this principle Plotinus writes: "But that is formless, and is even without intelligible form. For the nature of the one being generative of all things, is not any one of them. Neither therefore, is it a certain thing, nor a quality, nor a quantity, nor intellect, nor soul, nor that which is moved, nor again that which stands still. Nor is it in place, or in time; but is by itself uniform, or rather without form, being prior to all form, to motion and to permanency." 1 The couplet explaining how Past, Present, and Future shoot from one root is a reminiscence of the conception of the intelligible world which possesses all things in eternity. For intellect, which there reigns, as Plotinus says, "alone is, and is always, but is never future; for when the future arrives, it then also is; nor is it the past." One with Plotinus is the idea of the existence of all things in their archetypes in the world of pure intellect. He holds that all beings exist primarily in intellect. "Hence," he adds, "it is necessary that these things should be prior to the world, not as impressions from other things, but as archetypes, and 1 Select Works, 478. 2 Ibid., 263. primary natures, and the essence of the intellect." 1 Inasmuch as in intellect all things are together without respect to time and place, they are conceived by Plotinus to be in eternity 2—an idea which Emerson alludes to in his lines on Æon. Æon is the English name for alov (eternity). Into Emerson's account the imagery of Plato's Phædrus also enters. In his narrative of the life of souls in the intelligible world Plato tells how all that are able revolve about pure ideas which they behold and whose life they drink in. "For those that are called immortal," he writes, "when they reach the summit, proceeding outside, stand on the back of heaven, and while they are stationed here, its revolution carries them round, and they behold the external regions of heaven." Alluding to this Emerson thus directs the lover to "a region where the wheel On which all beings ride Visibly revolves." 4 The nature of poetry permitted Emerson to 1 Ibid., 293. 2 Ibid., 186. 3 Bohn translation, I., 323. give a highly concentrated account of love as conceived by Plato and the Platonists; it also permitted him to be impersonal. But in the more familiar form of the essay he was compelled to relate this theory to the ways of actual experience. Thus he came to write in his essay on Friendship: "My friends have come to me unsought. The great God gave them to me. By oldest right, by the divine affinity of virtue with itself, I find them, or rather not I, but the deity in me and in them derides and cancels the thick walls of individual character, relation, age, sex, circumstance, at which he usually connives, and now makes many one." 1 This account lacks the wealth of metaphysical statement that characterizes his poem, Celestial Love, but it shows how Emerson applied his metaphysics to his own life. Beneath the passage is the conception of the One which here unites his friends and himself into one mystic communion. And yet he is true to the teaching of the Platonists in making that mystic experience of the One a solitary communion of the soul with the Absolute. This mystic union of many friends is not satisfactory. Hence he passes 1 Ibid., II., 194. on to observe that the soul demands an absolutely solitary union with itself. "I cannot deny it, O friend," he continues, "that the vast shadow of the Phenomenal includes thee also in its pied and painted immensity,—thee also, compared with whom all else is shadow. Thou are not Being, as Truth is, as Justice is -thou are not my soul, but a picture and effigy of that. Thou hast come to me lately, and already thou art seizing thy hat and cloak. Is it not that the soul puts forth friends as the trees puts forth leaves, and presently, by the germination of new buds, extrudes the old leaf? The law of nature is alternation for evermore. Each electrical state superinduces the opposite. The soul environs itself with friends that it may enter into a grander selfacquaintance or solitude; and it goes alone for a season that it may exalt its conversation or society. This method betrays itself along the whole history of our personal relations." 1 In such an account the necessity of solitary self-communion is emphatic. It recalls the ideal of friendship which Iamblichus states characterized the Pythagoreans; "for they perpetually exhorted each other, not to divulse the God within them. Hence all the 1 Complete Works, II., 197-198. endeavour of their friendship, both in deeds and words, was directed to a certain divine mixture, to a union with divinity, and to a communion with intellect and a divine soul." 1 And this self-communion is for the purpose of catching a vision of eternal things in some great moment. "In the great days, presentiments hover before me in the firmament. I ought, then, to dedicate myself to them. I go in that I may seize them, I go out that I may seize them. I fear only that I may lose them receding into the sky in which now they are only a patch of brighter light. Then, though I prize my friends, I cannot afford to talk with them and study their visions, lest I lose my own. It would indeed give me a certain household joy to quit this lofty seeking, this spiritual astronomy or search for stars, and come down to warm sympathies with you; but then I know well I shall mourn always the vanishing of my mighty gods. It is true, next week I shall have languid moods, when I can well afford to occupy myself with foreign objects; then I shall regret the lost literature of your mind, and wish you were by my side. again. But if you come, perhaps you will fill my mind only with new visions; not with 1 Life of Pythagoras, 170. |