"With a psychological insight as remarkable in Emerson as it is rare, he tells how this morality dependent upon freedom is produced. "But insight is not will, nor is affection will... There must be a fusion of these two to generate the energy of will" (VI, 33). I might well have paused over the metaphysical and psychological significance of this sentence; but I have chosen to give it only its ethical bearing, since it is not an integral part of Emerson's Transcendentalism. Of the origin of conscience, Emerson has therefore this account to offer: "I see the unity of thought and of morals running through all animated nature; there is no difference of quality, but only of more and less. ...The man down in nature occupies himself in guarding, in feeding, in warming and multiplying his body, and, as long as he knows no more, we justify him; but presently a mystic change is wrought, a new perception opens, and he is made a citizen of the world of souls; he feels what is called duty; he is aware that he owes a higher allegiance to do and live as a good member of this universe. In the measure in which he has this sense he is a man, rises to the universal life. The high intellect is absolutely at one with moral nature" (X, I78). From this account of the origin of the virtues, their classification becomes an easy matter. "There is no virtue which is final" (II, 295). "The same law of eternal procession ranges all that we call the virtues, and extinguishes each in the light of a better" (II, 293). There is, then, a hierarchy in the virtues, the lower and simpler, of course, being the earliest produced. We pass from the individual virtue of physical courage, which is the mere "affection" of love joined with the "insight" of its universal value in opposition to and triumph over the self-conserving instinct of fear; to the personal virtues of chastity and temperance, by which we improve our own natures and make them more effective to universal ends at the expense of and triumph over our natural appetites and inclinations; to the third and final type of virtue, exemplified in justice and love, which are the public virtues, and show the active operation of virtue where it exists at its fullest—in our relation to others. The public virtue, justice, will of course have its own stages of development in the history of civilization. "The civil history of men might be traced by the successive ameliorations as marked in higher moral generalizations;—virtue meaning physical courage, then chastity and temperance, then justice and love;—bargains of kings with peoples of certain rights to certain classes, then of rights to masses,—then at last came the day when, as historians rightly tell, the nerves of the world were electrified by the proclamation that all men are born free and equal" (X, 181)."
January 1, 1970