are mixed up with innumerable acquired prejudices, erroneous conclusions, deceptive experiences, partial truths, one-sided tendencies.  The clearest insight will often find it hard to decide what is the real instinct, and whether the instinct itself is, in theological language, from God or the devil.  That which was a safe guide for Emerson might not work well with Lacenaire or Jesse Pomeroy.  The cloud of glory which the babe brings with it into the world is a good set of instincts, which dispose it to accept moral and intellectual truths,—­not the truths themselves.  And too many children come into life trailing after them clouds which are anything but clouds of glory.

It may well be imagined that when Emerson proclaimed the new doctrine,—­new to his young disciples,—­of planting themselves on their instincts, consulting their own spiritual light for guidance,—­trusting to intuition,—­without reference to any other authority, he opened the door to extravagances in any unbalanced minds, if such there were, which listened to his teachings.  Too much was expected out of the mouths of babes and sucklings.  The children shut up by Psammetichus got as far as one word in their evolution of an original language, but bekkos was a very small contribution towards a complete vocabulary.  “The Dial” was well charged with intuitions, but there was too much vagueness, incoherence, aspiration without energy, effort without inspiration, to satisfy those who were looking for a new revelation.

The gospel of intuition proved to be practically nothing more or less than this:  a new manifesto of intellectual and spiritual independence.  It was no great discovery that we see many things as truths which we cannot prove.  But it was a great impulse to thought, a great advance in the attitude of our thinking community, when the profoundly devout religious free-thinker took the ground of the undevout and irreligious free-thinker, and calmly asserted and peaceably established the right and the duty of the individual to weigh the universe, its laws and its legends, in his own balance, without fear of authority, or names, or institutions.

All this brought its dangers with it, like other movements of emancipation.  For the Fay ce que voudras of the revellers of Medmenham Abbey, was substituted the new motto, Pense ce que voudras.  There was an intoxication in this newly proclaimed evangel which took hold of some susceptible natures and betrayed itself in prose and rhyme, occasionally of the Bedlam sort.  Emerson’s disciples were never accused of falling into the more perilous snares of antinomianism, but he himself distinctly recognizes the danger of it, and the counterbalancing effect of household life, with its curtain lectures and other benign influences.  Extravagances of opinion cure themselves.  Time wore off the effects of the harmless debauch, and restored the giddy revellers to the regimen of sober thought, as reformed spiritual inebriates.