The theosophist whose soul is in direct contact with the “Oversoul” needs no “evidences of Christianity,” nor any revelation through the scripture or the written word. Revelation is to him something more immediate—a doctrine, said Andrews Norton, which is not merely a heresy, but is not even an intelligible error. Neither does the mystic seek proof of God’s existence from the arguments of natural theology. “The intellectual power is not the gift, but the presence of God. Nor do we reason to the being of God, but God goes with us into Nature, when we go or think at all.” The popular faith does not warm to Emerson’s impersonal deity. “I cannot love or worship an abstraction,” it says. “I must have a Father to believe in and pray to: a Father who loves and watches over _me_. As for the immortality you offer, it has no promise for the heart. My servant Death, with solving rite, Pours finite into infinite. I do not know what it means to be absorbed into the absolute. The loss of conscious personal life is the loss of all. To awake into another state of being without a memory of this, is such a loss; and is, besides, inconceivable. I want to be reunited to my friends. I want my heaven to be a continuation of my earth. And hang Brahma!” In literature, as in religion, this impersonality has disconcerting aspects to the man who dwells in the world of the senses and the understanding. “Some men,” says a note of 1844, “have the perception of difference predominant, and are conversant with surfaces and trifles, with coats and coaches and faces and cities; these are the men of talent. And other men abide by the perception of Identity: these are the Orientals, the philosophers, the men of faith and divinity, the men of genius.” All this has a familiar look to readers who remember the chapter on Plato in “Representative Men,” or passages like the following from “The Oversoul”: “In youth we are mad for persons. But the larger experience of man discovers the identical nature appearing through them all.” Now, in mundane letters it is the difference that counts, the _più_ and not the _uno_. The common nature may be taken for granted. In drama and fiction, particularly, difference is life and identity is death; and this “tyrannizing unity” would cut the ground from under them both. This philosophical attitude did not keep Emerson from having a sharp eye for personal traits. His sketch of Thoreau in “Excursions” is a masterpiece; and so is the half-humorous portrait of Socrates in “Representative Men”; and both these are matched by the keen analysis of Daniel Webster in the journals. All going to show that this transcendentalist had something of “the devouring eye and the portraying hand” with which he credits Carlyle.