Club was organized, and Emerson was called upon to preside at the next meeting. In preparation for this meeting he wrote a lengthy account of the development of Romanticism, and in the spirit of Nature he places the greatest emphasis upon what the distinction between the Understanding and the Reason had done for Germany:

This came deepest and loudest out of Germany, where it is not the word of few, but of all the wise. The professors of Germany, a secluded race, free to think, but not invited to action, poor and crowded, went back into the recesses of consciousness with Kant, and whilst his philosophy was popular, and by its striking nomenclature had imprinted itself on the memory, as that of phrenology does now, they analysed in its light the history of past and présent times which their encyclopaediacal study had explored. All geography, all statistics, all philology was read with Reason and Understanding in view, and hence the reflective and penetrating sight of their research. Niebuhr, Humboldt, Müller, Heeren, Herder, Schiller, Fichte, Schlegel.43

From the report Emerson makes of the second meeting we can not determine the extent to which he introduced the distinction between the Understanding and the Reason, unless he actually delivered the speech from which I have quoted. He does, however, say that Genius was brought into the discussion: "Alcott maintained that every man is a genius, that he looks peculiar, individual, only from the point of view of others. Genius has two faces, one towards the Infinite God, one towards man,-but I cannot report him." 44

The fact that these Transcendentalists all seemed to have definite ideas in regard to these fundamental distinctions of Kant and Coleridge indicates that Emerson had been drinking deeply in his three years of comparative solitude from a common heritage. The prospect of indicating the influence of the Club upon Emerson appears, for in "The American Scholar" Emerson must have felt that he was speaking for all what he felt to be true for himself. Since the distinction between Talent and Genius was stressed in this address, let us see to what extent Emerson had considered Coleridge's conception of this distinction and the kindred one between the Fancy and the Imagination previous to the formation of the Club.

43 Journals, Vol. 4, pp. 92-94. “Ibid., pp. 113-14.

In the same year, 1835, in which Emerson states that he fully understands what the philosopher means by the distinction between the Understanding and the Reason, he gives evidence of understanding also the distinction between Talent and Genius and between the Fancy and the Imagination. On the thirteenth of August he asks,

Who can read an analysis of the faculties by any acute psychologist like Coleridge, without becoming aware that this is proper study for him and that he must live ages to learn anything of so secular a science? 45

The following day Emerson indicates that he was thoroughly familiar with the distinction between the Fancy and the Imagination given in the Biographia Literaria, for he adds,

We would call up him who left half told

The story of Cambuscan bold,

but the great contemporary just now laid in the dust no man remembers; no man asks for him who broke off in the first sentences the Analysis of the Imagination, on the warning of a friend that the public would not read the chapter. No man asks, Where is the Chapter ? 46

A few days before, commenting upon Coleridge's treatment of the distinction between the Imagination and the Fancy, Emerson gave his conception of the distinction:

The distinction of Fancy and Imagination seems to me a distinction in kind. The Fancy aggregates; the Imagination animates. The Fancy takes the world as it stands and selects pleasing groups by apparent relations. The Imagination is Vision, regards the world as symbolical, and pierces the emblem for the real sense. Sees all external objects as types.*7

If we consider what Emerson says here of the distinction between the Fancy and the Imagination in relation to what he says of Wordsworth just three days later, we have the most complete example of Coleridge's influence that I have been able to locate. He begins, "Wordsworth's 'Ode to Duty' singeth,—

and concludes, "Wordsworth writes the verses of a great, original

45 Journals, Vol. 3, p. 540.

48 Journals, Vol. 3, p. 540.

7 Ibid., pp. 525-26.

bard." 948 A comparison of Coleridge's final definition of the Imagination, given in the Biographia Literaria, and what he has to say of the imaginative power of Wordsworth with what we have quoted from Emerson's Journals will illustrate fully what I mean.

Coleridge first differentiates between the primary Imagination and the secondary Imagination much as Kant differentiates between the productive and the non-productive Imagination. "The primary Imagination," says Coleridge, "I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary I consider as an echo of the former. . . . It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead." 49 Compared with this creative power of the Imagination, the definition of the Fancy given by Coleridge seems entirely mechanical.50 We see this more clearly in Coleridge's criticism of Wordsworth:

Last (Sixth), and pre-eminently I challenge for this poet the gift of IMAGINATION in the highest and strictest sense of the word. In the play of Fancy, Wordsworth, to my feelings, is not always graceful, and sometimes recondite. . . . But in imaginative power, he stands nearest of all modern writers to Shakespeare and Milton; and yet in a kind perfectly unborrowed and his own words, which are at once an instance and an illustration, he does indeed to all thoughts and to all objects

add the gleam,

The light that never was, on sea or land,

The consecration, and the Poet's dream.51

From the day Emerson first encountered Coleridge's glowing tribute to Wordsworth as the most imaginative poet since Milton and "yet in a kind perfectly unborrowed" to the time of the pub

"Fancy, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with, but fixities and definitives. The fancy is indeed no other than a mode of Memory emancipated from the order of time and space; while it is blended with, and modified by that empirical phenomenon of the will, which we express by the word Choice. But equally with the ordinary memory the Fancy must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association." 51 Biographia Literaria, pp. 151-52.

lication of Parnassus in 1876, he could not repeat too often his favorite sayings about Wordsworth. He held Wordsworth to be the sanest poet of the age and the most original poet since Milton. A quotation from the Journals in 1868 will bring out clearly how far-reaching and how permanent was Emerson's acceptance of Coleridge's position in regard to Wordsworth:

I read with delight a casual notice of Wordsworth in the London Reader, in which, with perfect aplomb, his highest merits were affirmed, and his unquestionable superiority to all English poets since Milton, and thought how long I travelled and talked in England, and found no person, or none but one, and that one Clough, sympathetic with him, and admiring him aright, in face of Tennyson's culminating talent, and genius in melodious

Great as was the indirect influence which Emerson received from Coleridge's treatment of the Imagination in its relation to Wordsworth, the direct influence was as great or even greater. We catch the spirit of Coleridge's conception of the creative writer in those glowing lines in "The American Scholar" where Emerson writes:

Genius looks forward: the eyes of man are set in his forehead, not in his hindhead: man hopes: genius creates/ Whatever talents may be, if the man create not, the pure efflux of the Deity is not his;-cinders and smoke there may be, but not yet flame.53

And in the essay "Intellect" we find a full development of the distinction that Coleridge was so careful to make between the primary and the secondary Imagination. In this essay Emerson writes,

Every man's progress is through a succession of teachers each of whom seems at the time to have a superlative influence, but it at last gives place to a new.54

To this we may add that Emerson here reveals the "superlative influence" of Coleridge before it had given "place to a new."

From first to last "Intellect" is permeated with such ideas as "constructive intellect," "receptive intellect," "instinctive action," spontaneous action," and "constructive powers." Almost the

52 Journals, Vol. 10, p. 68.

63 Centenary Edition, Vol. 1, p. 90. 5* Ibid., Vol. 2, p. 343.

first sentence gives a distinction between the primary and the secondary Imagination:

Intellect lies behind genius, which is intellect constructive. Intellect is the simple power anterior to all action or construction.55

But in what follows we may see even more unmistakably the influence of Coleridge.

In the intellect constructive, which we popularly designate by the word Genius, we observe the same balance of two elements as in intellect receptive. The constructive intellect produces thoughts, sentences, poems, plans, designs, systems. It is the generation of the mind, the marriage of thought with nature."

It must be evident that in distinguishing between intellect constructive and intellect reflective Emerson differs little from Coleridge's distinction between the primary and secondary Imagination.

I have endeavored to trace carefully the development of Emerson's conception of the three major distinctions made by Coleridge: between the Understanding and the Reason; between Talent and Genius; between the Fancy and the Imagination. The first distinction is of interest because it introduces the question of the reconciliation of Platonism and Transcendentalism. Since Emerson never lost his love for Plato, we might well ask if he ever accepted the Transcendentalism of Kant? To give a complete answer to the question, we should consider Carlyle's influence more carefully than we have been able to do in this paper; for Transcendentalism is implied in all of Carlyle's early work. However, Carlyle had little love for Plato and so could not have affected the acceptance by Emerson of a philosophy seemingly diametrically opposed to Platonism. Carlyle's contribution to Emerson was of another nature: he was an interpreter of the lives of the men responsible for the Romantic movement in Germany.

Our study of Emerson's Transcendentalism has led us to the acceptance of Coleridge as the reconciler of Platonism and Transcendentalism. We have seen, however, that Coleridge did not follow Kant closely except to distinguish between the Under

* Ibid., p. 325.

Centenary Edition, pp. 334-35.