Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1878

Marginal pencil notation on pages 212, 213 of Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1953)

Original is missing.

     Emerson stood for knowledge of the tree of LIFE. Not of good-and-evil, conflict, disharmony, tree of DEATH.

     EMERSON taught men not conflict, not to destroy evil, but to seek and attain LIFE — beyond the good-and-evil complex. He would eat of the Tree of Life, not of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil — tree of DEATH. To fight sin, to resist evil, is the worst practice of it.

    He did not deny that sin and death “exist.” He urged knowledge and practice of the alternative: creation, life.