EMERSON HALL 
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pendence, a document so anti-Emersonian in its conception of man; 
and he does not mean the liberty after which, as he says, the slaves 
are crowing while most men are slaves. No, we are free as responsible 
agents of our morality. We are free with that freedom which annuls 
fate; and if there is fate, then freedom is its most necessary part. 
“Forever wells up the impulse of choosing and acting in the soul.” 
“So far as man thinks he is free.” “Before the revelations of the 
soul, time, space, and nature shrink away.” “ Events are grown on 
the same stem with the personality; they are sub-personalities.” 
“We are not built like a ship to be tossed, but like a house to stand.” 
This freedom alone gives meaning to our life with its duties, and 
puts the accent of the world’s history on the individual, on the person¬ 
ality: “All history resolves itself very easily into the biography of a 
few stout and earnest persons,” and “An institution is the lengthened 
shadow of a man.” 
Nature speaks to us, Freedom speaks in us, but through us speaks 
a Soul that is more than individual, an over-individual soul, an “ Over¬ 
soul, within which every man is contained and made one with all 
others.” Now even “Nature is a great shadow, pointing always to 
the sun behind her.” Every one of us belongs to an absolute con¬ 
sciousness which in us and through us wills its will; “Men descend 
to meet” and “Jove nods to Jove from behind each of us.” Yes, 
“Man is conscious of a universal soul within or behind his individual 
life, wherein as in a firmament justice, truth, love, freedom arise and 
shine.” The ideals, the duties, the obligations, are not man’s will but 
the will of an Absolute. 
Does not all this sound like a wilful denial of all that has been 
fixed by the sciences of our time ? Does not every Sophomore who 
has had his courses in Physics, Psychology, and Sociologyknow 
better? He knows, we all know, that the processes of Nature stand 
under physical laws, that the will of man is the necessary outcome, of 
psychological laws, that the ideals of man are the products of human 
civilization and sociological laws. And if every atom in the universe 
moves according to the laws which physics and chemistry, astronomy 
and geology, have discovered, is it not anti-scientific sentimentality 
to seek a meaning and thoughts in the mechanical motions of the dead 
world of substance ? So the poet may speak, but we ought not to say 
that his fanciful dreams have value for scholarly philosophers. The 
philosophy of the scientist ought to be the acknowledgment that 
matter and energy, and space and time are eternal, and that the 
smallest grain of sand and the largest solar system move meaningless 
by blind causality.