ances cannot be overprized, yet that he exhibited a "very exclusive and partial development of the moral element. . . . A perfect man should exhibit all the traits of humanity, and should expressly recognize intellectual nature. [Italics mine.] Socrates I call a complete, universal man."
That Emerson's is the radicalism of a conservative bent upon holding fast that which is good is indicated by many other references to the character and teaching of Jesus, to whom he returns again and again with perceptions quickened and sharpened by his secular culture. "How strange," he exclaims, "that Jesus should stand at the head of history, the first character of the world without doubt, but the unlikeliest of all men, one would say, to take such a rank in the world." Approaching the subject from a quite different quarter, he says: "I think the true poetry which mankind craves is that Moral Poem of which Jesus chanted to the ages, stanzas so celestial, yet only stanzas." And finally from still another angle: "The heart of Christianity is the heart of all philosophy."
Much has been written of Emerson's philosophical indebtedness to Kant and his German followers, and to Coleridge and Carlyle and Madame de Staël, who were intermediaries between the German and the New England transcendentalists. It is not in
