We find that even so serene and enlightened a mind as Emerson's was liable to fall into error like any other mystic's, except that since his mind was unusually perspicuous and intelligent--bordering on the philosophic--this liability was much smaller with him. He suffered from an excess of optimism, which to that extent threw him out of balance at times. A single yet striking instance occurs in his Lecture on War. "Trade, as all men know, is the antagonist of war," he said. Yet it was the greed to secure a larger share of the world's growing trade which led in the last hundred and fifty years to several wars. "History is the record of the mitigation and decline of war," he continued. How little its horror has been mitigated since Emerson delivered that sentence in the year 1853, the slain civilian victims of mass air-raids (30,000 in Rotterdam alone) silently inform us. "The art of war, what with gunpowder and tactics, has made battles less murderous," he concluded. The enormous destructiveness of modern weapons, and especially the fiendish murderousness of atom bombs, flatly and fully contradict this statement. How could so honest a thinker, so lovable a man as Emerson fail so grievously in judgement? It was because his balance was not adequately and correctly established.
-- Notebooks Category 20: What Is Philosophy? > Chapter 3 : Its Requirements > # 451
