To paraphrase Thureau-Dangan, Emerson’s was the empire of the contemplative monks over barbarian axe-men and sword-bearers. To-day, while the prosperous shudder at every murmur of social unrest, and the not-prosperous are drunk with heady wines; while society is, as in Emerson’s day, still “devoured by a secret melancholy,” disguised in a hundred forms of madness; while the nations still glare at one another from behind their breast-works, and the classes still war or hate (with ever deepening consciousness of class): while all these things are so, democracy’s “great dangers” may well remain the vulgarizing of the arts, contempt of contemplation, “the atrophy of the individual conscience.” Emerson somehow soothes this conscience without putting it to sleep. His courageous faith in Destiny, his cheering theory of compensations, his deathless hope, his healthy, exaggerated individualism: here are counter-irritants for more than one of Time’s diseases. “If thought makes free, so does the moral sentiment. The mixtures of spiritual chemistry refuse to be analyzed.” And Emerson did indeed “make free”; he was Emancipator, “not of black bodies, but of the minds of white men.” [2] _Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson: 1820-1872._ With Annotations. Edited by Edward Waldo Emerson and Waldo Emerson Forbes. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company. Ten Volumes. [3] “Emerson refused to dogmatize about what is necessarily obscure at present.”—John Albee, _Recollections of Emerson_. Emerson wrote in his essay on _Experience_: “In accepting the leading of the sentiments, it is not what we believe concerning the immortality of the soul or the like, but _the universal impulse to believe_, that is the material circumstance and is the principal fact in the history of the globe.” This is not far from the point of view of James, Bergson, and, nowadays, Sir Oliver Lodge. If Emerson “refused to dogmatize” about the uncertainties of the future life, he had all the same his nobler convictions. He writes in his _Journal_: “I know my soul is immortal if it were only by the sublime emotion I taste in reading these lines of Swedenborg: ‘The organical body with which the soul clothes itself is here compared to a garment, because a garment invests the body, and the soul also puts off the body and casts it away as old clothes (_exuviæ_), when it emigrates by means of death from the natural world into its own spiritual world.’”