Hicks remarked that “Christianity brought a new wisdom. But learning,”
he added cautiously, “depends on the learner.”^52 Emerson’s essay “Immor-
tality” also interprets immortality as an extension of the life of the mind
and the power of the imagination—a yearning for perfection in a context
of an eternal existence. Assuming, like Whitman, that we live in a di-
vinely ordered universe, Emerson said, “I think all sound minds rest on a
certain preliminary conviction, namely, that if it be best the conscious
personal life shall continue, it will continue; if not best, then it will not:
and we, if we saw the whole, should of course see that it was better so.”
Emerson’s essay echoes many of the concepts that permeate Leaves of
Grass, among them that humanity yearns for “stability” and takes “delight
in permanence” and in a sense of “immense time.” Like Whitman, he
posits an orderly universe where “nature never moves by jumps, but al-
ways in steady and supported advances.” Also like Whitman, for whom
“a vast similitude interlocks” the visible and invisible worlds, Emerson
perceives many signs of immortality in the visible world, declaring that
“all I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen.”
And, like Whitman, he feels that the strongest indications of immortality
are the individual’s feeling that it exists and the supposedly universal
yearning for its existence. “Belief in the future is a reward kept only for
those who use it,” he maintains; and, like Kant, he interprets the belief in
eternity and immortality as part of the universal “moral sentiment” that
links man to God. “It is curious,” Emerson says, “to ¤nd the selfsame
feeling, that it is not immortality but eternity—not duration, but a state
of abandonment to the Highest, and so the sharing of His perfection—
appearing in the farthest east and west.” For both Emerson and Whit-
man, this mystic inner enlightenment and conviction are indicators of
eternity and immortality.^53
Eastern religious beliefs concerning the continuity of the species-life
and of the individual lives also impinged on Whitman’s views on death,
particularly in his later years. Like his own thought, the stream of Bud-
dhist thought about these matters is far from unitary. In fact, his concep-
tion of immortality both as some sort of personal survival and an inex-
haustible reservoir of the life-essence is pre¤gured in Buddhist thought.
According to Bruce R. Reichenbach,
Buddhist literature follows the Vedic tradition of avowing a belief
in life after death; what is not so clear is the sense in which this
belief, as a form of immortality, is to be understood. For example,28 / Introduction