The life and writings of Emerson owe their chief claim on our attention to the fact that they represent with singular force a line of thought and belief--if belief it can be called--which an immense number of the young, intelligent, and sincere of the past and present generation have been endeavouring to follow, though as yet without any remarkable or satisfactory results. “Every man is potentially a man of genius,” is the one dogma of Emerson’s religion--though it is nowhere put thus plainly by him; and its one commandment is “Be a man of genius.” Absolute nonconformity with everything, we are taught, is the first condition of personal and social well-being; and we are enjoined to look upon our individual insight as our one infallible guide, though it may bid us go one way to-day and the opposite to-morrow. At the time when Emerson was debating with himself as to whether he should throw up his office as Unitarian preacher he seems to have had some searchings of heart as to the validity of the new doctrine. “How,” he writes, in his Journal, “shall the droning world get on if all its _beaux esprits_ recalcitrate upon its approved forms and accepted constitutions and quit them in order to be single-minded? The double-refiners would produce at the other end the double-damned.” This is perhaps the wisest thing ever said by Emerson; but he nevertheless chose his part definitively with the “double refiners.” “I hate preaching,” he writes in a subsequent page of his Journal. “Preaching is a pledge, and I wish to say what I feel and think to-day, with the proviso that to-morrow perhaps I shall contradict it all.” In the free use of his proviso he accordingly, for the remainder of his life, followed and taught others to follow what he called “intuition,” even though it should not wait for “to-morrow” to contradict itself. For example, in the last page but one of the essay on “Character” we are instructed to reject the doctrine of the divinity of Christ because “the mind requires a victory to the senses, a force of character which will convert judge, jury, soldier, and king and on the following page we are told that, “when that love which is all-suffering, all-abstaining, all-aspiring ... comes into our streets and houses, only the pure and aspiring can know its face.”