There are many reasons to read Emerson: his skill with words, his penetrating intuition, his wonderful gift for concrete images of spiritual states of affairs, and his acute observations, marked by generosity, broad culture, and common sense. He was ambitious to understand all life as a spiritual system comprehending everything from human civilization to "the lizard on the fence, the fungus under foot, the lichen on the log."[44] He had his prejudices and unreasoned commitments, but was more interested in developing and communicating his perception of how things were than advancing any cause. Because he said what he thought, he touched on important truths even when wrong.
He dealt with enduring aspects of human life, in particular as lived in America, and said penetrating things on all sides of them. His greatest importance lies in his presentation of the spiritual state of Americans. His writings bring out essential implications of the democratic ideal and the faith that attends it. They are immensely valuable as an articulation of that faith, even though the ultimate incoherence of his views makes satisfactory exposition difficult. To read him is an education in the aspirations and illusions of the life of the spirit among us.
Emerson's faith, like that of American idealists generally, was a movement away from the half-dead forms and petty material concerns that pervade a national life too little rooted in the transcendent, and toward a shining but ill-defined and contradictory vision. In the end, his vision could not be given usable form; it could not replace what it attacked as insufficient, and led only to greater spiritual deadness. He failed in the task of the poet and scholar as he himself defined it: "Man … still watches for the arrival of a brother who can hold him steady to a truth, until he has made it his own."[45] He could not be that brother, because what he presented as truth could be made neither coherent or stable.
Nor did his thought advance. His best and most distinctive work was produced early on, and thereafter he repeated and contradicted himself while becoming more aware of problems his views raised but could not resolve. Self-accepting contradiction leads nowhere, and his views excluded the possibility of development. If a man idolizes "development," and tries to make all future changes virtually present in his work by accepting them in advance, then actual development becomes impossible because his existing views can never be shown wrong. His failure to develop was not due to declining powers. On concrete matters he continued to write brilliantly, as in his book on England (1856) and eulogy on Thoreau (1862).
Emerson's views are native to America, and so are his deficiencies. The ultimate sterility of the main tendencies in his thought correspond to fundamental problems in American life. Like many of his countrymen, he mistook the undefined for the great and settled standards for a prison. He viewed solid qualities as insufficient because they are not self-sufficient. Americans want to be infinite and self-contained wholes, and we cut ourselves off from every standard that could anchor us and make us something definite. The demand that literal reality conform to the unconditioned has caused us to lose real but limited goods. It has often seemed "not worth while to execute with too much pains some one intellectual, or aesthetical, or civil feat, when presently the dreams will scatter, and we shall burst into universal power."[46]
The result has been to put aspirations at odds with consequences. From the beginning America has been a country of dreams deferred or betrayed. Exaggerated principles have defeated their own purposes. Freedom from traditional hierarchies has meant oppressive conformity, because the majority becomes a mindless and irresponsible ruler; individualism has meant uniformity through the abolition of distinctions; and tolerance has meant closed minds, because it would be intolerant to take any idea seriously. The frustration of our dreams is incomprehensible to us, and our spiritual demands too vast for effective response, so we avert our eyes from our situation. Emerson himself put the matter best: "Whilst we are waiting [for universal power], we beguile the time with jokes, with sleep, with eating, and with crimes."[47]
He was nonetheless no prisoner of his general ideas. It was his strength as well as weakness that his final commitments were so few. His receptivity and honesty, and indifference to contradiction, helped him set forth the limitations as well as greatness of what he approved, and the virtue and reality of what he disliked. He gave us materials for thinking but left our thoughts free. This essay has emphasized the tendencies that mattered most to him and his readers — his subjectivism, his opposition to dogma, and his forceful pronouncements that seem strikingly perceptive but lack concrete implications. From other tendencies one could construct a very different Emerson with an acute appreciation for things he usually opposed. Few Americans have understood as well as he the limits of conscious intentions, the strength and dignity conferred by dogma, and the power of the accumulated experience summed up in tradition.
We should no more be prisoners of established ideas than he was. The debate among conflicting sides of Emerson's thought is the necessary debate between dreams and experience in America. Life among us has been more than grand proclamations of equality and democracy. Tradition, ordinary human ties, and loyalty to substantive goods that transcend us have been essential to what we have been. To get beyond a political, cultural and spiritual situation that grows increasingly superficial, sterile and perverse we must deal with that situation directly and at its root. Which aspects of our life and ideals have had enduring value, and which have proven at odds with the good of our people? The rhetoric we have made habitual cannot provide an answer. Emerson, the greatest expositor, proponent and critic of the spiritual side of the American polity, can be a special aid to us in our difficulties.