The true statement of the case doubtless is that Emerson received the doctrine of evolution--so far as he received it--as a poet. He welcomed the conception of a gradual unfolding of the universe, and a gradually higher development of life; but it dwelt in his mind rather as a poetical imagination than as a scientific theory. The consequence was that he was still able to speak in the old absolute manner of many things which the man of science can only discuss from a relative standpoint. When, for example, Emerson says, "All goes to show that the soul in man is not an organ, but animates and exercises all the organs; is not a function, like the power of memory, of calculation, of comparison, but uses these as hands and feet; is not a faculty, but a light; is not the intellect or the will, but the master of the intellect and the will; is the background of our being in which they lie--an immensity not possessed and that can not be possessed"--he may be uttering the sentence of a divine philosophy, or the deep intuition of a poet; but he is not speaking the language of science, nor evincing any sense of the restrictions which science might place on such expressions of opinion. Certainly he is not at the standpoint of evolution; and it is very hard to believe that the views he announces could in any way be harmonized with, say, Mr. Spencer's Principles of Psychology. Or take such a passage as the following: "All the facts of the animal economy--sex, nutriment, gestation, birth, growth--are symbols of the passage of the world into the soul of man, to suffer there a change and reappear a new and higher fact. He uses forms according to the life, and not according to the form. This is true science. The poet alone knows astronomy, chemistry, vegetation, and animation, for he does not stop at these facts, but employs them as signs. He knows why the plain or meadow of space was strewn with those flowers we call suns and moons and stars; why the great deep is adorned with animals, with men, and gods; for in every word he speaks he rides on them as the horses of thought." Now, we should be sorry to crumple one leaf in the laurel wreath of the poet; but is there much sense in saying that he is our only astronomer, or that he could inform us why suns and planets were disposed through space so as to make the forms we see? We do not think Goethe held these ideas; if he did, they were certainly not part of his evolution philosophy. The doctrine of evolution is not at war, we trust, with poetic inspiration; but if it teaches anything, it teaches that the world is full of infinite detail, and that without a certain mastery of details general views are apt to be more showy than solid. It also brings home to the mind very forcibly that one can only be sure of carefully verified facts, and, even of these, ought not to be too sure. It teaches that time and place and circumstance are, for all practical purposes, of the essence of the things we have to consider; that