In a material age he is the great apostle of the spiritual. "Will you not
tolerate," he asks, "one or two solitary voices in the land, speaking for
thoughts not marketable or perishable?" To him "mind is the only reality,"
and his great man is never the one who can merely alter matter, but who can
change our state of mind. He believed in reaching truth, guided by
intuition. He would not argue to maintain his positions. He said that he
did not know what argument signified with reference to a thought. To him a
thought was just as natural a product as a rose and did not need argument
to prove or justify its existence. Much of his work is tinged with Plato's
philosophy.
Of all American writers, he is the most inspiring teacher of the young. One
of his chief objects is, in his own phrase, "to help the young soul, add
energy, inspire hope, and blow the coals into a useful flame; to redeem
defeat by new thought, by firm action." John Tyndall, the eminent English
scientist, declared that the reading of two men, Carlyle and Emerson, had
made him what he was. He said to his students: "I never should have gone
through Analytical Geometry and Calculus, had it not been for these men.
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