by any insight of man." Real insight lies in the knowledge that nature will prevail in the long run. Submission, not defiance, is the way of true virtue; but Emerson's idea of submission carries no hint of weakness or passivity. "Loving resignation" has nothing in common with cowardice or timidity or with the complaint that we are helpless, blameless victims of circumstance. Submission, as admirable as it is rare in the "instinctive and heroic races" that believe in destiny, "makes a different impression" in the "weak and vicious people who cast the blame on Fate." Rightly understood, it is a "fatal courage," an "energy of will," an "ecstatic," "heroic" affirmation of life that transforms necessity into freedom precisely by acknowledging its fitness and beauty as well as its inescapability. Submission implies a willingness to accept fate not only as limitation but as justice, "as vindicator, levelling the high, lifting the low, requiring justice in man, and always striking soon or late when justice is not done." Submission comes in the heat of the struggle, in the form of a "revelation"—the "revelation of Thought," which "takes man out of servitude into freedom." This "beatitude," Emerson says—firmly rejecting for once his pet notion of the indwelling divinity in man—"dips from on high down to us and we see. It is not in us so much as we are in it."

This rugged little essay, notwithstanding its Machiavellian view of fate and its Darwinian view of nature, ends in a conclusion worthy of Edwards : freedom lies in the acceptance of necessity. In this context, the more recognizably "Emersonian" elements in the essay take on an appearance quite different from anything we are led to expect by the standard picture of Emerson as a nineteenth-century Pangloss, doggedly trying to convince himself that he lives in the best of all possible worlds. The statement that "evil is good in the making" does not deny the existence of evil; what it denies is the possibility that we can abolish it. It is our refusal to admit limits on our freedom that makes limits evil in the first place, and the "beatitude" that finally enables us to accept those limits dissolves their power to dominate us and thus turns evil into good. ^* The statement

____________________

*	This may also be the import of the striking observation in Emerson's 1841 essay "Heroism," which Melville found so outrageous. "A lockjaw that bends a man's head back to his heels; hydrophobia that makes him bark at his wife and babes; insanity that

-264-