimmer, runner, skater, boatman, and would probably outwalk most countrymen in a day's journey. (p. 400) Yet Thoreau was, for all that, an idealist, according to Emerson: as "abstract" a thinker (that is, as ideal a thinker) as Plato or Plotinus.4 My aim in this lecture is to determine in what sense this is true. I agree with Emerson that Thoreau is an idealist, but I'm uneasy with his way of spelling that idealism out. Thoreau, he says, saw the material world "as a means and symbol" (p. 401), meaning that he saw it at bottom as a means or symbol, or as a means or symbol through and through: that nature was for him, as it was for Emerson in Nature, something "thoroughly mediate" and "made to serve." I don't think this is right, and I hope this afternoon to explain why. I concedeindeed, I want to emphasizethat Thoreau's Walden, like Emerson's Nature, is anthropocentric. (This is a point to which I'll return, but it deserves a brief discussion now.) When Thoreau decided to leave the woods after two years and two months of living there, he contemplated the path he'd beaten from the cabin's door to the shore of the pond. He wasn't worried about the erosion on the surface of the earth. He was worried about erosion in the depths of his soul. "I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there," he writes. "It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves. I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door to the pond-side; and though it is five or six years since I trod it [the year of publication in 1854, seven years after he ended his experiment], it is still quite distinct. It is true, I fear, that others may have fallen into it, and so helped to keep it open. The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity! I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now."5 The material world does function for Thoreau as means and symbolor in Emersonian terms, as commodity and languageas this passage indicates. Almost everything said about nature in Walden can indeed be fit, without very little forcing, under one of Emerson's four headings. (As those of you who attended last week's lecture will remember, they are commodity, beauty, language, and discipline.) This is most obviously so in the book's first chapter, "Economy," which is an extended study of nature as

commodity. The fact that Thoreau devotes his longest chapter, a chapter Robinsonian (I mean, Crusoe-ian) in its intricacies, to a use of nature that occupies Emerson for barely a moment, has something to do with my uneasiness over Emerson's way of encapsulating Thoreau's idealism. Thoreau's idealism, as I will portray it today, is an engagement with a material world that has, disconcertingly but undeniably, some sort of standing of its own. It's a world with which Thoreau's soul eventually (and painfully) collides. Small collisions take place in Walden, but in "Ktaadn," as we'll see, there is a crash. Thoreau is intimate with nature as commodity and almost magically conversant with it, but his relationship to nature isn't as easy-going as Emerson's. Emerson's relationship to nature is more distant, genial but not intimatemore a matter of principle, perhaps, than of practice. At one point in his funeral oration, Emerson speaks insightfully of Thoreau's desire to "settle all his practice on an ideal foundation" (p. 395). Walden, as we'll see, is a foundationalist work, comparable in some respects to Descartes's Meditations. Thoreau's foundation, like Descartes's, is ideal, but the very fact that he's seeking a foundation for a practice that is, from the start, embodied or material, invests nature with a weight or authority that it does not, in Emerson's Nature, seem to carry. In the end, Thoreau works his way to an idealism that is, I think, more ethical than ontological.6 I'll begin today's lecture with Walden. I'll be asking how Thoreau seeks to combine idealism with meticulous, even loving, attention to the natural world, and to our footing in that world. (I'm not supposing that meticulous attention to nature is at odds with metaphysical idealism. Both Berkeley, in his description of the Cave of Dunmore, and Jonathan Edwards, in his Spider letter, give nature the kind of respectful attention that a divinely instituted system of signs seems to deserve.)7 Man, Thoreau wrote in his first book, "needs not only to be spiritualized, but naturalized, on the soil of the earth" (p. 307 in the Library of America edition). (This first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, was drafted while he lived at Walden Pond. It was published in 1849 by James Munroe, who had published Emerson's Nature. Thoreau agreed to charge the printing costs against his royalties, but his earnings on the stunningly heretical book never came to enough to cover the publisher's outlay. In 1853 he bought his way out of the agreement, taking on the unsold copies. "I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes," he wrote in his journal, "over seven hundred of which I wrote myself."8 They were stacked in his attic three weeks before he died, when he sold them to James T. Fields, who was also Emerson's publisher by then. Fields slapped on a new title page and sold the books after Thoreau's death.) Walden is an essay in naturalized spiritualization, and the essayist is a representative man, or at least a representative New Englander. (Proof: In II, 2, Thoreau says that in most books "the I, or first person, is omitted," but that "in this it will be retained." He requires of "every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life," and that is what he's pledged to give. But in the very first sentence of II, 3, his subject matter shifts from the first person to the second. He wants, he says, to say something about you"you who read these pages, who are said to live in New England." He'll say something about youthat is, about usby speaking about himself.) I'll be arguing that the project of Walden is only partially successful. The strains come out dramatically in Walden itself, and in different but perhaps even more dramatic ways in The Maine Woods and Cape Cod. (These books were posthumously published but they are not really "later" than Walden. Parts of both books had, in earlier versions, been printed in magazines or shopped to editors before Walden first appeared. This means that I won't be making a developmental argument.) I will then ask whether the partial character of this success really matters. I'll suggest that it may not, but to weigh my suggestion and determine its ultimate value, we'll have to look very closely at two things. The first is our place in nature and the universe as Thoreau conceives of them. Are we central, are we peripheral, or do we stand somewhere in between? The second is what it means, in Thoreau's view, to know oneself. For Thoreau, self-knowledge is a practical task. We discharge it not merely by thinking but also by living. The lived character of his project helps to

draw his apparently disparate tendencies together. It helps us to understand how someone can want to be infinite, but infinite in his own way.9

1. Ethical idealism I've already suggested that as Walden begins, Thoreau renders himself representative or mythical. "In most books, the I, or first person, is omitted; in this it will be retained; that, in respect to egotism, is the main difference. We commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking" (I, 2). Thoreau's I is, in the book's first paragraph, a historical individualsomeone who wrote the following pages and for two years and two months lived alone in the woods in a house he built himself, earning his living by the labor of his hands (of his hands only, he says). This I wouldn't be obtruding so much on the notice of readers had it not been for inquiries made by others. "Some have asked what I go to eat; if I did not feel lonesome; if I was not afraid" (I, 2). But by the end of the book's second paragraph, he is already asking readers of this account of his own life "to accept such portions as apply to them" (I, 2). He isn't yet expecting a good fit for everyone: when he writes "I trust that none will stretch the seams in putting on the coat, for it may do good service to him whom it fits" (I, 2), he's asking each reader to be careful as he tries it on, so that it isn't made a poor fit for the next. It would be interesting to trace Thoreau's use of personal pronouns more carefully than I can do here, but the pattern I see is roughly this: the I that seems at first to be the book's sole concern soon becomes a you, then a they, and finally a weas in paragraph eight: "I sometimes wonder that we can be so frivolous" and it remains we until the book concludes. An I is present throughout, as in the sentence I've just quoted, but this I is largely "the first person that is speaking"a "person" about whom we know no more than that. (I wonder about Thoreau's choice of the word "that." Why did he pass over "who," all in all a more obvious candidate? Could it be because an impersonal demonstrative is a better way of picking out an I who is no one in particular?) Thoreau's I is something like the impersonal I that can, according to Kant, accompany all of my representations. Yet it isn't quite right to call it I impersonal. It is personal but representativehence something with which each reader is invited to identify. And this I is talking about us: not about one physically located person, but about all physically located persons, or at least all who are nearby ("you who read these pages, who are said to live in New England"). The characteristic form of Thoreau's sentences, whether or not that form is made explicit, is "I think that . . . we . . . ." There are two first-personal positions here. We're invited to identify with each, but in different ways. In identifying with the first, we become the vehicles of the book's concerns; in identifying with the second, we become its objects. It's very important, I think, that the book's objects are, not only at first and for as long as they exist, historically or physically situated. ("I would fain say something not so much concerning the Chinese and Sandwich Islanders as you who read these pages, who are said to live in New England, something about your condition, especially your outward condition or circumstances in this world, in this town, what it is, whether it is necessary that it be as bad as it is, whether it cannot be improved as well as not" [I, 3].) In the end, though this needn't compromise their historicity or "facticity," these objective selves are identified with the vehicular (or, if you like, the "subjective") self. That this identification is imperative is, in my view, part of the message of the book, and part of the content of its idealism. Walden puts its finger on a problem, and our identification with the subjective selfwith the self inquiring into the problemis part of the solution. Our identification with this self is what Thoreau calls "spiritualization." It is spiritualization because the subjective self is, at first, spiritually characterized. But this self has been identified with our objective selves. Hence it must also be "naturalized." The movement between spiritualization and naturalizationa movement

across an identity, its terms are presented in different "modes"is the characteristic movement of Walden, and the source of a large part of its greatness. I want to begin by considering the possibility of a strictly ethical idealisman idealism that neither claims nor longs for metaphysical support. We encountered a definition of such idealism in Lecture I, in one of Royce's German sources, Richard Falckenberg's History of Modern Philosophy. "In ethics," he says there, idealism is exemplified "by all those views that locate the end of human beings in something higher than the satisfaction of sensual desire and selfish needs." Now the word "end" is multivalent. It can be used for the ends we seek in fact, or for the ends we ought to seek. I propose that we accept Falckenberg's formula, and that we assume it's meant to activate both senses of the word. Ethical idealism will then be the view that human beings actually seek something other than the satisfaction of sensual desire and selfish needs, and that they should. (Falckenberg himself must have had both claims in mind. Otherwise it would have been at least mildly discordant for him to speak of ends "higher" than the sensual or selfish, as opposed to merely "other.")10 When ethical idealism is given this twofold character, it's easy to see why one might want to back it up ontologicallyand even idealistically. I can illustrate the point by some brief remarks on an aspect of Jonathan Edwards's thought that I wasn't able to consider in my first two lectures. Edwards was schooled in the same emerging science of human nature that Hume describes, and pledges to advance, as he begins his Treatise of Human Nature. For Edwards, this science was the science of natural manman not yet lifted up by graceand he thought it took two forms. The first was pessimistic or Hobbesian. You perhaps know the story, told by John Aubry, about Hobbes and the beggar. The beggar craved his alms. Hobbes handed him a coin, and his companion asked why. Hobbes replied: I saw he was uneasy. This made me uneasy, and by easing him, I eased myself. In the view of the Hobbesian pessimist, there is no impulse in us truly deserving of the name of altruism. The second option placed before Edwards was optimistic or, if you like, Hutchesonian. According to Hutcheson (as well as to Shaftesbury, who influenced him, and to Hume, who followed him), a principle of benevolence has been worked into our clay. This principle may pulse less urgently than self-love (that was certainly Hume's view), but it is present, and more than faintly influential. Hutcheson thought of benevolence as naturally occurring principle, but he felt at least some of the pressure towards idealist ontologizing that I'm now trying to describe. For he thought that our benevolence had been arranged for by a providential God. But in Edwards and it is this I most want to emphasizethis pressure was more insistent, because his psychology of natural man was, at bottom, more like Hobbes's than it was like Hutcheson's. (I should note that I'm simplifying considerably here. But it's worth pointing out that although Hobbes pointedly refuses to condemn human nature as he finds it, his descriptions line up neatly with Puritan accounts of fallen man.) In his main work on ethics, the posthumously published Nature of True Virtue, Edwards was resourceful in showing how, on the slender basis of a fundamentally Hobbesian psychology (supplemented, I should acknowledge, by some other principles, among them a devotion to one's offspring, and a tendency, akin to sympathy, to imagine oneself in the place of others), various simulacra of benevolence or true virtue could be accounted for. But, Edwards thought, there really is (though it is rare) true virtuea universal love irreducible to selfish impulse, even when it has been redirected by association or modified by natural principles that attach us to particular persons. It is, in other words, in fact the case that human beings are sometimes drawn by something other than selfish need or sensual desire. If we assume that this need and this desire have their basis in the body, we're forced to acknowledge an intrusion of divine spirit into the corporeal world. This isn't quite idealism as I defined it in Lecture I, because it hasn't been said

that spirit is more real than body. But spirit at least has its foot in the door. It seems nearer than it does on Hutcheson's view, because our route to an awareness of its influence and presence in the world is more direct. Spirit isn't a distant cause of all to which we've found our way by contemplating nature's overall design, but the immediate cause of a particular fact that we are, when we see things clearly, unable to deny. (There is of course the question: could it be that what we call true virtue is just another simulacrum of virtue? This is a question that absorbed Edwards the evangelist, for whom it took this more general form: what are the reliable signs of religious affection?)11 So far I've shown how one might get to ontology, and perhaps even to idealist ontology, from what might be called the psychological side of ethical idealism, the claim that we do, as a matter of psychological fact, seek something other than sensual or selfish satisfaction. But one might also get there from the normative side. For if it's true that we ought to seek something more than the sensual or selfish, and if this claim is made not from the point of view of our bodily needs and desires, but from a point of view beyond them, it can easily seem that what makes it true is our being under the command of something other than body. A strictly ethical idealism would resist or impassively absorb the pressures I've described. It would make its two claims and then come to a halt. I want to suggest that Thoreau manages something like this. Walden is an extended defense of ethical idealism, but unlike Emerson, who also affirms ethical idealism, Thoreau doesn't seek to provide his idealism with ontological support. (Nor does he infer ethical idealism from his ontology, as Emerson images the transcendentalist might do: "From this transfer of the world into the consciousness, this beholding of all things in the mind, follows easily his whole ethics" ["The Transcendentalist"].) I have to say immediately that he sometimes seems to do so. Thus he writes in Walden that "only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence" (II, 21), and that "the greatest gains and values," though least appreciated, "are the highest reality" (XI, 7). But I believe that these are value judgments cast in an ontologizing idiom. I think so because Thoreau's published writings on nature (I cannot speak synoptically of the journal here) speak in defense of value judgments, and their grounds are experimental. They appeal not to an underlying metaphysics, but to experience. They affirm a material world that Thoreau portrays, at least for the most part, as mindindependent. This world presents him with a series of challenges. Some he surmounts. Some he does not. (Some seem insurmountable.)12 But his method throughout is practical, not theoretical. (Of course I'll have to explain why, once the method is followed, he writes about it. But this is basically because his practice is representative or emblematic.) He does not deny the fundamentality of matter. Nor does he idealistically construe it. When all is said and done, its existence is something he cannot find his way around. And I believe he takes this to be a good thing. I'm not suggesting, by the way, that Thoreau's metaphysically indifferent idealism is to be compared to the indifference of, say, a world-weary Richard Rorty, who reflects on philosophy's past and sees no hope of its providing the kind of underpinning for cherished but fragile values that philosophers once sought. It's just that Thoreau doesn't get exercised about metaphysics. He directs his energies elsewhere, despite the ontologizing idiom that his transcendentalist environment may have made obligatory. (Here it's worth remembering that when Thoreau called John Brown a "transcendentalist above all," he wasn't complimenting his metaphysics. He meant, as he went on to say, that Brown was "a man of ideas and principles"a man in pursuit of more than selfish or sensual ends.)

2. The argument of Walden Let me try now to find an argument in Walden. It is, I want to say, an experimental argument, and I offer the following remarks by Thoreau, most of them from the first chapter of Walden, that this was his own view of it: No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof. (I, 10) I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors. They have told me nothing, and probably cannot tell me anything to the purpose. Here is life, an experiment to a great extent untried by me. (I, 10) But man's capacities have never been measured: nor are we to judge of what he can do by any precedents, so little has been tried. (I, 12) "Tried" here does of course mean attempted, but Thoreau is also thinking of experimental trials, as he suggests a few lines later: We might try our lives by a thousand simple tests. (I, 13) I sometimes try my acquaintances by such tests as this. (I, 35) This last remark lends a further color to his talk of trialsa Socratic oneto which I will return. How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living. (I, 72) All things considered, that is, considering the importance of a man's soul and of today, notwithstanding the short time occupied by my experiment, nay, partly even because of its transient character, I believe that that was doing better than any farmer in Concord did that year. (I, 76) Once I went so far as to slaughter a woodchuck which ravaged by bean-field . . . and devour him, partly for experiment's sake. (I, 79) I learned from my two years' experience that it would cost incredibly little trouble to obtain one's necessary food, even in this latitude; that a man may use as simple a diet as the animals, and yet retain health and strength. (I, 82) I found by experiment that I could make a very good molasses either of pumpkins or beets. (I, 85) I short, I am convinced, both by faith and experience, that to maintain one's self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime, if we will live simply and wisely. (I, 98) The present was my next experiment of this kind. (II, 7) We are the subjects of an experiment which is not a little interesting to me. (V, 10)

I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have build castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them. (XVIII, 5) The experiment reported in Walden is a trial of two hypotheses, one lower, one higher. The lower hypothesis is that we can achieve what Thoreau calls the "gross necessaries of life" (I, 16)meaning "whatever, of all that man obtains by his own exertions, has been from the first, or from long use has become, so important to human life that few, if any, whether from savageness, or poverty, or philosophy, ever attempt to do without it"at an unexpectedly low cost. "The necessaries of life for man in this climate may . . . be distributed under the several heads of Food, Shelter, Clothing, and Fuel" (I, 17). All four are subsumed in the class that Emerson had entitled "Commodity."13 Emerson's chapter on "Commodity" occupied five rather casual paragraphs. "Under the general name of Commodity, I rank all those advantages which our senses owe to nature. This, of course, is a benefit which is temporary and mediate, not ultimate, like its service to the soul" (p. 12). Here Emerson anticipates Thoreau's higher hypothesis. But why is Thoreau's chapter on "Economy" is so much longer than "Commodity," and so much more detailed? It is, as I've already observed, Robinsonian. It is practically a manual that one might follow. I think those of you who've read Robinson Crusoe will agree that Defoe's detailed account of Crusoe's material lifehis labors to provide himself with what Thoreau calls the "necessaries"is one of its greatest pleasures. The corresponding account of Thoreau's labors is, likewise, one of the greatest pleasures of Walden. But the detail Thoreau offers is also required, I believe, by his experimental project, and that in two ways. The first has to do with Emerson's hasty and perhaps even illconsidered treatment of nature's benefits as commodity. He calls them "temporary and mediate, not ultimate, like [nature's] service to the soul." That's fine as far as it goes. Thoreau agrees. But though the benefits of nature as commodity are temporary and mediate, the need for them is perpetual, and for all Emerson has shown or even said, attaining those benefits might be allconsuming. Thoreau undertakes to show that they are not, and to show it experimentally. It may be objected that I've explained why Thoreau went to live at Walden, but not why he wrote about it in "Economy" as he did. He needed to live through the details, but why did he need to write about them? Here I have quite a lot to say, but I'll try to be brief. Thoreau is attempting a reproducible experiment, one that his readers had to be persuaded they could replicate. This is part of what it means for the I of Walden to be representative or mythical, and here comparisons with Crusoe are particularly apt, because Thoreau was alert to Crusoe's mythic power: All nations love the same jests and tales, Jews, Christians, and Mahometans, and the same translated suffice for all. All men are children, and of one family. The same tale sends them all to be, and wakes them in the morning. Joseph Wolff, the missionary, distributed copies of Robinson Crusoe, translated into Arabic, among the Arabs, and they made a great sensation. "Robinson Crusoe's adventures and wisdom," says he, "were read by Muhammedans in the marketplaces of Sanaa, Hodyeda, and Loheya, and admired and

believed!" On reading the book, the Arabians exclaimed, "O, that Robinson Crusoe must have been a great prophet!" To some extent, mythology is only the most ancient history and biography. So far from being false or fabulous in the common sense, it contains only enduring and essential truth, the I and you, and here and there, the now and then, being omitted. (A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, p. 49 in the Library of American edition) You'll remember that in Walden, the I is not omitted. Neither is the here or the now and then. All are present and emphasized. But that is because Thoreau has found a way of being mythical or representative in spite of that, by carrying out an experiment that could, thanks to the details he conscientiously supplies, be generalized or reproduced.14 (There is, I should say, another myth behind "Economy," the myth of Adamperhaps not Adam and Eve but Adam, as I may eventually be able to explain.)15 I said there were two reasons for the detail in "Economy." The second has to do with Thoreau's concern for foundations: The walls must be stripped, our lives must be stripped, and beautiful housekeeping and beautiful living be laid for a foundation. (I, 56) It would be worth the while to build still more deliberately than I did, considering, for instance, what foundation a door, a window, a cellar, a garret, have in the nature of man, and perchance never raising any superstructure until we found a better reason for it than our temporal necessities even. (I, 66) A sentimental reformer in architecture, he began at the cornice, not at the foundation. (I, 67) It would be better . . . for the students . . . even to lay the foundation themselves. (1.72) By closing the eyes and slumbering, and consenting to be deceived by shows, men establish and confirm their daily life of routine and habit everywhere, which is still build on illusory foundations. (II, 21) It affords me no satisfaction to commence a spring arch before I have got a solid foundation. Let us not play at kittly-benders. There is a solid bottom everywhere. (XVIII, 14) To live deliberately ("let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature," II, 22) is to seek a foundation for one's actionsa foundation in human nature, rather than in custom or habit. This will make it possible to separate necessaries from "superfluities," a distinction that Emerson's talk of "benefits" papers over.16 But to persuade us of the separation's viability, Thoreau has to give us the details.17 The higher hypothesis experimentally confirmed in Walden is that once our needs are met, we're better off "adventuring on life now" and "plucking its finer fruits" than we are seeking material comforts, luxuries, or superfluities. We're better off, that is, if the ends we seek aren't selfish or sensual:

When [a man] has obtained those things which are necessary to life, there is another alternative than to obtain the superfluities; and that is, to adventure on life now, his vacation from humbler toil having commenced. (I, 20). Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them. Their fingers, from excessive toil, are too clumsy and tremble too much for that. (I, 6) But what are these more nourishing ends or "finer fruits"? It isn't easy to say. I've already quoted a long passage from XVIII, 5, where Thoreau states his findings. If you look back on it, you'll see how difficult his higher findings are to paraphrase. In all of the chapters that follow "Economy," including even "The Bean-Field," where we hear again about nature as commodity, nature serves Thoreau in one of the other three ways identified by Emerson: as beauty, as language, and as discipline. By the end, he has been disciplined or educated. But what exactly has he learned? I see three extractable (or paraphrasable) lessons.18 The first is universal innocence: Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself. (II, 14) There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of nature and has his senses still. There was never yet such a storm but it was Aeolian music to a healthy and innocent ear. Nothing can rightly compel a simple and brave man to a vulgar sadness. While I enjoy the friendship of the seasons I trust that nothing can make life a burden to me. (V, 4) The indescribable innocence and beneficence of Natureof sun and wind and rain, or summer and wintersuch health, such cheer, they afford forever! (V, 17) The impression made on a wise man [by nature] is that of universal innocence. Poison is not poisonous after all, nor are any wounds fatal. (XVII, 23) We too are immersed in this innocence: A single gentle rain makes the grass many shades greener. So our prospects brighten on the influx of better thoughts. We should be blessed if we lived in the present always and took advantage of every accident that befell us, like the grass which confesses the slightest influence of the slightest dew that falls upon us; and did not spend our time in atoning for the neglect of past opportunities, which we call doing our duty. We loiter in winter while it is already spring. In a pleasant spring morning all men's sins are forgiven. Such a day is a truth to vice. While such a sun holds out to burn, the vilest sinner may return. Through our own recovered innocence we discern the innocence of our neighbors. You may have known your neighbor yesterday for a thief, a drunkard, or a sensualist, and merely pitied or despised him, and despaired of the world; but the sun shines bright and warm this first spring morning, re-creating the world and you meet him at some serene work, and see how his exhausted and debauched veins expand with still joy and bless the new day, feel the spring influence with the innocence of infancy, and all his faults are forgotten. There is not only an atmosphere of good will about him, but even a savor of holiness groping for

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expression, blindly and ineffectually perhaps, like a new-born instinct, and for a short hour the south hillside echoes to no vulgar jest. You see some innocent fair shoots preparing to burst from his gnarled rind and try another year's life, tender and fresh as the youngest plant. Even he has entered into the joy of his Lord. Why the jailer does not leave open his prison doorswhy the judge does not dismiss his casewhy the preacher does not dismiss his congregation! It is because they do not obey the hint which God gives them, nor accept the pardon which he freely offers to all. (XVII, 18) In Thoreau's mind, the innocence of nature stands for many things, among them its moral indifference. I hope I can come back to this. Our own particular innocence is a liberation from the past and its channeling or blocking of our future possibilities. We are re-created every morning. As Mencius says in a passage quoted by Thoreau in the paragraph following the one I've quoted, "a return to goodness [is] produced each day." We thereby approach, says Mencius, "the primitive nature of man" (XVII, 19). If we've fallen, we're propped again the next day.19 "There is," as Thoreau says in Walden's conclusion, "an incessant influx of novelty into the world"; it is wrong to think "that we can change our clothes only" (XVIII, 17). Like Edwards, Thoreau uses continuous creation to disconnect us from the past. Unlike Edwards, he doesn't think that the will of God (a personal God in whom he does not believe: "a sad mistake," he says on p. 63 of A Week) ties us back even to our own pasts and deeds, much less to the past and guilty deeds of Adam.20 Our innocence is (or entails) our perpetual perfectibiliy: The life in us is like the water in the river. It may rise this year higher than man has ever known it, and flood the parched uplands; even this may be the eventful year, which will drown out all the muskrats. . . . Every one has heard the story which has gone the rounds of New England, of a strong and beautiful bug which came out of the dry leaf of an old table of apple-tree wood, which had stood in a farmer's kitchen for sixty year, first in Connecticut, afterward in Massachusettsfrom an egg deposited in the living tree many years earlier still, as appeared by counting the annual layers beyond it; which was heard gnawing out for several weeks, hatched perchance by the heat of an urn. Who does not feel his faith in a resurrection and immortality strengthened by the hearing of this? Who knows what beautiful and winged life, whose egg has been buried for ages under many concentric layers of woodenness in the dead dry life of society, deposited at first in the alburnum of the green and living tree, which has been gradually converted into the semblance of its well-seasoned tombheard perchance gnawing out for years by the astonished family of man, as they sat round the festive boardmay unexpectedly come forth from midst society's most trivial and handseled furniture, to enjoy its perfect summer life at last. I do not say that John or Jonathan will realize all this; but such is the character of that morrow which mere lapse of time can never make to dawn. The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star. (XVIII, 18, 19) Thoreau speaks of faith here.21 Elsewhere he speaks of trust, as when he writes that "to love wisdom is to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust" (I, 19). "We may safely trust a good deal more than we do" (I, 15). But can this be squared with his insistence on experimentwith his warning that "no way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof" (I, 10)? His point, I take it, is that we have to trust even with proof. The evidence of past performance is so meagre, and the expectation of

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increasing perfection so audacious, that we can't escape the need for an inductive leap. The need is acknowledged in the following passage from the journals:22 We believe that the possibility of the future far exceeds the accomplishment of the past. We review the past with common sense, but we anticipate the future with transcendental senses. In our sanest moments we find ourselves naturally expecting or prepared for far greater changes than any which we have experienced within the period of distinct memory. We can reproduce the experimental evidence for Thoreau's higher hypothesis in either of two ways: by living as he advises, or by reading his book. (Reading his book is actually a special case of living as he advises. So long as we're reading wholeheartedly, we're no longer seeking necessaries, comforts, or luxuries, but plucking some of life's finer fruits.) Our reward in either case is a perception of perfectibility. That perception goes far beyond anything either our living or our reading could provide, but I think Thoreau wants to say that in either case, we'd be trusting the audacious perception with proof: not with the kind of proof that guarantees truth, but with the only kind of proofmore infirm than anything Hume (say) would call a proofthat the nature of the case allows.23 I said that the higher phase of Thoreau's experiment teaches a second extractable lesson: it is that the search for life's finer fruits is itself among life's finer fruits. Walden is a Socratic book. It calls at first for an admission of ignorance: "how can he remember well his ignorancewhich his growth requireswho has so often to use his knowledge?" (I, 6). The knowledge we so often use is the craft knowledge of the "laboring man" (I, 6). The ignorance we are unwilling to acknowledge is the ignorance of our higher (or ideal) ends. "When a man is warmed by the several modes which I have described"our vital or animal heat being the common currency into which any commodity can be cashed and its value measured"what does he want next?" (I, 20). The book concludes by urging us to seek knowledge of our proper wants or higher ends: Be . . . the Mungo Park, the Lewis and Clark and Frobisher, of your own streams and oceans; explore your own higher latitudes. (XVIII, 2) Explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one's being alone. (XVIII, 2) If you would learn to speak all tongues and conform to the customs of all nations, if you would travel farther than all travellers, be naturalized in all climes, and cause the Sphinx to dash her head against a stone, even obey the precept of the old philosopher, and Explore thyself. (XVIII, 2) The third and final paraphrasable lesson, on which I will not now elaborate, is that "our whole life is startlingly moral" (XI, 10). "There is never an instant's truce between virtue and vice," and there is never a doubt on which side we should stand (XI, 10). Moral laws or moral sentiments disclose our most important ends, and "goodness is the only investment that never fails" (XI, 10). I will return to these points in Lecture VI.24 I've now made my best attempt to paraphrase Thoreau's higher findings, and I wouldn't be surprised to learn that you find it rather thin. In Thoreau's defenseor in my ownit is worth recalling his declaration that to love wisdom (that is, to philosophize) is "to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically" (I, 19). Perhaps I was wrong to say that there are two ways of participating in his higher findings. Perhaps we can participate in them only

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by attempting an experiment of our own. But an attentive reading of the whole of Walden is certainly more akin to an experimental trial than is the hearing of my paraphrases. Perhaps it will offer proof enough; readers of Walden will have to decide that for themselves. I've done my best, then, to give you what I see as the argument of Walden. And if the argument actually offered is to be the measure of the idealism it defends, I think we have to say that the idealism of Walden is ethical, not metaphysical.25 No metaphysical premisses are put forward, and no metaphysical consequences are derived.26 The conclusions are ethically idealist in Falckenberg's sense and the proof, so far as it can be given, is empirical or practical. I've already said that Walden makes an anthropocentric argument. By that I mean, among other things, that its argument isn't "eco-centric." The historian Carolyn Merchant writes that27 Walden, the result of an experiment in living that took places between 1845 and 1848 south of Concord, Massachusetts, was an inquiry into the question: How can a human being obtain the physical and spiritual necessities for survival with as little impact on nature as possible? To begin living at Walden Pond, one did not need to drain a marsh or clear-cut the land. In the communal spirit of the subsistence culture, Thoreau borrowed a few tools, cut down only those pines essential for timber, recycled the siding and windows of an old shanty, and reused bricks, shingles, and windows to construct a dwelling oriented toward the sun. Rather than a property owner, he considered himself a visitor passing through nature, availing himself of squatter's rights. I find myself wanting to disagree with almost all that Merchant says here. I think that the leading question of Walden is closer to this: How can a human being be freed to adventure upon lifeto seek those spiritual goods that are so clearly unnecessary, given that almost all of us live, however desperately or uncontentedly, without themand to obtain the physical necessities (or 'necessaries,' as Thoreau calls them) with as little impact on his or her own time and labor as possible? A small impact on nature is, for Thoreau, simply a consequence of the small impact the life he recommends will have on our time and labor. What remains of nature will then be useful, he follows Emerson in suggesting, for the discipline and instruction of the human spirit. From the fact that the central argument of Walden is anthropocentric it doesn't however follow that the book as a whole is anthropocentric, or that Thoreau's considered view of nature is anthropocentric.28 (And "anthropocentrism" is, in any case, a very slippery term.) I hope to return to Thoreau's anthropocentrism as I conclude. I turn now to what is, I think, a related matter: the collisions between Thoreau and nature that I mentioned as I began.

3. Man (representative man) against nature The first collision comes in Walden, in the chapter on "Higher Laws," immediately after what I've called the third paraphrasable lesson ("our whole life is startlingly moral," XI, 10).29 What I'm about to say is crude, and it may not be correct, but I think it's useful to say it, if only to clear the air: he seems to be talking about his penis. And if he is talking about his penis, you'll recognize that his metaphors for it are still in use: We are conscious of an animal in us, which awakens in proportion as our higher nature slumbers. It is reptile and sensual, and perhaps cannot be wholly expelled; like the worms which, even in life and health, occupy our bodies. Possibly we may withdraw from it, but

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never change its nature. I fear that it may enjoy a certain health of its own; that we may be well, yet not pure. (XI, 11) Whether or not I'm right about what's being described here, the associated urges are sexual. (This is all it takes to make us realize that neither sex nor love figures directly in "Economy"neither as necessaries, comforts, or luxuries, nor as finer fruits. Sex and love do enter the chapter indirectly, via their consequences, in the form of a poor Irish family. They are leaving their shanty near Walden, just one step ahead of their creditors. From them Thoreau purchases the boards and nails for his cabin.) It seems fair to assume that during his lonely nights at Walden, Thoreau's genius has been struggling against them: The generative energy, which, when we are loose, dissipates and makes us unclean, when we are continent invigorates and inspires us. Chastity is the flowering of man; and what are called Genius, Heroism, Holiness, and the like, are but various fruits which succeed it. Man flows at once to God when the channel of purity is open. By turns our purity inspires and our impurity casts us down. He is blessed who is assured that the animal is dying out in him day by day, and the divine being established. Perhaps there is none but has cause for shame on account of the inferior and brutish nature to which he is allied. I fear that we are such gods or demigods only as fauns or satyrs, the divine allied to beasts, the creatures of appetite, and that, to some extent, our very life is our disgrace. (XI, 11) He next quotes Donne: "How happy's he who hath due place assigned / To his beasts and disafforested his mind!" This call for internal deforestation always comes as a surprise to my students, so at odds is it with the prevailing image of Thoreau as eco-centric champion of external nature. It is elaborated in the next paragraph, with the return of the reptile: When the reptile is attacked at one mouth of his burrow, he shows himself at another. If you would be chaste, you must be temperate. What is chastity? How shall a man know if he is chaste? He shall not know it. We have heard of this virtue, but we know not what it is. We speak conformably to the rumor which we have heard. From exertion come wisdom and purity; from sloth ignorance and sensuality. (XI, 12) To the end of his chapter on "Economy," Thoreau had appended what he called "Complemental Verses," by Thomas Carew, on "The Pretensions of Poverty." Their interpretation in this setting is, I gather, controversial, but to me it seems clear that Thoreau is using the verses to contrast the monkish virtues a reader might suppose he's celebrating in "Economy" with the heroic and pagan virtues he's actually promoting.30 Carew speaks in the poem of the "low abject brood" that "fix their seats in mediocrity"mediocrity being, I take it, the Aristotelian mean, the balance point between a vice of defect and a vice of excess. These "become your servile minds," the poet says, "but we advance / Such virtues only as admit excess""that heroic virtue / For which antiquity hath left no name, / But patterns only, such as Hercules, Achilles, Theseus." "Back to thy loath'd cell;" the poet concludes, "And when thou seest the new enlightened sphere, / Study to know but what those worthies were." For Thoreau, chastity has become a heroic virtue. "If you would avoid uncleanness, and all the sins," he writes (and now I'm back to "Higher Laws" and XI, 12), "work earnestly, though it be"and here I assume that we're meant to recall Hercules"at cleaning a stable." We're to be strenuous, Herculean, even excessive, in our pursuit of chastity. Then comes an especially startling sentence (startling when viewed against the prevailing eco-centric image of Thoreau): "Nature is hard to be overcome, but she must be overcome."31 Thoreau is courageously apologetic about the passages I've shown you:

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I hesitate to say these things, but it is not because of the subjectI care not how obscene my words are but because I cannot speak of them without betraying my impurity. (XI, 13) Thoreau made the same confession to his friend Harrison Gray Otis Blake, to whom he had sent his essay on love. He sent "the thoughts and chastity and sensuality with diffidence and shame," he told his friend, "not knowing how far I speak to the condition of men generally, or how far I betray my peculiar defects."32 These confessions recalls his distaste for Whitman, whose "sensuality" disturbed him. "He does not celebrate love at all. It is as if the beasts spoke."33 When we are told that nature must be overcome, its existence is neither denied nor idealistically construed. It is downgraded, but only in value. In fact I'm willing to go farther: it seems to me that in these passages on chastity, the fundamental reality of nature or body is affirmed, or at least presupposed. Its existence is unfortunate but undeniable. To my ear at least, this is the tendency of the last passages on this theme that I will quote: Every man is the builder of a temple, called his body, to the god he worships, after a style purely his own, nor can he get off by hammering marble instead. We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones. (XI, 14) Here the body is represented as something on which we ought to work, but as "material" that is even less compliant than marble. That idealism must take a bodily form is also the moral of the story, a myth of ascent and inevitable descent, that Thoreau tells in the final paragraph of "Higher Laws":34 John Farmer sat at his door one September evening, after a hard day's work, his mind still running on his labor more or less. Having bathed, he sat down to re-create his intellectual man. . . . He had not attended to the train of his thoughts long when he heard some one playing a flute, and that sound harmonized with his mood. Still he thought of his work . . . . But the notes of the flute came home to his ears out of a different sphere from that he worked in, and suggested work for certain faculties which slumbered in him. They gently did away with the street, and the village, and the state in which he lived. A voice said to himWhy do you stay here and live this mean moiling life, when a glorious existence is possible for you? Those same stars twinkle over other fields that these.But how to come out of this condition and actually migrate thither? All that he could think of was to practise some new austerity, to let him mind descend into his body and redeem it, and treat himself with ever increasing respect. (XI, 15) The second collision I want to discuss gives more emphatic evidence of the strictly ethical character of Thoreau's idealism. It comes not in Walden but in the "Ktaadn" chapter of The Maine Woods. I should say, briefly, before presenting you with the passages, that in his descriptions of nature, Thoreau makes use of two fairly well-controlled sets of images, which I'll call the Edenic and the Titanic. You may not know that Walden Pond is very close to the village of Concord, Massachusetts, not much more than a mile away. Emerson, who owned the land on which Thoreau built his cabin, regularly went there and back on afternoon walks. Thoreau did not think of the Walden woods as a wilderness (see among other passages p. 708 of The Maine Woods, on the wilderness v. the tame forest of today); he saw it more as a garden, and his images for it tended towards the Edenic. But his characteristic images for Ktaadn, the tallest mountain in

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Maine, are Titanic. In his account of his approach to the summit, the contrast with a garden is very clear: The mountain seemed a vast aggregation of loose rocks, as if some time it had rained rocks, and they lay as they fell on the mountain sides, nowhere fairly at rest, but leaning on each other, all rocking-stones, with cavities between, but scarcely any soil or smoother shelf. They were the raw materials of a planet dropped from an unseen quarry, which the vast chemistry of nature would anon work up, or work down, into the smiling and verdant plains and valleys of earth. This was an undone extremity of the globe; as in lignite, we see coal in the process of formation. (pp. 639-40 in the Library of America edition) . . . Occasionally, when the windy columns broke in to me, I caught sight of a dark, damp crag to the right or left; the mist driving ceaselessly between it and me. It reminded me of the creations of the old epic and dramatic poets, of Atlas, Vulcan, the Cyclops, and Prometheus. Such was Caucasus and the rock where Prometheus was bound. Aeschylus had no doubt visited such scenery as this. It was vast, Titanic, and such as man never inhabits. Some part of the beholder, even some vital part, seems to escape through the loose grating of his ribs as he ascends. He is more lone than you can imagine. There is less of substantial thought and fair understanding in him than in the plains where men inhabit. His reason is dispersed and shadowy, more thin and subtile, like the air. Vast, Titanic, inhuman Nature has got him at disadvantage, caught him alone, and pilfers him of some of his divine faculty. She does not smile on him as in the plains. She seems to say sternly, Why came ye here before your time. This ground is not prepared for you. Is it not enough that I smile in the valleys? I have never made this soil for thy feet, this air for thy breathing, these rocks for thy neighbors. I cannot pity nor fondle thee here, but forever relentlessly drive thee hence to where I am kind. (pp. 640-1) We're being prepared for a collision here, but it comes on his way down: Perhaps I most fully realized that this was primeval, untamed, and forever untamable Nature, or whatever else men call it, while coming down this part of the mountain. We were passing over "Burnt Lands," burnt by lightning, perchance, though they showed no recent marks of fire, hardly so much as a charred stump, but looked rather like a natural pasture for the moose and deer, exceedingly wild and desolate, with occasional strips of timber crossing them, and low poplars springing up, and patches of blueberries here and there. I found myself traversing them familiarly, like some pasture run to waste, or partially reclaimed by man; but when I reflected what man, what brother or sister or kinsman of our race made it and claimed it, I expected the proprietor to rise up and dispute my passage. It is difficult to conceive of a region uninhabited by man. We habitually presume his presence and influence everywhere. And yet we have not seen pure Nature, unless we have seen her thus vast and drear and inhuman, though in the midst of cities. Nature was here something savage and awful though beautiful. I looked with awe at the ground I trod on, to see what the Powers had made there, the form and fashion and material of their work. This was that Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night. Here was no man's garden, but the unhandseled globe. It was not lawn, nor pasture, nor mead, nor woodland, nor lea, nor arable, nor waste land. It was the fresh and natural surface of the planet Earth, as it was made forever and ever,to be the dwelling of man, we say,so Nature made it, and man may use it if he can. Man was not to be associated with it. It was Matter, vast, terrific,not his Mother Earth that we have heard of, not for him to tread on, or be buried in,no, it were being too familiar even to

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let his bones lie there,the home, this, of Necessity and Fate. There was clearly felt the presence of a force not bound to be kind to man. It was a place for heathenism and superstitious rites,to be inhabited by men nearer of kin to the rocks and to wild animals than we. We walked over it with a certain awe, stopping, from time to time, to pick the blueberries which grew there, and had a smart and spicy taste. Perchance where our wild pines stand, and leaves lie on their forest floor, in Concord, there were once reapers, and husbandmen planted grain; but here not even the surface had been scarred by man, but it was a specimen of what God saw fit to make this world. What is it to be admitted to a museum, to see a myriad of particular things, compared with being shown some star's surface, some hard matter in its home! (pp. 645-6) But the real site of the collision is unexpected and closer to home: the rudest collision is not with the hard matter of the mountain's rocks, but with the hard matter of his own body. I stand in awe of my body, this matter to which I am bound has become so strange to me. I fear not spirits, ghosts, of which I am one,that my body might,but I fear bodies, I tremble to meet them. What is this Titan that has possession of me? Talk of mysteries! Think of our life in nature,daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it,rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we? (p. 646) Here the mind-body problem is being enacted.35 The existence of body is not denied. Nor is it said to depend on mind. The existence of a body is a surd. Ontological idealism isn't affirmed, but embarrassed or perplexedso much so that by the end of the passage, Thoreau seems no longer sure that he is the ghost he thought he was. His identity and sense of location have been disrupted.36 We are, after all, like the Titans, "earth-born," as he says in A Week, as well as "heaven-born" (p. 308).

4. Anthropocentrism in Walden That nature is what might be called an "overlapping thing," rather than something bound by human ends and human uses, is a thought present even in Walden: Our village life would stagnate if it were not for the unexplored forests and meadows which surround it. We need the tonic of wildnessto wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe; to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground. At the same time are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature. We must be refreshed by the sign of inexhaustible vigor, vast and titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and decaying trees, the thunder-cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander. We are cheered when we observe the vulture feeding on the carrion which disgusts and disheartens us, and deriving health and strength from the repast. (XVII, 23)

17

This is an elusive passage, because it puts nature's uncontainedness or inhumanity to human use. Thus it might be read as an unwitting confirmation of Emerson's thesisas an admission that nature is subservient to us after all. But I think this would be a error, at least from Thoreau's point of view. That we can put even Titanic nature to work for us doesn't mean that such a use was in any way intended. It doesn't mean that such use is somehow underwritten by "reality." As Emerson himself says in the 1849 motto of Nature, "the eye reads omens where" meaning wherever"it goes." We can read a human purpose into anything. "The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions," Thoreau writes (II, 21), but he does not always seem to think so. That nature serves us may tell us less about the "ontological status" of nature (that is it subordinate to us, or less fundamentally real than "we" are) than it tells us about ourselves. Thoreau does think that we should make use of nature's wildness: that by abashing us or humbling us, aloof and indifferent nature teaches an important truth. I understand why one might seek ontological backing for this truth, but I do not think that Thoreau himself is searching for that backing.37 That his moral sentiments require no such certification may be, for him, the surest sign of their reality. "I know that there are many stars," he says in A Week. "I know that they are far enough off, bright enough, steady enough in their orbits,but what are they all worth?" (p. 314).38

Kenneth P. Winkler February 7, 2012

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This is the text of the fourth in a series of six lectures, honoring Isaiah Berlin, delivered at Oxford University in January and February, 2012. For the opportunity to give them, I'm grateful to the benefactors and electors of the Sir Isaiah Berlin Visiting Professorship in the History of Ideas, to the Faculty of Philosophy, and to Corpus Christi College. The present lecture was delivered on February 7. This document isn't an actual transcript of my talkit was prepared before I spoke (and lightly edited afterwards), and contains more than I was actually able to coverbut it is written as if to be spoken. It is more loosely structured than a formal paper would be, and the notes sometimes contain reminders to myself. It is, above all, a draft piece of work, and I ask that it not be quoted or cited without my permission.
2

p. 399 in "Thoreau," in Larzer Ziff's edition of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Selected Essays (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982). I wonder what Emerson made of a February 21, 1842 entry in Thoreau's journal: "I must confess there is nothing so strange to me as my own body. I love any other piece of nature, almost, better." Thoreau says a page later that "my soul and body have tottered along together of late, tripping and hindering one another like unpracticed Siamese twins. They two should walk as one, that no obstacle may be nearer than the firmament" (The Journal of Henry D. Thoreau, edited by Bradford Torrey and Francis H. Allen [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906], 14 volumes, volume 1, pp. 321, 322).
3

I've decided not to count the time he set fire to the Walden woods.

To our ears, it's a bit strange to speak of an idealist as "abstract"and there is a long tradition, stretching at least from Berkeley to Borden Parker Bowne, criticizing materialism for its abstractions. But in Emerson's prose, the words "abstractionist" and "idealist" are virtually interchangeable. In "Montaigne," in a passage that (like with the one from "The Transcendentalist" I quoted in Lecture I) carries on Plato's battle of the gods and giants, Emerson lines up "the abstractionist" against "the materialist," each one "mutually exasperating" the other (p. 693 in the Library of America edition of Emerson's essays). Here, though, "a third party" enters the picture, "to occupy the middle ground between these two"the skeptic.
5

I will be using Walter Harding's annotated edition of Walden (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1995). The passage quoted appears on p. 314, but henceforth, instead of giving page numbers, I'll follow the universal reference system introduced by Stanley Cavell in The Senses of Walden, expanded edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). This passage is XVIII, 4: chapter 18 ("Conclusion"), fourth paragraph.
6

Emerson too has been read as a purely ethical idealist, for example by Joel Porte in his Representative Man: Ralph Waldo Emerson in His Time (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979).
7

The attention Berkeley and Edwards give to nature is, however, the attention of a spectator. Thoreau isn't a spectator upon the world but an embodied agent within it.
8

Journal, edited by Torrey and Allen, volume 5, p. 459. I'm borrowing here from a letter by Josiah Royce, in which this paradoxical desire is expressed.

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10

Although it takes a very different verbal form, Hugo Mnsterberg's definition of idealism (in Science and Idealism [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906], also quoted in Lecture I) is, in intention, the same as Falckenberg's. Emerson, Mnsterberg writes, was no "technical scholar, but no one stood more warmly, more luminously, more wholeheartedly for the deepest convictions of idealistic philosophy: he believed in the freedom of man and in the absolute value of man's ideals" (p. 6). To believe in human freedom is to believe we are not always at the mercy of sensual and selfish impulses (Falckenberg's psychological thesis); to affirm the absolute value of our ideals is to acknowledge that the other ends we sometimes serve are superior to the sensual or selfish (Falckenberg's normative thesis).
11

In Lecture I we saw arguments leading from an austere conception of body (a conception according to which body is inactive, for example) to existence of something other than body. What we have here is an argument leading from an austere conception of human psychology to the existence of something not recognized by that psychology, or by the naturalist metaphysics that underlies it.
12

Does this mean that there may be, despite what I seem to suggest later in the lecture, a ceiling to our perfectibility?
13

I'm not suggesting that "Economy" is just a Thoreauvian synonym for "Commodity." "Economy" carries tones or colors than "Commodity" lacks, among them the suggestion that we should be "economizing," or simplifying our lives. Economy is thrift or frugality.
14

On Thoreau's myth-making aspirations see the following journal entry, from November 8, 1851: "I, too, would fain set down something besides facts. Facts should only be as the frame to my pictures; they should be material to the mythology which I am writing; not facts to assist men to make money, farmers to farm profitably, in any common sense; facts to tell who I am, and where I have been or what I have though: as now the bell rings for evening meeting, and its volumes of sounds, like smoke which rises from where a cannon is fired, make the tent in which I dwell. My facts shall be falsehoods in the common sense. I would so state facts that they shall be significant, shall be myths or mythologic." Another useful entry is quoted by Robert Richardson, Henry David Thoreau, p. 251: "A fact truly and absolutely stated is taken out of the region of common sense and acquires a mythologic or universal significance . . . . Express it without expressing yourself." In other places Thoreau nonetheless insists that self-expression is the only mode of expression possible for us.
15

On the myth of Adam see for example The Maine Woods, p. 602: where land costs nothing and houses only the labor of building, the emigrant "may begin life as Adam did." For some musings on Walden at the time of Adam and Eve's expulsion see "The Ponds," (IX, 8).
16

The distinction between necessaries and superfluities raises interesting questions I can't pursue. Thoreau also speaks of "luxuries" and "comforts." Some of those comforts are "next to necessaries," and crucial ingredients of the writer's life he lived at Walden, though the book doesn't often acknowledge them. "At the present day, and in this country, as I find by my own experience, a few implements, a knife, and axe, a spade, a wheelbarrow, etc., and for the studious, lamplight, stationery, and access to a few books, rank next to necessaries, and [he is careful to add, so the lower hypothesis will not be disturbed] call all be obtained at a trifling cost" (I, 18, my emphasis).

20

As Cavell observes, hoeing stands in for reading and writing. "After hoeing, or perhaps reading and writing, in the forenoon" "The Village" begins, "I usually bathed against in the pond, swimming across one of its coves for a stint, and washed the dust of labor from my person, or smoothed out the last wrinkle which study had made, and for the afternoon was absolutely free" (IX, 1).
17

When Thoreau says "there is a solid bottom everywhere," he's suggesting that nature is always guided by sufficient reasons. (It's worth recalling the story of the man, about to drive his horse and cart across a river, who asked a nearby boy whether its bottom was solid. The boy answered yes and the man went ahead, but the horse and cart were sucked in by the mud. You said it had a solid bottom, the man objected. Oh, it does, said the boy. You just haven't reached it yet.) To live as deliberately as nature is to be guided by sufficient reasons. We can get at those reasons by "fronting" facts, and by reducing life to its "lowest terms."
18

I may want to add something about the difficulty of extracting pat lessons from Walden. There are two reasons for this. The first and more basic difficulty is that force is inevitably lost when these lessons are lifted out of their contexts. The second is Thoreau's admitted obscurity (see pp. 16 ("You will pardon some obscurities"), 352 (anticipating the charge of obscurity), and 353 (replying that obscurity wasn't aimed at) in the Princeton University Press edition of Walden). Emerson has a nice comment on this in his eulogy, triggered as I recall by the figure of the hound, the bay horse, and the turtle-dove (p. 409 in the Ziff anthology): "His riddles were worth the reading, and I confide that if at any time I do not understand the expression it is yet just."
19

For Emerson, the fall is more serious than it seems to be for Thoreau. Could its importance for Emerson have to do with his idealist metaphysicswith his belief that infinite spirit necessarily publishes itself in creatures? (Thoreau agrees what we're broken or degenerate, but he's speaking ethically rather than metaphysically. He does think in Biblical termshe's hoping to restore us to the innocence of Adambut he isn't serious about providing Biblical doctrines with metaphysical backing. I don't think he's serious about the Biblical doctrines (the fall, for example) or about associated philosophical doctrines (Neo-Platonic theories of lapse or emanation, say).
20

Thoreau often mentions God (as in II, 21, "God himself culminates in the present moment"), but I agree with Joel Porte that he is a "dangerous heretic."
21

I believe that there is further evidence for what I say about faith in Thoreau's review of J. A. Etzler, The Paradise within the Reach of All Men, without Labor, by Powers of Nature and Machinery (Pittsburgh: Etzler and Reinhold, 1833). "Surely [Etzler argues], all the gross necessaries and economies might be cared for in a few years" (p. 129 in the Library of America edition of Thoreau's essays and poems). "Thus [by technological means, by harnessing the powers of nature] is Paradise to be Regained, and that old and stern decree at length reversed" (p. 131). "The chief fault of this book is, that it aims to secure the greatest degree of gross comfort and pleasure merely" (p. 136). "This is the crying sin of the age, this want of faith in the prevalence of a man" (p. 133). We have no faith that we have higher ends, and the capacity to achieve them. Faith will always be necessary because the positive findings of experience are only partial, suggestive rather than definitive. The induction from past to future calls for "transcendental" thinking.
22

This entry is from June 6, 1851. I need to say more about "transcendental" induction. It's more infirm than the ordinary, "common sense" induction that confirms the lower hypothesis. In the

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ordinary case, we can raise questions about the representativeness of his sample. We might even raise the problem of induction. Imagine we put all these concerns to rest. Our sample is representative. The future will be like the past. The transcendental induction remains suspect, because it invites us to expect a future unlike the past. (Thoreau's decision to live at Walden Pond was an attempt to insure the representativeness of his sample. He reports that for several years, quite apart from his experiment, six weeks of manual labor were enough to meet his yearly needs. But he was living in the town of his birth. He had a house. He had friends and connections. By uprooting himself he becomes a purer, more ideal case, but also a more representative one. Here it may be worth considering the role played by idealization in, say Plato's Republic. Even if an ideal can't be precisely realized, it can still serve as a model.)
23

With this sort of proof there is always a need for faith. Thus Thoreau writes that he is convinced "both by faith and experience, that to maintain one's self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime" (I, 98).
24

Although Thoreau doesn't say this directly, I believe it's true that as we simply our lives, two things happen. First, moral laws assume more importance for us. We're able to dwell on their demands and take them more to heart. Second, the laws seem easier to satisfy. We can imagine having the time and energy to meet their demands. In that way, they become more "liberal," or more generous, at the same time they become more urgent.
25

I'm also inclined to say that the idealism of "Civil Disobedience" is "political, not metaphysical." If I don't get to this paper this afternoon, I hope to say something about it in Lecture VI.
26

An objection: what about such pronouncements as "time is but a stream I go a-fishing in" (II, 23)and, moreover, a "shallow" one? This is Time's Subordination to Eternity, but it is, in Thoreau's hands, a judgment of value: the judgment that no moment has more value than any other, and that truest human ends are indifferent to time's passage. See II, 21 and V, 6 for Thoreau's best statements of the thought (see also A Week, p. 255), as well as Emerson's remarks in the opening pages of his eulogy. In much the same way, when Thoreau says in A Week (p. 104) that to one who contemplates the truth, the political state hardly has existence, he is commenting on the importance of the ends it serves, not on its metaphysical reality. I hope I can say more about this in Lecture VI, in connection with "Civil Disobedience" and its influence on Martin Luther King.
27

In her book Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Science, and Gender in New England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), p. 257.
28

I can't deny, though, that there are anthropocentric sentiments expressed in places. See for example p. 284 of A Week: "The universe is a sphere whose centre is wherever there is intelligence. The sun is not so central as a man." See also p. 270: "let us wander where we will, the universe is built round about us, and we are central still." Then there is the passage, emphasized by Cavell, on the world's obedience to our conceptions. Cavell gives this a Kantian reading, but the proper reading may be more Leibnizian. So much is suggested, at any rate, by pp. 239 and 240.
29

In the paragraphs that follow I am very much indebted to conversations of many years ago with Michael Cooper.

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30

I'm surprised by Walter Harding's suggestion that the verses round out "a one-sided view of things" (p. 77 in his edition of Walden). In "Downwardly Mobile for Conscience Sake: Voluntary Simplicity from Thoreau to Lily Bart" (American Literary History 17 (2005), pp. 653-65) Lawrence Buell takes the sense of opposition or correction farther, suggesting that the verses are quoted in "self-parody" (p. 662). I don't see parody but reinforcement. Thoreau supposes, I think, that the voice of the poet is entirely on his side. For readings closer in spirit to mine see Thomas Woodson, "Thoreau on Poverty and Magnanimity," PMLA 85 (1970), pp. 21-34, and Robin Grey, The Complicity of Imagination: The American Renaissance, Contests of Authority, and 17th Century English Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 133-41.
31

Yet he says in the first paragraph of "Higher Laws" that he loves the wild as well as the good, the primitive or savage in him no less than the higher or spiritual (XI, 1). "I reverence them both," he says. I'm not sure what do make of this.
32

Quoted in Robert Richardson, Henry David Thoreau, p. 267. Also quoted in Richardson, p. 349.

33

34

The theme of this paragraph is addressed humorously in "Brute Neighbors," in a dialogue between Hermit and Poet. "Shall I go to heaven or a-fishing," asks the Hermit (XII, 5). "If I should soon bring this meditation to an end, would another so sweet occasion likely to offer? I was as near being resolved into the essence of things as I ever was in my life."
35

I should try connecting this passage to Thoreau's commentary on his "doubleness" at V, 11. I should also consider VIII 1, on automatic walking and estrangement from the world.
36

What we have here is neither monism nor pantheism, but dualism. There is no idealist sublimation.
37

The sort of backing I'm imagining is roughly this: spirit intended that nature should impart this lesson, and somehow arranged for it to do so.
38

Just before delivering the lecture I was reminded of what Frank Ramsey says in a paper he gave to the Apostles: "I don't feel the least humble before the vastness of the heavens. The stars may be large, but they cannot think or love." It would also be interesting to consider this in the light of Bill McKibben's The End of Nature.

"'A New World': Philosophical Idealism in America, 1700 to 1950"1 Lecture V (Draft. Please do not quote without permission.) Harvard University opened its Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in 1872, but its first attempt at something like graduate education in philosophy had come two years before that, in the form of "University Lectures" arranged by the university's ambitious young president, Charles Eliot. (Eliot started his career as a teacher of chemistry. William James had been among his students.) C. S. Peirce was one member of the team that Eliot assembled. Ralph Waldo Emerson was another. Emerson lectured on "The Natural History of the Intellect," and according to his daughter Ellen, the work of the lectures ate him up. He signed on for a second year, but he was too discouraged or exhausted to make it all the way through. After his last lecture his wealthy son-inlaw took him to California to recuperate; a party of twelve traveled by rail from Chicago to San Francisco in a private car. The University Lectures, meanwhile, were deemed a failure.2 Francis Bowen, another of the University Lecturers, was a Harvard professor, the author, in fact, of a touchy review of Emerson's Nature that I mentioned in the footnotes to Lecture III. He lasted long enough at Harvard to teach George Santayana, who remembered him, despite his "fits of coughing and invectives against all who were wrong and didn't agree with Sir William Hamilton," as an excellent teacher.3 ("Sometimes," Santayana relates, "he would wander into irrelevant invectives against John Stuart Mill [author of the withering Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy] who in a footnote had once referred to Bowen (who was then editor of a reputable review) as 'an obscure American.'" Should I mention that Bowen used to cough into his handkerchief, inspect the contents with disgust, and return it to his pocket?) It's tempting to contrast the overwhelmed amateur Emerson with the hardy professional Bowen, teaching through his coughing fits, but in 1870, there was really no one teaching philosophy at Harvard, or anywhere else in America, whom we'd call a "professional" in the present-day sense of the term. For a proof of this, we can consult the list, compiled by George Herbert Palmer, of the "agencies" responsible for the professionalization of philosophy at Harvard.4 Palmer joined the Harvard department in 1872 as Bowen's assistant, meaning that Bowen "directed all my work, even what books my classes should use" (p. 41). When he retired in 1913, Palmer was the most senior full professor. His full professor colleagues in the years between were William James, Josiah Royce, Hugo Mnsterberg, and George Santayana.5 Here are the leading elements on Palmer's list (pp. 71-2), called by him a "Table of influences aiding philosophic advance" (p. 71). 1. Resort to Germany for graduate study. [The budding professional had to go abroad, because adequate preparation was pretty much unavailable at home. When Palmer himself contemplated graduate study, before The Johns Hopkins University was founded in 1876, he decided that the best domestic choice was a divinity school (pp. 20-1). Even his undergraduate education at Harvard had been spotty. Bowen then "offered only a single course," more elementary than any of the thirty courses offered after Palmer's retirement. The Harvard curriculum as a whole, Palmer thought, though no worse than others, "would seem to have been arranged by a lunatic." He joked that its only value lay in making way for Eliot's reforms.6] 2. Professors make a specialty of single subjects. ....

2 4. Possibility of aiming at a professorship even though not a minister. 5. Philosophic staffs employed in place of Presidents or single Professors. [In the older system, in which Jonathan Edwards for example was educated, philosophical instruction by the president was the capstone experience.] 6. For courses beyond elementary, textbooks and mere criticism of authors abandoned and orderly constructive work expected of Professors. 7. Lectures substituted for recitations. [In an early twentieth-century manifesto on educational technique, a recitation was understood as "a mere recital of things diligently garnered from the pages of a text-book."7] 8. Books reserved in the Library, and large private reading demanded of students. 9. Sabbatical years [which, he explained, were "introduced at Harvard in 1878"] This gives us a good sense of the state of things in 1870, before Palmer's influences had begun to exert themselves. Yet even in this pre-professional atmosphere, Emerson saw himself as an amateur. Seneca, he declared almost regretfully in 1870, was a "professional philosopher," unlike the more personal Plutarch, who was, Emerson made very clear, much more to his liking than Senecaand much closer in spirit to Emerson's own self.8 With today's lecture, we come to the first of our major figures whose standing as a professional cannot be questioned. Josiah Royce was very conscious of his professionalism, perhaps partly because he saw it, rightly, as a novel attainment. Just as Royce was coming of age, the structures of the profession (those Palmer lists, as well as others) were being put in place. But at the University of California, Berkeley in the early 1870's, when Royce, a native Californian, was an undergraduate, they were nowhere near. The university offered no formal instruction in philosophy at all.9 Whatever philosophy Royce formally acquired was imparted by Berkeley's distinguished professor of geology, Joseph LeConte. LeConte himself is a fascinating figure.10 His interests in philosophy ran deep. "Until I was thirty," he writes in his autobiography, "I could not have said whether my tastes were more in the direction of science or of art and literature or of philosophy" (p. 285).11 He was channeling his commitments by 1850, when he arrived at Harvard to study with Louis Agassiz. LeConte met with Emerson while he was in Cambridge"sometimes," he records, "not often" (p. 143)and grew especially close to both Agassiz and Benjamin Peirce. But even after his Harvard and Cambridge education in science, he recounts, "I could never be a specialist in the narrow sense of the term" (p. 286). He tore into Comte and Whewell, studied Sir William Hamilton, Cudworth, and Herbert Spencer, and "dipped into" many other philosophers, among them Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and Berkeley (p. 287). He claimed never to have mastered what he called "the technology of philosophy" (in fact it "repelled" him, he says [p. 287]), but he was, for young Royce, a vital resource.12 More significantly, perhaps, for our purposes this afternoon, LeConte was an absolute idealist, affirming, much as Emerson had before him, "the immanence of Deity in Nature" (p. 49).13 If we could pierce nature's veil, he pledged, we would discover an "Infinite Person" directly behind itthe only "Complete Personality that exists." LeConte conceived of the physical and chemical forces whose terrestrial operations were his particular field of study as a "diffused" and "unindividuated" portion of "the omnipresent Divine Energy," and "therefore not [as] self-active but having its phenomena determined directly by the Divine Energy" (p. 49). His conception of creation and its tendencies was broadly Fichtean. "God may be conceived as self-sundering his Energy, and setting over against himself a part as Nature. A part of this part, by a process of evolution, individuates itself more and more, and finally completes its

3 individuation and self-activity in the soul of man," in whose immortal life God's plan will eventually be realized (pp. 49-50). When Royce completed his work at Berkeley he headed (in unconscious conformity with Palmer's guidelines) to Germany for further study. When the Johns Hopkins University opened its doors in 1876, Royce was among its first students, receiving his Ph.D. in 1878. Unlike the Harvard or Yale of the late 1870's, Johns Hopkins wasn't an undergraduate college with a graduate school grafted onto it. It was created a university. Among its earliest instructors was C. S. Peirce (who arrived in 1879, too late to teach Royce, though Royce did hear him lecture in Cambridge in both 1892 and 1898), who authoredwith a workman's pride in the new institution, I expectthe following definition of "university" for the twenty-volume Century Dictionary:14 An association of men for the purpose of study, which confers degrees which are acknowledged as valid throughout Christendom, is endowed, and is privileged by the state in order that the people may receive intellectual guidance and that the theoretical problems which present themselves in the development of civilization may be resolved. The purpose of this new institution wasn't the grooming of ministers. It wasn't even teaching. Its purpose was simply "study." And the immediate objects of its concern weren't adolescents in particular, but "the people" in general, and the theoretical problems of their common life. Royce joined Harvard's philosophy faculty in 1882. Not long after, he became the first full professor in the department to hold a Ph.D. He published his first book, The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, in 1885, when he was still (according to the title page) an instructor. (He had been hired originally in 1882, to replace James while he was on leave.)15 The final paragraph of the book's preface is eerily similar to the corresponding paragraph in many of the first books of today. After noting that he commenced work on the book's main argument in his dissertation ("a thesis for the Doctor's degree of the Johns Hopkins University in 1878"), he acknowledges two recently created journalsthe Journal of Speculative Philosophy and Mindwhere earlier versions of parts of the book had first appeared.16 Over the next fifteen years, the earnest professional returned to the argument again and again: tinkering with it, defending it, and exploring its connections with an ever-widening collection of themes. That argumentthe argument from errorwill be my topic in this lecture. It purports to be a "coldly theoretical" proof of absolute idealism (p. 337). I hope you'll recall the diffidence of Berkeley and Edwards at the same stage in their careers, as they contemplated the introduction of their idealisms into the learned world. To smooth the way, they both thought, it would be prudent not to promise demonstration. Not so Royce. His immodest aim was "to set forth an absolute idealism as a demonstrable theory" (p. 383). As Royce begins his demonstration, he says that his calculated way of proceeding "commends itself as avoiding the greatest danger of idealism, namely, fantastic speculation with noble purposes, but with merely poetical methods" (p. 337). Now who, in our American past, could he have in mind? Who is the fantastic speculator with noble purposes who operated by merely poetical means? It's hard to resist the suspicion that it's Emerson Royce has in mind, and therefore that it's Emerson he is trying to surpass.17 And this suspicion turns out to be correct, because when Royce's rigorous march ends nearly one hundred pages later, having carried us, or so he was persuaded, from the uneasiness of doubt into the reassuring and capacious lap of Absolute Spirit, he encapsulates his argument by quoting three of Emerson's best-known lines of verse.18 But before I quote those lines a word of explanation is in order. Santayana once observed that it was characteristic of Royce to begin proofs of the sublime with something "sad and troublesome."19 Royce's starting point in the present case is universal doubt, and with it the possibility of error. His argument is that no matter how desperately the skeptic tries to fly from

4 the Absolute, his own doubts, and the attendant presupposition that objective error is possible, return him to the Absolute.20 "Truly the words that some people have thought so fantastic," he writes in triumph as the demonstration concludes, "ought henceforth to be put in text-books as a commonplace of logical analysis" (p. 434). A poetic cloud has been condensed into a clear drop of argument. The word "fantastic" recalls his earlier warning of idealism's dangers, and the words he quotes are from Emerson's poem "Brahma":21 They reckon ill that leave me out; When me they fly, I am the wings, I am the doubter and the doubt. Here is the whole of the poem: If the red slayer think he slays, Or if the slain think he is slain, They know not well the subtle ways I keep, and pass, and turn again. Far or forgot to me is near; Shadow and sunlight are the same, The vanished gods to me appear, And one to me are shame and fame. They reckon ill who leave me out; When me they fly, I am the wings; I am the doubter and the doubt, And I the hymn the Brahmin sings. The strong gods pine for my abode, And pine in vain the sacred Seven; But thou, meek lover of the good! Find me, and turn thy back on heaven. Suddenly Emerson, poet and dilettante, doesn't look so shabby. He not only intuited Royce's conclusion, but stumbled upon the general outline of Royce's method. Emerson saw that as we try, on the wings of Doubt, to escape from the Absolute, Brahma or the Absolute is powering our very flight. But for Dr. Royce, Mr. Emerson's glimpse of this truth had to be a lucky accident. The larger share of the credit should go to the coolly rational professional. Emerson, we're asked to agree, fell victim to idealism's greatest danger. Royce has escaped the danger and led the rest of us to safety. His idealism is the reward not of imaginative theft, but of honest philosophical toil. Royce published five versions of the argument from error: in chapter 11 of The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885); in a popular lecture included in The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892); in an essay on "The Implications of Self-Consciousness," also published in 1892, and later reprinted in Studies of Good and Evil in 1898; in The Conception of God, a lecture delivered at Berkeley in 1895, on which both LeConte and George Holmes Howison (about whom you'll hear much more next week) were asked to comment; and in his first series of Gifford Lectures, published in 1899 as volume 1 of The World and the Individual. For reasons both literary and philosophical, I believe his first presentation is the most revealing. Royce referred to his initial statement on every later occasion, and I plan to give it most of my attention.22 But I will make

5 some use of each of the others, particularly the last, where the argument is amplified in ways both striking and profound. Royce's argument from error created a sensationor as much of a sensation as one can expect from an attempt at demonstration. Howison reports running into Edward Everett Hale, the revered author, editor, and reformer, coming from the lectures on which The Religious Aspect of Philosophy was based. You've got to meet this man, Hale told him. "What do you think I heard him doing in a lecture the other afternoon? Why, nothing less than showing that our human ignorance is the positive proof that there is a Goda supreme omniscient being."23 I do think there's something sensational about it; the argument deserves a place, it seems to me, in our introductory textbooks, not as a lesson to be learned (that's what Royce himself hoped for), but as a nagging argument that any thoughtful person, even one who supposes they're uninclined towards philosophy, will find hard to ignore. But I'm going to be very hard on it nonetheless, for two broad reasons. The first is that I think it (and by "it" I mean the argument, not Royce himself) fundamentally misrepresents the real strength of monistic idealism, which is its (hoped for) coherence or systematicity: its promise to bring order to a vast rangeindeed, the whole range of our intellectual and spiritual concerns. This is what made it appealing to LeConte, and to some of the other American thinkers we'll encounter in Lecture VI. It is what made monism appealing (for as long as it was appealing) to Howison, for whom it was always true that "nothing stands alone and isolated in the universe present to genuine thinking; each truth rests on every other and on all" (p. 237 in "Josiah Royce"). I think Royce himself always believed this too, even if he sometimes found it hard not to hope for a knockdown argument (and who wouldn't?). The argument disappears from Royce's writings after 1900, and I'm not sure that the metaphysics of his Problem of Christianity (1913) is even consistent with it. I hope to return to this (though even there I must be brief) in Lecture VI. The second reason I'm going to be hard on the argument is simply that it seems to me to be open to many particular objections. These objections still leave me impressed with its value, however, because they show that the argument raises, pressingly and vividly, many of the deepest metaphysical and epistemological questions that preoccupied American philosophers in the first half of the twentieth century.

1. The argument's precedents Royce's argument from error belongs to an ancient and distinguished class. When Santayana declared it characteristic of Royce to begin with something sad and troublesome, he made the argument's starting point seem oddmore a matter of personal proclivity than rational necessity.24 There may indeed be something odd and personally revealing about it. But Royce's starting point, however idiosyncratic it may seem at first glance, begins to look more familiar when we consider it as a member of a broader kind. Royce's argument is an instance of the form of argument that the British idealist Bernard Bosanquet, in accord with a long tradition, labeled "a contingentia mundi [from the contingency of the world]."25 It is, according to Bosanquet, "the essential argument of metaphysics": an inference "from the imperfection of data and premisses" to an unconditioned absolute.26 We begin with something imperfect, fragmentary, or incomplete, and infer the existence of something perfect in which imperfection is grounded or completed.27 The cosmological argument is a familiar example.28 So is the overall argument of Descartes's Meditationsan example that brings us closer to Royce, because Descartes's starting point isn't the contingency or imperfection of the whole world, but the imperfection of our own selves, or a single aspect of that imperfection: our exposure or proneness to doubt. (I'm speaking here of the overall argument of the Meditations, rather than of the proof of God's existence in the Third Meditation. The Third Meditation argument has an ambiguous starting-point: a perfect idea that exists in an imperfect thing.)

But the example nearest to Royce, at least in my view, is Plato's, in the Meno's paradox of inquiry.29 An inquiring mind is an imperfect mind; if it knew everything, it would have no incentive to undertake the labor of inquiry. From the existence of an inquiring mind with some chance of success (which means that its outlook, though not entirely bleak, is nonetheless precarious or uncertain), Socrates is made in the Meno to infer a mind more perfect, or more perfect than we think: a mind already acquainted with what it seeks, and struggling now to recollect it. Royce's argument is closely similar, as the following illustration, from The Spirit of Modern Philosophy, suggests: What I intend by . . . saying that the self which thinks about an object, which really, even in the midst of the blindest ignorance and doubt concerning its object still means the object,that this self is identical with the deeper self which possesses and truly knows the object,what I intend hereby I can best illustrate by simple cases taken from your own experience. You are in doubt, say, about a name you have forgotten, or about a thought that you just had, but that has now escaped you. As you hunt for the name or the lost idea, you are all the while sure that you mean just one particular name or idea and no other. But you don't yet know what name of idea this is. You try, and reject name after name. You query, "Was this what I was thinking of, or this?" But after searching you erelong find the name of the idea, and now at once you recognize it. "On, that," you say, "was what I meant all along, onlyI didn't know what I meant." Did not know? Yes, in one sense you knew all the while,that is, your deeper self, your true consciousness knew. It was your momentary self that did not know. But when you found the longsought name, recalled the lost idea, you recognized it at once, because it was all the while your own, because you, the true and larger self, who owned the name or the idea and were aware of what it was, now were seen to include the smaller and momentary self that sought the name or tried to recall the thought. Your deeper consciousness of the lost idea was all the while there. In fact, did you not presuppose this when you sought the lost idea? How can I mean a name, or an idea, unless I in truth am the self who knows the name, who possesses the idea? (pp. 371-2. This is the passage Mander cites on p. 453 of his paper.) From the existence of a mind whose beliefs can be in error, Royce infers a mind more perfect: an error-proof mind fully acquainted with the object of which the error-prone mind has only an incomplete or fragmentary idea. In the Socratic argument, every imperfect mind has its own more perfect counterpart. In Royce's argument there is only a single perfect counterpart, the same for each of us. Plato's argument discloses the hidden resources of an immortal self who is one among many. Royce's argument discloses the hidden resources of an immortal absolute in whom each of us lives, moves, and has her being. That this immortal self is our true self is made especially clear in "The Implications of Self-Consciousness," where Royce identifies two distinguishing features of any "Idealism of the post-Kantian type" (p. 145). The first is "a criticism of the inner nature of finite self-consciousness." Its main finding is that "the true Self is . . . far more than the 'empirical' self of ordinary consciousness." "The flickering and limited selfconsciousness of any moment of my life," Royce writes, "logically implies far more than it directly contains." It logically implies the presence of "far more of a self than I now know myself to be" (p. 145). The second feature is that external objects, "although external to this finite self," are "not external to the true and complete Self of which this finite self is an organic part" (pp. 145-6). "Uniting these two features we have," Royce explains, this result: The self of finite consciousness is not yet the whole true Self. And the true Self is inclusive of the whole world of objects. Or, in the other words, the result is, that there

7 is and can be but one complete Self, and that all finite selves, and their objects, are organically related to this Self, are moments of its completeness, thoughts in its thoughts, and, I should add, Will in its Will, Individual elements in the life of the Absolute Individual. (p. 146)

2. The argument's conclusion When idealism makes its first sustained appearance in The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, it is as a postulate or hypothesis. In a chapter entitled "Idealism," Royce "consider[s] very generally and briefly what idealism could do for us if it were established" (Religious Aspect, p. 334, my emphasis). The brief account he gives is the fullest in his writings, and I'll review its outcome before we turn to his proof.30 Considered hypothetically, as a potentially "simple, adequate, and consistent hypothesis about the nature of external reality" (p. 338), idealism is defined by Royce as the view that "our thought is true by reason of its correspondence to the facts of an actual consciousness external to our own" (p. 342). This, as he explains, is simply Berkeley's hypothesis ("there is an Omnipresent Eternal Mind, which knows and comprehends all things, and exhibits them to our view"), stripped of its causal and teleological commitments (p. 342; for the quotation from the Three Dialogues, see p. 340). The hypothesized relation between our thoughts and those of the external mind is correspondence, pure and simple. It's not part of the hypothesis that the external mind is the cause of our thoughts, or that the external mind ordains the correspondence in order to achieve some end or purpose. Correspondence itself is somewhat abstractly understood (p. 343):31 In order . . . that my consciousness should correspond to some other consciousness, external to mine, it is only necessary that for each event or fact in my consciousness there should exist some event or fact in the other consciousness, and that some relation existing among my conscious states should be like or parallel to the relation existing among the conscious states external to mind. The more numerous the points of resemblance between the two series of states, the closer the correspondence. But correspondence in the abstract implies only some one definite and permanent resemblance found throughout the two series. The correspondence between my consciousness and the omnipresent eternal mind is, however, perfect: every relation existing among my conscious states has its mirror in relations holding among the conscious states of the Absolute. Royce makes this point by considering my thought of a clock, which includes not only my present consciousness of its outward condition, but various "possibilities of sensation" (p. 344). Both my present consciousness and those possibilities must be "represented," in the form of what Royce calls "facts," in the hypothesized eternal consciousness (p. 345). Because I conceive of the clock as inhabiting a universeas a thing related to its now unseen parts and inner workings; to the wall on which it hangs; to the people who consult it; to the building it occupies; to the neighborhood around it; to its maker; to its restorer; to the motions of the sun and moon and to the fixed stars in far-off spaceevery one of its co-inhabitants will be reflected in the consciousness of the "Knowing One" (p. 345).32 In this consciousness, all of my possibilities of sensationindeed, all of anyone's possibilities of sensationare actually present.33 "For us," Royce explains, "colors and odors suggest possible sensations, which science interprets as being in the last analysis the possible sensations known as atoms, motions, velocities, distances. For the universal consciousness, these atoms, motions, velocities, and distances, or the ultimate facts to which these notions correspond, are not possible but actual data" (p. 347).34

8 Royce imposes various requirements on the idealist hypothesis, but the most important is that it capture what we mean when we speak of the world as "external." Royce is confident that it does so: This supposed universal knowing consciousness, this "Not-Ourselves," has, under the conditions stated, all the essential characteristics of a real world. It is beyond us; it is independent of us; its facts have a certain correspondence to our sensations. Under the supposition that by nature we tend to be in agreement with this consciousness, progress in the definiteness and extent of our agreement with it may be both possible and practically useful. This agreement would constitute truth. (p. 346) Note that this universal knowing consciousness is not said to be the cause of our sensations. This is deliberate. Royce denies that the Absolute is, like the God of Berkeley or Edwards, the cause of our sensations. And he denies that being the cause of our sensations is an essential component of our conception of external reality. These denials will occupy us later on, but let me say a bit more about them here. In The Religious Aspect, Royce's God is no creator. "A creator would have to be finite," he explains (p. 476), and that for two reasons: its "infinite Power would become finite as soon as there was in existence something outside of it" (p. 274; I find this point obscure), and, more tellingly, "the concept of producing an external thing involves, of necessity, a relation to a Law, above both producer and product, which determines the conditions under which there can be a product at all" (p. 274). Hence "the creative power must . . . work under conditions, however magical and mysterious its acts may be. And working under conditions, it must be finite" (pp. 274-5). The existence of a creator (as opposed to an all-knower) could only be established by experience (p. 274), and "experience furnishes no evidence of single creative powers that are at once unlimited and good" (pp. 476-7). (The argument from error is, by contrast, a priori.) "God as Power would be nothing, or finite. God as thought can be and is all in all" (p. 477). "The World of Divine Life" is "in deepest truth not a Power at all, but the Infinite Knowing One, for whom are all the powers, but who is above them all, beyond them all,no striving good principle that cannot get realized in a wicked world, but an absolute Judge that perfectly estimates the world. In the contemplation of this truth we may find a religious comfort" (p. 382).

3. The argument's structure The argument from error is, at its most abstract, a dilemma. "Total relativity, or else an infinite possibility of truth and error; that is the alternative before us. And total relativity of thought involves self-contradiction" (p. 422). We have a choice to make, between what he calls the total relativity of truth on the one hand, and the infinite possibility of objective error on the other. Total relativity is self-defeating or contradictory, so we have no choice but to acknowledge that the threat of errorthe threat of objective erroris omnipresent and perpetual. No matter what we think, there's is a chance that it's mistaken. Now, as we focus in more closely on the argument's details, comes an inference to the best explanationindeed, an inference to the only possible explanation. (The argument wouldn't be a demonstration if any other explanation were possible. Hence Royce declares, in The World and the Individual [1: 349], that the argument's conclusion is logically or absolutely necessary.) 35 That the chance of error casts its shadow over all of our judgments can be explained in just one way: by supposing that all our ideas and judgments, and all of their objects, are present to a single absolute mind. In fact, Royce insists, mere presence isn't enough: they have to be constituted by the mind's awareness of them.36

9 Royce formulates the doctrine of total relativity in several ways. They all have two things in common: first (the negative part), the insistence that there is no real or objective difference between truth and error; and second (the positive or constructive part), the suggestion that when call things true or false, we're appealing to a subjective standard (pp. 379, 420, 421). Formulations differ because the suggested standardsor "indexes," as I will call themvary. In one of Royce's statements of the doctrine (pp. 393-4), talk of truth and falsehood is indexed to social consensus: "there's no real difference between truth and error, but only a kind of opinion or consensus of men about a conventional distinction between what they choose to call truth and what they choose to call error." The view resembles what Thrasymachus proposes in Republic 1, when he says that justice is the advantage of the stronger. When Royce restates the doctrine a bit later (p. 420), its social character has disappeared. Now the index seems to lie in each of us, taken separately, though it isn't clear exactly what it is:37 Every judgment, A is B, in fact does agree and can agree only with its own object, which is present in mind when it is made. With no external object can it agree or fail to agree. It stands alone, with its own object. It has neither truth nor error beyond itself. It fulfills all its intentions, and is true, if it agrees with what was present to it when it was thought. Only in this sense is there any truth or falsity possible for thought. Still elsewhere, but perhaps even in the passage I've just quoted, the index isn't merely individual but momentary. "Every sincere judgment is indeed true for the moment in which it is made," Royce writes, laying out a relativistic view he confesses he once held, "but not necessarily true for other moments" (p. 388). Indexes, then, can vary. In the three versions we've considered (if the second is really distinct from the third), the relativizing index (or the entity in which the index lies) is ever more drastically circumscribed. At first it was a social group. Next it was an individual. Finally it was a moment or dispensation in the life of an individual. Other versions of the doctrine are easy to imagine. Royce, as I said, confesses that he once "tried" to hold the doctrine (p. 387). The . . . doctrine to be sure has no real meaning," he says, "but the author used with many others to fancy that it had" (p. 388). Reading Kant was to blame, he explains. It had convinced him that our judgments are founded "on a union of thought and sense" (p. 387), on an integration of a priori forms of intuition with a priori concepts of the understanding that might well be temporary. This integration makes things appear to us as they do. "If either thought or sense altered its character," however, "truth would alter" (p. 388). Hence sincere judgments are true for the moment in which they are made, but not necessarily true for other moments (p. 388). But in this form or any other, Royce insists, the doctrine of total relativity is self-refuting: "meaningless" (as he says on pp. 376, 388, and 394) or self-contradictory (as he says on p. 422). Here is the argument: If there is no real distinction between truth and error, then the statement that there is such a difference is not really false, but only seemingly false. And then in truth there is the distinction once more. Try as you will, you come not beyond the fatal circle. If it is wrong to say that there is Absolute Truth, then the statement that there is absolute truth is itself false. Is it however false only relatively, or is it false absolutely? If it is false only relatively, then it is not false absolutely. Hence the statement that it is false absolutely is itself false. But false absolutely, or false relatively? And thus you must at last come to some statement that is absolutely false or absolutely true, or else the infinite regress into which you are driven makes the very distinction between absolute and relative truth lose all meaning, and your doctrine of total Relativity will also lose meaning. "No absolute truth exists,"can you say this if you want to? At least you must add, "No absolute truth exists save this truth itself, that no absolute truth exists." Otherwise your statement has no

10 sense. But if you admit this truth, then there is in fact an absolute distinction between truth and error. (pp. 375-6) Here Royce is zeroing in on the relativist's first or negative claim: the common core of all of the versions I've identified. Could a canny relativist refuse to say that the claim is objectively true? Could the claim simply be that it's seemingly true? Perhaps so, but then Royce would of course ask whether it's objectively true that it's seemingly true, and he could direct a similar question at any relativist's version of the second or constructive claim: is it objectively true that our judgments are called true or false only in relation to your chosen index? I'm not sure I see why the regress, as far as the relativist is concerned, has to end. He or she migh be content as a rook, circling ever higher above Royce's goshawk. Royce will tire eventually, but he has a parting shot, which is that nothing has yet been said. To that, the relativist can shrug his shoulders. Of course, Royce can shrug his own shoulders in turn, but I'm not sure what we, observing from the ground, should make of it all. If you're a skeptic, and especially if you're a self-conscious skepticone who takes himself to be doubting, really doubting as opposed to doubting seeminglyyou can bypass the first stage of Royce's argument. As Royce understands you at least, youre already committed to a real difference between truth and error. Your worry is that we can't safely discriminate between them. Unlike the total relativist, you think that objective error is possible.38 But how?39

4. Royce's pragmatism Royce's argument from error is shaped by a pragmatism that becomes, over the course of the argument's restatements, more pronounced.40 Royce's first ambition was always analytical, as were those of James in the lectures published as Pragmatism. James asks throughout what various realities (or alleged realities) are, and to ask this, he advises, is no more than to ask what they are known as (see pp. 50, 74, 86 138, and 142 in the original edition). Royce's analytical project moves in the very same direction. "What do you now mean," Royce asks, in a sympathetic exposition of Berkeley (whom James was to identify as a predecessor in pragmatism, "by calling [something] real?" "No doubt it is known as somehow real," he says, "but what is this reality known as being?" (The Spirit of Modern Philosophy, p. 357). With this question alone, Royce begins releasing idealist energies that had always been present in pragmatism, as Peirce for example recognized. For the pragmatist, Peirce proclaims, "the absolutely incognizable is absolutely inconceivable." The pragmatist's criterion of meaning is both anti-Cartesian (because it denies the existence of unknowable realities) and "directly idealistic," according to Peirce, for, since the meaning of a word is the conception it conveys, the absolutely incognizable has no meaning because no conception attaches to it. It is, therefore, a meaningless word; and, consequently, whatever is meant by any term as "the real" is cognizable in some degree, and so is of the nature of a cognition, in the objective sense of that term. ("Some Consequences of Four Incapacities") Full (ontological) idealism is the doctrine that the real is of the nature of cognition is the formal sense of that term, and we are not yet there. But Royce thinks that we are on our wayon our way to the conclusion that "there can exist no fact except as a known fact, as a fact present to some consciousness" (The World and the Individual, 1: 397). In The World and the Individual, Royce's pragmatism is especially evident.41 "What," he asks there, "is an idea?" (p. 16). An idea is not a moment of "purely intellectual life" (p. 21). Nor

11 are ideas "merely images" (p. 22). They include a consciousness of how we propose to act. Ideas are "the motor soul of life," packed with will and "active meaning." They embody attitudes and intended behavior. They are, quite simply, "plans of action" (p. 22). Each is the fulfillment, however partial, of a purpose (p. 24). Ideas are "tools" (p. 309) with a defining "teleological structure" (p. 310). They are "volitional process[es]" that embody both purpose and meaning (p. 311). In his posthumously published Lectures on Modern Idealism (in the editing of which his student Jacob Loewenberg did have a hand, perhaps a heavy one [p. vii]), Royce, in a passage to which we will return, seems to endorse the pragmatic theory of truth:42 Idealism has appeared in recent thought partly as pragmatism, insisting that all truth is practical, that is, is true by virtue of its practical relation to some finite need. For many thinkers, pragmatism is essentially opposed to an absolutism which suggests, or perhaps positively maintains, that the world in its wholeness has an absolute constitution in the light of which all finite truth must be interpreted. Now I myself am far from pretending to possess any peculiar revelation as to what the content of absolute truth may be. But I do maintain that a pragmatist to whom whatever is true, is true relatively, that is, with reference to some finite need or definition, is actually in need as I am of attributing to his world whatever constitution it actually possesses. Truth meets need; truth is also true. Of these two propositions I conceive idealism to be constituted. If one attempts to define a world of merely relative truth, this world, as soon as you define it in its wholeness, becomes once more your absolute, your truth that is true. In acknowledging truth we are indeed meeting, or endeavoring to meet, a need which always expresses itself in finite form. But this need can never be satisfied by the acknowledgment of anything finite as the whole truth. For, as Hegel well insisted, the finite is as such self-contradictory, dialectical, burdened with irrationality. It passes away. Meanwhile it struggles with its own contradictions, and will not be content with acknowledging anything less than its own fulfilment in an Absolute Life which is also an absolute truth. . . . I may assert that personally I am both a pragmatist and an absolutist, that I believe each of these doctrines to involve the other, and that therefore I regard them not only as reconcilable but as in truth reconciled. (pp. 257-8). I should add something about Royce's persistent linking of an inquiry into what error is with an inquiry into how error is possible (as on pp. 390-2 of The Religious Aspect). He's after a "real definition" in the traditional senseone that will exhibit the "cause" of the thing in question, and establish its possibility. The search for real as opposed to merely nominal definitions is, I think, the best context in which to view pragmatism.

5. The case against the common sense alternative In Pragmatism, William James set out to analyze truth or agreement with reality. Royce is interested in analyzing candidacy for truth or agreement with reality.43 What makes something eligible for truth and falsehood? James argues that agreement doesn't attach to a truth in isolation, meaning: in isolation from us, our aims, our practices. Royce argues that eligibility for truth ("truth-evaluability," as it's called by philosophers nowadays) doesn't attach to a judgment in isolation. The judgment can't "reach out" to its objectto the fact with which it hopes to agree unless it's part of an "organism of thought."44 So a judgment's truth-evaluability exists only in reference to "a higher inclusive thought," which must, "in the last analysis, be assumed as Infinite and all-inclusive" (p. 393).45

12 In The Religious Aspect, Royce offers common sense realism as the only alternative to his absolute idealism. Common sense, he says, treats each judgment as a separate creation (p. 393). The judgments stands alone (not in isolation from the judging mind, but in isolation from other judgments), looking towards its object, yearning to agree with it (p. 393). But the object, according to common sense, isn't present to the mind. How, then, does the judging mind look towards it? In order to be in error my judgment needs an object. That object (p. 397) is neither the subject of the judgment (that is, its "subject-idea," on which see p. 403) nor its predicate (or "predicate-idea," on which see p. 403 again).46 These ideas are in the mind. They are constituents of the mental occurrence that is the judgment.47 The object, by contrast, is something external to the judgment. But of "the infinity of real or possible objects," how does the judgment pick out the one that is its own (p. 397)?48 (Royce never really makes it clear whether the object of which he speaks is an object in the world corresponding to the subject-idea, or, supposing the judgment is true, a fact in the world corresponding to the judgment as a whole. I'm going to assume, for now and with admitted uncertainty, that it's the first rather than the second, partly because Royce seems to think even a judgment that is false has a corresponding object in the world. [Could it be, though, an intentional objectan object as conceived? So much is suggested by p. 399, but Royce has to show more than that intentional objects exist in the Absolute. He has to show that worldly objects themselves exist there.] If the judgment is false, that object can't be a fact. The "object" corresponding to a false judgment could be what we sometimes call a propositiona Fregean thoughtbut that wouldn't be an object in the world, at least not according to common sense, whose presuppositions Royce now seems to be granting.) There must be something in the judgment that makes the selection. Royce calls it "the intention wherewith the judgment is accompanied" (p. 397). But how is such an intention possible? In order to intend the object, the judgment (in company with the intention, which we're meant to see as a constituent of the judgment) must "know" it (p. 398).49 But the isolated judgment doesn't know it, because the isolated judgment, if in error, is wrong about it. Remember that we're talking about an isolated judgment. It isn't directed towards its object by its fellow judgments, but stands alone. So we can't correct the problem by introducing other judgments, even true judgments.50 (Here I'm suggesting, in effect, that common sense can't accommodate a genuine holism. See p. 405 for an indication that Royce himself agrees.) This brings common sense up against the following undermining syllogism (pp. 398-9): Everything intended is something known. The object even of an erroneous judgment is intended. [Therefore] The object even of error is something known. Or: Only what is known can be erred about. The problem is that this contradicts the fact that the object of an erroneous judgment is not knownnot by the judgment in question, anyway. Common sense has no way around this antinomy; it has too little to work with. Royce anticipates that common sense "will at once reply . . . that our syllogism uses known ambiguously." But on the common sense view, the object of any judgment is just that portion of the then conceived world, just that fragment, that aspect, that element of a supposed reality, which is seized upon for the purpose of just this judgment. Only such a momentarily grasped fragment of the truth can

13 possibly be present in any one moment of thought as the object of a single assertion. Now it is hard to say how within this arbitrarily chosen fragment itself there can still be room for the partial knowledge that is sufficient to give to the judgment its object, but insufficient to secure the judgment in its accuracy. If I aim at a mark with my gun, I can fail to hit it, because choosing and hitting a mark are two distinct acts. But, in the judgment, choosing and knowing the object seem inseparable. No doubt somehow our difficulty is soluble, but we are here trying first to show that it is a difficulty. (p. 399) The argument so far has been perfectly general, as Royce observes on p. 406. But beginning in section V, on p. 406, he offers a series of striking applications. I might be in error about my neighbor's states of mind (p. 406). How can I intend my neighbor as the object of my thoughts when my neighbor is not an object for me at all (p. 408)? Here Royce is thinking of what I earlier called a subject-term. (Royce's dependence is very much like what we now call "direction of fit." As I've learned from Gabriel Marcel, this act of stretching towards a vagely felt beyond is the germ of what became, in The World and the Individual, the volitional character of ideas.51) How do we make John or Thomas our object? My conception of Thomas is one thing and the real Thomas is another (p. 408). (I should probably note that this example comes from Oliver Wendell Holmes, who said that when John and Thomas have a conversation, "at least six personalities" are taking part in the dialogue, the real John, "known only to his Maker"; John's ideal John; Thomas's ideal John; the real Thomas; Thomas's ideal Thomas; and John's ideal Thomas. See The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1889], pp. 71, 72.) It is my conception of Thomas, rather than Thomas, that enters into my thought. So how does the real Thomas enter in? Royce's answer is that according to common sense he never does. Can common sense reply that my conception of Thomas can represent the real Thomas? Yes, Royce admits, but what is representation? A plausible answer is that picking out an object is a matter of fit. But, Royce objects, resemblance isn't enough. On p. 413, he considers a dream "to which there should happen to correspond some real scene or event in the world." "Such correspondence would not make the dream really 'true,' nor yet false." "It would be a coincidence, remarkable for an outside observer, but none the less would the dreamer be thinking in his dream not about external objects, but about the things in his dream" (p. 413).52 Then there is the memorable case of A and B, which he starts putting together later on p. 413. A and B live in separate rooms. There is no communication between the rooms. (They are, as he says on p. 416, in "perpetual imprisonment.") But there are pictures of B's room on the wall of A's room, and pictures of A's room on the wall of B's room. And the pictures are accurate. "A cannot make mistakes about the real room of B," says Royce, "for he will never even think of that real room" (p. 414). A well-known painting by Magritte provides a vivid illustration of Royce's point.53 If I see only the canvas, I do not thereby see the landscape, even if the two of them are, as in the painting, perfectly matched.

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Elsewhere Royce uses the mental life of replicas or twins to argue against the sufficiency of likeness. "I have, for instance, in me the idea of a pain. Another man has a pain just like mine. Say we both have toothache; or have both burned our finger-tips the same way. Now my idea of pain is just like the pain in him, but I am not on that account necessarily thinking about his pain, merely because what I am thinking about, namely my own pain, resembles his pain. No; to think about an object you must not merely have an idea that resembles the object, but you must mean to have your idea resemble that object" (The Spirit of Modern Philosophy, p. 370). In The World and the Individual, his statement of the case brings him close to the "Twin Earth" arguments of present-day philosophy: If in fact you suppose, as an ideal case, two human beings, say twins, absolutely to resemble each other, not only in body, but in experience and in thought, so that every idea which one of these beings at any moment had was precisely duplicated by a thought which at the same instant, and in the same fashion, arose in the other being's life,if, I say, you suppose this perfect resemblance in the twin minds, you could still, without inconsistency, suppose these twins separate from infancy, living apart, although of course under perfectly similar physical conditionas, and in our human sense what we call absolute strangers to each other, so that neither of them, viewed merely as this human being, ever consciously thought of the other, or conceived of the other's existence. In that case, the mere resemblance would not so far constitute the one of these twin minds the object of which the other mind thought, or the being concerning whom the ideas of the other were true. (I: 350-1) Meaning, as we now say, "ain't in the head." The lesson Royce draws is different: "the resemblance of idea and object, viewed as a mere fact for an external observer, is . . . never by itself enough to constitute the truth of the idea. Nor is the absence of any externally predetermined resemblances, such as you from without may choose to demand of the idea, enough to constitute any specific sort of error" (p. 351). The key words here are those conveying externality. There is no external fact

15 that constitutes anyone's intending or meaning the object he or she intends or means. (Now we're on our way to a superlative fact, of course.) To return to Thomas, even if there were a perfect fit between my conception of Thomas and the real Thomas, my only object, other than my conception of Thomas, would be an ideal Thomas tailored to my conception, rather than the real Thomas. Common sense tells us that Thomas is never in our thoughts, but that we can "blunder about him" nonetheless (p. 409). But common sense can't tell us how we do so, because the object of our "phantom Thomas" is "ideal Thomas," the Thomas that fits our phantom to a "T". Further illustrations concern the future (pp. 417-18) and the past (p. 419). Future moments, for example, "are not now given to my consciousness" (p. 418). I may postulate . . . that I can [later] look back and say: Thus and thus I predicted about this moment, and thus and thus it has come to pass, and this even contradicts that expectation. But can I in fact ever accomplish this comparison at all? And is the comparison very easily intelligible? For when the event comes to pass, the expectation no longer exists. The two thoughts, namely expectation and actual experience, are separate thoughts, far apart in time. How can I bring them together to compare them, so as to see if they have the same object? It will do to appeal to memory for the purpose; for the same question would recur about the memory in its relation to the original thought. How an a past thought, being past, be compared to a present thought to see whether they stand related? (pp. 418-19)

6. Royce's solution Royce restates the difficulty on p. 420: "If every judgment is . . . by its nature bound up in a closed circle of thought, with no outlook, can any one come afterwards and give it an external object?" We might throw up our hands. "Shall we now give up the whole matter, and say that error plainly exists, but baffles definition" (p. 422)? His reply is that "this way may please most people, but the critical philosophy knows of no unanswerable problem affecting the work of thought in itself considered." This is Benjamin Peirce's old principle of Correspondence.54 It is a premiss in Royce's argument, and it complicates his claim of demonstration. Royce's solution is to suppose that John and Thomas, for example, are both actually present to and included in a third and higher thought (p. 22). He supposes the same about the past and future, which had provided him with other cases in which the mind's purported (or sought-for) object of thought lies beyond it. (Thus he asks, on p. 419, how a "not-given future [can] be a real object of any thought." And "a present thought and a past thought are in fact separate, even as were John and Thomas.") "Let us," he writes, overcome all our difficulties by declaring that all the many Beyonds, which single significant judgments seem vaguely and separately to postulate, are present as fully realized intended objects to the unity of an all-inclusive, absolutely clear, universal, and conscious thought, of which all judgments, true or false, are but fragments, the whole being at once Absolute Truth and Absolute Knowledge. Then all our puzzles will disappear at a stroke, and error will be possible, because any one finite thought, viewed in relation to its own intent, may or may not be seen by this higher thought as successful and adequate in this intent. (p. 423)

16 But how? If the absolute is directly acquainted with Thomas, how does that help me? The case is much the same, he suggests, as when I judge that the color now before me is red, and realize I would blunder were I to judge it blue. "One includes in one's present thought three distinct elements, and has them present in the unity of a single moment of insight. These elements are, first, the perception of red; secondly, the reflective judgment whose object is this perception, and whose agreement with the object constitutes its own truth; and, thirdly, the erroneous reflection, This is blue, which is in the same thought compared with the perception and rejected as error" (p. 423). It is the co-presence of all these elements "that makes their relation plain" (p. 424). Just so, Royce writes, we must conceive the relation of John's thought to the united total of thought that includes him and Thomas. Real John and his phantom Thomas, real Thomas and his phantom John, are all present as elements in the including consciousness, which completes the incomplete intentions of both the individuals, constitutes their true relations, and gives the thought of each about the other whatever of truth or error it possess. In short, error becomes possible as one moment or element in a higher truth, that is, in a consciousness that makes the error a part of itself, while recognizing its error. (p. 424) But what does it mean for the absolute to complete my incomplete intention? "Only as actually included in a higher thought, that gives to the first its completed object, and compares it therewith, is the first thought in error. It remains otherwise a merely mental fragment, a torso, a piece of drift-wood, neither true nor false, objectless, no completed act of thought at all. But the higher thought must include the opposed truth, to which the error is compared in that higher thought. The higher thought is the whole truth, of which the error is by itself an incomplete fragment" (p. 431). In what does the knowledge of the Absolute consist? The all-inclusive Thinker is directly acquainted with them all. And this is because they all exist in (that is, inhere is, and have no existence apart from) the all-inclusive Thinker: The deepest assertion of idealism is not that above all the evil powers in the world there is at work some good power mightier than they, but rather that through all the powers, good and evil, and in them all, dwells the higher spirit that does not so much create as constitute them what they are, and so include them all. (p. 335) This universal consciousness and the individual minds make up together the sum total of reality. (p. 351) All reality must be present to the Unity of the Infinite Thought. . . . You and I and all of us, all good, all evil, all truth, all falsehood, all things actual and possible, exist as they exist, and are known for what they are, in and to the absolute thought. (p. 433) All things are for Thought, and in it we live and move. (p. 435) This Universal Thought . . . we have ventured . . . to call God. It is not the God of very much of the traditional theology. . . . We do not regard the Universal Thought as in any commonly recognized sense a Creator. (p. 476)

17 The absolute is, as Royce says, a constituter, and it constitutes things by being conscious of them. But is this solution, along with the many new questions it raises, out of proportion to the problem it's meant to solve?55

7. Assessment William James was exhilarated, and perhaps for a time convinced, by his younger colleague's argument from error.56 "California may feel proud," he concluded in a review, "that a son of hers should at a stroke have scored so many points in a game not yet exceedingly familiar on the Pacific slope." "Turn and twist as we will," he wrote, "we are caught in a tight trap. Although we cannot help believing that our thoughts do mean realities and are true or false of them, we cannot for the life of us ascertain how they can mean them. If thought be one thing and reality another, by what pincers, from out of all the realities, does the thought pick out the special one it intends to know?" James was ready to agree with Royce that the question is insoluble on common-sense terms, and "to suspect that his idealistic escape from the quandary may be the best one for us all to take."57 I too find Royce's argument a creative response to a profound difficulty, but I'm inclined to hold back, taking my cue more from James's cautious words (he suspects that Royce's route may be the best one to take, leaving us with several points at which we might excuse ourselves) than from his tone. (i) Presence to the Absolute v. constitution by the Absolute. My most elementary difficulty is that I don't think Royce succeeds in explaining why the absolute has to be a constituter. Why doesn't the argument establish only that the absolute must know or perceive all things? Why does it follow that being perceived by the absolute must constitute them?58 (ii) "What do we perceive besides our own ideas or sensations?"Berkeley, in the Principles of Human Knowledge. At least in The Religious Aspect, Royce seems to assume, with Berkeley, that we're acquainted with nothing other than our own conceptions or ideas, and when he asks whether those conceptions or ideas can represent anything beyond them, he gived detailed consideration only to likeness or resemblance. These policies or assumptions should be defended.59 On p. 407 of The Religious Aspect, Royce cleverly observes that "even a Scot will admit that I have nothing but representative knowledge of my neighbor's thoughts and feelings." But the Scot won't admit that he has nothing but representative knowledge of bodies. In the end, Royce needs his argument to be perfectly general, as he often emphasizes. Only then will he get to the Absolute. (I understand that this may only be the beginning of a long argument. The same holds for my other objections. But Royce claims to be demonstrating his conclusion.) (iii) Acquaintance v. description. Why not solve the problem of error as follows? The subject-term of a judgment picks out an object, while the predicate-term picks out a potential property of the object. The judgment says that the object selected by the subject term has the property selected by the predicate-term. The object and property are known. But the truth of the proposition is not known. (Royce himself speaks in almost identical terms in The World and the Individual, 1: 319-20. The point here is that this way of talking seems to be available to common sense. A judgment, even on the common sense view, isn't as undifferentiatedas "blank" or unarticulatedas Royce makes it out to be.) The distinction between knowledge of things and knowledge of truths is emphasized by Bertrand Russell. We can be acquainted with the "things" the object and their possible propertiesand thereby form the thought or make the judgment. This is akin to aiming. But whether we hit the markwhether the thought or proposition is true is a further question. The following passage appears in Russell's The Problems of Philosophy, in a chapter tellingly entitled "Idealism":

18

[I]t is by no means a truism, and is in fact false, that we cannot know that anything exists which we do not know. The word 'know' is here used in two different senses. (1) In its first use it is applicable to the sort of knowledge which is opposed to error, the sense in which what we know is true, the sense which applies to our beliefs and convictions, i.e. to what are called judgements. In this sense of the word we know that something is the case. This sort of knowledge may be described as knowledge of truths. (2) In the second use of the word 'know' above, the word applies to our knowledge of things, which we may call acquaintance. This is the sense in which we know sense-data. (The distinction involved is roughly that between savoir and connatre in French, or between wissen and kennen in German.) Thus the statement which seemed like a truism becomes, when re-stated, the following: 'We can never truly judge that something with which we are not acquainted exists.' This is by no means a truism, but on the contrary a palpable falsehood. I have not the honour to be acquainted with the Emperor of China, but I truly judge that he exists. It may be said, of course, that I judge this because of other people's acquaintance with him. This, however, would be an irrelevant retort, since, if the principle were true, I could not know that any one else is acquainted with him. But further: there is no reason why I should not know of the existence of something with which nobody is acquainted. This point is important, and demands elucidation. If I am acquainted with a thing which exists, my acquaintance gives me the knowledge that it exists. But it is not true that, conversely, whenever I can know that a thing of a certain sort exists, I or some one else must be acquainted with the thing. What happens, in cases where I have true judgement without acquaintance, is that the thing is known to me by description, and that, in virtue of some general principle, the existence of a thing answering to this description can be inferred from the existence of something with which I am acquainted. C. S. Peirce makes much the same point in a review of The Religious Aspect, written for The Nation (but never published there), called "An American Plato." He thinks Royce mistakenly assumes that objects must aways be captured descriptively. If the subject of discourse had to be distinguished from other things, if it all, by a general terms, that is, by its peculiar characters, it would be quite true that its complete segregation would require a full knowledge of its characters and would preclude ignorance. But the index, which in point of fact alone can designate the subject of a proposition, designates it without implying any character at all. A blinding flash of lightning forces my attention and directs it to a certain moment of time with an emphatic "Now!" "Index," for Peirce, is a technical term, the ancestor our our word "indexical." An "index," he explains, "like a pointing finger, exercises a real physiological force over the attention, like the power of a mesmerizer, and directs it to a particular object of sense. One such index at least must enter into every proposition, its function being to designate the subject of discourse" ("An American Plato"). It directs our attention to objects not by insight into their characters, but by "blind compulsion" ("Index," 1: 532 in Baldwin's Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology). It is "difficult, if not impossible, to instance an absolutely pure index," but it's no less difficult, in Peirce's view, "to find any sign absolutely devoid of the indexical quality" (Dictionary, p. 532).

19 Both Russell and Peirce suggest that acquaintance with an object will put us in a position to refer to it.60 Royce does have some things to say here. In The World and the Individual, he argues that there are difficulties in knowing "individuality as such" (1: 292). External experience doesn't present us with individuals but with merely conceived "types" (p. 293). Nor can we define individuals abstractly (p. 295). We can work our way to what's that are more or less specifically defined, but no matter how finely we chop things, we'll never get down, by experience or by description, to a unique that. Their individualitytheir "baffling no-other character"will forever elude us (p. 295). We stand, then, in no immediate relation to any individual (p. 299). An individual, with respect to any finite mind, is a "limit" (pp. 297, 298, 299), reached only in the absolute. (Peirce's reply to this would be a Kantian one, that Royce has intellectualized appearances. Hence Peirce, in "An American Plato," calls on Kant's doctrine of intuition, and on the brute individuating power of space and time. This is the beginning of a "naturalist" response to Royce's argument that culminates in Dewey.) (iv) How do my intentions exist in the Absolute? Are they present to its consciousness as objects or ideas are, or is the relation between them more intimateand more "inward"? For the story I am telling in this lectures, this is the most important worry. Is an intention (or an intention as Royce undertands it) something the Absolute perceives, as it perceives objects and ideas?61 Are intentions objects of observation? I'm inclined to say no: they are not objects of observation or introspection even for me. I know my intentions by enacting them, by "having" or performing them. Their esse is not percipi, but velle or agereas Berkeley says in his notebooks. But then the Absolute must enact my intention. But what then becomes of me? Is the intention any longer mine? It is constituted by divine enactment, so there is nothing left for me but to participate in it. But what is participation, and can it make the intention my own? We are back to Channing's worry about the pantheism of Edwards. A similar point can be made about power. Is power (or power as Royce understands it) something the Absolute perceives? Here again I'm inclined to say that the esse of power is not percipi. Power simply isn't the sort of thing whose esse could be percipiwhich is another point made by Berkeley. Berkeley's distinction between ideas and notions is often treated as an embarrassment. I'm treating it as an insight. The esse of power would be percipi if power were constant conjunction. But that just goes to show that it isn't. If Royce believes that power is objective, and if he doesn't reduce it to constant conjunction, he'll have to say that the Absolute constitutes power by exercising power. But then what becomes of me? Can an exercise of power any longer be my own?62

8. Conclusion "No accusation is more frequent than that an Idealism which has once learned to view the world as a rational whole, present in its actuality to the unity of a single consciousness, has then no room either for finite individuality, or for freedom of ethical action" (The World and the Individual, p. 433). This was our accusation against Edwards. Royce offers a complex response, in volume 2 of The World and the Individual and in The Problem of Christianity, that we cannot pursue here. (It is a partly attempt to transport the theory of finite individuality beyond the confining categories of traditional metaphysics.) His conception of God or the absolute is "not pantheistic. It is not the conception of any Unconscious Reality, into which finite beings are absorbed; nor of an Universal Substance, in whose law our ethical independence is lost; nor of an Ineffable Mystery, which we can only silently adore" (The Conception of God, p. 35). Howison, as we'll see

20 in next week's lecture, was not so sure. "We do not escape pantheism, and attain to theism, by the easy course of excluding the Unconscious, or the sole Substance, or the Inscrutable Mystery, from the seat of the Absolute. We must go farther, and attain to the distinct reality, the full otherhood, of the creation" (The Conception of God, p. 61). He worries that Royce has "reduce[d] all particular so-called selves merely to modes of his Omniscient Perceptive Conception," and made God "the only and only real agent," thereby robbing even God of personality, by robbing him of sociality "the consciousness of self and of other selves as alike unconditional ENDS (p. 82). Royce gives us a union of God and man (The World and the Individual, 2: 479-80). That are thou, he often says there. In a late essay on "The Problem of Truth in the Light of Recent Discussion," he quotes Tennyson: "Oh living will that shalt endure / Flow through our deeds and make them pure."63 It seems that he could just as easily have quoted Emerson: "From the heart of God proceeds, / A single will, a million deeds."64 But if the will is God's, can the deeds be ours?65

Kenneth P. Winkler February 19, 2012

21

This is the text of the fifth in a series of six lectures, honoring Isaiah Berlin, delivered at Oxford University in January and February, 2012. For the opportunity to give them, I'm grateful to the benefactors and electors of the Sir Isaiah Berlin Visiting Professorship in the History of Ideas, to the Faculty of Philosophy, and to Corpus Christi College. The present lecture was delivered on February 14. This document isn't an actual transcript of my talkit was prepared before I spoke (and lightly edited afterwards), and contains more than I was actually able to coverbut it is written as if to be spoken. It is more loosely structured than a formal paper would be. Some of the footnotes are reminders to myself; others raise issues that call for further, more disciplined thought. This is, above all, a draft piece of work, and I ask that it not be quoted or cited without my permission.
2

My source is Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 562-4. As Richardson observes, the University Lectures were in some respects like extension courses. It would be interesting to compare them, so viewed, to the lectures given at Bronson Alcott's Concord Summer School.
3

Persons and Places: The Background of My Life (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1944), p. 245. The next quotation is from pp. 245-6.
4

The Autobiography of a Philosopher (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1930), p. 70. Palmer himself doesn't speak of professionalization, but in giving witness to "its entire development" and to his own role in "shaping its policies" (p. 48), he is charting what we now regard as the birth of his profession in America. For an insider's account of the rise of Harvard philosophy that concentrates less on its nuts and bolts, see George Santayana, Character and Opinion in the United States (New York: Norton, 1967), pp. 35-63. Character and Opinion was originally published in 1921. Professionalization is a main theme in Bruce Kuklick's The Rise of American Philosophy: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1860-1930 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977).
5

The popular image of turn-of-the-century Harvard is of a hotbed of pragmatism, but of the five full professors who served in those years, threePalmer, Royce, and Munsterbergwere professed idealists. As Santayana testified in 1921, "philosophic tradition in America has merged almost completely in German idealism. In a certain sense this system did not need to be adopted: something very like it had grown up spontaneously in New England in the form of transcendentalism and unitarian theology. Even the most emancipated and positivistic of the latest thinkerspragmatists, new realists, pure empiricistshave been bred in the atmosphere of German idealism" (Character and Opinion, p. 145). Judging from the resentful tone of Munsterberg, who laments pragmatism's "spread[ing] among our academic youth like a contagious disease" (Science and Idealism [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906], p. 29), and the subsequent misgivings of Ralph Barton Perry, who had been a graduate student at Harvard in the 1890's ("Realism in Retrospect," p. 188 in Contemporary American Philosophy: Personal Statements, edited by George P. Adams and Wm. Pepperell Montague [London: Allen & Unwin, 1930], volume 1), pragmatism prevailed among the graduate students, even as the idealism of the old guard (or as

22

Munsterberg put it, their "unprejudiced study of Kant and Fichte," p. 29) inoculated most of them against it.
6

George Herbert Palmer, "Introduction," in Contemporary American Philosophy, 1: 20.

F. C. French, "Lectures versus Recitations," Educational Review 23 (1902), pp. 345-6. French was actually writing in criticism of the lecture system and in favor of a revamped system of recitations that would require more active participation from students.
8

This is in his 1870 introduction to Goodwin's edition of Plutarch's Morals.

See Royce, "Autobiographical Sketch," p. 128 in The Hope of the Great Community (New York: Macmillan, 1916). Things weren't any better between 1878 and 1882, when Royce, after receiving his Ph.D. in philosophy, returned to California to teach English. "There is no philosophy in California," he wrote in a letter to William James, "from Siskiyou to Ft. Yuma, and from the Golden Gate to the summit of the Sierra. . . . Hence the atmosphere for the study of metaphysics is bad, and I wish I were out of it" (in Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James [Boston: Little Brown, 1935], 1: 781).
10

I wish I could pause to relate more episodes from his life. In 1844, he took a long camping trip with his cousin John LeConte, who later became a renowned entomologist. I dont know whether they told John James Audubon about the birds they saw (Joseph collected birds for much of his life), but that same year, Audubon named a sparrow after "John LeConte"either Joseph's cousin or his brother, who later served as president of the University of California. After meeting John Muir in 1870, Joseph became one of the founders of the Sierra Club. Audubon also named a thrasher after John LeConte.
11

Quotations are from The Autobiography of Joseph Le Conte, edited by William Dallam Armes (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1903).
12

Royce praises his former teacher, who first taught him to address philosophical questions "with the calmer piety and gentleness of the serious reason," in Josiah Royce, Sidney Edward Mezes, Joseph LeConte, and G. H. Howison, The Conception of God (Berkeley: Philosophical Union of the University of California, 1895), pp. 6-7. See also Royce's "Autobiographical Sketch" in The Hope of the Great Community, p. 128. For further details see John Clendenning, The Life and Thought of Josiah Royce, revised ane expanded edition (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1999), pp. 447.
13

LeConte is classed as an idealist by G. H. Howison, about whom we'll hear more later in this lecture and in the next. See Howison's contribution to The Conception of God, pp. 53-4. Howison and LeConte were intimate friends (see LeConte's Autobiography, p. 261). The upcoming quotations in the main text are from LeConte's contribution to The Conception of God, pp. 43-50. LeConte addresses the question of idealism directly in Evolution and Its Relation to Religious Thought (New York: D. Appleton, 1888), pp. 283-4. "But some will object that this is pure Idealism. Yes, but far different from what usually goes under that name. The ideal philosophy as usually understood regards the external world as having no real objective existence outside of ourselvesas literally such stuff as dreams are made ofas a mere phantasmagoria of trooping shadows having no real existence but in the mind of the dreamer, and each dreamer makes his

23

own world. Not so in the idealism [here] presented. According to this the external world is the objectified modes, not of the mind of the observer, but of the mind of God. According to this, the external world is not a mere unsubstantial figment or dream, but for us a very substantial objective reality surrounding us and conditioning us on every side." He goes on to consider the objection that his view is pantheistic, and again answers yes. In an earlier work, Religion and Science: A Series of Sunday Lectures (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1875), LeConte disavows pantheism but seems to accept idealism. "What is spirit?," he asks. "It is this same all-pervading force of Naturethis same Divine energy, or a portion of it, individuated more and more until it becomes a separate entity, a self-conscious person" (p. 278). God "made all the forms which exist in the universe," and is "the ordainer of the laws of the universe, of the order and beauty of the cosmos"a truth opposed to "materialism, which teaches that all this is done by forces and laws residing in matter itself" (p. 265).
14

The Century Dictionary was published in New York in 1889. I'm quoting from p. 331 in Charles S. Peirce: Selected Writings (Values in a Universe of Chance), edited by Philip P. Wiener (New York: Dover, 1966).
15

For more details on the beginnings of Royce's career at Harvard see John J. McDermott, "The Confrontation Between Royce and Howison," Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 30 (1994), pp. 779-90.
16

(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1885), p. xiii.

17

See also pp. 333-4: "Many writers have presented . . . idealism as a sort of product of poetical fantasy, and have thereby helped to bring it into disrepute."
18

Royce returns to Emerson's "Brahma" several times: in The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1849), p. 99 and especially p. 349, where he notes, as he had in The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, the structural similarity between Emerson's imaginative insight and his own hard-won argument; and in his lectures on metaphysics as transcribed by several of his students (Josiah Royce, Metaphysics: His Philosophy 9 Course of 1915-16, edited by William Ernest Hocking, Richard Hocking, and Frank Oppenheim [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998], p. 187). There are fainter echoes of the Emersonian insight elsewhere in Royce, for example in The World and the Individual, 1: 427: "We win the presence of God when we most flee." For Royce's assessment of Emerson's historical significance, see the opening pages of "William James and the Philosophy of Life," pp. 3-45 in William James and Other Essays on the Philosophy of Life (New York: Macmillan, 1912). See also the interesting reflections in Clendenning, pp. 93-4.
19

Character and Opinion, p. 100.

20

On p. 4 of The World and the Individual, Royce speaks of "the wilderness of solitary reflection." "None prize the home-coming more than those who wander farthest"a point also made by Berkeley in the Preface to the Three Dialogues.
21

"Brahma," in Collected Poems and Translations (Library of Liberal Arts), p. 159. In Baldwin's Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology, Brahma is identified as "the principal deity of the Hindu pantheon. As originally conceived, Brahma may be compared to Spinoza's Substance. He was the one self-created and self-subsisting thing." Although Spinoza is now often read as a materialist,

24

his metaphysics served, in nineteenth-century America (due partly to the influence of Schelling), as a model for monistic idealism.
22

In the Preface to volume 1 of his Gifford Lectures, Royce says that "the philosophy here set forth is the result of a good many years of reflection. As to the most essential argument regarding the true relation between our finite ideas and the ultimate nature of things, I have never varied, in spirit, from the view maintained in Chapter XI of my first book, The Religious Aspect of Philosophy. That chapter was entitled The Possibility of Error, and was intended to show that the very conditions that make error possible concerning objective truth, can be consistently expressed only by means of an idealistic theory of the Absolute,a theory whose outlines I there sketched. The argument in question has since been restated [in some of the intervening works I name above] without fundamental alteration of its character" (p. xiv). Later he says that in the lectures, "this argument assumes a decidedly new form, not because I am in the least disposed to abandon the validity of the former statements, but because, in the present setting, the whole matter appears in new relations to other philosophical problems, and becomes, as I hope, deepened in its signifiance by these relations" (p. xv).
23

The conversation with Hale is recounted in Howison, "Josiah Royce: The Significance of His Work in Philosophy," p. 234. It must have taken place in 1882 or 1883; Howison didn't actually meet Royce until 1884.
24

Thus T. L. S. Sprigge describes the basis of Royce's argument as "surprising" (The God of Metaphysics [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006], p. 359).
25

It is so classified by G. Watts Cunningham in his able and thorough survey, The Idealistic Argument in Recent British and American Philosophy (New York: Century, 1933), pp. 378-82, 42851.
26

The Principle of Individuality and Value (London: Macmillan, 1912), pp. 262, 267.

27

This makes the argument "transcendental" in the present-day sense. Several commentators have stressed the transcendental character of Royce's argument. See for example W. J. Mander, "Royce's Argument for the Absolute," Journal of the History of Philosophy 36 (1998), pp. 443-57, p. 444. Another word for Royce's strategy is "dialectical." His conclusions are extracted from the presuppositions or concessions of his interlocutors. John E. Smith gives the following account of Royce's procedure. "He began with an accepted fact and sought to show that its reality necessitates the reality of its conditions, etc., until the analysis finally results in the necessary recognition of the infinite or absolute" (Royce's Social Infinite: The Community of Interpretation [Hamden: Archon Books, 1969], p. 18). Smith remarks that given such a starting point, Royce "was justified in calling attention to the empirical character of his philosophy."
28

When Kant introduces the cosmological argument, he describes it as the proof "which Leibniz called the proof a contingentia mundi" (Critique of Pure Reason A 604/B 632).
29

See Mander, "Royce's Argument for the Absolute," p. 453, where Mander takes note of echoes, in The Spirit of Modern Philosophy, of Plato's doctrine of recollection. Royce himself recalls another Platonic precedent in The Religious Aspect, p. 396: the Theaetetus, where, as Royce

25

explains, Socrates says "that his great difficulty has often been to see how any opinion can possibly be false." I think Royce's argument could be reformulated as an argument from inquiry.
30

There may seem to be a fuller elaboration of idealism in Lectures VII and VIII of The World and the Individual, volume 1.
31

For more on correspondeence see The World and the Individual, 1: 303-4.

32

When Royce calls this consciousness "hypothetical," he means only that it's hypothesized or supposed (p. 345).
33

"We see the clock-face; and for us the inside of the clock is possible sensation only. For the supposed consciousness the inside of the clock will be as present as the outside" (p. 347).
34

Are all these data present at one moment in the universal mind? Royce is cagey on this. On pp. 351-2, he says that the hypothesis settles the Kantian question of the subjectivity of spaceit is subjective, considered as "belonging to the states of the universal consciousness," but "to us objective, since in thinking it we merely conform ourselves to the universal consciousness" (p. 352)but he does not address the corresponding question about time. Elsewhere, immediately after saying that the hypothesis is silent "as to [the] succession" of the states of the WorldConsciousness, he writes that individual conscious beings are made or unmade, "according as there arise or disappear in this universal consciousness certain groups of data that, as represented in our mortal thought, are called organic living bodies. . . . These groups pass, and with them the individual consciousness that coexisted with each" (p. 350). The latter claim seems to imply that the states of the World-Consciousness are successive, and therefore in time. All unmade individuals will be present to the World-Consciousness, but not at any one moment. This leaves me wondering, though, about possibilities that are never actualized. It seems that they can't be present now, because if they were, they'd be nosing out future actualities in the race towards being. But that means they can't be present at any later moment either. But then how are they present at all? One can say that they are present as possibilities, but this needs explaining. For an analysis of Royce's evolving views on succession in God or the absolute, see Smith, Royce's Social Infinite, pp. 13-18. For more on Royce and the open future, see the essay by Charles Hartshorne I cite below.
35

See also "The Implications of Self-Consciousness," p. 162: "If then, this analysis of the concept of Personality be sound, there is logically possible but one existent Person, namely, the one complete Self." In The World and the Individual, Royce's presentation centers on an antinomy. The antinomy must be resolvable, and absolute idealism is (he argues) the only way of resolving it. For the antinomy and its resolution see 1: 320-4. I cannot examine the antinomy's resolution here. The whole of volume 1 of The World and the Individual is really one long argument for idealism. Being can be conceived in four different ways. The first three self-destruct. The fourth not only survives, but gives us everything (everything valuable or legitimate) that the first three views were seeking.
36

Royce sometimes appeals to "immediate insight" (The Religious Aspect, p. 392). I'm not altogether sure what to make of this. On the page he also says that the argument "is not any effort to demonstrate in fair and orderly array, from any one principle or axiom, what must be the nature of error." He will, instead, proceed opportunistically, using "every and any device that may

26

offer itself, general analysis, special example, comparison and contrast of cases,anything that shall lead us to the insight into what an error is and implies." But his dialectical argumenthis argument that common sense collapses in contradiction when it tries to come to terms with erroris, I assume, intended as demonstrative, even if it is ad hominem. (The claim of demonstrability reappears on the title page of the second edition of The Conception of God, as I note in Lecture VI. I would say that Royce's illustrations are "opportunistic"they are, at least, very varied and colorfulbut at its core the argument still strikes me as demonstrative. We begin with two alternatives, total relativity and error's infinite possibility. Total relativity is reduced to absurdity. That leaves us with the possibility of error. There must be an explanation but there can be only two, common sense and absolute idealism. Common sense is reduced to absurdity. Absolute idealism is left standing, and it checks out.
37

This is intriguing: why the shift from a "social" relativism to a subjective one? I suppose even social relativity places "objects"in this case, constellations of opinion or deliverances of conventionbeyond the boundaries of any single finite mind. So relativism allows for a possibility of error, even if the "object" isn't what it seemed to be at first. (It can be argued, of courseand Royce does arguethat the object is what it seemed to be at first: part of an objective world that stands apart from whatever any one believer, or even the corporate body of believers, might think of it. It will be an objective fact that a convention is thus and so, or that general opinion gravitates towards this rather than that.) I wonder whether Royce, recognizing the public character of language, would say that social consensus plays a role in the fixing of any index. If we relativize our judgments of truth and error to moments in the lives of individuals, it is only because this is licensed by social convention. In that case, relativization to convention is in some sense unavoidable.
38

See p. 395 for a Roycean argument that any real doubt "impl[ies] an assumed order of being. Mander, on p. 449 of "Royce's Argument," expands on this as follows: "If there is no error, then since at least some people believe there is, they at least must be in error, so there is error after all."
39

On p. 389, Royce actually describes total relativity as a form of "imperfectly defined skepticism"and, at one time, as the only view he could provisionally adopt. But he escaped it, he says, by asking "the one question more." "If everything beyond the present is doubtful, then how can even that doubt be possible?" "With this question," he says, "that bare relativity of the present moment is given up," because the conditions that make doubt "logically intelligible" evidently "transcend the present moment." We're left, he concludes, with at least one general truth: "All but the immediate content of the present moment's judgment, being doubtful, we may be in error about it." For helpful discussion of the relativity of truth in Royce and James (with some comments on James's "Emersonianism"), see James Conant, "The James/Royce dispute and the development of James's 'solution,'" in The Cambridge Companion to William James, edited by Ruth Anna Putnam (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 186-213.
40

In Josiah Royce: An Intellectual Biography, Kuklick argues that "Royce was a pragmatist like James prior to writing The Religious Aspect of Philosophy" (p. 40; see also pp. 16-17). In a quotation from "How Beliefs are Made" (p. 243 of Kuklick's book), the young Royce seems to be repeating lessons learned from Peirce.
41

See, however, the cautionary note in Marcel, Royce's Metaphysics, pp. 162-3, as well as Kuklick, Josiah Royce, pp. 128-9, and my conclusion.

27

42

This book was published in New Haven by Yale University Press in 1919.

43

As Royce says on p. 431, he could have reached the same result if he had started by asking "what is truth?", though as I suggest in the footnote just below, his question would really have been "what is knowledge?"
44

I expect that I'll later be saying something along these lines. It isn't true (as James and Royce himself both suggest) that Royce's argument can be restated as an argument from truth. (Royce makes the point in both The Religious Aspect, p. 432, and in The World and the Individual, 1: 323.) At best it would have to be cast as an argument from the knowledge of truth, but it is not even that: it is an argument from the finite or imperfect knowledge of truth. That's because Royce is unable (constitutionally) to see any mystery in the absolute's knowledge of truth. Why is that? One possibility is that the absolute has infallibly individuating descriptive knowledge of every thing. Another possibility is that each thing exists in the absolute, and has no existence apart from it. Because the thing is present in the absolute mind (and has no existence that doesn't consist in that presence)because it inheres in itsit is present to the absolute mind. Epistemic presence doesn't call for an explanation, because its underwritten by ontological presence or inherence. But if that's correct, it isn't really necessary that each thing be part of a living and thriving organism of thought. There might be nothing more in the absolute than a single, solitary thing. But it would still be known. (It's interesting to wonder whether we could know it. "No," it might be said, "because it doesn't exist in us." But I haven't said that ontological presence is necessary for epistemological presence, only that it is sufficient. If the (creaturely) universe were a "contracted" one, amounting to no more than a single individual, we could master all of the descriptive information about it, without running up against the limits of our finitude. Is it an unspoken premiss of Royce's argument that the (creaturely) universeand I'm going to allow myself to speak in that way, in order to hold the world, or natura naturata, apart from God, or natura naturans, even though Royce denies that his God is a creator (see p. 476 of The Religious Aspect), and may not have any tolerance for the scholastic or Spinozistic distinction I've invokedis infinitely complex, and therefore beyond "descriptive capture" by any finite mind? Here I'm imagining two forms of "capture," descriptive and ontological. C. S. Peirce, in his unpublished review of The Religious Aspect, suggests another, broadly consistent with Bertrand Russell's separation between knowledge of things and knowledge of truths. I take up Peirce and Russell later on.
45

Though it can't be followed up here, a stray comment in The Religious Aspect indicates that Royce might have argued for the absolute from agreement or disagreement, or from their possibility. "Two judgments cannot have the same object save as they are both present to one thought," he says on p. 425. This suggests that the absolute may be our only escape from referential solipsismor from a referential solipsism of the present moment.
46

Each idea is a "mass of consciousness" (p. 403), something very much like a mental atom or (as Royce in fact calls it) an "element" (p. 403).
47

On the judgment as a mental occurrence, see the "provisional psychological description of a judgment as a state of mind" put forward on p. 402, as well as p. 403, where Royce calls a judgment a "mental phenomenon." Royce bases these descriptions on Ueberweg's definition of a judgment as the "Consciousness about the objective validity of a subjective union of ideas." On p.

28

403, Royce explains that a judgment, due to its sense of dependence, looks "to a somewhat indefinite object as the model after which the present union of ideas is to be fashioned." On p. 404, the sense of dependence is said to contain an intention.
48

I wonder about the word "infinity." If there were only finitely many objects, could a finite mind achieve "world contact" without the support of an engulfing absolute?
49

The intention is (or is closely bound up with) what Royce calls "the Sense of Dependence" in every judgment, "whereby we feel the value of this act to lie, not in itself, but in its agreement with a vaguely felt Beyond, that stands out there as Object" (p. 402).
50

This raises a question about the prospects of an argument from truth. The possibility of truth or knowledge, ratherseems easier to explain that the possibility of error, because a true judgment does "know" its object. But it knows it only partially. It doesn't know it well enough that is, fully enoughto separate it from the many other objects that might satisfy its subject-idea.
51

Marcel, Royce's Metaphysics, translated by Virginia and Gordon Ringer (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1956), pp. 21-36. This volume a translation of four articles originally published in La Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale 1918-19 (p. 159).
52

"Things in his dream" is an allusion to a scene in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, where Tweedledum and Tweedledee torture Alice with the thought that all of them, Alice included, are nothing but things in the dream of a kingthe Red Kingwho lies sleeping before them. Earlier in the book, on p. 352, in the course of dismissing the possibility that the "WeltGeist" is a power, Royce puts "things in his dream" in quotation marks. See also pp. 380 and 407. Royce was a great fan of Carroll, as Clendenning's biography testifies. See his Life and Thought, pp. 343, 351.
53

I'm borrowing this example from Michael Della Rocca (via Gilad Tanay). Michael uses it his lectures to bring out the shortcomings of the view that representation is resemblance.
54

Royce repeats it in other places, for example in The Spirit of Modern Philosophy, p. 346, where he says that there is no rational question that couldn't be answered by a person sufficiently wise.
55

I sometimes wonder how Royce can hope to explain how my mind reaches out to one thing by hypothesizing that there is an infinite mind that reaches out to everything. But I think what I say below, in part (i) of section 4, helps to explain this. The infinite mind isn't really reaching out. It is reaching outthe inescapable fate of finite mindsthat presents a problem. A self-contained minda mind whose objects are "inherent" or internalpresents no problem at all. Am I wrong to saddle Royce with the notion of inherence, and with the substance-mode metaphysics that follows in its train? On p. 11 of volume 1 of The World and the Individual, Royce announces that "it is of 'God, the only Substance,' that your lecturer, if his Ontology so far agrees with Lord Gifford's, will principally speak," but I'm not sure how seriously this should be taken.
56

I don't think it's fair to describe James as a "Roycean" in 1885 (as Bruce Kuklick does in Josiah Royce: An Intellectual Autobiography [Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1972]), or even to say that "he accepted Royce's doctrine" (Kuklick, p. 38). As we'll see in a moment, James's official verdict on Royce's argument, despite the effusiveness of his 1885 review, is hedged. James does say in The

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Meaning of Truth (New York: Longmans, Green, 1909), p. 22) that Royce's "powerful book maintained that the notion of referring involved that of an inclusive mind that shall own both the real q and the mental q, and use the latter expressly as a representative symbol of the former," and that "at the time I could not refute this transcendentalist opinion." But to say that he couldn't refute it isn't to say that he embraced it. James could have been agnostic about the basis of referring even if he thought that Royce gave the "best" account of it. Even the best account might not be good enough to justify accepting it.
57

William James, "The Religious Aspect of Philosophy," pp. 276-84 in Collected Essays and Reviews (New York: Longmans, Green, 1920). On p. 282, James refers to Royce's absolute as an "OverSoul." The review was originally published in 1885.
58

Some further thoughts on this first criticism: The space between the absolute as knower and the absolute as constituter may be most evident in The Conception of God. There Royce defines God as "a being who is conceived as possessing to the full all logically possible knowledge, insight, and wisdom" (p. 9). He then argues, in the style of The Religious Aspect, that beyond the mere "fragment" of experience that each of us enjoys, there must be "some more organized whole of experience, in whose unity this fragment is conceived as finding its organic place" (p. 31). But then it is simply asserted that "to talk of any reality which this fragmentary experience indicates, is to conceive of this reality as the content of the more organized experience"by which he means, as nothing over and above the content of the more organized experience (p. 31). But why does this further claim follow? Royce's answer to my objection would, I suspect, be this: if the esse of things were more than their percipi by the absolute, we'd face the problem of error all over again. But if this is the answer, Royce is making two assumptions he should openly acknowledge and defend. The first is that if an object exists in the mind, it's needless to explain how the mind can refer to it. This assumption is debatable. A mode, for example, can exist in a mind without the mind's being able to refer to it. I admit that the objects now under consideration are in the mind "not by way of mode or attribute," as Berkeley puts it, "but . . . by way of idea." But my whole question is why it isn't enough for them to exist in the absolute "only by way of idea" (which is in fact what Berkeley says, though the present emphasis is mine). What reason do we have to say that the being of these objects is exhausted by their being known? (For an earlier criticism of Rouyce along these lines, see J. Harry Cotton, "Royce's Case for Idealism," Journal of Philosophy 53 [1956], pp. 11223.) The second assumption is that if an object doesn't exist in the mind, it's imperative to explain how the mind can refer to it. (There is, however, a puzzle here. In "The Implications of SelfConsciousness," Royce writes that "no human reflection has ever yet fathomed perfectly the consciousness of even a single one of our moments" [p. 155]. It seems that we can be mistaken even about what lies within us. Does this mean that the ideal Thomas is not present to the mind after all, and that what we took to be the ideal Thomas is actually an ideal ideal-Thomas? Dickinson Miller quotes this curious sentence in "The Meaning and Truth and Error," p. 417. He says that "the statement may be true; but how such a defect of memory or introspective power proves the existence of any metaphysical mare's nest concealed in the shadows I cannot divine.") I should consider whether, in The World and the Individual, Royce's distinction between internal and external meaning might enable him to dispense with the two assumptions I've identified. The internal meaning is, very roughly, my conception of the object. It is akin to the ideal Thomas. The external meaning is the object itself (the real Thomas, for example). It's been suggested that Royce's distinction coincides with Frege's sense/reference distinction. (For discussion see Elizabeth Flower and Murray G. Murphey, A History of Philosopy in America [New York: Capricorn, 1977), 2: 714-15; Christopher hookway, "Truth and Reference: Peirce versus

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Royce,' pp. 108-34 in his Truth, Rationality, and Pragmatism: Themes from Peirce [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000], pp. 132-3; and Sprigge, The God of Metaphysics, p. 376.] I'm not sure of this partly because an internal meaning is more than a spectator's conception: it's a conception suffused by the object's practical bearings. An idea has a sort of aspiration, a kind of transcendence or "dependence" (as Royce calls it in The Religious Aspect, p. 402), contained within it. This is partbut only a partof what becomes, in The World and the Individual, the volitional character of ideas. External meanings, Royce argues there, are only apparently external. Internal and external meanings cannot in fact be "sundered." The partiality or promise of every internal meaning is fulfilled or completed in the absolute, in which the external meaning is wholly contained. In the absolute, internal and external meanings are joined. (At the very least, Royce seems at times to be seeking a vocabulary that will take him far from the antique terms and assumptions that I am perhaps forcing on him here. For one thing, in The Problem of Christianity, volume 2 (pp. 268, 418, and 426), he explicitly denies that the finite mind is a substance. (See also The World and the Individual, 2: 291-2 and elsewhere.) The notion of substance, he argues there, is a remnant of realism, the first of the three conceptions of being he had struggled to overcome in The World and the Individual. A substance, in the realist sense, is an "independent" being, but a finite mind is not independent. It is "a meaning embodied in a conscious life" (Problem of Christianity, 2: 418), and it therefore has its full existence only in the absolute. It is less clear to me, though, that Royce does not continue to conceive of the absolute as a substance. What, after all, could compromise the independence of a being so total and self-sufficient? He certainly conceives of the absolute as a substance in earlier writings, for example in The Spirit of Modern Philosophy. See for example p. 418, where he proudly observes that "our theory," instead of veiling the world's substance, as double-aspect theories do, "undertakes to know what this substance is." "It is," he says, "the conscious life of the Logos.") Yet in the end, the argument of The World and the Individual, for all its length, seems to close with an appeal to immediate insight, and my own apprehensions don't seem to track those of Royce. In making this first criticism, I've been assuming that it's the absolute's intimacy with objects that enables it to know them. (The flip side is that our diminished intimacy, or partial estrangement, makes our knowledge of them problematic.) But could the driving force instead be the totality or completeness of its field of view? So much is suggested by Royce's repeated claim that we make contact with objects only as parts of an organic whole. But there is something suspiciously back-to-front about achieving reference through totality. If making contact with a single object is a problem, how can it be solved by positing a mind that enjoys contact with every object? Mustn't its contact with each be something more fundamental than its contact with all? But this, perhaps, is simply what a holist would deny. Perhaps this first doubt be expressed most simply as follows: why does presence to the mind require presence in the mind? This is roughly the question that Arnauld asked Malebranche. Presence-to is an epistemic. Presence-in (or inherence) is ontological. But could it be Royce's view that the joint presence of all is precisely what constitutes the inherence of any element, taken distributively, within the all?
59

Again, some additional thoughts: Royce argues that likeness or resemblance is insufficient, and yet he argues, in chapter 10, that because our ideas must be like their objects, their objects must themselves be ideas. I'm not sure what to make of this. Perhaps that argument is part of a hypothetical or postulated construction that he moves beyond in chapter 11. (An interesting question: how much of the patient but hypothetical argumentation in chapter 10 is made superfluous by the quick strike in chapter 11?) He does take up causation in The World and the

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Individual. As he acknowledges there, "for many of the older theories of knowledge," an idea's object is "that which arouses, awakens, [or] brings [it] to pass" (1: 312). But neither the past nor the future, he then argues, is the cause of our present ideas (1: 314-16). Here he can be criticized for considering only direct causal relations, but indirect causal relations won't by themselves solve the problem. There is typically a very long chain of intervening causes between past moments and the present (or between the present moment and the future). How can one item in the chain be singled out as the thing to be represented? Peirce's theory of the index, which I discuss below, amounts to a causal theory, but he seems to do without conceptions that exist only in the mind. In Peirce's view, the causal relation holds between the organism and its environment. He simply has a different starting point.
60

Did Royce respond to this point in his metaphysics seminar (p. 73 in Metaphysics)? There he says that "the intention is lacking," his point perhaps being that I can be acquainted with something without meaning or intending it. Acquaintance does fall short of intention, but couldn't acquaintance be all it takes to make something available to an intention?
61

Unless the Absolute knows my intentions, Royce cannot solve the problem he sets for himself. Let's grant that my idea and its object both exist in the Absolute. The Absolute can therefore compare them, as (for the moment) I'll grant I cannot. I'll also grant that comparability matters, though this does call for more discussion. The Absolute can now say that my idea is false of a particular object. It can say the same of my friend's idea. But suppose I intend the object and my friend does not. Only I am in error. (My friend, let's suppose, intends a different object, and he's right about it.) I can be in error only if my intention exists in the Absolute. But what is my intention, and how does it exist in my idea or judgment? That was our difficulty, and I'm as much in the dark about it as I was at first. The Absolute will know my intention if I have it (as my friend does not), but what is it for me to have it? Perhaps Royce will reply that I'm working from the wrong end. I'm supposing that the Absolute knows of my intention because I have it, as if my intention is something that exists prior to its recognition in the Absolute. (I have to admit that Royce's talk of knowledge suggests as much.) But perhaps the Absolute itself intends the object something I shouldn't find mysterious, because the object is present to itand I simply share in that intention. But what then am I, and what makes the intention my own?
62

Here are some further things that give me pause.

(v) The Red King objection: why isn't the "world" just a thing in the Absolute's dream? "If that there King was to wake, you'd go outbang!just like a candle." Even if the absolute is the constituter of all objects or ideas, I continue to worry that it will not constitute a world. Imagine that there is another mind more "knowing" than my own, with whom I tend to agree as I grow in knowledge, but suppose that this mind, unlike Royce's absolute, is finite. It will be beyond me; it will be independent of me; and its "facts"that is, the states or contents of its consciousness (which is all that "facts" can mean, so far)will correspond to my "facts," that is, to my own sensations or ideas. I don't think this has the slightest tendency to show that as we grow in agreement, I will be achieving or approaching truth. And I don't see what difference it makes if we suppose this other mind is all-knowingunless, that is, we let the word "knowing" do the work, and treat its "facts" not as bare occurrences, but as notions that are (in a sense as yet unanalyzed) true.62 Now I have, I admit, ignored something in the important passage I quote at the top of p. 8 (from p. 346 of The Religious Aspect), and it may seem to make all the difference. Suppose that

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it's practically useful for me to agree with Royce's "Not-Ourselves" (or, for that matter, with my more finitely perfect companion). Royce has a bit more to say about utility or practical power, as he begins the long paragraph that includes the lines I've quoted: We can easily see how, under this supposition [that is, under the idealist hypothesis], conformity to the supposed universal consciousness will become on my part a goal of effort. Knowledge of possible experiences is useful to me. But all possible experiences are or will be actual in the hypothetical consciousness. [Note that we have, here, another temporalization of the universal consciousness. For discussion see the footnote above.] If I am standing near a concealed pitfall, or am in danger of a blow, or in danger of death from poison, that fact, translated into ultimate terms, means, we may suppose, that in the universal consciousness there is now the knowledge of certain relative positions and motions of atoms. (p. 346) But in the absence of additional, specifically "pragmatist" argumentation, the fact that I find agreement profitable doesn't mean that it is trueunless, as I said, we treat the "knowledge" of the mind I've taken for my model and guide as representations of external fact (and therefore as true in a sense that has so far eluded our analysis), rather than brute occurrences.62 Is there some further ingredient, short of truth understood as correspondence to external fact, that we can add to Royce's idealist recipe, so that it can keep its promise to capture the ordinary understanding of "external reality"? I think a large part of what's missing is something that Royce very deliberately excludes: a causal relation between the world-consciousness and our own sensations or ideas.62 So long as the world-consciousness "does nothing, [but] merely looks on" (p. 350)so long as it's just a world-consciousness and not an active "World-Spirit" who weaves, as Spirit claims to do in Goethe's Faust, its own "living robe of Deity," a Seer and not a Creator (p. 350)I have trouble seeing how its "experience," however full it may be when compared to our own, can be called reality in the ordinary sense of that expression.62 Royce doesn't address my objection in the very terms I've used, but he does admit that in the ordinary picture, external reality is endowed with causal power. "We are," he says, concerned to show why we have left out of view the causal element that popular thought makes so prominent in its conception of Reality. For popular thought, the world is a Power that causes our perceptions. But we, both here and in our subsequent religious discussion, shall consider the eternal not as Power, but as Thought. Why is this? We shall try here to explain, still regarding the real world merely as something postulated to meet the inner needs of our thought. (p. 354) To explain his choice, Royce stages a contest between two postulates. The first postulate is that "our ideas have something beyond them and like them" (p. 356). The second is that this thing standing beyond them is their cause. He argues that the likeness or correspondence postulate is deeper than the causal postulate, and that the latter depends on the former for whatever realist "punch" it may possess. When I say that sensation s was provoked by cause C, he points out, my claim favors the reality of s only on the assumption that my idea of the causal relation "correspond[s] to the truth of things" (p. 355). Can I even conceive of a real cause, he then asks, "save by virtue of a postulate that my conception of a real cause is like the real cause itself?" (p. 355). "Surely," he argues, "I do not know the validity of my idea of a causal relation merely on the ground that I know this idea . . . must itself have been caused by the real existence

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of causal relations in the world. Such an attempt to justify my idea would mean endless regress. The deeper notion that we have of the world is therefore founded on the insight or on the postulate that there must be, not merely a sufficient cause for our thought, but a sufficient counterpart thereto" (p. 355).62 Much of this part of chapter 10 is an argument against a "Disfigured Realism" that banishes the likeness postulate and clings to the causal postulate, leaving us with "the notion of an utterly unknowable external cause of [our] sensations" (p. 358). From such a realism we can, Royce complains, expect no reports. Of the reality it offers us "nothing will be said, but that it is" (p. 358). "Science, experience, serious reflection about reality," Royce laments, "will utterly cease" (p. 358). Faced with this depressing blankness, we may, he predicts, begin inventing. "All degrees of likeness or unlikeness [will be] assumed," he suggests "according to the tastes of individual thinkers." "External reality is once for all absolved from the condition of being intelligible, and becomes capable of being anything you please, a dead atom, an electric fluid, a ghost, a devil, an Unknowable" (p. 360). Against this "Disfigured Realism," Royce has a point. A causal realism can't completely let go of the likeness postulatenot without finding some replacementbecause it's forced to conceive of the causal relation (insofar as we know it), at least, as real in a non-causal sense. But this doesn't really meet the concern I believe I share with Renouvier. I want the idealist to supplement the likeness postulate with the causal postulate, my worry being that without it, the idealist won't be in a position to capture a crucial common-sense commitment. What disfigures agnostic realism, in Royce's view, is the vain hope of dispensing altogether with the likeness postulate. This leaves room for a more comely and more confident realism, in which the two postulates are blended, and the scope of the likeness principle is narrowed as much as it needs to be to preserve the name of realism. Royce does have an argument against this, but it's a cautious and (to my mind) uncertain one. Once we concede that "external reality is somewhat like our ideas of its nature," he justly observes, "likeness remains to be defined" (p. 360). But then he simply seems to insist that it be defined in idealist fashion. There are, he thinks, two idealist ways of understanding likeness: as a relation between my present conscious state and other actual states, past or present, my own or another's; and as a relation between my present conscious state and merely possible conscious statesbetween my present state and "possible experience" (p. 361). What Royce calls "modern phenomenism," a broad current of post-Kantian speculation that includes (to cite only the more luminous names in the long list Royce presents on p. 362) Fichte, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Ferrier, Mill, and Renouvier, holds that "thought, when it inquires into its own meaning, can never rest satisfied with any idea of external reality that makes such reality other than a datum of consciousness, and so material for thought" (p. 363). Royce urges that we accept this, but only as "the simplest and least contradictory postulate" (p. 363).62 Can we, after all, readily conceive of external reality "as being, although in nature like our conscious states, yet in no necessary relation to consciousness?" (p. 361). Mustn't any reality of which we can conceive stand in "a definite relation of likeness to my present consciousness" (p. 362)? These are awkward and indirect statements of Berkeley's familiar likeness principle: only an idea can be like an idea. Near the end of his chapter on idealism, Royce condemns Berkeley's "theological hypothesis" for assuming more than it should (p. 369)for pouring into the pure current of idealism a causal mixture that modern phenomenism wisely filtered out. My worry is that without that mixture, the external reality of the idealist won't coincide with the external reality of common sense. I've been recommending not a disfigured realism, but a blend of the causal and likeness postulatesa realism with a human or idealist face.

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One further point about Royce's understanding of idealism. Mill, as we saw, is recruited by Royce into the noisy and colorful crowd of "modern phenomenists." Mill called matter a "permanent possibility of sensation" (pp. 362, 364), and with this Royce so far agrees. (In The Spirit of Modern Philosophy, he calls it "a very fair beginning" [p. 359].) But matter is not, Royce insists, a bare possibility (pp. 364-5). A bare possibility calls for nothing more than freedom from contradiction. If the material world were nothing more than permanent possibilities in this sense, it might as well include unicorns as horses. The existence of any material thing needs, he says, an actual ground, and that ground, as we've also already seen, must stand in "a definite relation of likeness to my present consciousness." We must therefore conceive of it as "the object of an absolute experience" (p. 369)as an object, indeed, of an actual absolute experience. But we can't conceive of an actually experienced object without an actually experiencing subject. "To complete our theory," as Royce says, "'we want a hero'"an absolute world-consciousness.62 This is the "simple and adequate" hypothesis (p. 369) whose truth Royce seeks to establish in his chapter on the possibility of error. My question, I suppose, is whether the argument from error allows Royce to dispense with the argumentation of chapter 10. I suppose it's meant to. He doesn't need the likeness principle because he has another way of establishing that things are ideas: they are ideas because if they were not, we couldn't be right and wrong about them. I complained earlier that Royce's absolute cannot contitute the world unless it plays a causal role. But doesn't it? If my ideas of sight are caused (let's say) by particles falling on my retina, then those particles, with their causal power, exist in the absolute. So in the end, the absolute has causal power built into ita point that becomes more evident as Royce's views develop, and his conception of the absolute as will more prominent. But all causal power exists, so to speak, within the absolute, rather than between the absolute and something (such as a finite mind) that stands outside it. But perhaps this is as it should be. Royce is not Berkeley. (vi) Dickinson Miller's theory of error. Miller's "The Meaning of Truth and Error," Philosophical Review 4 (1893), pp. 408-25, is an (oblique) response to Royce that develops a nonidealist (but not anti-idealist) theory of error. Miller's theory is an elaboration of Royce's third conception of being (though Royce hadn't yet called it that): being as validity. The basic idea is Berkeley's: to believe in an object is to form expectations, expectations concerning the laws or patterns that my future ideas will exemplify. (This idea is present throughout Royce's writings, from The Religious Aspect on, though it's erected into a conception of being only in the Gifford Lectures.) If my expectations are defeated, I am in error. But my error isn't (and needn't be) absolute. It's enough for my present expectations to be at odds with a distant and persistently corrective future. The basic question raised here is whether error, in order to be error, must be "deep" or absolute. Perhaps the possibility of relative errorof "surface" discrepancies between present expectations and future disappointmentsis all that we require. Miller's view seems to have persuaded James. He writes in The Meaning of Truth that "largely through the influence of Professor D. S. Miller," he "came to see that any definitely experienceable workings would serve as intermediaries quite as well as the absolute mind's intentions would" (p. 22). (vii) An ever-ascending hierarchy of minds? A consensus at the end of inquiry? Why one Absolute Mind? Why not a distinct and more inclusive mind for every possible error? Would we need an infinite hierarchy of ever more inclusive minds. I'm not sure we stand in need of anything at all that is infinite? Why can't we make do with the finite? Royce's thought seems to be that the condition of error must be infinite because error itself (or, rather, its possibility) is itself infinite.

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But this seems hasty. How many actual errors have there been? And how many actual errors will there be? I don't think Royce can assume either an infinite past or an unending future. Could there (to take a different tack) be several minds that serve as conditions for error? That would call for a "segretation" of error, but how do we know that such segretation isn't possible? Consider Royce's definition of error on p. 425 of The Religious Aspect: What, then, is an error? An error, we reply, is an incomplete thought, that to a higher thought, which includes it and its intended object, is known as having failed in the purpose that it more or less clearly had, and that is fully realized in this higher thought. There is a possibility here of pragmatic clarification, along Peircean lines. The "Absolute" would then be something merely possiblean ideal. Here Royce would fall back on his earlier condemnation of the barely possible. (This is a recurring theme. See for example "The Implications of Self-Consciousness," p. 166, and especially The Conception of God, pp. 25-30, where Royce works his way from reality as Peircean consensus to reality as absolute experience.) The idea of the barely possible, in which there is no actuality, is an empty idea. If anything is possible, then, when we say so, we postulate something as actually existent in order to constitute this possibility. The conditions of possible error must be actual. Bare possibility is blank nothingness. If the nature of error necessarily and with perfect generality demands certain conditions, then these conditions are as eternal as the erroneousness of error itself is eternal. And thus the inclusive thought, which constitutes the error, must be postulated as existent. (pp. 429-30) The objection I have in mind here was raised by Peirce himself in his review. (It's actually anticipated by Royce, who ascribes it to Thrasymachus and calls it "the only outwardly plausible objection to his view." See also The World and the Individual, p. 361.) Peirce recognized himself as Thrasymachus, who believes that "the real is that which any many would believe in, and be ready to act upon, if his investigations were to be pushed sufficiently far" ("An American Plato"). "Upon the luckless putter-forth of this opinion Dr. Royce is extremely severe." According to Royce, a barely possible judge is not enough. But Peirce does not think this judge is barely possible. "Our experience in this direction warrants us in saying with the highest degree of empirical confidence that questions that are either practical or could conceivabily become so are susceptible of receiving final solutions provided the existence of the human race be indefinitely prolonged and the particular question excite sufficient interest." There are interesting (and interlocking) questions here about the grounding of possibility, the nature of idealization, and the force of the pragmatic maxim. (Good starting-points for an examination of some of these issues are Hookway, "Truth and Reference," pp. 129-34, Mander, "Royce's Argument," especially pp. 446-8 and 457, and Sprigge, The God of Metaphysics, p. 363.) Here is Peirce's entry on "Pragmatism" in volume 2 of James Mark Baldwin's Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology (1902): This maxim was first proposed by C. S. Peirce in the Popular Science Monthly for January 1878; and he explained how it was to be applied to the doctrine of reality. . . . The writer subsequently saw that the principle might be misapplied, so as to sweep away the whole doctrine of incommensurables, and, in fact, the whole Weierstrassian way of regarding the calculus. In 1896 William James published his Will to Believe and later his Philos. Conceptions and Pract. Results, which pushed this method to such extremes as must tend to give us pause. The doctrine appears to assume that the end of man is actiona stoical

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axiom which, to the present writer at the age of sixty, does not recommend itself so forcibly as it did at thirty. If it be admitted, on the contrary, that action wants an end, and that that end must be something of a general description, then the spirit of the maxim itself, which is that we must look to the upshot of our concepts in order rightly to apprehend them, would direct us towards something different from practical facts, namely, to general ideas, as the true interpreters of our thoughts. Nevertheless, the maxim has approved itself to the writer, after many years of trial, as of great utility in leading to a relatively high degree of clearness of thought. He would venture to suggest that it should always be put into practice with conscientious thoroughness, but that, when that has been done, and not before, a still higher grade of clearness of thought can be attained by remembering that the only ultimate good which the practical facts to which it directs attention can subserve is to further the development of concrete reasonableness. (Later, Peirce came to regret some of what he said here.) The reference to incommensurables is extremely interesting. Peirce's worry, I think, is that there may be no "lived meaning" to the notion of an irrational number, because we can, practically speaking, make do with approximating fractions. For Royce, this is a central preoccupation. He's desperate that his notion of the absolute have pragmatic meaning, and he wants its meaning to be different from the Peircean notion of what the community of inquirers is fated to agree on at the imagined end of inquiry. See The World and the Individual, 1: 36-8, where Royce discusses the notion of a limit, and addresses irrational numbers in particular. Throughout this lecture, I've emphasized Royce's assumption that objects in the world aren't present to us. I've said less than I should have about the fragmentary character of our knowledge, and about the "atomism" of common sense. That atomism applies not only to judgments (or "truth-vehicles") but to facts (or "truth-makers"). Royce believes that Truth is One: that the truth-maker of any true judgment is the whole of reality. Peirce gives us a whole that is not the Absolute: an ideal (but not a "barely possible" ideal) rather than an actually existing "all knower." (viii) The volitional character of ideas. I'm not sure I understand what it means for ideas to be volitional in character. There are at least three distinguishable elements. (1) There is behavior for which an idea might prepare us. (2) There is our desire to sing a melody. Here the melody is serving to illustrate ideas. (Though at one important point Royce contrasts melody and idea.) We have an interest in ideasan interest in ideas themselves. Or so the example of the melody suggests. (3) Counting is another paradigm of an idea-directed process. We want to go onwe will to goand we know how to do so (The World and the Individual, 1: 338). There are anticipations of Wittgenstein and Kripke here. What we intend transcends what is present before us. Is the Absolute a "superlative fact"? (ix) Is Royce faced with modal collapse? "Error, if possible, is eternally actual" (The Religious Aspect, p. 425). Are there possible errors that we will never make? It seems not, on Royce's view. The only errors established as "possible" are those that turn out to be actual. Or so it seems. The possibility of other errors is "bare," or purely logical. But perhaps that's enough, at least for Royce. There are related questions about the openness of the future, explored by Charles Hartshorne in "Royce's MistakeAnd Achievement," Journal of Philosophy 53 (1956), pp. 123-30.
63

This essay can be found in William James and Other Essays in the Philosophy of Life (New York: Macmillan, 1911), pp. 187-254. The quotation from Tennyson appears on p. 253.

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64

"Woodnotes II," p. 47 in Collected Poems and Translations, in the Library of American edition.

65

Does Royce's absolute have ends of its own, or are all the ends included in it finite ends? Royce wants to say that there is a finite need for absolute (or infinite) truth. Pragmatism gives "a correct account of man's natural function as a truth seeker" ("The Problem of Truth in the Light of Recent Discussion," p. 222). It "correctly describes the nature truth possesses insofar as we actually verify it" (p. 223), but truth "cannot be defined solely in terms of our personal experience and our success in controlling this experience" (p. 224). In seeking adequate expression of our absolute nature, "we strive in the empirical world for a success that can't be defined in merely relative terms" (p. 252). Pragmatism cannot conceive of itself as merely instrumentally true (pp. 218-22). (On this see Conant, "The James/Royce dispute," and James, A Pluralistic Universe.) Its aspirations must be absolute. Pragmatism must therefore recognize "all truth as the essentially eternal creation of the Will" (p. 254). Absolute truth has "a distinctly and intensely practical import" (p. vii). Royce's distinctive strategy is to find a pressure toward the infinite exerted by the finite. It is a pressure exerted by our finite needs themselves. But "pressure" is probably the wrong word. It is really a need or a lack, and in this respect Royce is, perhaps, closer to Edwards than he is to Emerson or Thoreau. Emerson's individual can't be confined. Thoreau's individual is elastic. In Royce, as in Edwards, we suffer from a need, but we don't have the promise of (natural, unassisted) expansion. Or do we? I'm really not sure. The absolute self is our true self, after all.

"'A New World': Philosophical Idealism in America, 1700 to 1950"1 Lecture VI (Draft. Please do not quote without permission.) I want to begin my final lecture by turning back in timeto 1842, the year in which Emerson gave the lecture on transcendentalism that I mentioned (and quoted from) in Lecture I. You may remember the very simple definition of transcendentalism he gives there: transcendentalism, he tells his listeners, is idealism, idealism as it exists in 1842. That same year, a young minister from the Congregational Church in New Milford, Connecticut, a small town not far from New Haven, published a paper on Emerson's same topic, in a magazine called The American Biblical Repository. His view of transcendentalism as a whole wasn't favorable (and that's putting it lightly), but he was particularly scornful of one column in the mass of men and women he saw marching under the transcendentalist banner"the Pantheistic," he called it"with whom," he explained, "the name of Mr. Emerson is too intimately connected, to require that it should be concealed."2 When, four years later, this minister, Noah Porter, became a professor of philosophy at Yale, it's unlikely that he encouraged the young men in his care to read Emerson. He was certainly not doing so after becoming president of Yale in 1871. As president, he imagined being asked the following question: "Why not read the modern Emerson, because some say he teaches a subtle Pantheism, as freely as you read the ancient Plotinus, to whom he refers so often, and with a deference so profound; or as you read those Indian sages, from whom he quotes a striking line now and then?"3 "Questions like this are not infrequently asked," he said, "and it is not always easy to answer them." "It is safe to say," though, "that whoever the author may be, whether he be . . . Emerson or Plotinus, . . . if he shakes your well-established confidence in God, or leads you to disown the name that is above every name; or if he disturbs the serenity or fervor of your Christian devotion, then he is not an author whom you should read." (He applied the same warning to the "cynical-minded" Thoreau [pp. 70, 119]. "Cynical-minded" probably comes as a surprise, but he was surely thinking of A Week and not of Walden.) As an educator, Porter had no doubt that Emerson was, compared to Plotinus, the greater danger. Today's young, he said, wouldn't easily be moved by the "effete" Plotinus. But Emerson makes pantheism and antiChristianity "glow with the interest of current thought, as well as breathe the warmth of men who have the ear and the sympathy of the present generation" (p. 109). That rising generation included William Torrey Harris, who arrived at Yale College in 1854. He didn't stay at Yale long enough to study moral philosophy with Porter (he left in 1857, in the middle of his junior year), but it was the glow and warmth of modern thought that he was seeking, and Yale's backward-looking curriculum left him cold. While at Yale, outside of class, he'd experimented with vegetarianism, Graham flour, phrenology, graphology, gymnastics, and Swedenborg. After Yale (but perhaps while there: the record of his first meeting with Alcott is foggy), it was transcendentalism. He headed for a time to Emerson's Concord, where he attended Bronson Alcott's Conversations. He filled pages of his commonplace books with selections from Alcott's Orphic Sayings.4 Harris resolved to seek his fortune in the west, in St. Louis. There, in 1858, at a meeting of a St. Louis literary and philosophical society, he met another New England college dropout, Henry C. Brockmeyer. Brockmeyer had made it through two years at Brown, in Providence, Rhode Island, when the transcendentalist Frederic Henry Hedge was a Unitarian minister in the city. (Hedge, better educated in German idealism than any other New Englander of his day, was the founder, in 1836, of Boston's Transcendental Club. Emerson and Alcott were among its charter members.) Hedge, who eventually became a professor of German literature at Harvard, was one

2 of the nineteenth century's great promoters of German culture in America. His massive anthology, Prose Writers of Germany, first published in 1847 but already in its fourth or fifth edition during Brockmeyer's years at Brown, ran from Martin Luther through the first quarter of the nineteenth century. It was in Hedge's volume that Brockmeyer first encountered Hegel. There was actually rather little of Hegel in the bookjust twelve double-columned pagesbut here are a few samples of the dramatic pronouncements Brockmeyer found there. They are bold expressions of the synoptic or systematic aspirations I spoke briefly about last week. From such clues as these, if his friend Harris can be believed, Brockmeyer divined or inferred the full extent of Hegel's system. (The first passage below is from the introductory account of Hegel. The ones that follow are translations from Hegel's Introduction to the Philosophy of History. Hedge attributes both to "a friend.") There is one Absolute Substance pervading all things. That Substance is Spirit. This Spirit is endued with the power of development; it produces from itself the opposing powers and forces of the universe. . . . The process is at first the evolution of antagonistic forces; then a mediation between them. Reason is the substance of all things, as well as the infinite power by which they are moved; is itself the illimitable material of all natural and spiritual life, as well as the source of the infinite variety of forms in which this material is livingly manifested. It is the substance of all things; . . . it is the infinite power, . . . it is the illimitable material of all essentially and truth; . . . it feeds upon itself, it creates its material, viz. the infinite variety of extant forms; for only in the shape which reason prescribes and justifies do phenomena come into being and begin to live. [History is] the rational and necessary course of the spirit which moves the world, spirit whose nature does indeed ever remain one and the same, but which, in the existence of the world, unfolds this its one nature. The essence of spirit is freedom. The history of the world is the exhibition of the process by which spirit comes to the consciousness of that which it really is. The history of the world is the progress in the consciousness of freedom. The Oriental world only knew that one is free; the Greek and Roman world knew that some are free; but we know that all men, in their true nature, are freethat man as man is free. Harris later recalled that Brockmeyer "was even at that time, a thinker of the same order of mind as Hegel." (It is here that Harris goes on to say that "before reading Hegel, except the few pages in Hedge's German Prose Writers, had divined Hegel's chief ideas and the position of his system."5) At their first meeting, Brockmeyer informed Harris that "Hegel was the great man among modern philosophers, and that his large logic was the work to get." Harris immediately sent to Germany for a copy. He'd studied German while at Yale, but when the book arrived, he couldn't make anything of it. It wasn't until 1866 that he read the three-volume work through to the end, this time in an English translation prepared by Brockmeyer himself. It didn't help much. "I am sure I read every word of it," Harris wrote of his post-war reading of the translation, but "it was all over my head." He could follow nothing at all in the second and third volumes, he confessed, or "even remember the words from one page to the other."

I've taken us to Civil-War-era St. Louis because that is where we find George Holmes Howison, who arrived there from Massachusetts in 1864. Howison was the philosopher who, in Cambridge twenty years later, hadn't quite found his footingthe potential leave replacement James forgot. He taught mathematics at Washington University in St. Louis from 1864 to 1872. In the end, by the way, Howison did just fine (I mention this now because my wife, who was in the audience at last week's lecture, was concerned to know what became of him); in 1884, he took up the first named chair in philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, and had a long and influential career there. (Oxford's Jonathan Barnes will be giving the next set of Howison Lectures there in April.) In fact, of the "St. Louis Hegelians" I've mentioned so far did just fine. Brockmeyer, who had been a Union colonel in the Civil War, became lieutenant governor of Missouri and acted for a time as governor. (Missouri was a border state, sending soldiers and regiments to both sides.) Harris became superintendent of schools in St. Louis, then moved back to New England and became superintendent of schools in Concord (where he helped Alcott run the Concord School of Philosophy), and went on to serve, for seventeen years, as U.S. Commissioner of Education. And even better, perhaps, than all of that: he at last came to understand Hegel. Indeed, if we can trust the 1873 report of a visit to St. Louis by an admittedly cheeky correspondent for New York's Scribner's Monthly, he and his friends came to understand great deal more. Brockmeyer and Harris formed a clubthe Kant Club"whose members," the correspondent writes, "had a supreme contempt for the needs of the flesh and who, after long days of laborious and exhaustive teaching, would spend the night hours in threading through the mysteries of Kant." "In 1858," the correspondent continues, "Mr. Harris claims they mastered Kant, and between that period and 1863 they analyzed, or, as he phrases it, obtained the keys to Leibnitz and Spinoza." Hegel, as we know, took longer; when Howison joined the club in 1864, they were plowing through Hegel's Phenomenology. But eventually even Hegel's Logic was subdued: the recollections of incomprehension I quoted earlier are from the preface to Harris's triumphant Hegel's Logic[,] A Book on the Genesis of the Categories of the Mind[:] A Critical Exposition, published in 1890. Harris had become America's foremost expert on Hegel, and in 1901, when Howison published his only book, The Limits of Evolution, he identified Harris ("our own National Commissioner of Education") as one of two men (the other was "the Master of Balliol," Edward Caird) who might bring Hegel's project in the Logic to completion, purifying it of "sundry slips and gaps" and elaborating "a complete system of our experiential ascent out of inadequate to adequate categories."6 Between Boston and St. Louis in the post-war years, transcendentalists and Hegelians shuttled back and forth. Alcott visited the Kant Club twice. Emerson came in 1867, invited not because the Hegelians wanted to listen to him, he complained, but because they wanted him to listen to them. In the year of Emerson's visit, Harris founded the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, the first journal of philosophy in the United States, where the young Royce had tested the waters before releasing The Religious Aspect. Harris sent copies of the journal's first two issues to Emerson. "It is a brave undertaking," Emerson wrote in a letter of thanks, "& I shall think better than ever of my country-men if they shall sustain it. I mean [that is, intend] that you shall make me acquainted in it with the true value & performance of Hegel, who, at first sight is not engaging nor at second sight satisfying." Howison returned to Boston in 1872, to teach philosophy at MIT. That same year, Brockmeyer's translation of Hegel's Logic also came to town. It was brought there by two young businessmen from Quincy, Illinois, "who had become enthusiastic hegelians and,"here I'm quoting from the recollections of William James, a member of the group who gathered to study the translation"knowing almost no German, had actually possessed themselves of a manuscript translation of the entire three volumes of Logic, made by an extraordinary Pomeranian immigrant

4 named Brockmeyer."7 The following year, Thomas Davidson, another member of the St. Louis circle, also moved to Boston. Davidson began hosting the study group described by James. "I saw most of him," James recalled, "at a little philosophical Club that used to meet every fortnight in his rooms on Temple Street in Boston." The club's other members, as listed by James, were "W[illiam] T[orrey] Harris, G[eorge] H[olmes] Howison, J[ames] E[liot] Cabot [later Emerson's amanuensis, editor, and literary executor], C[harles] C[arroll] Everett [Unitarian minister, professor of theology at Harvard, and later dean of its Divinity School], B[orden] P[arker] Bowne [who was soon to begin a distinguished career at Boston University], and sometimes G[eorge] H[erbert] Palmer [the Harvard philosopher introduced in Lecture V]." The roster of regular members can be pretty neatly divided into the somewhat older and better established monists, or thinkers sympathetic to monism (Harris, Cabot, Everett) and the somewhat younger, less established, and soon-to-be-declared pluralists (Davidson, James, Howison, and Bowne).8 "Current thought" was already a larger thing than Noah Porter perhaps imagined, roomy enough for generational divisions of its own. This generational split makes it reasonable to conjecture that the club's meetings were the starting point for the pluralistic idealismthe personal idealism of Howison and the personalism of Bownethat is my main topic this afternoon.

1. Bowne and Howison Bowne and Howison have many things in common, but there are four closely joined commitments I will emphasize: (i) condemnation of monistic idealism as an open or disguised form of pantheism, destructive of human freedom and individuality; (ii) a belief, derived from Kant, that the spontaneously acting subject of experience constitutes the world in space and time, which is therefore "ideal" or "phenomenal"; (iii) a denial, formed this time in opposition to Kant (and to other "agnostics," such as Herbert Spencer), that the world beyond the natural or ideal worldthe real world that is its source and sustainercannot be known; and (iv) confidence that this real world includes not only an infinite God, but finite selves who are in some way independent of him"relatively independent," as Bowne for example proposes (this being the positive side of the condemnation in (i)).9 Let me first document (i). "Idealistic monism," Howison writes, "is in the last resort irreconcilable with personality. By its unmitigated and immitigable determinism, with its one sole Real Agent, it directly annuls moral agency and personal freedom in all the conscious beings other than its so-called God" (The Limits of Evolution, p. x).10 Monistic idealism is a "pantheism [that] necessarily represents what it calls God as the sole real cause in existence. Every other being exists but as a part or mode of the eternal One" (p. 8). "We are not ends, we are only means, and transient means at that. We are only stage supernumerariesnay, worse, only stage properties of the eternal drama, and not at all its proper personages. We are only here as appurtenances of the real dramatis personaeonly as marks and false shows" (p. 291). The "Higher Pantheism" of recent idealism "signalise[s] a return to the elder views of the Orient" (p. 345) "Philosophised monism" may be coherent, and it may give us "clear proofs of its pantheistic Cause," but it is "incapable of providing any genuine freedom for the souls that are his parts" (p. 346). Echoes of William Ellery Channing's dissatisfaction with the occasionalism of Jonathan Edwards are unmistakable. They are even clearer in two passages I've yet to quote. In the first, Howison writes that "pantheism means, not simply the all-pervasive interblending and interpenetration of God and other life, but the sole causality of God, and so the obliteration of freedom, [and] of moral life" (p. 81). In the second, Howison takes aim at the pantheistic image of GodGod as "Omnipresent Meddler" (p. 360)he turns to Benjamin Jowett for support. "The abasement of the individual before the Divine Being is really a sort of pantheism, " Jowett writes in the passage Howison quotes, "so far that in the moral world God is everything and man nothing." "There is want of

5 proportion in this sort of religion," Jowett continues. "God who is everything is not really so much as if he allowed the most exalted free agencies to exist side by side with him" (p. 361). Howison realizes that the pantheists of the nineteenth century, religiously cool by the Calvinist standards of the eighteenth century, don't mean to abase us, but he must have been sensitive to the similarities, because in a book reacting mainly to the nineteenth-century phenomenon, he has this to say: There is no escaping from the reasoning of an Augustine, a Calvin, an Edwards, except by removing its premise. That premise is the utter finitude of the "creature," resting upon the conception that the Divine functions of creation and regeneration, more especially creation, are operations by what is called "efficient" causation, that is, causation by direct productive energy, whose effects are of course as helpless before it as any motion is before the impact that starts it. Creation thus meant calling the creature into existence at a date, prior to which it had no existence. It was summoned into being by a simple fiat, out of fathomless nothing; and quite so, it was supposed, arose even the human soul, just as all other things arose. (p. 331) In Edward's view, you will recall, we're created out of nothing at every moment. It is time we all understood how finally at variance with the heart of Christian faith and hope is any doctrine of evolution that views the whole of human nature as the product of "continuous creation,"as merely the last term in a process of transmissive causation. (p. 51)11 After he arrived in Berkeley in 1884, Howison founded the university's Philosophical Union. Lectures to the union soon became one of the most visible events in American academic life. In 1895, Royce, hometown boy made good, returned to speak to the union on "The Conception of God." It was a big event: Howison arranged for himself to comment, along with Royce's old teacher LeConte. For Howison, Royce was America's leading representative of modern, Orientalizing pantheism. The proceedings were published, and in his editorial introduction, Howison raised what he took to be their central question: "Can the reality of human free-agency, of moral responsibility and universal moral aspiration, of unlimited spiritual hope for every soul,can this be made out, can it even be held, consistently with the theory of an Immanent God?" (pp. xxxxi).12 His personal answer was an emphatic no. "If the Infinite Self includes us all, and all our experiences,sensations and sins, as well as the rest,in the unity of one life, and includes us and them directly;" he wrote in his commentary, "if there is but one and the same final Self for us each and all; then, with a literalness indeed appaling, He is we, and we are He; nay, He is I, and I am He" (pp. 98-9). "What [then] becomes of our ethical independence?what, of our personal reality, our righteous i.e. reasonable responsibilityresponsibility to which we ought to be held? Is not He the sole real agent?" (p. 99). Are we not reduced to "modes of his eternal thinking and perceiving?" (p. 99). The first edition of the proceedings was warmly reviewed by Charles C. Everett, Howison's old companion in the "fortnightly club" that met in Boston in the 1870's. He said that reading Royce and Howison was a bit like watching a tightly contested game of chess; he expressed disappointment that after Howison's firm declaration of "check," readers were ushered out the door.13 Everett got his wish for more in 1898, when a revised edition of The Conception of God appeared. Royce's "supplementary discussion" was the main reason why a volume that had been 84 pages in its first edition swelled to 354 in its second. And if you're worried that readers had no chance to learn how Howison might respond to Royce's latest move, you can put your mind to rest: Howison took advantage of his role as editor to insert bracketed footnotes of quarrelsome commentary into Royce's own text.

When Howison took aim at Royce, standing (as Howison saw it) in the front lines of this new battlenot the old Battle of Gods and Giants, but a new battle, among the Gods themselves he saw Emerson standing behind him. In The Conception of God, a moment before Howison identifiesin italicsthe central question of the volume, he cites the essays of Emerson ("in his theistic moods," p. xxx) as one expression of the new idealism.14 And in The Limits of Evolution he says this (p. 8): The doctrine of a Cosmic Consciousness . . . reduces all created minds either to mere phenomena or, at best, to mere modes of the Sole Divine Life, and all their lives to mere effects of its solitary omnipresent causation: When me they fly, I am the wings. You'll recognize the quoted verse as one of the three lines from Emerson's "Brahma" repeated by Royce in a passage I talked about last week. By quoting it, Howison alludes both to Royce's argument from error and to its poetic source. Bowne condemns monistic idealism as pantheism in the following passage from his Metaphysics.15 (He is sometimes thought to have Royce specifically in mind here; I am not so sure.) It is no doubt fine, and in some sense it is correct, to say that God is in all things; but when it comes to saying that God is all things and that all forms of thought and feeling and conduct are his, then reason simply commits suicide. . . . Suppose the difficulty overcome which is involved in the inalienability of personal experience, so that our thoughts and life might be ascribed to God. What is God's relation as thinking our thoughts to God as thinking the absolute thought ? Does he become limited, confused, and blind in finite experience, and does he at the same time have absolute insight in his infinite life? Does he lose himself in the finite so as not to know what and who he is; or does he perhaps exhaust himself in the finite, so that the finite is all there is ? But if all the while he has perfect knowledge of himself as one and infinite, how does this illusion of the finite arise at all in that perfect unity and perfect light? There is no answer to these questions, so long as the infinite is supposed to play both sides of the game. We have a series of unaccountable illusions and an infinite playing hide-and-seek with itself in a most grotesque metaphysical fuddlement. The notion of creation may be difficult, but it saves us from such dreary stuff as this. How the infinite can posit the finite, and thus make the possibility of a moral order, is certainly beyond us ; but the alternative is a lapse into hopeless irrationality. We can make nothing of either God or the world on such a pantheistic basis. Accordingly, we find writers who incline to this way of thinking in uncertain vacillation between some "Eternal Consciousness" and our human consciousnesses and without any definite and consistent thought concerning their mutual relation, but only vague and showy phrases. The illusion is completed by taking thought abstractly and forgetting the personal and volitional form of concrete thinking. The infinite thought as conception of course embraces all things, but it must embrace them as what they are. On the side of the infinite we have not a resting thought, but a thinker and a doer. And on the side of the finite spirit also we have no mere conceptions of the divine understanding, but thinkers and doers also; and in that fact they have an inalienable individuality and personality. (pp. 102-3) In his lectures on Personalism he writes that16

the conception of the many as made out of the one, or as resulting from any fission or selfdiremption of the one, or as being parts of the one,its "internally cherished parts,"is seen at once to be an attempt of the uncritical imagination to express an unpicturable problem of the reason in the picture forms of the spatial fancy. When these reflections are continued, we reach the result that the unpicturable many must be conceived as unpicturably depending on the unpicturable one. (p. 279) The quoted phrase is an allusion to the Microcosmus of Bowne's teacher Hermann Lotze (also Royce's teacher [see The Religious Aspect, pp. 11-12]), who speaks of "the full reality of an infinite living Being, of whom all finite things are inwardly cherished parts." (I'm quoting from the English translation of 1888.17 Bowne is directly translating Lotze's German, innerlich gehegten Teile.) Lotze goes on to say that in all action, "the Infinite acts only on itself." It is both the only agenet and the only patient. Bowne continues as follows: This result has been perhorresced by many able thinkers in recent times as committing us to a destructive and pernicious pantheism, and they have taken refuge in an impossible pluralism. Some have gone so far as to hold that the many have always existed, as the only means of rescuing finite personality. But surely this is to throw out the child with the bath. (pp. 279-80) The thinkers "perhorrescing" or shuddering at this result include James and Howison. Howison is also among those who believe that the many have always existed, as I'll later explain. (I think there's little room for doubt that when he wrote this passage, Bowne had Howison in mind.) From this passage alone, it may seem that Bowne doesn't himself suppose that monistic idealism is a pantheism, but as we already know from the Metaphysics, he does. "The dangers against which these thinkers protest are indeed real," he confirms, "and their pernicious character is clearly seen in the Vedanta philosophy of India" (p. 280). For Bowne, as for Howisonand indeed for Royce and Emersonmodern idealism is orientalizing.18 Bowne declares that relief cannot be sought in a "despairing pluralism"despairing because, in affirming the eternal and unerasable existence of the many, it precludes divine creation. "It would be easy to fall [back] into pantheism at this point," he says, "by emphasizing the dependence of the finite spirit, or by taking that dependence in an abstract or absolute sense" (p. 280). But the right way out is to "find in our experience a certain selfhood and a relative independence" (p. 281). This relative independence "constitutes our personality" (p. 281). The argument for (ii) is stated very fully by Bowne, though Howison gives a crisp statement of the basic idea, which is that the "varying flood of serial experiences" has to be "connected," and that only an "act of the soul" can do the job (The Limits of Evolution, pp. 300, 301). Bowne's statement is more general: "Every . . . successive thing, in itself," he writes, "is made up of mutually external existences, and these attain to any abiding existence only through the activity of some non-successive being which is able to unite the successive existences into the thought of something fixed and permanent. Every such successive thing must be phenomenal, for, like the symphony, it exists and can exist only for and through intelligence. Or if we prefer to say the thing exists, then the claim is that it exists only through intelligence" (p. 115). This should sound familiar: it's Edwards's old argument for the Diminished Reality of BodyBowne calls it the "Phenomenality of the Physical World" (p. 123)with a new, more everyday hero: not the arbitrary will of God, but the "constitutive and synthesizing intelligence" of the human mind. For Bowne, as for Edwards, "changeless existence cannot be found" in the natural world (p. 103). Nature is "Heraclitic" (p. 120); everything in it is "change or flow" (p. 98). "There can be no real unity in anything existing in space and time," Bowne writes, "for in that case everything would be

8 dispersed in infinite divisibility" (p. 103). Because "successive existence is not identity" (p. 103), the identity is bodies is merely "formal""imposed" rather than "real" (p. 98). "On the impersonal plane, this problem of change and identity admits of no solution" (p. 123). "We find the problem solved only in the unity of conscious self, which is the only concrete unity that escapes the infinite dispersion of space and time" (p. 103). "The process, the succession . . . need intelligence to sum it up and inform it with meaning, so that it becomes anything intelligible and articulate for us" (p. 126). "Metaphysics [thereby] shows that neither matter, force, nor motion has any such existence as common sense attributes to them" (p. 151). "Nature is phenomenal, existing only in and for intelligence" (p. 153). In the following very pregnant paragraphs, Bowne sums up the argument and uses it to show that bodies have no causal power. (Here Bowne seems at the very limit of his powers as a writer, but his words, whether or not they're under his control, reach backwards to Edwards and forward to present-day four-dimensionalists or "worm-theorists.") We came to the phantasmagoric flux of Heraclitus, which is the destruction of both thought and thing. We also saw the impossibility of making any use of the world of rigid identity. . . . In the view before us [a common-sense impersonalism] all this is overlooked, and it is assumed as a matter of course that both change and identity can be united in the impersonal. But when this is seen to be impossible, we no longer have one cause or one being, or indeed any cause or being whatever, but simply a causing in which nothing causes and nothing is caused, and a movement in which nothing moves and nothing is moved. We have a kind of metaphysical vermiform peristalsis, or peristaltism, in which nothing worms itself along from nothing to nothing, and is mistaken for something along the way. A moving body without continuity and identity would not be a moving body, but only a succession of optical phenomena; and if there were no observer, not even this could exist. The impersonal changing cause is in this case. Its unity and identity are not in the flow itself, but in the observing mind; and when that is removed, there is nothing articulate left. . . . (pp. 190-1) All that we bring away from these crude notions is the conviction that causality must be affirmed, but that it cannot be conceived in the mechanical and temporal form. (p. 191) The world of space objects which we call nature is no substantial existence buy itself, and still less a self-running system apart from intelligence, but only the flowing expression and means of communication of those personal beings. It is throughout dependent, instrumental, and phenomenal. (p. 278) These passages raise many questions, but I have time to consider only one, the same one I raised for Edwards in Lectures I and II: if these are good arguments for the Diminished Reality or Phenomenality of Body, aren't they also good arguments for the Diminished Reality or Phenomenality of Finite Mind?19 This is an aspect of a more general queston: can Bowne avoid saying that it is God who collects successive bursts of being into organized, continuing wholes? Bowne has a profound answer to this question, one that it will take some time to develop.20 Bowne is an empiricist. (He describes his empiricism as "transcendental." See for example pp. 215 and 259 of Personalism. He is careful to note, however, that on crucial points he sides with the rationalists. See p. 307, for example.) He is an empiricist regarding the justification of our beliefs, and an empiricist regarding the origin of our conceptions. Philosophy, he says, is "an attempt to give an account of experience" (p. 4). "Positively, philosophy has the function of formulating and systematizing life and experience so as to bring out into clear consciousness our aims and principles" (p. 9). "Experience itself, with ourselves as its subject, is the primary fact; and anything we affirm beyond this fact must be for its explanation" (p. 89). "For us the real can

9 never be primarily anything but the contents of experience and whatever we may infer from them" (pp. 107-8). Experience is also the source of all of our conceptions. "Concepts without immediate experience are only empty forms, and become real only as some actual experience furnishes them with real contents" (p. 258). He is a transcendental empiricist because there are categories or forms "which the mind gives to its experience." Yet "the mind is not to be understood through them. Rather they are to be understood through the mind's living experience of itself" (p. 105). Unlike the "formal" identity of bodies, which has to be constructed, "identity is given as the self-equality of intelligence throughout experience" (p. 103). Our causality is also given in eperience. It is "verified in self-consciousness, as something actual and not merely formal" (p. 107). So we know by experience that the argument for Diminished Reality cannot possibly apply to us.21 Here Bowne is extending a point I made last time. I suggested that we know power not insofar as we perceive it, but insofar as we exercise it. Bowne thinks that our own exercise of power is the source of our notion of power. He also thinks that our experience of our "selfequality" in the face of succession is the source of our notion of identity. (I use the word "notion" advisedly, to recall the Berkeleyan precedent.) Neither our power or our identity is "picturable." (For the notion of "picturability," see pp. 234, 261.) They are not objects of experience. "We ourselves are invisible" (p. 268). But our power and identity are experienced. "Personality can never be construed as a product or compound; it can only be experienced as a fact. It must be possible because it is given as actual. When we attempt to go behind this fact we are trying to explain the explanation. We explain the objects before the mirror by the images which seem to exist behind it. There is nothing behind the mirror. When we have lived and described the personal life we have done all that is possible in sane and sober speculation. If we try to do more we only fall a prey to abstractions. This self-conscious existence is the truly ultimate fact" (pp. 264-5). (See also p. 324, on the invisible world of powers.) He then does two things. The first is hinted at in the last passage quoted: he joins to this empiricism a militant anti-abstractionism. (Once again, Berkeley is an instructive precedent. Bowne was one of very few nineteenth-century idealists who happily admitted Berkeley's influence.) Abstractionism is what empiricists typically rely on to extend the application of concepts beyond their slender basis in experience. But Bowne, like Berkeley, is very strict. "The conceptions of impersonal metaphysics are only the abstract forms of the self-conscious life, and . . . apart from that life they are empty and illustory" (p. vi; for other passages narrowing our powers of abstraction see, among many others, pp. 199 and 261). Early in the last century, M. Comte, the founder of French positivism, set forth his famous doctrine of the three stages of human thought. Man begins, he said, in the theological stage, when all phenomena are referred to wills, either in things or beyond them. After a while, through the discovery of law, the element of caprice and arbitrariness, and thus of will, is ruled out, and men pass to the second, or metaphysical stage. Here they explain phenomena by abstract conceptions of being, substance, cause, and the like. But these metaphysical concepts are really only the ghosts of the earlier theological notions, and disappear upon criticism. When this is seen, thought passes into the third and last stage of development, the positive stage. Here men give up all inquiry into metaphysics as bootless, and content themselves with discovering and registering the uniformities of coexistence and sequence among phenomena. (p. v) The aim of these lectures is to show that critical reflection brings us back again to the personal metaphysics which Comte rejected. We agree with him that abstract and

10 impersonal metaphysics is a mirage of formal ideas, and even largely of words, which begin, continue, and end in abstraction and confusion. Causal explanation must always be in terms of personality, or it must vanish altogether. Thus we return to the theological stage, but we do so with a difference. At last we have learned the lesson of law, and we now see that law and will must be united in our thought of the world. Thus man's earliest metaphysics reemerges in his latest; but enlarged, enriched, and purified by the ages of thought and experience. (p. vii) A passage on p. 314 shows how aggressive his anti-abstractionism isso aggressive that it leads him to deny that a physical fact or analogy can rightly represent "any intellectual fact or process whatever." (The striking fact is that it disputes what Emerson has to say about nature as a language. Bowne is another writer clawing past Emerson. Emerson's concrete types and symbols for mental and spiritual life, borrowed from nature, turn out to be abstractions! Emerson thinks these are all we have. Bown thinks we have something else, right representations"notional" in Berkeley's sensethat do not "picture" what they represent, and succeed precisely for that reason.) Bowne's anti-abstractionism disposes of bodies as causes. "Experience certifies only volitional causality as real" (p. 215). Our experience of our own power and identity does, however, allow us to conceive of God. This gives a new, unintended meaning to Bowne's declaration that "we cannot believe in God without believing in man" (p. 299). And now we come to the second thing Bowne does, at least implicitly. He denies that we can turn back and deny of ourselves properties we are able to conceive of only because we find them in ourselves. So we must be exempt from the argument for Diminished Reality. We can't be forced out by the Absolute, because if we go, the Absolute goes with us. Hume makes a comment that I think Bowne would have appreciated: "Ideas always represent the objects or impressions from which they are deriv'd, and can never without a fiction represent or be apply'd to any other" (Treatise of Human Nature 1.2.3.11). Hume is using his own particular vocabulary, but I think both of Bowne's fundamental points are present here. The application of our ideas or notions can only be extended so far. And they will always represent the things from which they were derived. The following passage, from Bowne's 1902 Deems Lectures, published as Theism, sums up the line of thought I've just presented.22 The view that identifies conservation with perpetual creation has no difficulty when applied to the physical system. Here form and law are the only fixed elements we can find; and metaphysics makes it doubtful whether there can be others. In that case the physical order becomes simply a process which exists only in its perpetual ongoing. It has the identity of a musical note, and, like such a note, it exists only on condition of being incessantly and continuously reproduced. But we cannot apply this view to the world of spirits without losing ourselves in utterly unmanageable difficulties, at least on the realistic theory of time. The identity of the phenomenal process exists only for the beholder; and to reduce the finite spirit to such process would cancel its selfhood altogether and make thought impossible. We seem, then, shut up to distinguish creation from preservation; and the nature of this distinction eludes all apprehension. We affirm something whose nature and method are utterly opaque to our thought. The only relief, such as it is, lies in falling back on the ideality of time. We replace the notions of creation and conservation by the notion of dependence on the divine will. The mystery of this fact we have seen in treating of

11 pantheism, and we have also seen that thought cannot move without affirming at once the dependence and the relative independence of the finite spirit. On the possibility of such a relation thought cannot pronounce; it can only wait for experience to reveal the fact. The puzzle about the identity of the dependent has the same solution. The identical spirit has not to maintain its identity across different times, but only to identify itself in experience. This self-identification is the real and only meaning of concrete identity; and it is to be judged or measured by nothing else. Experience is the only test of meaning and possibility in this matter. The abstract categories of time, continuity, and identity do not go before and make experience possible; but experience is the basal fact from which these categories get all their meaning and by which they are to be tested. Apart from this experience they are self-canceling abstractions. Howison doesn't make the empiricist argument I've just reviewed, but he too has a reply to the parity objection. It is a rationalist reply. (Howison doesn't saythough he doesn't denythat our conceptions originate in experience, but his test of truth in metaphysics is "the inconceivability of the opposite" (p. 23).) Howison's reply is suggestive but less developed than Bowne's. (Howison published much less than Bowne. He was also a more reactive writer; most of his papers seem "occasional." Howison's only book is a collection of papers, filled with references to others. In this respect, Bowne's many books are majestically limited. They are wide and almost undisturbed spaces, ready for positive development. Howison's one book has a copious index, including many proper names. I haven't seen a book by Bowne that has an index.) It runs as follows. Howison is sure that he exists (the appeal is to the cogito, p. 357 of The Limits of Evolution), and equally sure "that in order to the solidifying of associations in any consciousness there must be some principlesome springof association, of unification, of synthesis, in that consciousness itself" (p. 19). But why that consciousess as opposed to some other consciousness? The lesson of Hume, he says, is not that the self is a bundle of perceptions, but that "without an Abiding and Active in us the transitory and sensible is impossible" (p. 178). "Each mind," he insists, "no doubt organises its own self-contents, directly by its own a priori formative consciousness, for spontaneity is meaningless unless it is individual; and Nature is, in so far, a product of individual's efficient causality" (p. xxi). But why "its own"? Howison's reply is that self-consciousness is essentially social. He uses this point negatively, against Royce, as we saw at the close of last week's lecture. Royce's Absolute, like all monistic Absolutes, is left "without genuine personality; for his consciousness is void of that recognition and reverence of the personal initiative of other minds which is at once the sign and the test of the true person" (p. x). "It is the essence of a person to stand in a relation with beings having an autonomy, in whom he recognises rights, towards whom he acknowledges duties" (p. 52). Here he makes positive use of it. "That a mind is conscious of itself as a self, means at the least that it discriminates itself from others, but therefore that it also refers its own defining conception to others,is in relation with them, as unquestionably as it is in the relation of differing from them. It cannot even think itself, except in this relatedness to them; cannot at all be, except as a member of a reciprocal society. Thus the logical roots of each mind's very being are exactly this recognition of itself through its recognition of others, and the recognition of others in its very act of recognizing itself" (p. 311; see also p. 353 and 355). "Our self-thought being is intrinsically a social being; the existence of each is reciprocal with the existence of the rest, and is not thinkable in any othe way. We all put the fact so, each in the freedom of his own self-defining consciousness. The circle of self-thinking spirits indeed has God for its central Light, the Cynosure of all their eyes: he is if they are, they are if he is [in other words, he is only if they are]; but the relation is freely mutual, and he only exists as primus inter pares, in a circle and indissoluble."

12 Unlike Bowne, Howison hardly touches on the doctrine of continuous creation, but that's because he was troubled enough by creation, even if it takes place only once. "The Creator," he writes, "cannot, of course, create except by exactly and precisely conceiving."23 If God creates something, Howison reasonably assumes, he must be responsible for all of its details, small as well as large. (The same assumption plays a crucial role in Malebranche's argument from continuous creation to occasionalism.) In Lecture V, we took note of Royce's strange view that if God were a creator, he would be finite, because some law above his will would be required for his will to take effect. Howison makes a more plausible assumption along the same general lines: if God says, for example, let there be light, he cannot leave its color, or its quality or direction, up to someone else. God can't decide to create a man without deciding exactly what the man will look like and what he will do, and where and when he will do it. For Howison, sheer creation is as threatening to finite initiative as continuous creation is for Malebranche and Edwards. Hence he concludes that finite spirits are uncreateda result confirmed by the fact that they must exist beyond time in order to unify or synthesize the sensory appearances that do exist in time. So we have two complementary answers to the parity objections. The first is empiricist and the second is rationalist and communitarian. I hope it is clear enough how the commitments I've identified as (iii) and (iv) flow from them. Howison and Bowne both had long university careers. But Bowne felt more fortunate as a teacher. When Howison was congratulated on having many students who were teaching at distinguished universities (among them Arthur O. Lovejoy), he replied sourly, "Yes, but not one of them teaches the truth."24 Howison's truth wasn't easy to swallow. It was the view that each of us is on "the same dead level" as God (p. 339). Each of us is eternal, uncreated, autonomous, and even infinite, though our infinity isn't of the same character as God's. (Our infinity "embosoms finitude and evermore raises this toward likeness with God," p. 374.) This is what Bowne had in mind when he spoke of those who go so far as to say that the many have always existed.25 It is, as Howison says, "an uncompromising Pluralisman absolute democracy" (p. 339). Bowne had reason to feel more fortunate. Many of his students and colleagues were loyal to his views. (He was also fortunate that when he was tried for heresy by the Methodist Episcopal Church (now folded into the United Methodist Church) in 1903, some of the bishops on the jury that speedily acquitted him had been his students.) The most prominent among them was Edgar Sheffield Brightman. Brightman studied with Bowne during Bowne's last years at Boston University. He himself taught at the university from 1919 to 1953, where he was the first holder of the Borden Parker Bowne chair. Brightman repeated Bowne's argument for the Diminished Reality of Body.26 He argued, as Bowne had, that "if we are to be guided in our thinking by the facts of experience rather than by unverifiable concepts of a substance that can never be present in any experience," we must conclude that "substance is person or self" (Person and Reality, p. 199; see also p. 189: "a personalistic view of substance banishes . . . the unempirical definition of substance"). He also followed Bowne's method, which he described as a "search for empirical coherence" (Person and Reality, p. 178). (He also speaks of "the criterion of empirical coherence" [pp. 182 and 183]). The aim of the method, in Bowne's words, is to "set forth a general way of looking at things which . . . will be found consistent with itself and with the general facts of experience."27 Brightman was loyal to Bowne but he recognized that others weren't. The fact of disagreementand of disagreement among idealists in particularunsettled him, so much so that he embarked on a series of irenic or conciliating projects. In a paper on "Modern Idealism," published in the Journal of Philosophy in 1920, Brightman identified four different kinds of idealism. He then tried, and failed, to find a common element.28 Ten years later he tried a

13 different, more political strategy. He met with another idealist, Mary Whiton Calkinsshe was a student of Royce and Mnsterberg and a representative monist, he was of course a representative pluralistand they drafted a platform.29 He reported on the results of their negotiations in the same journal in 1933.30 The attempt to define idealism may be brought to a close by a document which has some historical interest in this connection. It is a "Platform of Personalistic Idealism" on which Professor Mary Whiton Calkins and I agreed May 25, 1929. It defines positions which may be held by those who affirm all four types of idealism. I will present only the metaphysical planks in the platform. PLATFORM OF PERSONALISTIC IDEALISM 1. The universe is completely mental in nature. 2. Every mental existence is either a self, or else a part, aspect, phase, or process of a self. The term "person" is used for selves capable of reasoning and ideal valuations. 3. The physical universe may be regarded as the direct experience and willing of one cosmic person, or as a system of infra-human selves, or as a system of ideas in the minds of finite persons. 4. The total universe is a system of selves and persons, who may be regarded either as members of one all-inclusive person who individuates them by the diversity of his purposing or as a society of many selves related by common purposes. (pp. 434-5) Note the recurring appearances of the word "or." It is a mark of political compromise. It provides a way of arriving at agreement even if a (simple, non-disjunctive) "common element" can't be found. Brightman came to realize that the method of coherence allows forand perhaps even predictsdisagreement. It isn't a method that can establish certainties (Person and Reality, p. 214).31 He wrote that the personalistic theory of substance . . . is not advanced as something absolutely certain or completely demonstrated. It is advanced as the most coherent and most adequate hypothesis available to present insight on the basis of the whole of empirical evidence and what it implies and involves. The basic justification for a theory of substance stands with full recognition of human limitations and cosmic mystery. (Person and Reality, p. 215) I think Brightman may have recognized that the method of coherence lends itself to a more social or, if you like, more political way of proceeding in philosophy. The method of coherence can of course be practiced by a heroic individual, no less than the method of intuition (as practiced by Emerson in Nature, or by Thoreau in Walden) or the method of demonstration (as practiced by Royce in The Religious Aspect) can be. But the socialized prosecution of the method is arguably more coherent with both the method, and the metaphysics Brightman arrived at by its means.32 Like his teacher Bowne, Brightman was fortunate in his students. One of the last was Martin Luther King, who became a graduate student at Boston University in 1951. In "My Pilgrimage to Nonviolence" (1958), King describes his encounter with Brightman and with personalism:

14

I studied philosophy and theology at Boston University under Edgar S. Brightman and L. Harold DeWolf. Both men greatly stimulated my thinking. It was mainly under these teachers that I studied personalistic philosophythe theory that the clue to the meaning of ultimate reality is found in personality. This personal idealism remains today my basic philosophical position. Personalism's insistence that only personalityfinite and infiniteis ultimately real strengthened me in two convictions: it gave me metaphysical and philosophical grounding for the idea of a personal God, and it gave me a metaphysical basis for the dignity and worth of all human personality. Just before Dr. Brightman's death, I began studying the philosophy of Hegel with him. . . . There were points in Hegel's philosophy that I strongly disagreed with. For instance, his absolute idealism was rationally unsound to me because it tended to swallow up the many in the one. But there were other aspects of his thinking that I found stimulating. His content that "truth is the whole" led me to a philosophical method of rational coherence. The King papers include his final exam from his course with DeWolf, who was himself one of Brightman's former students. Here is an excerpt.33 Brightman modified Bowne's personalistic system by positing a finite God. Bowne was in every sense of the word a theistic absolutist. Brightman, on the other hand is a theistic finitist. For him God is a struggling God . . . . His power is finite, and his goodness infinite. In the closing words of his doctoral dissertation, A Comparison of the Conceptions of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman (1955), King endorses personalistic pluralism. By a qualitative pluralism, King means a pluralism that recognizes several fundamentally different kinds of things; by a quantitative pluralism, he means a pluralism that recognizes distinct individuals within a kind. Wieman holds to an ultimate pluralism, both quantitative and qualitative. Tillich, on the other hand, holds to an ultimate monism, both qualitative and quantitative. Both of these views have been found to be inadequate. Wieman's ultimate pluralism fails to satisfy the rational demand for unity. Tillich's ultimate monism swallows up finite individuality in the unity of being. A more adequate view is to hold a quantitative pluralism and qualitative monism. In this way both oneness and manyness are preserved. King's substantive conclusions are interesting. They justify me in offering him to you as a very late representative of the tradition I've been charting. But his acceptance of the method of coherence is also interesting, and I want to conclude with some reflections on it. The first is that his acceptance of the method may enable us to see why King was not, as I've argued Thoreau was, a strictly ethical idealist. Metaphysical idealism may have allowed him to achieve a wider "reflective equilibrium." The second is that the method, because it doesn't convey certainty, left King with a difficulty. He discusses it in the final exam from his course with DeWolf. In it, incidentally, what he elsewhere calls a method of rational coherence is described as a method of empirical coherence:

15 To my mind one of the most important problems confronted by present personalists is that of the relationship between Personalism and theology. This problem grows up mainly because of the emphasis, by many personalists, on the method of coherence. The problem boils down to this: Can one hold to an empirical method of coherence and at the same time make absolute decisions? Certainly religion demands such absolute decisions . . . . Theoretically we can never make a claim to absolute certainty. This is certainly the emphasis of a method of coherence and that I accept. But while we cannot be theoretically certain about any issue, we are compelled to act. And certainly we have a right to act and accept any belief until one better is found if it does not contradict experience. So that along with a "theoretical relativism" we have the perfect right to adopt a "practical absolutism." My third and final reflection is that King's acceptance of the method of coherence might help us better understand the influence on him of Thoreau. I quote again from "My Pilgrimage to Nonviolence": When I went to Atlanta's Morehouse College as a freshman in 1944 my concern for racial and economic justice was already substantial. During my student days at Morehouse I read Thoreau's Essay on Civil Disobedience for the first time. Fascinated by the idea of refusing to cooperate with an evil system, I was so deeply moved that I reread the work several times. This was my first intellectual contact with the theory of nonviolent resistance. I don't want to deny the importance of the thought that King expresses here. But Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience" is, in its epistemology, strongly individualist, and if I'm right in thinking that the method of coherence calls naturally for social or collaborative application, King's epistemology is fundamentally at odds with Thoreau's. I suggested in Lecture III that Emerson's way out of Calvinist pantheism was to deny the personality of the Oversoul. I suspect that one effect of this denial, in Thoreau as in Emerson, was to expand the epistemic authority of the individual. (In Thoreau's case, I should speak not of his denial of personality to the Oversoulthat makes him seem too much of a metaphysicianbut of his refusal to affirm the personality of the Oversoul, or of his willingness to say no more than that the Oversoul is law. However I spell out the details, the Oversoul was, for both Emerson and Thoreau, understood nomologically rather than personally.) King's political practice was also less individualist than the practice Thoreau recounts in "Civil Disobedience." In both of these ways, King seems to me to be closer to Royce, who, in an essay on a California squatter's riot, has this to say about transcendentalism:34 The cultivated Radicals of the anti-slavery generation, and especially of Massachusetts, were a type in which an impartial posterity will take a huge delight; for they combined so characteristically shrewdness, insight, devoutness, vanity, idealism, and self-worship, To speak of them, of course, in the rough, and as a mass, not distinguishing the greater names, they were usually believers in quite abstact ideas; men who knew how to meet God "in the bush" whenever they wanted, and so avoided him in the mart and the crowded street; men who had "dwelt cheek by jowl, since the day" they were "born, with the Infinite Soul," and whose relations with him were like those of any man with his own private property. This Infinite that they worshipped was, however, in his relations to the rest of the world, too often rather abstract . . . . From him they go a so-called Higher Law. As it was ideal, and, like its author, very abstract, it was far above the erring laws of men, and it therefore relieved its obedient servants from all entangling earthly allegiances. If the constitution upon which our only hope of better things also depended, was contradicted by this Higher Law, then the constitution was a "league with hell," and

16 anybody could set up for himself, and he and the Infinite might carry on a government of their own. These Radicals were, indeed, of the greatest value to our country. To a wicked and corrupt generation they preached the gospel of a pure idealism fervently and effectively. If our generation does not produce just such men, it is because the best men of our time have learned from them, and have absorbed their fervent and lofty idealism into a less abstract yet purer doctrine. The true notion, as we all, of course, have heard, is, that there is an ideal of personal and social perfection far above our natural sinful ways, and indeed revealed to us by the agencies of spiritual life, and not by baser worldy means, but not on that account to be found or served by separating ourselves, or our lives, or our private judgments, from the social order. . . . He is the best idealist who casts away as both unreal and unideal in vain private imaginings of his own weak brain, whenever he catches a glimpse of any higher and wider truth all this lesson we, like other peoples and generations, have to study and learn. The Transcendentalists, by their very extravagances, have helped us towards this goal; but we must be pardoned if we learn from them with some little amusement. For when we are amused at them, we are amused at ourselves, since only by these very extravagances in our own experience do we ever learn to be genuine and sensible idealists. Royce made these remarks in 1885, the same year The Religious Aspect was published. Here, as there, he's trying to surpass Emerson, though once again Emerson isn't named. The image of meeting God "in the bush," and the opposition between the bush and the busy street, are from Emerson's poem "Good-Bye," to which Royce also alludes in other places. The words quoted next are from James Russell Lowell's A Fable for Critics (1848), a satire of contemporary writers that begin with Emerson; the words are attributed not to Emerson but to "Miranda," Lowell's stand-in for Margaret Fuller, Emerson's close friend and collaborator. (Royce had to go to some effort to make "men" the subject of the two quoted pieces. In the poem, they are spoken by Miranda.)35 In opposition to Emerson, Royce is recommending the method of coherencea socialized method of coherence, in epistemology and in politics. And if this method is indeed more coherent with pluralistic personalism than with monistic personalism, then at the end of his life, finally Royce brought everything into adjustment, by accepting a metaphysics that was very much like Howison's or Bowne's. "This essentially social universe," he wrote in 1913, "this community which we have now declared to be real, and to be, in fact, the sole and supreme reality,the Absolute, what does it call upon a reasonable being to do?"36 This sounds very much like what Howison had already written in 1898: Ethics for [me], as for Professor Royce, can have no valid presuppositions except such as find their place in a totally coherent, totally embracing theoretical view. ("The Real Issue in 'The Conception of God,'" 1898) [The] Divine republic of autonomous Persons . . . is itself the only sufficient condition of knowledge. ("The Real Issue") The equivalent word 'true,' can have no valid meaning except as marking the a priori collective consensus of an absolutely total society of minds, independent and yet disinterested and harmonizing. ("The Real Issue")

17 This is a very attractive package: personalism, or the fundamental reality of persons; the method of coherence (or what we now know as "reflective equilibrium"); and a way of proceeding in philosophy and politics that aims at consensus or agreement rather than heroic and isolated certainty. It seems surprising that it sank so suddenly. Why it sank is a question for another occasiona big question, if only because the story of one movement's fall is always the story of another movement's rise. (The story of idealism's fall, in particular, would also be a story of its differentiation from other movements. Many elements in the idealist "package" I've identified are also found in naturalism and pragmatism. What they do away with, above all, is the stern division between mind and body: that is certainly idealism's weak pointthe one that worries Santayana in the essays I go on to quote.) I hope I've persuaded you that American idealism doesn't rest, as Santayana alleged, on the "conceited notion that man, or human reason, or the human distinction between good and evil, is the centre and pivot of the universe."37 Whether the specifically human is central or pivotal was, as we've seen, a matter for debate, even within the party of the gods. But the idealists may be guilty of a lesser charge, also brought against them by Santayana: that they take what is in fact a "small and dependent part" of the world, whether or not they know it, and make it "the central and universal power."38 The idealists would rightly wonder whether Santayana himself is any better off, since to judge that mind is small and dependent is to exercise its power, and thereby to grant it a kind of centrality after all. Whether this methodological or epistemic centrality carries with it a metaphysical centrality is a further question, but it is one we can answer, it seems to me, only by examining the arguments for and against it, whenever they are made.

Kenneth P. Winkler February 28, 2012

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This is the last in a series of six lectures, honoring Isaiah Berlin, delivered at Oxford University in January and February, 2012. For the opportunity to give them, I'm grateful to the benefactors and electors of the Sir Isaiah Berlin Visiting Professorship in the History of Ideas, to the Faculty of Philosophy, and to Corpus Christi College. The present lecture was delivered on February 21. This document isn't an actual transcript of my talkit was prepared before I spoke (and lightly edited afterwards), and contains more than I was actually able to coverbut it is written as if to be spoken. It is more loosely structured than a formal paper would be. Some of the footnotes are reminders to myself; others raise issues that call for further, more disciplined thought. This is, above all, a draft piece of work, and I ask that it not be quoted or cited without my permission.
2

"Transcendentalism," in The American Biblical Repository, second series, 8 (1842), pp. 195-218, p. 196.
3

Books and Reading: Or, What Books Shall I Read and How Shall I Read Them? (New York: Scribner's, 1883), pp. 108-9. To be fair, Porter does include Emerson in some of his lists of recommended authors (pp. 321, 389, 391). He thinks it's permissible to read him Emerson so long as he won't shake your faith in God. If you can read him and simply admire his genius, fine (p. 108). But how will I know beforehand whether I'll be safe? It seems that the prudent course is not to read him.
4

Many of the biographical details in this paragraph are from Kurt F. Leidecker, Yankee Teacher: The Life of William Torrey Harris (New York: Philosophical Library, 1946). Also useful is J. H. Muirhead, "How Hegel Came to America," The Philosophical Review 37 (1928), pp. 226-40. Scribner's Monthly for 1873 (New York: Scribner and Company, 1874), in "The Heart of the Republic," has Harris meeting Alcott in 1856, before he left Yale, and this is consistent with everything Leidecker says (though he doesn't say it himself). Leidecker also states that Harris met Theodore Parker while at Yale.
5

Hegel's Logic . . . A Critical Exposition (Chicago: S. C. Griggs and Company, 1895). The first edition appeared in 1890. Harris's book appeared in a series of critical expositions edited by George Sylvester Morris, the absolute idealist who was John Dewey's teacher. Dewey writes of him: "It is not for me to expound the idealism which won the ardent loyalty of Morris. But I may comment upon it from the standpoint of the impressions left upon a student. It was, all the way through, an objective and ethical idealism. He effected in himself what many book-scholars would doubtless regard as impossible, a union of Aristotle, Fichte and Hegel. The world, the world truly seen, was itself ideal; and it was upon the ideal character of the world, as supporting and realizing itself in the energy of intelligence as the dominant element in creation, that he insisted. That the struggle of intelligence to realize in man the supreme position which it occupies ontologically in the structure of the universe was a moral struggle, went without saying. The teleological metaphysics of Aristotle thus found a natural complement in the moral idealism of Fichte." (My source is The Life and Work of George Sylvester Morris, where Dewey's reminiscence is quoted.)
6

G. H. Howison, The Limits of Evolution and Other Essays Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Idealism (New York: Macmillan, 1901), p. xxvi.
7

Quotations from James are from "Thomas Davidson, Individualist," as it appears in Essays, Comments and Reviews (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), pp. 88-9. In the version

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published in Memories and Studies, only the deceased members of the club, Cabot and Everett, are identified. (There may be reason to doubt James's testimony regarding Bowne. Was Bowne regularly in Boston in 1873? Or is James talking about a group that met for many years?) The Illinois businessmen James mentions were Samuel H. Emery and Edward McClure. According to Franklin Sanborn, in his Recollections of Seventy Years, Emery and his brother-in-law McClure became Alcott's tenants in Orchard House in 1879. They had Harris as a guest there, and the following year (says Sanborn) Harris bought the property. Emery was the moderator of the first public sessions of the Concord Summer School. In 1888, after Alcott's death, Orchard House was held by three trustees: Harris, Emery, and Sanborn. (This is according to an 1889 letter by Sanborn quoted in his Recollections. While wandering around the internet I ran across an architect's document saying that Alcott sold the property to Harris in 1885, and that Harris sold it in 1893. No doubt I could get all this straight by visiting Orchard House.)
8

The somewhat older and (considerably) more established group: Harris, born in 1835; Cabot, 1821; and Everett, 1829; the younger and less established group: Davidson, 1840; James, 1842; Bowne, 1847; and Howison, a late-starting outlier, 1834. Everett may be more difficult to place than my division suggests. In grouping him with those whose sympathies are monistic, I'm guided by his admiration for Hegel (the chief authority in his 1869 The Science of Thought: A System of Logic [Boston: William V. Spencer, 1869]) and Fichte (the subject of his Fichte's Science of Knowledge: A Critical Exposition [Chicago: S. C. Griggs, 1884], an entry in the same series as Harris's book on Hegel's Logic), and by the verdict of Josiah Royce in his "Professor Everett as a Metaphysician," The New World 9 (1900), pp. 726-41. Royce concludes there that "an Idealism Professor Everett's philosophy certainly was. As to the problem of the One and the Many, he inclined rather, as we have seen, to emphasizing unity as against any abstract pluralism. On the other hand, he fully recognized that a truly significant unity must do justice both to finite individuality and to finite freedom of choice, while in their turn these latter must be defined with no abstract insistence upon their separateness as existent facts. They must be harmonized with the divine unity without losing their reality" (p. 740). For Everett's desire to reconcile divine immanence ("the final and highest thought of religion," p. 324) with finite individuality, see "The Philosophy of Browning," in Essays Theological and Literary (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1901), pp. 304-27, pp. 324-7. This volume also includes (on pp. 219-47) an appreciation of "The Poems of Emerson" that addresses Emerson's idealism. It was first published as a pamphlet in 1887 by Houghton Mifflin in Boston. There may be further evidence of my hypothesized generational divide in a lecture Howison gave to the Concord School of Philosophy in the summer of 1882. He says there that absolute idealism, "the doctrine of a one and only Infinite Person, manifesting his eternal consciousness in an incessant system of persons, the complete expression of whose conscious lives into definite and adequate particularity forms the sensible universe of experience and the world of moral order that is perpetually being inorbed therein," was "wrought to its completest form by Hegel" (Concord Lectures on Philosophy [Cambridge: Moses King, 1883]). He then observes that "this view of things, which is at present taking such a hold in Scotland, England, and America, is in Germany, if not dead, at any rate dormant," making the present situation in Germany "one of metaphysical non-conviction, of halt, of transition" (p. 30). The lecture was published as "Some Aspects of Recent German Philosophy" in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy in 1883. A revision of parts of it then appeard as "Later German Philosophy" in Howison's Limits of Evolution, pp. 10178. There Howison dates the turn away from absolute idealism to 1865. The subtitle of the final version is revealing: "Monism Moving towards Pluralism, through Agnosticiam and Its SelfDissolution" (p. 101).

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By 1902, when John Dewey wrote the entry on "Pluralism" ("the theory that reality consists in a plurality or multiplicity of distinct beings") in James Mark Baldwin's Dictionary, the club's younger generation had come into its own. One aim of pluralism, Dewey explains there, is to account for "the possibility of real variety, particularly in the differences of persons, as monism appears to lend itself to a pantheistic view, regarding all distinctions as simply limitations of the one being," as well as for "the possibility of freedom, as a self-initiating and moving power inherent in every real qua real" (volume 2, p. 306). He then says that "the term pluralism," used in German by Wolff and Kant, "is very recent in English": Bowne uses the term incidentally in Philos. of Theism, 57; James has probably done more than any one else to give it currency, in his Will to Believe (see Preface in particular); and Howison employs it to denote the substantially distinct existence of free ethical personalities (Limits of Evolution, and in Royce's Conception of God, xiv). Bowne's use of the term in the passage indicated really is incidental. Dewey includes him, I assume, because he is, like James a Howison, a well-known pluralist in the sense defined.
9

They also share a "positivistic" interpretation of natural science, as the recording and classifying of regularities, sequences, or concomitant variations. They reserve genuine explanation (which they take to be teleological, or teleological at bottom) for causes in the world beyond.
10

All quotations in this paragraph are taken from Howison, The Limits of Evolution.

11

Here, "continuous creation" isn't quite what it is for Edwards. It is the constant injection of novelty into the evolutionary process. (Edwards would agree that novelty is constantly injected, but for him it always tends to take the same old form: ape, ape, ape, ape, rather than ape, ape, ape, ape, man.) The creation of a species is a long-continued process. As Bowne writes in Studies in Theism (New York: Phillips and Hunt, 1880), "evolution is but the continuous activituy of God realizing an unfolding plan" (p. 297).
12

My references to The Conception of God: A Philosophical Discussion concerning the Nature of the Divine Idea as Demonstrable Reality, by Josiah Royce, Joseph LeConte, G. H. Howison, and Sidney Edward Mezes, are to the second edition (New York: Macmillan, 1898). Note that the title page repeats the claim of demonstrability of which I made so much in last week's lecture. The first edition was published in Berkeley in 1895 by the Executive Council of the Union; the title page of that edition says nothing about demonstrability.
13

The brief review appeared in the 1896 number of Everett's journal The New World. Everett portrays Howison as pleading for "morality and personality," in opposition to an argument that is resolutely metaphysical. Howison objects to this portrayal, because it pits Royce the rigorous metaphysician against Howison the sentimental moralist, in "The Real Issue in 'The Conception of God,'" The Philosophical Review 7 (1898), pp. 518-22. (Howison refers to Everett on p. 518.) As I later explain, Howison believes that his case against Royce is no less metaphysical than moral.
14

He also cites the essays of Carlyle, along with a slew of modern poets.

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15

New York: American Book Company, 1910. The earliest version of Bowne's Metaphysics was published by Harper and Brothers in 1882.
16

Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1908. These lectures on Bowne's "ism" were delivered in 1907, the same year James delivered the lectures published as Pragmatism.
17

Hermann Lotze, Microcosmus: An Essay concerning Man and His Relation to the World, two volumes, translated by Elizabeth Hamilton and E. E. Constance Jones (Edinburgh: T. and T. Smith, 1888), volume 1, p. 380.
18

As it is also for James. See A Pluralistic Universe (New York: Longmans, Green, 1909), p. 182.

19

I should briefly acknowledge one further question: if we accept what Bowne has said so far, how will he prove there is an infinite mind? His reply is that "it would be incredible that we should know things by ideas essentially unrelated to them; and as the ideas by which the things are constituted are independent of us, there must be a supreme intelligence behind the things which makes them the bearer or expression of the ideas" (p. 118). Even though we apply these "ideas," forms, or categories, we do not invent them. We know this because they figure in necessary truths that are beyond our control (pp. 139-40). "The object itself," in other words, "must have an affinity for some forms rather than others" (p. 139), and because we can't be the source of this affinity, the object must owe to its affinity and its existence to "the infinite consciousness and will" (p. 143).
20

He also has a quick answer, which is that the successive can only exist for the non-successive (Personalism, pp. 149, 122). But this gets us no more than some spirit or other; it doesn't guarantee that the non-successive synthesizing spirit is finite.
21

Needless to say, Bowne denies "Kant's doctrine of phenomenalism with regard to the self" (p. 88). Bowne has to say that our experience of the self is not successive.
22

Bowne, Theism (New York: American Book Company, 1902), pp. 228-30. For more on relative independence see p. 216. Theism is a revision of Bowne's Philosophy of Theism (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1887), where Bowne's appeal to the ideality of time is more tentative: "How these two facts [our self-hood and our dependence on some absolute existence] coexist," he writes on p. 202, "is perhaps the deepest mystery of speculation. Possibly the ideality of time might serve to relieve the difficulty involved in distinguishing creation and preservation." In The Immanence of God, published three years after Theism (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1905), Bowne seems to want to replace the doctrine of continuous creation with a doctrine of continuous dependence: "We are . . . in God's world, and all things continuously depend on him" (p. 28).
23

"Personal Idealism in Its Ethical Bearings," pp. 445-55, p. 448.

24

Quoted in James McLachlan, "George Holmes Howison: The Conception of God Debate and the Beginnings of Personal Idealism," The Personalist Forum 11 (1995), pp. 1-16, p. 2. McLachlan is quoting from John Wright Buckham and George Malcolm Stratton, George Holmes Howison: Philosopher and Teacher (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1936), p. 13.

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25

Bill Mander has suggested to me that Bowne may also have been thinking of McTaggart.

26

Edgar Sheffield Brightman, Person and Reality: An Introduction to Metaphysics, edited by Peter Anthony Bertocci, Jannette Elthina Newhall, and Robert Sheffield Brightman (New York: Ronald Press, 1958), pp. 179-84.
27

Bowne says this twice: at the end of the preface to Theory of Thought and Knowledge, and at the end of the preface to Metaphysics, where the words are quoted.
28

"Modern Idealism," Journal of Philosophy 17 (1920), pp. 533-50. For the confession of failure see p. 539.
29

Mary Whiton Calkins (1863-1930) taught at Wellesley College from the mid-1880's until 1929. She was the first woman to complete the requirements for a Ph.D. at Harvard. The Department of Philosophy put her forward for a degree, but it was denied, because she was a woman. Years later, she was offered a Radcliffe Ph.D., but she refused it, saying that she had earned a Harvard Ph.D. and would accept nothing else. Calkins went on to become one of three people to be president of both the American Philosophical Association and the American Psychological Association. The others were James and Dewey.
30

"The Definition of Idealism," Journal of Philosophy 30 (1933), pp. 429-35.

31

There are anticipations of this methodological humility in Bowne. See for example his Studies in Theism (New York: Phillips and Hunt, 1880), pp. 286, 323-4. I need to study Bowne's metamethodology more closely.
32

Though consensus would be the end of the socialized method of coherence, conflict or confrontation would be perfectly acceptable as means. I need to think more about what I say here, perhaps in connection with Peirce's essay "The Fixation of Belief."
33

I don't know whether King agreed with Brightman that God is finite, but a finite God is one with whom we can very easily concura God (to recall a familiar image from King's writings) whose co-workers we can be. I've been told that King borrowed the image of "responsible co-workers with God" from Joshua Loth Liebman, Peace of Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1946), p. 173, but the more basic image of human beings as God's co-workers is Biblicaland its influence, before Liebman, was widespread.
34

"An Episode of Early California Life: The Squatter Riot of 1850 in Sacramento," pp. 298-348 in Studies of Good and Evil (New York: Appleton, 1898). The quoted passage appears on pp. 324-6. This essay was originally published in the Overland Monthly in 1885.
35

The words "league with hell" are generally identified with the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison.
36

The Problem of Christianity: The Real World and the Christian Ideas (New York: Macmillan, 1913), p. 296.

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37

"The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy."

38

Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe, Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature, volume 1 (Cambridge: Harvard University, 1910), p. 61.