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Emerson is a practical as well as an idealistic man. His main concern is to duly keep the trembling balance between the poles of life: the real and the ideal, man and nature, matter and mind, East and West and so on. He tries to harmonize these bipolarities and incarnate the dualistic unity in his life and literature. His neutrality is a result of his unyielding effort to obtain objective truthfulness. Many critics say that after his son Waldo’s death early in 1842, his cosmic optimism was severly changed. Strictly speaking, however, as the characteristics of his bipolar thought, the scepticism inherent in his optimism emerged and thus the trembling balance of both was kept. Through his spiritual metamorphoses, he pursues the harmony and balance of the extremes. Although he is often blamed for showing inconsistency, his “double consciousness” is a key “to the old knots of fate.” Truth exists, not in the isolated vacuum, but in the associated and harmonized whole of individual and bipolar facts. Consequently, it is in the “middle region,” both receiving and transcending contradiction of bipolarity. Since his second mental crisis, Confucianism has become a guide for his philosophy of living. His double consciousness is similar to Confucian wisdom of the Golden Mean. He says, “Life is not a dialectics.” Accordingly, “the noblest theory of life” cannot explain its total meaning. “The true art of life” is, then, “to skate well” amid two ways of life: reception and transcendence, progression and regression. In this sense, his “stupendous antagonism” against fate as a “tyrannous circumstance” leads to a need for his creative metamorphosis, for a new order of life. His antagonism, as Lopez points out, needs “the continual interplay of both positive and negative powers,” and naturally it brings about his “inconsistency.” As Feidelson notes, however, this inconsistency is “the source of his power.” Emerson argues that our “anchorage is quicksand.” Just as nature has a fluid tendency, so our life has a “onward trick,” and we need “change of objects.” In this respect, “the transcendentalism of common life” is a living attitude and philosophy, in search of a “new center.” The self-reliance is acquired through the incessant pursuit of neutrality.