His philosophy never acquired form and substance.

His thoughts are not linked in chain, but are just so many precious pearls lightly strung on a silken thread.
In 1852 he wrote in his journal, "I waked last night and bemoaned myself because I had not thrown myself into this deplorable question of slavery, which seems to want nothing so much as a few assured voices.

But then in hours of sanity I recover myself, and say, 'God must govern his own world, and knows his way out of this pit without my desertion of my post, which has none to guard it but me.

I have quite other slaves to free than those negroes, to wit, imprisoned spirits, imprisoned thoughts, far back in the brain of man, far retired in the heaven of invention, and which, important to the republic of man, have no watchman or lover or defender but me,'" thereby naively leaving to God the lesser task.
But he wrongs himself in his own journal, for he did bestir himself and he did speak, and he did not leave the black men to God while he looked after the white; he helped God all he could in his own peculiar, irresolute way.

At the same time no passage from the journals throws more light on the pure soul of the great dreamer.