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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
There lies the gold, and there it has slept, and will sleep, unless you can manage the collisions of discourse … to overcome the strong cohesion and detach the sparkling atom to the day.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Clubs”Vernon Parrington seems far off the mark when he takes the Master's final word from the Poet passage examined at the end of the last chapter – “Boys must not touch off their squibs and crackers too near the powder-magazine” – out of its conversational context, citing it as the main piece of evidence for his influential 1927 revaluation of Holmes:
If the mind is free other things will take care of themselves – this pretty much sums up Holmes's social philosophy …
Unfortunately his Brahminism sealed pretty tightly certain windows of his mind that might better have been kept open. A radical in the field of theology where personal concern brought him to serious grappling with the problem, a tolerant rationalist in the realm of the intellect, he remained a cheerfully contented conservative in other fields. He was unconsciously insulated against the currents of social and political thought flowing all about him.
But it is difficult to sum up the social philosophy of a very complex written oeuvre and of a very self-divided man.
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