His picturesque speech delights in fact and anecdote, and a public which
is used to treatises and deduction cares always to be told the moral. It
wants everything reduced to a generalization. All generalizations are
partial truths, but we are used to them, and we ourselves mentally make
the proper allowance. Emerson's method is, not to give a generalization
and trust to our making the allowance, but to give two conflicting
statements and leave the balance of truth to be struck in our own minds
on the facts. There is no inconsistency in this. It is a vivid and very
legitimate method of procedure. But he is much more than a theorist: he
is a practitioner. He does not merely state a theory of agitation: he
proceeds to agitate. "Do not," he says, "set the least value on what I
do, or the least discredit on what I do not, as if I pretended to settle
anything as false or true. I unsettle all things. No facts are to me
sacred, none are profane. I simply experiment, an endless seeker with no
past at my back.
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