my power, happily it is not much to our purpose, to enter into the details of this discussion. Briefly speaking, it may be said that the German thinkers and their interpreters by their combined influence did undoubtedly strengthen Emerson's instinctive reaction against the dry and incomplete rationalism of the eighteenth century and against the Utilitarians of the nineteenth century, who to his nostrils brought a peculiarly repugnant odor of "profit and loss." But Emerson was no systematic student of metaphysics, and most of such general impulses as he was capable of receiving from the German system-makers, he had perhaps encountered in Plato and Berkeley and the seventeenth century divines before he had much cultivated his German. He ultimately made his way through Goethe, but he never became intimately attached to him or even quite reconciled to him, finding him and his æsthetic friends deficient in "moral life."
What is still more to the point, the vital features of Emerson's philosophy are due less immediately to his reading than to that religious illumination of which we have already spoken. He arrived at the centre of his beliefs by intuition. From the mechanical conception of the universe which reduced Carlyle almost to despair, Emerson emancipated himself, or rather he perfected his emancipation, by a critical examination of his own experience. This scrutiny disclosed a real world, the world of things, moved by physical energies in accordance
