can rive the planet, and the beauty which certain objects have for him is the friendly fire which expands the thought and acquaints the prisoner that liberty and power await him." 1

In such exposition of the meaning of a presiding genius Emerson is treating in his own way a subject which Plutarch, in his Discourse Concerning Socrates' Dæmon, had already handled and which in Proclus is the occasion for much speculation. Without adopting the views of either, Emerson maintains his independence, while at the same time engaged in a solution of the question which Socrates' utterances concerning his Dæmon had raised.

Thus it is evident that reading in the Platonists fed the moralizing tendency in Emerson's mind and afforded him interpretations of parts of ancient mythology which he either adopts as his own or with such changes as he wished to make in them. And just as he gathered homely proverbs, so he attended to the collection of such myths as attracted his attention in his reading. He found them significant expressions of the Universal Mind.

1 Ibid., VI., 287-288.

And thus the practice of using fables to set forth his teaching and the habit of rationalizing myths testify to the influence of the literary and critical side of Platonism on his own work.

CHAPTER VII

THE ASCENDENCY OF PLATONISM

HE works of Plato and the Platonists

were great storehouses from which Emerson drew the material of his thought on nature, soul, love, beauty, art and mythology. His indebtedness to Platonism is thus an assured thing. But Emerson had read thoughtfully, if not widely, in other provinces of literature and philosophy, and in the course of that reading had gathered much that he worked into his essays. But no body of thought did he esteem as highly as Platonism. "Plato is philosophy," he maintained, "and philosophy is Plato." Imbued with this idea, he either deliberately leavened the suggestions that came to him through non-Platonic sources with the leaven of Platonism, or he openly criticized the new thought from the standpoint of Platonic theory. There thus remains the consideration of the significant phases of Emerson's thinking in which

1 Complete Works, IV., 40.

1

Platonism though blended with other thought is seen in the ascendent.

In the writings of Oriental peoples, especially the Hindoos, Emerson found much congenial reading. In his library these volumes of the ancient East were assigned to a position on his shelves close to the Platonists; and in his thought the teachings of both were most intimately associated; for both dwelt on the fundamental unity of things. In his essay on Plato he uses long quotations from his Eastern books to explain the idea of the ineffable One of the Platonists. "The raptures of prayer and ecstasy of devotion," he explicitly states, "lose all being in one Being. This tendency finds its highest expression in the religious writings of the East, and chiefly in the Indian Scriptures, in the Vedas, the Bhagavat Geeta, and the Vishnu Purana. Those writings contain little else than this idea, and they rise to pure and sublime strains in celebrating it." 1

Emerson holds, too, that Plato drew certain elements of his thought from the East, whither, perhaps, he journeyed. He also maintains that the influence of the East was 1 Complete Works, IV., 49.

3 Ibid., 42.

an important factor in the development of the Neo-Platonism of Plotinus and his followers. "When Orientalism in Alexandria found the Platonists," he told the auditors in his Harvard course on philosophy, "a new school was produced. The sternness of the Greek school, feeling its way forward from argument to argument, met and combined with the beauty of Orientalism. Plotinus, Proclus, Porphyry, and Jamblicus were the apostles of the new philosophy." 1 Orientalism and Platonism were thus intimately associated in his survey of the philosophy of the ancient world.

This association of the sacred writers of the East with Plato and the Platonists may have arisen from Emerson's adoption of the critical attitude of Cousin. That French philosopher was interested both in Greek thought and in the books of the East. He maintained that the origins of Grecian culture and philosophy are to be found in the sacred books of the Oriental peoples. He denominated Asia the land whose fundamental character is unity; where all the elements of human nature lay enveloped indistinct within each other; while Greece was the land in which these

1 Atlantic Monthly, LI., 826.

2 Introduction to the History of Philosophy, 42.