Transatlantic Echoes

Ralph Waldo Emerson, born in 1803, was not the kind of man to drift with his fellow Americans down the river of popular thought. Like Blake and Coleridge, Emerson was resistant to the science of reduction and atomization. In his essay on nature titled Prospects, he eludes to some very Romantic notions; “Empirical science is apt to cloud the sight, and by the very knowledge of functions and processes to bereave the student of the manly contemplation of the whole.” He continues by praising the naturalist who observes with a mind open to truth gained through “untaught sallies of the spirit” and opposed to the path of learning that calls for “any addition or subtraction or other comparison of known quantities.” He further illuminates his own thinking by saying “when I behold a rich landscape, it is less to my purpose to recite correctly the order and superposition of the strata, than to know why a thought of multitude is lost in a tranquil sense of unity” (50).
Emerson argues that the recognition of the world’s mysterious beauty is what initially attracts men to science “but the end is lost sight of in attention to the means” and it is better that we “prefer imperfect theories, and sentences which contain glimpses of truth, to digested systems which have no one valuable suggestion.” Through literature, “the ends of study” are resolved “by announcing undiscovered regions of thought” and therefore awakening “the torpid spirit” (52).
Emerson, like his European counterparts, exercises a kind of childlike wonder with respect to the natural world. In a passage from Prospects (which reminds this writer of Dr. Ogden’s experience of the sublime when he sighted a little bird in the hedge), Emerson states “in a cabinet of natural history, we become sensible of a certain occult recognition and sympathy in regard to the most unwieldy and eccentric forms of beast, fish, and insect” (51). Although the tone of Emerson's work resembles the lightness of Goethe's, I sense that a theme of the gothic (eg "occult recognition") may underlie many of his musings. I will look out for this aspect as I go for it seems to be becoming a common thread through this blog.

Work cited:
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Selected essays, lectures, and poems. Ed. Richardson, Robert D. Jr. New York: Bantam, 1990.