There are, it seems, three principles of a philosophical character without which Emerson's life-work cannot be conceived. To bring them to the shortest expression we might say, Nature speaks to us; Freedom speaks in us; the Oversoul speaks through us. There is no word in Emerson's twelve volumes which is inconsistent with this threefold conviction, and everything else in his system either follows immediately from this belief or is a non-essential supplement. But that threefold faith is a courageous creed indeed. The first, we said, refers to Nature; he knew Nature in its intimacy, he knew Nature in its glory; "Give me health and a day and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous." And this Nature, that is the assertion, is not what natural sciences teach it to be. The Nature of the physicist, the dead world of atoms controlled by the laws of a dead causality, is not really the Nature we live in; the reality of Nature cannot be expressed by the record of its phenomena, but merely by the understanding of its meaning. Natural science leads us away from Nature as it really is. We must try to understand the thoughts of Nature. "Nature stretches out her arms to embrace man; only let his thoughts be of equal greatness;" and again Emerson says, "All the facts of natural history taken by themselves have no value, but are barren like a single sex; but marry it to human history and it is full of life;" and finally, "The philosopher postpones the apparent order of things to the empire of Thought." And in the midst of Nature, of the living Nature, we breathe in freedom; man is free. Take that away and Emerson is not. Man is free. He does not mean the freedom of the Declaration of Independence, a document so anti-Emersonian in its conception of man; and he does not mean the liberty after which, as he says, the slaves are crowing while most men are slaves. No, we are free as responsible agents of our morality. We are free with that freedom which annuls fate; and if there is fate, then freedom is its most necessary part. "Forever wells up the impulse of choosing and acting in the soul." "So far as man thinks he is free." "Before the revelations of the soul, time, space, and nature shrink away." "Events are grown on the same stem with the personality; they are sub-personalities." "We are not built like a ship to be tossed, but like a house to stand." This freedom alone gives meaning to our life with its duties, and puts the accent of the world's history on the individual, on the personality: "All history resolves itself very easily into the biography of a few stout and earnest persons," and "An institution is the lengthened shadow of a man."