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Updated: May 31, 2025
Each prakritic atom has what may be called a soul, its three-fold astral cause; and an over-soul, or the three-fold spiritual archetype, or causeless cause. Every combination of these atoms, whether a knife, a leaf, an animal, an earth, a sun, or a star, has this soul and oversoul. Once the idea of what is meant by these terms becomes clear, the difficulty in understanding them vanishes.
That magical sense of the brooding Over-Soul which thrills us so in Goethe's poetry never touches his pages. The Wordsworthian intimations of "something far more deeply interfused" never crossed his sensibility; and, as far as he is concerned, Plato might never have existed.
Some passages of "Nature," "The Over-Soul," "The Sphinx," "Uriel," illustrate sufficiently this mood of spiritual exaltation. Emerson's calm temperament never allowed it to reach the condition he sometimes refers to, that of ecstasy. The passage in "Nature" where he says "I become a transparent eyeball" is about as near it as he ever came.
It comes through meditation on the Infinite, and the Formless Absolute the Over-soul of the universe the Brahman of the Vedanta the Self of the philosophers the Atman of the Yogis the personal impersonal God of the devotee and, last, but not least, the humanity of the humanitarian. The mind can think of one thing only. Fear is an acute form of negative concentration worry its chronic form.
He in whom reason dwells can as little appropriate it as his own possession, as he can claim ownership in the breathing air or take in the canopy of heaven. Now, this is essentially what Emerson means by the Over-soul. It is the universal mind, the light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.
Emerson states the case in his "Over-Soul" and "Spiritual Laws" in the true, calm Spinozistic style as if the gentle Jew had come back to earth and dictated his thought, refined, polished and smooth as one of his own little lenses, to the man of Concord. Benedictus Concordia, blessing and peace be with thee! It was really of some importance.
Conscience, they proclaimed, is the voice of God. So surely as the maternal instinct in woman is the voice of universal Nature, so surely is conscience the witness in us that we are indeed "sons of God". If that teaching of the "Over-soul" be the truth, then since the Divine is incarnate in every man, by what other voice can we be guided than by the Divine utterance commanding us to live by a moral law?
But the day of leaders, as such, is gradually closing the people are beginning to lead themselves the public store of reason is slowly being opened the common universal mind and the common over-soul is slowly but inevitably coming into its own. "Let a man believe in God, not in names and places and persons.
"No," Edith answered, rising in her turn; "I am not even sure whether the Buddhists believe themselves to have an over-soul. But why must you go? Wait, and let Arthur walk home with you." "Oh, I shall take a car," Helen said. "I don't in the least mind going alone; and it's time both of us were in bed. Good-night, dear; do try and get rested."
Now that they are gone away from us, I will tell what I know. His was a life which shows that a man cut off from all contact with his brother-thinkers may still be worked upon by the great over-soul of thought: his is the story of a weak man who lived a strong life in a strength greater than his own.
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