To covet truth is a very distinguished passion.  Every philosopher says he is pursuing the truth, but this is seldom the case.  As Mr. Bertrand Russell has observed, one reason why philosophers often fail to reach the truth is that often they do not desire to reach it.  Those who are genuinely concerned in discovering what happens to be true are rather the men of science, the naturalists, the historians; and ordinarily they discover it, according to their lights.  The truths they find are never complete, and are not always important; but they are integral parts of the truth, facts and circumstances that help to fill in the picture, and that no later interpretation can invalidate or afford to contradict.  But professional philosophers are usually only apologists:  that is, they are absorbed in defending some vested illusion or some eloquent idea.  Like lawyers or detectives, they study the case for which they are retained, to see how much evidence or semblance of evidence they can gather for the defence, and how much prejudice they can raise against the witnesses for the prosecution; for they know they are defending prisoners suspected by the world, and perhaps by their own good sense, of falsification.  They do not covet truth, but victory and the dispelling of their own doubts.  What they defend is some system, that is, some view about the totality of things, of which men are actually ignorant.  No system would have ever been framed if people had been simply interested in knowing what is true, whatever it may be.  What produces systems is the interest in maintaining against all comers that some favourite or inherited idea of ours is sufficient and right.  A system may contain an account of many things which, in detail, are true enough; but as a system, covering infinite possibilities that neither our experience nor our logic can prejudge, it must be a work of imagination and a piece of human soliloquy.  It may be expressive of human experience, it may be poetical; but how should anyone who really coveted truth suppose that it was true?

Emerson had no system; and his coveting truth had another exceptional consequence:  he was detached, unworldly, contemplative.  When he came out of the conventicle or the reform meeting, or out of the rapturous close atmosphere of the lecture-room, he heard Nature whispering to him:  “Why so hot, little sir?” No doubt the spirit or energy of the world is what is acting in us, as the sea is what rises in every little wave; but it passes through us, and cry out as we may, it will move on.  Our privilege is to have perceived it as it moves.  Our dignity is not in what we do, but in what we understand.  The whole world is doing things.  We are turning in that vortex; yet within us is silent observation, the speculative eye before which all passes, which bridges the distances and compares the combatants.  On this side of his genius Emerson broke away from all conditions of age or country and represented nothing except intelligence itself.