human thought; the wild enthusiast would just as certainly run on a snag or be cast up on the shore. This led to the second of Emerson's leading ideas--that a man should not be "warped clean out of his own orbit." Reasoning from the evident working of a natural law in the universe, he was convinced that there was a spiritual law which controlled human affairs. He was certain that in the end all would be well with the world. It was his duty and every other man's to be virtuous and to encourage virtue, but as the times were "in God's hand" no man need actively fight the forces of evil. It was the "manifest destiny" theory cropping out again, a belief easy to foster in a new country like America, where wickedness could be explained on the ground that in a period of national youth temporary mistakes were sure to be committed,--and equally sure to be rectified. "My whole philosophy," he said, "is compounded of acquiescence and optimism." Hence there was more of sympathy than coöperation in Emerson's attitude toward life. Like Matthew Arnold in these same years, he distrusted all machinery, even the "machinery" of social reform. To some of his younger friends, and particularly to those who were more familiar than he with the unhappy conditions in the older European nations, Emerson's "acquiescence and optimism" seemed wholly mistaken. We may return to Norton's comment (p. 215), which was unfairly interrupted: "But never before in intercourse with him had I been so impressed with the limits of his mind.... His optimism becomes a bigotry, and though of a nobler type than the common American conceit of the preëminent excellence of American things as they are, had hardly less of the quality of fatalism. To him this is the best of all possible worlds, and the best of all possible times. He refuses to believe in disorder or evil." This comment is not utterly fair to Emerson, but it represents the view of the practical idealist who feels that for all Emerson's insistence on the value of learning from life, he had drawn more from solitude than from society. One may quote with caution what the pragmatic Andrew D. White said of Tolstoi: He has had little opportunity to take part in any real discussion of leading topics; and the result is that his opinions have been developed without modification by any rational interchange of thought with other men. Under such circumstances any man, no matter how noble or gifted, having given birth to striking ideas, coddles and pets them until they become the full-grown, spoiled children of his brain. He can see neither spot nor blemish in them, and comes virtually to believe himself infallible.