"
With this very beautiful and striking passage no one will quarrel, nor
will any one misunderstand it.
The following passage has the same sort of poetical truth. "Things are
saturated with the moral law. There is no escape from it. Violets and
grass preach it; rain and snow, wind and tides, every change, every
cause in Nature is nothing but a disguised missionary." ...
But Emerson is not satisfied with metaphor. "We affirm that in all men
is this majestic perception and command; that it is the presence of the
eternal in each perishing man; that it distances and degrades all
statements of whatever saints, heroes, poets, as obscure and confused
stammerings before its silent revelation. _They_ report the truth. _It_
is the truth." In this last extract we have Emerson actually affirming
that his dogma of the Moral Law is Absolute Truth. He thinks it not
merely a form of truth, like the old theologies, but very
distinguishable from all other forms in the past.
Curiously enough, his statement of the law grows dogmatic and incisive
in proportion as he approaches the borderland between his law and the
natural instincts: "The last revelation of intellect and of sentiment is
that in a manner it severs the man from all other men; makes known to
him _that the spiritual powers are sufficient to him if no other being
existed_; that he is to deal absolutely in the world, as if he alone
were a system and a state, and though all should perish could make all
anew.
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