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THE TEACHERS OF EMERSON

THE

TEACHERS OF EMERSON

TH

CHAPTER I

EMERSON'S PLATONISM

HE mind of Emerson may best be studied from the standpoint of Platonism. If one examines the chief centers of his teaching to be found in his conception of nature, soul, love and beauty, art, and mythology, he will find that Emerson in his most characteristic utterances is indebted to Plato and the Platonists. In those great intellectual teachers Emerson found a body of thought which he so thoroughly appropriated that to understand the character of his mind it is necessary to watch it consciously forming itself in keeping with the main trend of Platonic speculation.

The Platonism, however, which is thus ascendent in Emerson's thought, is not identified with the body of philosophical doctrine

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which present-day scholarship assigns to Plato and which for English readers is presented in the volumes of Jowett's translation (1871). Those volumes came to Emerson's shelves, but so late in life as to find him with his work already done. It was the fruits of an earlier era of Platonic scholarship that Emerson enjoyed. In the complete translation of Plato made by Thomas Taylor (1804) and in his earlier translation, The Cratylus, Phædo, Parmenides, and Timæus of Plato (1793) Emerson found a rendering of Plato and an interpretation of his doctrine that identified Platonism with the final stage of Hellenic speculation now named Neo-Platonism. The center of that new philosophy was Plotinus and the great commentator and expounder of its doctrines was Proclus. Taylor esteemed the thinking of these men, especially of Proclus, all important in the right interpretation of Plato, and to render Plato in an English dress "unattended with his Greek interpreters in the same garb," Taylor assured his readers in his Dedication, is to act "like one who gives an invaluable casket, but without the only key by which it can be unlocked." Later the Bohn translation of Plato (1848) came into Emerson's hands, but in spite of

its aim to present Plato without "the absurd mysticism and fanatical extravagances which the New Platonists introduced in their interpretations,' "1 it was not able to counteract the effects of Emerson's earlier readings in Taylor's edition; Emerson still remained at heart a sympathizer with the manner of the later school of Platonism.

His readings in other translations of Thomas Taylor are proof of the attraction which the writings of the Platonists had for him. The Select Works of Plotinus, On the Theology of Plato by Proclus, The Commentaries on the Timaus of Plato by the same, The Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans and Assyrians by Iamblichus, The Life of Pythagoras by the same, to which is added a Collection of Pythagoric Sentences, the treatise On the Nature of the Universe by Ocellus Lucanus, were all translations by Thomas Taylor with which Emerson was familiar. All but the last two he had in his own library at Concord. In them he found a mass of comment culled by Taylor from obscure Platonists. To the Select Works of Plotinus was appended an extract from the treatise of Synesius On Providence, which Emerson con1 II., General Introduction, p. I.

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