Matthew Arnold characteristically explained to an American audience that Emerson was not a great poet, nor a great philosopher, nor even a great man of letters. For all that, he was the friend and aider 'of those who would live in the spirit.' Perhaps the phrase is a little vague, though it, no doubt, indicates the truth. Emerson was the founder and leader of the American 'Transcendentalists,' and Transcendentalists, I suppose, were people who professed to 'live in the spirit.' The name is alarming, but it represents a very harmless and a very commendable phenomenon. In Emerson's youth his countrymen were in need of a sharp intellectual shock. Their understanding, in Coleridgean phrase—the faculty which is useful in clearing forests and accumulating dollars—was thoroughly wide-awake; but their reason—the faculty which cultivates poetry and 'divine philosophy'—had somehow sunk into slumber. A vague craving for better things had been roused, though by no leader with authoritative credentials. There were no trained professors profoundly learned in the past history of thought to come forward and propound new solutions of the enigma of the universe. Active but superficially educated youths were ready to take for a beacon any light, ancient or modern, of which they happened to catch a glimpse. Some enthusiasts had vague impressions that there was such a thing as German philosophy, and had heard of Schelling through Cousin or Coleridge. One swore by Pythagoras; and others took up Plotinus, or found what they wanted in Swedenborg or in Jacob Behmen, or set up some mystic doctrine of their own. 'Transcendentalism' took its name from Kant, but implied no familiarity with Kant's special metaphysical system. It meant a 'wave of sentiment'—a vague desire for some kind of intellectual flying machine—some impulse that would lift you above the prosaic commonplace world into the charmed regions of philosophy and poetry. Emerson had no more academical training than his followers, and, in one sense, was certainly not a 'great philosopher.' If 'philosophy' means such a logical system as was worked out by Kant or Hegel, he was not a philosopher at all. He positively disliked such philosophies. 'Who,' he asked, 'has not looked into a metaphysical book? And what sensible man ever looked twice?' You may collate and distil all the systems, he declared, and you will get nothing by it. We have as yet nothing but 'tendency and indication.' Systems are merely the outside husk, worthless except as a temporary embodiment of the essential truth. Emerson, that is, is a denizen of the region where philosophy is not differentiated from poetry.