It is enough that he makes us recognize that these men were
men too, and that their writings mean something not unknowable to us.
The East added nothing to Emerson, but gave him a few trappings of
speech. The whole of his mysticism is to be found in Nature, written
before he knew the sages of the Orient, and it is not improbable that
there is some real connection between his own mysticism and the
mysticism of the Eastern poets.
Emerson's criticism on men and books is like the test of a great chemist
who seeks one or two elements. He burns a bit of the stuff in his
incandescent light, shows the lines of it in his spectrum, and there an
end.
It was a thought of genius that led him to write Representative Men. The
scheme of this book gave play to every illumination of his mind, and it
pinned him down to the objective, to the field of vision under his
microscope. The table of contents of Representative Men is the dial of
his education. It is as follows: Uses of Great Men; Plato, or The
Philosopher; Plato, New Readings; Swedenborg, or The Mystic; Montaigne,
or The Sceptic; Shakespeare, or The Poet; Napoleon, or The Man of the
World; Goethe, or The Writer.
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