SOURCE: “Toward a Grammar of Moral Life,” in Emerson and the Conduct of Life: Pragmatic and Ethical Purpose in the Later Work, Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 181-201.

THE UNIVERSAL CIPHER

“I am of the oldest religion”

(W, 12:16).

The assessment of Emerson's later career is complicated by the gradual decline in creative order that he was able to bring to his work after Society and Solitude. The pattern of revision and rearrangement of journal and lecture material into book form that had begun in the 1830s served him well in many respects, but the final process of selection, organization, and revision was always a burden to him, perhaps because it seemed further removed from the original moment of inspiration and lacked the immediacy of a potential living audience.¹ Emerson's personal struggles with authorship were exacerbated in the 1860s by the emotional burdens and material constrictions of the Civil War, and his will and capacity to bring his papers into book form declined precipitously after a fire at his home in 1872.² The resulting situation, in which James E. Cabot took charge of editing much of the later work, prompts caution in analyzing these texts, but less for their validity as Emerson's ideas than for the authority of their combination and arrangement. “There is nothing here that he did not write, and he gave his full approval to whatever was done in the way of selection and arrangement,” Cabot explained, adding, as I pointed out in Chapter 8, “but I cannot say that he applied his mind very closely to the matter” (W, 8:xiii).

Emerson's failure to push toward book completion should not, however, overshadow his intellectual vigor in the 1860s, and the decline in his creative power during the next decade should not obscure the significance of a number of later pieces. Several later texts authoritatively express Emerson's continuing orientation toward the ethical expression of spirituality and extend the pragmatic direction of his work in the 1850s. Emerson's exploration of the interplay of spiritual enlightenment with ethical action continued in Natural History of Intellect, “Poetry and Imagination,” and “Character.” These works chart the resurgence of Emerson's long-held faith in the moral sentiment, which the political experience of the 1850s and 1860s had confirmed and revivified. Emerson composed by accretion, and the roots of his later texts are usually deep in his journals and lectures. But the later texts indicate clearly that moral philosophy permeated all aspects of his thought. Although Emerson could arguably be labeled a moral philosopher throughout his career, that is emphatically true of his final productive decades.

We have noted how the tour of England in 1847-8 had a significant impact on Emerson's shift, the most tangible result of which was English Traits. But England jolted Emerson in another way, by rekindling an attraction to science that had long been part of his intellectual outlook. With fresh exposure to current work in empirical science, Emerson undertook the ambitious project of translating the paradigm of the scientific study of nature into an inquiry into the processes of mind and spirit. Natural History of Intellect was the title Emerson gave to this essentially uncompleted project, a compilation of loosely related speculations that in their present form exemplify what Nancy Craig Simmons has termed the “synthetic” texts Cabot had a hand in arranging.³ But despite its long and tangled history, the work still suggests the original intellectual stimulus that was first embodied in lectures presented in England in 1848. Struck anew by the power of English science, Emerson hoped that the same observation, classification, and generalization that had made “natural history” a revolutionary intellectual discipline might be harnessed in the profounder work of the inner life.⁴

This compelling philosophical project has been largely overlooked in Emerson studies, its state of incompletion contributing to the general assessment of failure and waning intellectual force in his later work. But Natural History of Intellect is significant as a point of reference for Emerson's attempt to correlate knowledge with ethical action. The term natural history, when applied to the mind, implied that the same laws of genesis and development that controlled organic nature also operated on mental processes. If mind and nature operated by the same laws and could be understood with the same rigor, Emerson felt that these laws could be put to work to derive an ordered economy of mental power. But it was the hope, not the finally unpersuasive demonstration, that was intellectually fertile. In a formative journal entry for the project, written shortly before he departed for England in 1847, he noted that “the highest value of natural history & mainly of these new & secular results like the inferences from geology, & the discovery of parallax, & the resolution of Nebulae, is its translation into an universal cipher applicable to Man viewed as Intellect also” (JMN, 10:136). The mind and nature were different manifestations of a seamless whole, and nature stood as the “cipher” of that reality, the means by which the mind could pursue a knowledge that ultimately coincided with self-determination.

The promise of science had a formative influence on Emerson's early career, but he increasingly felt that a more rigorous attempt might be made to specify the correlations that existed between the physical world and the mind. In entertaining the idea of applying a scientific model to the mind, Emerson implied that the success of pure observation, the mark of scientific advancement, might also characterize self-reflexive knowledge. The scientist observes and compiles facts, and from these observations, classifications and laws emerge. Emerson was confident that similar results would obtain if the mind were closely observed, and when he heard lectures by Richard Owen and Michael Faraday in England, and attended meetings of the Geological Society of London, that conviction was renewed. Science became again, at least for a time, his paradigm for philosophical speculation.⁵ Emerson measured himself, with a sense of vulnerability, against the scientific example that he saw: “One could not help admiring the irresponsible security and happiness of the attitude of the naturalist; sure of admiration for his facts, sure of their sufficiency” (W, 12:3). To be “sure”—this was a quality that appealed to the Emerson of the late 1840s, when certainty had become a scarce commodity.

Natural history seemed to offer this promise of stable knowledge at a crucial moment, when Emerson had been battling with skepticism about the capacity of the self to make an impact on the world through willed choice. The subject of nature, and the example of the naturalist, offered an alternative to the introspection inevitable to the philosophy of self-culture, while also suggesting that certainties, even in the inner life, might be approached. It was a welcome and provocative stimulus to the Emerson who had risked so much of himself in the introspective probings of “Experience.” It is therefore significant to find, in the aftermath of “Experience,” an important credo: “I believe in the existence of the material world as the expression of the spiritual or the real, and in the impenetrable mystery which hides (and hides through absolute transparency) the mental nature, I await the insight which our advancing knowledge of material laws shall furnish” (W, 12:5). But it is a credo that admits “impenetrable mystery” and thus suggests the bounds of its own capacity to know fully.

Emerson's reaction to the claims of science to certainty was the basis of that credo. He wondered whether “a similar enumeration” might not “be made of the laws and powers of the Intellect.” Would these not “possess the same claims on the student”? Enthralled by the power of facts, he was driven to search for them in the more problematic realm of the intellect: “Could we have, that is, the exhaustive accuracy of distribution which chemists use in their nomenclature and anatomists in their descriptions, applied to a higher class of facts; to those laws, namely, which are common to chemistry, anatomy, astronomy, geometry, intellect, morals and social life;—laws of the world?” (W, 12:3-4). Emerson's list is carefully structured to move from the more concrete and factual objects of study to the more abstract and subjective ones. Anatomy yields to astronomy, also a physical science, but of greater compass, which in turn yields to geometry, a discipline with a different, though no less compelling, aura of certainty. But the move from the physical solidity of astronomy to the abstract mathematical truths of geometry prepares him for the greater leap from geometry to intellect; his progressions into morals and social life are deeper forays into the regions in which speculation must replace empiricism. It is here, of course, that we find the seeds of his project's failure—but also its enormous challenge and appeal. His assumption, finally, was that the “certainty” of empirical observation was one manifestation of a system of symbolic resonances that constituted our perception of the world. The scientist's capacity to move from fact to law was the evidence that the spiritual world showed itself in the material.

That such correlations between the material and the spiritual existed, Emerson had never doubted. His immersion in scientific reading in the early 1830s, leavened by his background in natural theology, Platonism, and his new reading of the Swedenborgian Sampson Reed, had helped him to develop a theory of corresponding levels of reality, in which the phenomena of the physical world were reflections of a deeper series of spiritual laws.⁶ Nature thus became the means for the education of the mind, and the key intellectual task was to perceive and express the analogy between physical and spiritual phenomena. Such perception, and its correlative expression, were problematic, standing at the crossroads between ecstatic intuition, symbolic perception, metaphysical speculation, and exact scientific observation. But the conviction that in certain moments a glimpse of unified being might be available, a perception that would prove the connection between the physical and the spiritual, was the motivating promise of much of his intellectual career.

The revelation of the spirit through the processes of nature served Emerson best as a working hypothesis, or a basis from which to reason by analogy. Its fragility as a philosophical concept is suggested by the eventual failure of Natural History of Intellect, which he himself also seemed to feel. The most persuasive part of the project is the statement of the method and assumptions, not the effort to work them out. Emerson's premise that laws and operations of the mind could be mastered in the way that the forms of nature had been was far from a dry statement of procedural assumptions; it was the evidence of a hope in the mind's growing comprehension of being. Ironically, as Emerson's conviction of the possibility of specifying the identity of nature and the mind grew, building a momentum for a more thorough analysis, the suggestive potential of the doctrine decreased. Reality, he thought at times, could be conceived as a continuum between mind and matter, or perhaps a series of ascending planes of significance, or a material surface under which depths of spiritual truths were to be found. All of these poetic images served well as a framework for speculation, even though they could not sustain the weight of minute and detailed analysis.

An important moment in the initial development of his project was recorded in a journal entry of 1848 (JMN, 10:316-17), written under the influence of a recent visit to the British Museum. The renewed exposure to science had reinforced Emerson's sense of the monistic unity of matter and mind, and he expressed that insight in terms of a unifying power. “One power streams into all natures,” he noted, pursuing the implications of that law into an analysis of mind. “Mind is vegetable, & grows thought out of thought as joint out of joint in corn.” This was the first of several analogies in which mental processes were considered in terms of the natural world. “Mind is chemical, & shows all the affinities & repulsions of chemistry, & works by presence.” The analogy of chemistry is followed by the notations “Mind grows, crystallizes, electricity,” as Emerson stretches to capture the suggestions of the mind's conformity to natural law. This insight might be regarded as the starting point for his speculation on natural history, but it marks its end point as well. Even though it illumined the dark connection between spirit and matter, it was a flash of insight hard to sustain. The entry continues in an abbreviated but fascinating recapitulation of Emerson's entire structure of metaphysical belief:

This all comes of a higher fact, one substance
          Mind knows the way because it has trode it before
          Knowledge is becoming of that thing
          Somewhere sometime some eternity we have played this game
                    before
          Go thro' British Museum & we are full of occult sympathies
          I was azote

The curious sense of completion contained in the bare bones of this sketch suggests the problem of the entire project—the prosaic analysis and descriptions of exactly how the mind is “vegetable” or “chemical” constitute a significant reduction of intellectual intensity from the initial recognition of the similarity. These poetic assertions have greater impact when they remain suggestive, free of heavy explanatory comment.

The last statement is a three-word summation of what Emerson defined a decade later (1857) as the laws of his “philosophy”: “1. Identity, whence comes the fact that metaphysical faculties & facts are the transcendency of physical. 2. Flowing, or transition, or shooting the gulf, the perpetual striving to ascend to a higher platform, the same thing in new & higher forms” (JMN, 14:191-2). The identity of the human self with so distant a form as the mineral is the telling exemplification of the law of identity.⁷ The capacity to sense that identity is itself the evidence of the series of similarly patterned levels of reality that for Emerson was the form of the universe. “Mind knows the way because it has trode it before.”

But to read Natural History of Intellect is a frustrating experience. It is permeated with the Neoplatonism that marks the preceding journal entry, but also claims a skepticism of all metaphysics: “I confess to a little distrust of that completeness of system which metaphysicians are apt to affect. 'Tis the gnat grasping the world. All these exhaustive theories appear indeed a false and vain attempt to introvert and analyze the Primal Thought” (W, 12:12). One of the attractions the scientific method held for Emerson was its seeming release from rational systematization. Its inductiveness suggested a certain pragmatic humility and reemphasized close observation as a key to the truth. “We have invincible repugnance to introversion, to study of the eyes instead of that which the eyes see,” he wrote, seeing in rational and deductive metaphysical systems a damaging solipsism. For Emerson, “the natural direction of the intellectual powers is from within outward” (W, 12:12). Natural History of Intellect shares with Nature the belief that natural objects serve as a symbol or cipher of a larger reality, but this devaluation of the introspective and the deductively rational sets quite a different tone. Nature had devolved ultimately to the moral and pragmatic injunction “Build, therefore, your own world” (CW, 1:45). Similarly, Natural History of Intellect is finally less a treatise of philosophical speculation or scientific observation than a search for usable truth for the conduct of life. “My metaphysics are to the end of use,” Emerson declared. “I wish to know the laws of this wonderful power [mind], that I may domesticate it.” The object of observing the mind, as one would observe the facts of the natural world, is “to learn to live with it wisely, court its aid, catch sight of its splendor, feel its approach, hear and save its oracles and obey them.” And just as he had given the final and authoritative words of Nature to his figure of the “Orphic Poet,” he admits in Natural History of Intellect that philosophy “will one day be taught by poets”—the poet “is believing; the philosopher, after some struggle, having only reasons for believing” (W, 12:13-14).

Emerson's plan of observing the intellect thus subtly becomes a plea for the moral advantages of its cultivation and an argument for the greater social valuation of intellectual pursuits. Moreover, he aspires not only to describe the mind, but to offer a practical guidebook for intellectual development. His remark on “instinct,” which he has described as the groundwork of the intellect, typifies the nature of his pragmatic orientation toward epistemology. “To make a practical use of this instinct in every part of life constitutes true wisdom, and we must form the habit of preferring in all cases this guidance, which is given as it is used” (W, 12:67). The applications of this attitude amount to no more, really, than the development of a habit for the instinctual and a faith that acting out of it will increase its availability. Emerson has instinct enough to know that the further specification of the means of intellectual cultivation would be reductive, narrowing the appeal to openness that he is trying to broaden. This limitation offers one example of the irony of Natural History of Intellect. Despite its rhetoric of scientific specificity and close observation of the factual, the work's greatest accomplishment is its demonstration of the impenetrable mystery of the intellect.

We might borrow the very terms that Emerson uses to describe the basis of the intellect to indicate how the work thus undercuts itself. For Emerson, all intellectual power is a reduction to instinct, the individual's access to the fundamental power of being. Contact with that source of power requires a constant discarding of impediments, a perpetual turning back to an unobstructed rediscovery of one's primary orientation. Similarly, the reader of Natural History of Intellect finds that Emerson's rational accounts of the working of the mind are less impressive than his images of its mystery. Emerson's desire to describe the intellect in the terms he has set forth is thus undermined by the operation of the very power he has described, instinct, when the reader directs it to the text. I have in mind in particular Emerson's strangely compelling presentation of the metaphor of the stream of consciousness: “In my thought I seem to stand on the bank of a river and watch the endless flow of the stream, floating objects of all shapes, colors and natures; nor can I much detain them as they pass, except by running beside them a little way along the bank. But whence they come or whither they go is not told me” (W, 12:16). This image of the self helplessly witnessing the processes of the mind overpowers most of the talk about the precise observation and practical use of intellect. Emerson's adept dramatization of the desperation involved in running for a closer look drains the text of its assurance of power. Where is the surety that he has envied in the scientist? In the face of such absolute mystery, talk of certainty seems out of place. This eruption of vulnerability clouds the whole enterprise of tracing the mind's “natural history,” but it stands as one of the valuable lessons of this divided and revealing work. Emerson stressed instinct as the primary power of intellect because he saw it as the entry to “that unknown country in which all the rivers of our knowledge have their fountains, and which, by its qualities and structure, determines both the nature of the waters and the direction in which they flow” (W, 12:33). The metaphor of the stream is extended to include the mysterious source of the waters, emphasizing that the value of instinct is its contiguity with this fundamental mystery.

Emerson's motivating paradigm of scientific observation is thus inadequate to the elucidation of the mind, but he is left with other means of binding his observations together, loci of value rather than observations or categories. Primary among them is a faith in the essential identity of reality, the assumption that has underlain his entire project. “There is in Nature a parallel unity which corresponds to the unity in the mind and makes it available.” That this unity has a mysterious source does not weaken Emerson's conviction that “without identity at base, chaos must be forever” (W, 12:19-20). This faith in a final order compensates for the vulnerability of our limited knowledge, and is closely related to a valuation of “impressionability,” the constant openness to perception, as an ethical quality. This is the same value that he expounded in “Success,” when he turned the definition of successful living to a renewed attention to the quality of open sensitivity. In Natural History of Intellect he bolsters that idea with reference to our sense of our place in the larger cosmic order. “The universe is traversed by paths or bridges or stepping-stones across the gulfs of space in every direction. To every soul that is created is its path, invisible to all but itself” (W, 12:42). The responsibility of the intellect is to maintain those paths and thus retain a vital connection with the order of things, which is, after all, a part of ourselves, as we are a part of that order. “The conduct of Intellect must respect nothing so much as preserving the sensibility,” alive to the nuances that confirm the complexity and richness of reality. Everything of which we remain sensible, after all, helps us to discover or reconfirm another part of ourselves, so that self-knowledge and open impressionability become one and the same. “That mind is best,” Emerson declared, “which is most impressionable” (W, 12:43).

Daily life must be imbued with this kind of heightened sensibility, which can show itself as the capacity to value the ordinary as a revelation. “There are times when the cawing of a crow, a weed, a snow-flake, a boy's willow whistle, or a farmer planting in his field is more suggestive to the mind than the Yosemite gorge or the Vatican would be in another hour” (W, 12:43). This catalog of the homely and rural elevates the quality of the day and the hour to a quest for divinity in the ordinary conduct of life, but made extraordinary through a consecrated openness of the senses and the mind. Such “suggestive” moments become occasions in which the assumption of faith in a holistic order is reconfirmed through symbolic seeing.

The valuation of “impressionability” entails a similar emphasis on “transition,” an energetic capacity to change and adapt. Although impressionability is a word with passive connotations, it has a latent orientation toward the seizure of the world in perception. “Transition is the attitude of power,” Emerson asserted, thus emphasizing the necessity of an impressionability turned active. This is the mood of “Circles,” and it emerges fresh in Emerson's later analysis of the mind's response to uncertainty and illusion. “The universe exists only in transit, or we behold it shooting the gulf from the past to the future” (W, 12:59). Richard Poirier's persuasive meditation on the Emersonian attitude of “transition” has suggested the fundamental importance of Emerson's distrust of stasis in any form and its continuing value as an example.⁸ It is telling that Emerson sounded this note well beyond “Circles.” Embedded in Natural History of Intellect, the thrust of which was to reduce the operations of mind to factual laws, we find this energetic declaration: “A fact is only a fulcrum of the spirit. It is the terminus of a past thought, but only a means now to new sallies of the imagination and new progress of wisdom” (W, 12:59). Facts, as tools, are only the means by which we work.

The method of science never functions in Natural History of Intellect as a true methodology, but only as a scaffolding, discarded when Emerson's meditation on intellect becomes self-supporting. It metaphorically suggests the fundamental connection between nature and the mind, but as metaphor rather than as method, it is enabling, returning him by a different route to his old faith in energy. Since it is the leap itself that Emerson values, he honors whatever brings him to the edge. In Nature, the energy for movement was derived from the mystical charge best described in the transparent eyeball passage. In Natural History of Intellect the mysticism has largely evaporated, leaving the complex promise of natural history, and the desire to employ a corresponding economy of mind and spirit, as the remaining source of power.

THE TROPE OF PERCEPTION

“For the value of a trope is that the hearer is one: and indeed Nature itself is a vast trope, and all particular natures are tropes”

(W, 8:15).

Despite its empiricist rhetoric, Natural History of Intellect was at bottom a poetic project, a consideration of the relation of power to the creation and recognition of symbolic forms. It aimed to achieve a deeper symbolic knowing, an apprehension of the correspondence and ultimate unity of the physical and the mental. This aim was a restatement through the metaphor of science of the centrality of poetic knowledge. This recurring emphasis on symbolic perception in Emerson's later work is important, for as he replaced the wilder voice of his earlier work with a more tempered and pragmatic one, he reduced the potential of his work for emotional nurture. His pragmatic emphasis, as we have seen, was in part an attempt to compensate for the scarcity and unreliability of the ecstatic moment, and he continued to explore ways of reaffirming truths that he had earlier asserted by vision. The claim of symbolic knowledge, and of poetry in particular, thus remained a crucially stable element in Emerson's transition from mystic visionary to pragmatic moralist.

Among Emerson's most significant explorations of the nature of symbolic knowledge and its connection to moral action is “Poetry and Imagination,” an essay whose significance has been recently noted by both Barbara Packer and Ronald A. Bosco. Like Natural History of Intellect, the essay has its roots in the late 1840s and developed over the next two decades in Emerson's lecturing.⁹ The epistemological concern fundamental to Natural History of Intellect also drives “Poetry and Imagination,” which begins its exploration of the symbolic consciousness with an acknowledgment that “the perception of matter is made the common sense, and for cause.” As in Nature, the perception of matter is shown to be only the first stage of perception, but crucial in the development of the individual's capacity to establish a relation with the order of things. “We must learn the homely laws of fire and water; we must feed, wash, plant, build. These are ends of necessity, and first in the order of Nature. Poverty, frost, famine, disease, debt, are the beadles and guardsmen that hold us to common sense. The intellect, yielded up to itself, cannot supersede this tyrannic necessity” (W, 8:3). We might compare this passage with the discussion of the use of nature as “Commodity” in Nature to understand the rather significant change of focus in Emerson's later work. Nature had stressed the successful use of the world to solve human material needs; “Poetry and Imagination” describes, with less confidence and considerably more gravity, the “tyrannic” and threatening qualities of material necessity that the “common sense” reinforces.

Although this depiction of the tragic limitations of human experience is consonant with the more somber strains of “Experience” and “Fate,” it has a larger purpose in Emerson's description of the working of the symbolic imagination. The common sense, as he calls it, is the first and most elemental reminder that intellectual power is a power of synthesis. The mind has no power outside the range of possible convergences that nature represents. One manifestation of romanticism, represented in its extremest form by Poe, posited the power of intellect as arrayed against the material world, and the poet as one who struggles against the restraints that materiality and empiricism represent.¹⁰ Emerson's opening acknowledgment of the material “ends of necessity” is a recognition not only that rebellion against nature is finally impossible but that it is undesirable as well, for the nature of its impossibility is self-destruction. Common sense respects “the existence of matter, not because we can touch it or conceive of it, but because it agrees with ourselves, and the universe does not jest with us, but is in earnest, is the house of health and life” (W, 8:3). Materiality is thus the most fundamental expression of the governing laws that establish our identity, and the limitations represented by these laws are in this sense forms of self-expression.

Emerson's project in “Poetry and Imagination” is to develop this insight about material knowing into a recognition that symbolic knowing is also a form of self-knowledge. The limits imposed by materiality are, as Emerson reads them, the signs of a fundamental cosmic unity, and the apprehension of this unity is the work of poetry. The imagination is not, however, simply an echo of the life of the senses or of empirical knowledge. Emerson stresses “the independent action of the mind” with its “strange suggestions and laws,” and describes a quality of thought that resonates with his opening discussion of matter: “a certain tyranny which springs up in his own thoughts, which have an order, method and beliefs of their own, very different from the order which this common sense uses” (W, 8:6). Emerson's recurrence to the term tyranny to describe the workings of the mind implies that its laws are as ironclad as those of matter, and his reference to the “order, method and beliefs” of the mind suggests a uniform structure of mental activity that was the fundamental assumption of Natural History of Intellect.

But Emerson develops his theory of mind less in terms of its static structural elements than in terms of process and metamorphosis, arguing that the tyranny of mind is its persistent movement toward unity. Commenting on the tendency of science to rise to ever higher and more inclusive general classifications, he concludes that “all multiplicity rushes to be resolved into unity” (W, 8:7). It is this perceptual “rush” that Emerson finds at the basis of symbolic perception, a process in which the mind discerns the metamorphosis of a physical form into part of a larger pattern or order, the form serving as the entry into that order. Poetic knowledge is thus the pursuit of the larger contextual pattern that will make sense of an individual object by demonstrating its relation to the whole. Emerson takes reading itself as a metaphor for perception, a striking moment in which the reader is asked to perceive metaphorically the process of metaphor: “Natural objects, if individually described and out of connection, are not yet known, since they are really parts of a symmetrical universe, like words of a sentence; and if their true order is found, the poet can read their divine significance orderly as in a Bible.” The relation between the establishment of a scientific order and the workings of language confirms the assumption that “identity of law, perfect order in physics, perfect parallelism between the laws of Nature and the laws of thought exist,” or more simply that “there is one animal, one plant, one matter and one force” (W, 8:8-9).

This pervasive unity suggests the limits of the empirical method of science, which attempts to isolate a phenomenon rather than find its larger context and is therefore “false by being unpoetical” (W, 8:10). Poetic knowing, which is fundamentally a recognition that perception is connection, strives not to isolate objects from each other or the object of perception from the perceiving subject. Emerson's recognition of the self-referential element of symbolic perception makes the perceiver of a symbol also a symbol, an argument that is crucial to his eventual reading of poetic perception as a form of the moral imagination. “For the value of a trope is that the hearer is one: and indeed Nature itself is a vast trope, and all particular natures are tropes” (W, 8:15). In the resonant ambiguity of Emerson's phrase, “the hearer” is “one,” a trope, that is, in the sense of being similar to what he or she perceives. But the hearer is also “one” in the sense of having achieved oneness with the object of perception, and with the unity that is the fundamental quality of the cosmos. Symbolic perception is a means of transcending the self through participating momentarily in the rush of energy that defines both the natural order and the pattern of the mind. “The endless passing of one element into new forms, the incessant metamorphosis, explains the rank which the imagination holds in our catalogue of mental powers. The imagination is the reader of these forms.” It is significant that Emerson again uses reading to represent this participation in the widening of a consciousness of our larger context, expanding it into an image of the cosmos as a vast language. The “productions and changes of Nature” come to be viewed by the poet “as the nouns of language” (W, 8:15). Used “representatively” they provide interpretive access to the same grammar that provides and defines the poet's identity as well.

There is pleasure as well as knowledge in reading this text of nature. Emerson's testimony to that pleasure is striking, particularly in light of the waning of his dependence on mystical ecstasy that we have traced. “Every new object so seen”—seen, that is, as part of the vocabulary of natural unity—“gives a shock of agreeable surprise” (W, 8:15). Emerson's description of the experience of recognizing that the identity of one thing slides perennially into the identity of another, in an ever-enlarging whole, is permeated with a sense of bodily excitement and emotional intensity that is, many readers might be tempted to say, positively un-Emersonian. If he has found the ecstasy of mystical rapture fleeting and precarious, his closest emotional substitute has become the Bacchanalian quality of the peak moment of poetic insight, the perception of the collapse of individual identity into a newer form: “The act of imagination is ever attended by pure delight. It infuses a certain volatility and intoxication into all Nature. It has a flute which sets the atoms of our frame in a dance. Our indeterminate size is a delicious secret which it reveals to us. The mountains begin to dislimn, and float in the air” (W, 8:18). This dizzying rapture that seems to threaten the solidity of the material world is a result of experiencing the flow of energy that confirms the unity of nature, a flow Emerson had identified earlier as the principal law or quality of the mind.

Emerson denotes the experiential apprehension of this law as imagination, and his description of the phenomenon of imaginative perception stresses the sense in which it is a form of knowing in which mind and object are both encompassed in a comprehensive energy: “The imagination exists by sharing the ethereal currents.” Such a phenomenon is essentially one of process rather than stasis; knowing is an event, one that defines the knower as it reveals the world. The “central identity” moves “with divine flowings, through remotest things.” This is also the movement of the mind in symbolic perception. The poet “can detect essential resemblances in natures … because he is sensible of the sweep of the celestial stream, from which nothing is exempt.” As Emerson emphasizes, that inclusiveness extends to the poet or perceiver, whose act of perception is a surrender to the “celestial stream” of identity. “His own body is a fleeting apparition,—his personality as fugitive as the trope he employs” (W, 8:21).

Yet as ethereal as this description of symbolic perception seems—“In certain hours we can almost pass our hand through our own body” (W, 8:21)—it is, like the pursuit of scientific perception in Natural History of Intellect, ultimately linked to a moral imperative. The capacity of the self to blend into a larger flow of cosmic identity is at bottom a moral quality for Emerson, indicating the larger possibilities of the self and the grounding of moral decisions in self-transcendence. In moving from the description of the symbolic perception essential to poetry to a consideration of the effects of poetry in a larger social framework, Emerson argues that the value of poetry lies in its capacity to address human possibility: “All writings must be in a degree exoteric, written to a human should or would, instead of to the fatal is: this holds even of the bravest and sincerest writers” (W, 8:30-1). The poet's address to human potential is grounded in the recognition that the human mind is linked to vastly larger powers, a revelation that the moment of symbolic insight has provided. The ethereal sense of the self's evaporation into a larger stream of natural energy thus gives way to the recognition that larger power is always the power to do and that poetry is finally a pragmatic discipline. “To the poet the world is virgin soil; all is practicable; the men are ready for virtue; it is always time to do right.” Poetry is the expression of the reality and immediacy of moral choice, for the poet “affirms the applicability of the ideal law to this moment and the present knot of affairs” (W, 8:31).

Poetry is vision, but as Emerson describes it here, it is completed only in the grounding of that vision in practical power. “None of your parlor or piano verse, none of your carpet poets, who are content to amuse, will satisfy us. Power, new power, is the good which the soul seeks” (W, 8:63). Emerson associates that power with the concept of “metamorphosis,” another term, like “transition,” that captured his sense of reality as process. Such terms became increasingly crucial in his later philosophical vocabulary. Metamorphic energy comes to represent the condition of human possibility. “The nature of things is flowing, a metamorphosis. The free spirit sympathizes not only with the actual form, but with the power or possible forms.” Although he admits the conservative tendency to “rest on to-day's forms,” he sees that inertia as a contributing element to the rush of energy that accompanies the renewed recognition of change. “Hence the shudder of joy with which in each clear moment we recognize the metamorphosis, because it is always a conquest, a surprise from the heart of things” (W, 8:71). The term conquest suggests initially the poet's triumphant perception, but its more lasting implication is that in the act of perception the individual is conquered, overtaken by power that had been heretofore unknown.

That sense of surprised surrender is finally the product of the nature of perception as a series of enlarging generalizations in which the mind is carried from the particular to an inclusive whole. “Power of generalizing differences men,” Emerson argues, equating the capacity “of not pausing but going on” with “the Divine effort in a man” (W, 8:72). He discusses this as a form of aesthetic energy, in which the poet is elevated by a larger capacity for generalization, but this aesthetic energy is a form of the moral energy that is required in the transcendence of the limited desires and perspectives of the self into a larger will for the benefit of the whole. “Poetry and Imagination” reminds us how closely Emerson had interwoven his aesthetic concerns with his moral perspective, and of the increasingly important role his aesthetics of symbolic perception played in the growing predominance of the ethical in his later outlook.

THE HABIT OF ACTION

“The progress of religion is steadily to its identity with morals”

(JMN, 16:209).

As noted earlier, Emerson had turned to the concept of character in Essays: Second Series (1844) to express the increasingly social and moral grounding of his spirituality. The renewed emphasis on moral theory that resulted from his pragmatic turn permeates most of his work from the middle 1840s on and is encapsulated in a second essay on character, published in the North American Review in 1866.¹¹ Relegated to deep obscurity in the general neglect of his later work, “Character” is nevertheless a significant text for assessing Emerson's transformation of the doctrine of self-culture under the pressures of fleeting mysticism and rising ethical responsibility. The essay reflects Emerson's renewed emphasis on ethical action, and its tone of earnest determination reflects his response to the nation's moral and political crisis. The essay makes it clear that purpose and commitment are central values, and the threats of introspective paralysis and constitutional restriction enunciated in “Experience” and “Fate” seem to have lost some of their urgency. Although the essay is not explicitly political, its edge of hard-won confidence in moral fortitude reflects an attempt to find and maintain moral bearings in the aftermath of the antislavery struggle and the Civil War. The “steadfastness” that Emerson praises as essential to the moral character (W, 10:102) has not been abstractly deduced but has proved itself as both a personal and national resource in difficult times.

“Character” is most significant for the force with which it restates Emerson's doctrine of the moral sentiment, the foundation of his earliest thinking and the most important point of continuity in his thinking from first to last. He had identified it in a sermon of 1827 as “the main, central, prominent power of the soul” (CS, 1:116), and it had remained a crucial point of reference, the various depictions of his vision of self-development always circling back to this fundamental quality of the self. His explication of the concept of character as a version of the moral sentiment marks no new philosophical departure, but it is a good example of Emerson's later emphatic dependence on the ethical as the subsuming spiritual category. Called in 1867 to address an organizational meeting of the religious radicals who were forming the Free Religious Association, he made clear his conviction that religion was less a matter of speculation than action: “Pure doctrine always bears fruit in pure benefits. It is only by good works, it is only on the basis of active duty, that worship finds expression” (W, 11:480). He had come to feel that “the progress of religion is steadily to its identity with morals” (JMN, 16:209), and the moral category had become the means of testing and confirming both religious experience and perceptual validity.

Even though “Character,” with its exposition of the moral sense, marks no major philosophical departure, it does suggest how the national crisis had confirmed Emerson's faith. The antislavery movement and the Civil War were crusades that had tested and might restore the moral fiber of American culture. Emerson's evocation of qualities such as steadfastness, stability, and determination represents an important tonal shift from the aggressive defiance of earlier texts like the “Divinity School Address” and “Self-Reliance.” Emerson describes character as the representation of the moral sense in the cumulative action of the individual, “the habit of action from the permanent vision of truth” (W, 10:120). It is the product of two potentially contradictory factors, namely, the exercise of the will and the orientation of the self toward a universal rather than a personal good. The construction of character is a result of perpetual work in both these directions, in each of which it is vulnerable to a different form of skepticism: a surrender to fate or a narrowing pursuit of selfish ends. The battle against these forms of skepticism, the obstacles to the achievement of character, constitutes the narrative of Emerson's later work.

Emerson locates the work of character building in the perpetual necessity of choice, the condition of life that gives to every moment a moral quality. The fatalism that loomed as such a pressing issue in “Experience” and “Fate” has been displaced in “Character” by an unequivocal affirmation of the freedom of human moral expression: “Morals implies freedom and will. The will constitutes the man.” Emerson argues that the distinction of humanity among the species lies in this capacity for choice: “Choice is born in him; here is he that chooses” (W, 10:91-2). The cumulative lesson of the 1850s and 1860s, decades saturated with political challenge and struggle, has been to reaffirm the centrality of will. “For the world is a battle-ground; every principle is a war-note, and the most quiet and protected life is at any moment exposed to incidents which test your firmness” (W, 10:87), he wrote in “Perpetual Forces,” another late essay with close affinities to “Character.” “Character” reflects that shift in moral vision with its emphasis on will, choice, and action as the fundamental expressions of the moral sentiment.

Emerson is careful, however, to specify that “will, pure and perceiving, is not wilfulness” (W, 10:92), a distinction that allows the power of choice to be insulated from narrowly individualistic ends: “Morals is the direction of the will on universal ends. He is immoral who is acting to any private end. He is moral,—we say it with Marcus Aurelius and with Kant,—whose aim or motive may become a universal rule, binding on all intelligent beings.” The consideration of universal ends thus lies at the foundation of all human virtues, which are “special directions of this motive” (W, 10:92). The cooperative enterprise that the antislavery movement and the Civil War represented had demonstrated how the individual will might be conjoined into a larger social movement with an end that went beyond the individual. That possibility had not been excluded from his moral reasoning in the 1830s, of course, but his problem then had been a different one—to separate the individual from a suffocating social identity, whose moral ends were questionable.

In “Character,” Emerson points to unrestrained individualism as the fundamental moral challenge. A deeper problem for the moral life than fatalism is the fundamental antagonism between “the wishes and interests of the individual” who “craves a private benefit,” and the pursuit of an “absolute good.” The individual's cultivation of the capacity to renounce private interest in deference to a larger good is “the moral discipline of life” (W, 10:94). Despite the renunciatory and ascetic nature of this principle, the essay communicates a celebratory quality, according with the energetic rush of fulfillment associated with symbolic perception in “Poetry and Imagination.” The moral sentiment “puts us in place. It centres, it concentrates us. It puts us at the heart of Nature, where we belong, in the cabinet of science and of causes, there where all the wires terminate which hold the world in magnetic unity, and so converts us into universal beings” (W, 10:95). The imagery of circuitry suggests both the instantaneous unity and mysterious power of the moral sense, but we should not overlook Emerson's use of a term drawn from an entirely different world of discourse, the suggestion of conversion. He is cognizant of a resistance to a religion of morals alone, arising from the “fear that pure truth, pure morals, will not make a religion for the affections” (W, 10:119). All the emotional dynamics concentrated in the Protestant concept of conversion are therefore lent to the action of the moral sentiment. Although Emerson notes that “Truth, Power, Goodness, Beauty, are its varied names,” he also ties the moral sense to more specific and historically resonant religious terminology: “the light, the seed, the Spirit, the Holy Ghost, the Comforter, the Dæmon, the still, small voice” (W, 10:95-7). The burden of this assertion is not only to establish the universality of the moral sense but to imbue it with the emotional and spiritual coloration that will save it from being perceived as mere legalism.

From this perspective, religious forms represent the mythical expression of an enduring moral energy. “The religions we call false were once true. They also were affirmations of the conscience correcting the evil customs of their times.” Although the comment seems at first to affirm religious forms and institutions, its deeper strategy is to undermine a belief in the stability of any particular historical manifestation of religion, including, of course, Protestant Christianity as most of Emerson's readers would have known it. “The populace drag down the gods to their own level, and give them their egotism; whilst in Nature is none at all, God keeping out of sight, and known only as pure law, though resistless” (W, 10:103-4). Emerson thus offers an assurance of religious development based on the capacity of the moral sentiment to evoke perpetually a critique of the religious forms in which it is periodically embodied. “Men will learn to put back the emphasis peremptorily on pure morals, always the same, not subject to doubtful interpretation, with no sale of indulgences, no massacre of heretics, no female slaves, no disfranchisement of woman, no stigma on race; to make morals the absolute test, and so to uncover and drive out the false religions” (W, 10:114). The progression of religious abuses is notable, for it equates the modern movements for feminism and racial equality with the struggle against the most egregious historical examples of religious bigotry. The immediate relevance of the working of this law is clear: “It is only yesterday that our American churches, so long silent on Slavery, and notoriously hostile to the Abolitionist, wheeled into line for Emancipation” (W, 10:114). These reform movements have thus become the gauges of the workings of the moral sentiment.

This analysis of the course of American religion articulates Emerson's larger concern about the social context within which the development of character must occur, and it suggests his concern about the moral condition of the new American culture that was emerging from the war. Emerson's sense that a new and less institutionalized form of religion was emerging was much in accord with the spirit of the Free Religious Association, which hoped to foster a “radical” religion based on noncreedal theological speculation and a decentered, individualized worship through ethical commitment and moral work.¹² Emerson recognized that during the 1840-60 period, American culture's moral impetus had passed from the churches to the reform movements. “The churches are obsolete,” he wrote in 1859, because “the reforms do not proceed from the churches” (JMN, 14:236). The sign of that cultural shift was confirmed for him in the growing schism between the church and the intellectuals. “Every intellectual man is out of the old Church,” he noted in 1867. “All the young men of intelligence are on what is called the radical side” (JMN, 16:72). “Character” and other writings that reflect the experience of the 1850s and 1860s suggest that Emerson had been profoundly impressed with the coalescence of the ethical imperative of antislavery with the national political purpose, and that this conjunction of events had a renewing effect on his moral confidence. “We see the dawn of a new era,” he wrote in 1865, “worth to mankind all the treasure & all the lives it has cost, yes, worth to the world the lives of all this generation of American men, if they had been demanded.” He noted the cost in lives, but he argued that the war “has made many lives valuable that were not so before” and has effectively “moralized cities & states” (JMN, 15:64). Although he worried, prophetically, that in the war's aftermath “the high tragic historic justice which the nation with severest consideration should execute, will be softened & dissipated & toasted away at dinner-tables” (JMN, 15:459), his final phase of thought emphasized the ethical renewal that he found in the unavoidable commitment that the slavery crisis and the war had forced on the nation. He had, through experience, come to stake all on a single proposition: “The only incorruptible thing is morals” (JMN, 15:471).

THE PRAGMATIC STANCE

“Will is always miraculous, being the presence of God to men”

(W, 12:46).

In an address at Waterville College in 1863, Emerson remarked on the “dark, but heroic” times: “The times develop the strength they need” (W, 10:258). This faith in the nation's moral resolve during the war was conditioned by his own experience of renewed strength as he brought his philosophy into working relationship with the moral demands of his day. Although the war confirmed that strength for him, it had been secured well before in the ethical emphasis that had marked a turn in his work in the 1840s. Emerson had needed strength to believe in the possibility of the “transformation of genius into practical power” (CW, 3:49), and the narrative of his work after “Experience” focuses on the growth of that faith in will, power, and moral action. This pragmatic turn entailed, especially as the slavery crisis deepened and the war approached, a circling back to his early vocabulary of the moral sense. But by the 1860s, Emerson was not simply parroting the terminology of his college texts, but expounding a position he had earned with some difficulty. No, we do not find in his later texts the buoyancy we associate with Nature or “The American Scholar.” But the burden of the later texts has its own value, especially when placed in the context of Emerson's career.

The persistence of Emerson's moral-sense terminology, from very early to very late in his career, also helps us understand with wider reference the five-year burst of expression, from 1836 to 1841, that has been historically regarded as his most important phase. The version of philosophical idealism and the concomitant exploration of mystical experience that characterize that period were motivated in large part by his earlier conviction that the soul grasped moral imperatives without mediation—apart from, and perhaps in opposition to, institutionalized religious forms and socially defined moral codes. The mystical and transcendental Emerson, the Emerson American literary scholars have come to accept as the “real” or “important” Emerson, was from the beginning in the process of exploring the connection of morals with intuitive enlightenment. He had combined, in the supple concept of self-culture, his belief in the moral sense, inherited from the Unitarian theological milieu, with an intense personal commitment to religious experience as a form of ecstasy, an inheritance from the larger tradition of New England congregationalism. That synthesis kept elements of the moral and the mystical in a delicate balance for a while, but when Emerson began to see ecstasy as an increasingly problematic and unreliable concept in the early 1840s, he entered a new phase of his thinking. It was in some respects a crisis in epistemology, centering on the difficulty of assurance in perception. But it was also a crisis in moral philosophy, a reassessment of the capabilities of the will. Emerson's essentially pragmatic answer to his problem, an emphasis on action and work, led him to see that action could generate new experience, and thus bolster faith. His experience in the later 1840s and the 1850s helped him formulate in the notions of will and work a broad conception of moral action that integrated the inner life and the social world. These efforts represent a patient attempt to understand the moral sense as the expression of a comprehensive but progressive natural unity, a unity best revealed through moral action that subsumed the individual for a larger end.

Talk of moral sense or moral law inevitably seems rigid and rulebound, but Emerson's final stance is really an appeal to a life less of settled patterns and relations than of “very mutable” circumstances, in which the individual must “carry his possessions, his relations to persons, and even his opinions, in his hand, and in all these to pierce to the principle and moral law, and everywhere to find that.” Such a stance, fundamentally open, relational, and dynamic, is also a position of faith, for in assuming it, one stands “out of the reach of all skepticism” (W, 10:213-14).

Notes

1. For the argument that the journal was fundamental, see Lawrence Rosenwald, Emerson and the Art of the Diary.

2. There seems to have been a struggle involved in bringing each of Emerson's books to print, but it is especially notable in the cases of English Traits and Society and Solitude. With Letters and Social Aims, the difficulties became insurmountable, and the book was finally arranged with the help of James E. Cabot.

3. See Nancy Craig Simmons, “Arranging the Sibylline Leaves,” pp. 335-89. For further analysis of Emerson's later compositional practice, and the resulting textual problems, see Ronald A. Bosco, “‘Poetry for the World of Readers’ and ‘Poetry for Bards Proper.’”

4. Emerson began to gather notes for his “Natural History of Reason” as early as 1838 (JMN, 5:482), and the first and most significant gestures toward its completion were made in the 1848 lecture series “Mind and Manners of the Nineteenth Century,” delivered in England. On the earliest delivery of these lectures and their English context, see Larry J. Reynolds, European Revolutions and the American Literary Renaissance, pp. 38-40. Versions of the lectures were delivered in various contexts in the 1850s and 1860s, the period in which Emerson was also working through the ethical pragmatism that marks his later work. Of particular interest are the lectures “Powers and Laws of Thought” (1848-50, Houghton Library, Harvard University, b MS Am 1280.200 [3], [4], and [5]) and “Relation of Intellect to Natural Science” (1848-50, b MS Am 1280.200 [6] and [7]). The project was culminated in Emerson's lectures in the Harvard philosophy department in 1870. Natural History of Intellect as we now have it in James E. Cabot's arrangement is a good example of the textual problem presented by Emerson's later work. I do not believe that anything absolutely definitive can be written of this and other such later texts until the later volumes of Emerson's Collected Works are completed and we have an edition of his later lectures. Even so, these later texts cannot be absolutely ignored either, containing as they do powerful passages that reveal important aspects of Emerson's thought.

5. See Ralph L. Rusk, The Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson, pp. 341-6, and Gay Wilson Allen, Waldo Emerson, p. 509.

6. On the intellectual influences on Nature, see Kenneth Walter Cameron, Emerson the Essayist.

7. See Robert D. Richardson, Jr.'s discussion of the expanded sense of the “organic” in Henry David Thoreau: A Life of the Mind, pp. 310-13.

8. Richard Poirier, The Renewal of Literature, pp. 47-8.

9. In “Ralph Waldo Emerson,” p. 390, Barbara Packer termed “Poetry and Imagination” a “brilliant” essay. In “‘Poetry for the World of Readers' and ‘Poetry for Bards Proper,’” Ronald A. Bosco characterized it as “the unrecognized fullest statement by Emerson of poetic theory” (p. 280). As Bosco demonstrates, the essay is closely connected with the development of Emerson's late poetry anthology Parnassus. For other details on the essay's evolution, see W, 8:357-8.

10. The example of Poe is delineated in Joseph J. Moldenhauer, “Murder as Fine Art: Basic Connections Between Poe's Aesthetics, Psychology, and Moral Vision.”

11. See JMN, 15:468-71, for Emerson's notes on the essay. “Character” concluded a series of lectures at the Parker Fraternity in 1864-5 (W, 10:531).

12. On the Free Religious Association, see Stow Persons, Free Religion: An American Faith, and David Robinson, The Unitarians and the Universalists, pp. 107-22.

Abbreviations

The following abbreviations are cited parenthetically in the text to refer to various editions of Emerson's writings.

CEC The Correspondence of Emerson and Carlyle. Edited by Joseph Slater. New York: Columbia University Press, 1964.

CS The Complete Sermons of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Edited by Albert J. von Frank et al. 4 volumes. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1989-.

CW The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Edited by Alfred R. Ferguson et al. 4 volumes to date. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971-.

EL The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Edited by Robert E. Spiller, Stephen E. Whicher, and Wallace E. Williams. 3 volumes. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959; Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1964, 1972.

JMN The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Edited by William H. Gilman et al. 16 volumes. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1960-82.

L The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Edited by Ralph L. Rusk (Volumes 1-6) and Eleanor Tilton (Volumes 7-8). 8 volumes to date. New York: Columbia University Press, 1939-.

W The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Centenary Edition). Edited by Edward Waldo Emerson. 12 volumes. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903-4.