EMERSON HALL 
17 
sistent work in methodology and epistemology. Is it not irony to put 
over the door, through which daily hundreds of students are to enter, 
the name of a man who may be a poet and a prophet, a leader in 
literature and a leader in life, but who certainly was a mystic and not 
a thinker, an enthusiast but not a philosopher? Not only those who 
belittle him to-day and who short-sightedly deny even his immense 
religious influence, but even many of Emerson’s warmest admirers 
hold such an opinion. They love him, they are inspired by the superb 
beauty of his intuitions, but they cannot respect the content of his 
ideas, if they do not wish to deny all their modern knowledge and 
scientific insight. Yes, for the most part they deny that his ideas form 
at all a connected whole; they are aphorisms, beautiful sparks. 
Did he not himself say: “With consistency a great soul has simply 
nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on 
the wall.” And yet how can there be philosophy without consistency; 
how can we interpret reality if we contradict ourselves ? If Emerson’s 
views of the world did really not aim at consistency and did really 
ignore our modern knowledge, then it would be better to go on 
with our philosophical work in Harvard without shelter and roof 
than to have a hall whose name symbolizes both the greatest foe of 
philosophy, the spirit of inconsistency, and the greatest danger for 
philosophy, the mystic vagueness which ignores real science. 
But Emerson stands smiling behind this group of admirers and says, 
“To be great is to be misunderstood.” Yes, he did say, “A foolish 
consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little states¬ 
men and philosophers and divines;” but he soon adds, “Of one will 
the actions will be harmonious however unlike they seem.” Emerson 
despises the consistency of the surface because he holds to the con¬ 
sistency of the depths, and every sentence he speaks is an action of 
the one will, and however unlike they seem they are harmonious, and, 
we can add, they are philosophical; and, what may seem to these 
anxious friends more daring, they are not only in harmony with ea,ch 
other, they are in deepest harmony with the spirit of modem philo¬ 
sophy, with a creed which ought to be taught by the most critical 
scholars of Harvard’s Philosophy Hall. 
What is the essence of Emerson’s doctrine in the realm of philo¬ 
sophy ? It seems like sacrilege to formulate anything he said in the 
dry terms of technical philosophy. We must tear from it all the rich¬ 
ness and splendor of his style, we must throw off the glory of his meta¬ 
phor, and we must leave out his practical wisdom and his religious 
emotion. It seems as if we must lose all we love. It is as if we were