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Updated: June 28, 2025
The preceding view is, as yet, too purely determinist. The due place of ideals, individual and corporate, in their reaction upon the function and the structure of the city, and even upon its material environment, has next to be recognised.
But as environment is a greater power than heredity, so there is only one power greater than environment and that is our power to alter environment. "But that," protests the determinist, "is just what we hold ought to be done." Certainly; only it is just what, on his presupposition, cannot be done.
Let us waive that question for a moment, and consider our second case. Lord Rackrent evicts his tenants. The orthodox method is well known. The Determinist method is different. The Determinist would say: "This peer is what heredity and environment have made him. We cannot blame him for being what he is. We can only blame his environment.
The Determinist would say that Bill Sikes had committed a crime, and that he ought to be restrained, and taught better. You may tell me there seems to be very little difference in the practical results of the two methods. But that is because we have not followed the two methods far enough.
The whole question of free will concentrates itself, then, at this same small point: "Is or is not the appearance of indetermination at this point an illusion?" It is plain that such a question can be decided only by general analogies, and not by accurate observations. The free-willist believes the appearance to be a reality: the determinist believes that it is an illusion.
It is not particularly profitable, again, to seek for Emerson one of the labels out of the philosophic handbooks. Was he the prince of Transcendentalists, or the prince of Idealists? Are we to look for the sources of his thought in Kant or Jacobi, in Fichte or Schelling? How does he stand towards Parmenides and Zeno, the Egotheism of the Sufis, or the position of the Megareans? Shall we put him on the shelf with the Stoics or the Mystics, with Quietist, Pantheist, Determinist? If life were long, it might be worth while to trace Emerson's affinities with the philosophic schools; to collect and infer his answers to the everlasting problems of psychology and metaphysics; to extract a set of coherent and reasoned opinions about knowledge and faculty, experience and consciousness, truth and necessity, the absolute and the relative. But such inquiries would only take us the further away from the essence and vitality of Emerson's mind and teaching. In philosophy proper Emerson made no contribution of his own, but accepted, apparently without much examination of the other side, from Coleridge after Kant, the intuitive,
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