His wild individualism is indeed a life, and not an 'expiation.' "No law can be sacred to me but that of my own nature." Since Darwin we have been inundated with a pale sociality that needs the innoculation of Transcendentalism. Emerson's inner life was filled with a joyous self-reliant irreligion. "If I am the Devil's child," he says, "I will live then from the Devil." Emerson's strong individualism does not disown his debt to vice. He prefers to be classed among the goats rather than among the sheep. If our Anglo-American pragmatists did not lack the will to view their neat doctrine in the strong light of irrationalism and immoralism, they could claim Emerson as a prophet of their cult. He desires that "the universe be kept open in all directions," and that Jesus be not allowed to "absorb the race." There is a hint of dilettantism in Emerson. His anarchy, immoralism, and irreligion were perhaps merely intellectual. They seem not to have been the result of such spiritual storms as were hardly weathered by Ibsen and Strindberg. Swedenborgianism held for Emerson, as for the late Professor James, a secret stairway to the heights of spiritual life where is lost some of the seriousness of man's prayers and man's religion.
Modern philosophy in its regnant aspect has been an exceedingly one-sided affair, confining its function to the critical examination of the concepts employed by the mathematico-natural sciences. A new direction is now imminent. Philosophy must be the comprehensive critique of the concepts of all social sciences. The task of social philosophy is, first, to examine the intended scope of the concepts employed by a particular science; second, to determine whether or not in the elaboration of these concepts that science passes unconsciously beyond the intended scope; and, third, to find out what relation the special meanings assigned bear to the meanings which these concepts yield when they are regarded from a point of view which is thoroughly comprehensive. The organization of these social concepts is one which the social philosopher must himself effect. His first task is to make an inventory of the master concepts of the social sciences and to arrange them in some manner of organic relationship. Tentatively speaking, these master concepts are (1) work, (2) sex-life, (3) æsthetic enjoyment, (4) knowledge, (5) government, and (6) the good. A social philosophy, then, properly begins as a philosophy of economics, and proceeds to the elaboration of philosophies of sex-life, of æsthetics, of science and education, of law and government, and, finally, of ethics and religion.
The imagination is practically virgin soil for experiment. It has been treated (1) as a mystical or inexplicable faculty; (2) by earlier psychologists
