Thus one pregnant sentence of Emerson’s shows, when we examine it more closely, that he had seen deeper into the mysteries of nature, and of the human mind, than thousands of philosophers, call them evolutionists (realists) or nominalists. Evolutionists imagine that they have explained everything that requires explanation in nature if they have shown a more or less continuous development from the moneres to man, from the thrills of the moneres to the thoughts of man. Nominalists again think that by ascending from the single to the general, and by comprehending the single under a general name, they have solved all the questions involved in nature, that is, in our comprehension of nature. They never seem to remember that there was a time when all that we call either single or general, but particularly all that is general, had for the first time to be conceived or created. Before there was a single tree, some one must have thought the tree or treehood. Before there was a single ape, or a single man, some one must have thought that apehood or that manhood which we see realised in every ape and in every man, unless we can bring ourselves to believe in a thoughtless world. If that first thought was the concept of a mere moneres, still in that thought there must have been the distant perspective of ape or man, and it is that first thought alone which to the present day keeps the ape an ape, and a man a man. Divine is hardly a name good enough for that first Thinker of Thoughts. Still, it is that Divinity which Emerson meant when he said that generalisation is always a new influx of divinity into the mind because it reveals to the mind the first thoughts, the Divine Logoi, of the universe. The thrill of which he speaks is the thrill arising from the nearness of the Divine, the sense of the presence of those Divine Logoi, or that Divine Logos, which in the beginning was with God, and without which not anything was made that was made. Evolution can never be more than the second act; the first act is the Volition or the Thought of the universe, unless we hold that there can be effect without a cause, or a Kosmos without a Logos. Such utterances, lost almost in the exuberance of Emerson’s thoughts, mark the distinction between a thoughtful and a shallow writer, between a scarred veteran and a smooth recruit. They will give permanence to Emerson’s influence both at home and abroad, and place him in the ranks of those who have not lived or thought in vain. When he left my house, I knew, of course, that we should never meet again in this life, but I felt that I had gained something that could never be taken from me.