how many essays did emerson write

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Photo from Amos Bronson Alcott 1882.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

An American essayist, poet, and popular philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) began his career as a Unitarian minister in Boston, but achieved worldwide fame as a lecturer and the author of such essays as “Self-Reliance,” “History,” “The Over-Soul,” and “Fate.” Drawing on English and German Romanticism, Neoplatonism, Kantianism, and Hinduism, Emerson developed a metaphysics of process, an epistemology of moods, and an “existentialist” ethics of self-improvement. He influenced generations of Americans, from his friend Henry David Thoreau to John Dewey, and in Europe, Friedrich Nietzsche, who takes up such Emersonian themes as power, fate, the uses of poetry and history, and the critique of Christianity.

1. Chronology of Emerson’s Life

2.1 education, 2.2 process, 2.3 morality, 2.4 christianity, 2.6 unity and moods, 3. emerson on slavery and race, 4.1 consistency, 4.2 early and late emerson, 4.3 sources and influence, works by emerson, selected writings on emerson, other internet resources, related entries, 2. major themes in emerson’s philosophy.

In “The American Scholar,” delivered as the Phi Beta Kappa Address in 1837, Emerson maintains that the scholar is educated by nature, books, and action. Nature is the first in time (since it is always there) and the first in importance of the three. Nature’s variety conceals underlying laws that are at the same time laws of the human mind: “the ancient precept, ‘Know thyself,’ and the modern precept, ‘Study nature,’ become at last one maxim” (CW1: 55). Books, the second component of the scholar’s education, offer us the influence of the past. Yet much of what passes for education is mere idolization of books — transferring the “sacredness which applies to the act of creation…to the record.” The proper relation to books is not that of the “bookworm” or “bibliomaniac,” but that of the “creative” reader (CW1: 58) who uses books as a stimulus to attain “his own sight of principles.” Used well, books “inspire…the active soul” (CW1: 56). Great books are mere records of such inspiration, and their value derives only, Emerson holds, from their role in inspiring or recording such states of the soul. The “end” Emerson finds in nature is not a vast collection of books, but, as he puts it in “The Poet,” “the production of new individuals,…or the passage of the soul into higher forms” (CW3:14).

The third component of the scholar’s education is action. Without it, thought “can never ripen into truth” (CW1: 59). Action is the process whereby what is not fully formed passes into expressive consciousness. Life is the scholar’s “dictionary” (CW1: 60), the source for what she has to say: “Only so much do I know as I have lived” (CW1:59). The true scholar speaks from experience, not in imitation of others; her words, as Emerson puts it, are “are loaded with life…” (CW1: 59). The scholar’s education in original experience and self-expression is appropriate, according to Emerson, not only for a small class of people, but for everyone. Its goal is the creation of a democratic nation. Only when we learn to “walk on our own feet” and to “speak our own minds,” he holds, will a nation “for the first time exist” (CW1: 70).

Emerson returned to the topic of education late in his career in “Education,” an address he gave in various versions at graduation exercises in the 1860s. Self-reliance appears in the essay in his discussion of respect. The “secret of Education,” he states, “lies in respecting the pupil.” It is not for the teacher to choose what the pupil will know and do, but for the pupil to discover “his own secret.” The teacher must therefore “wait and see the new product of Nature” (E: 143), guiding and disciplining when appropriate-not with the aim of encouraging repetition or imitation, but with that of finding the new power that is each child’s gift to the world. The aim of education is to “keep” the child’s “nature and arm it with knowledge in the very direction in which it points” (E: 144). This aim is sacrificed in mass education, Emerson warns. Instead of educating “masses,” we must educate “reverently, one by one,” with the attitude that “the whole world is needed for the tuition of each pupil” (E: 154).

Emerson is in many ways a process philosopher, for whom the universe is fundamentally in flux and “permanence is but a word of degrees” (CW 2: 179). Even as he talks of “Being,” Emerson represents it not as a stable “wall” but as a series of “interminable oceans” (CW3: 42). This metaphysical position has epistemological correlates: that there is no final explanation of any fact, and that each law will be incorporated in “some more general law presently to disclose itself” (CW2: 181). Process is the basis for the succession of moods Emerson describes in “Experience,” (CW3: 30), and for the emphasis on the present throughout his philosophy.

Some of Emerson’s most striking ideas about morality and truth follow from his process metaphysics: that no virtues are final or eternal, all being “initial,” (CW2: 187); that truth is a matter of glimpses, not steady views. We have a choice, Emerson writes in “Intellect,” “between truth and repose,” but we cannot have both (CW2: 202). Fresh truth, like the thoughts of genius, comes always as a surprise, as what Emerson calls “the newness” (CW3: 40). He therefore looks for a “certain brief experience, which surprise[s] me in the highway or in the market, in some place, at some time…” (CW1: 213). This is an experience that cannot be repeated by simply returning to a place or to an object such as a painting. A great disappointment of life, Emerson finds, is that one can only “see” certain pictures once, and that the stories and people who fill a day or an hour with pleasure and insight are not able to repeat the performance.

Emerson’s basic view of religion also coheres with his emphasis on process, for he holds that one finds God only in the present: “God is, not was” (CW1:89). In contrast, what Emerson calls “historical Christianity” (CW1: 82) proceeds “as if God were dead” (CW1: 84). Even history, which seems obviously about the past, has its true use, Emerson holds, as the servant of the present: “The student is to read history actively and not passively; to esteem his own life the text, and books the commentary” (CW2: 5).

Emerson’s views about morality are intertwined with his metaphysics of process, and with his perfectionism, his idea that life has the goal of passing into “higher forms” (CW3:14). The goal remains, but the forms of human life, including the virtues, are all “initial” (CW2: 187). The word “initial” suggests the verb “initiate,” and one interpretation of Emerson’s claim that “all virtues are initial” is that virtues initiate historically developing forms of life, such as those of the Roman nobility or the Confucian junxi . Emerson does have a sense of morality as developing historically, but in the context in “Circles” where his statement appears he presses a more radical and skeptical position: that our virtues often must be abandoned rather than developed. “The terror of reform,” he writes, “is the discovery that we must cast away our virtues, or what we have always esteemed such, into the same pit that has consumed our grosser vices” (CW2: 187). The qualifying phrase “or what we have always esteemed such” means that Emerson does not embrace an easy relativism, according to which what is taken to be a virtue at any time must actually be a virtue. Yet he does cast a pall of suspicion over all established modes of thinking and acting. The proper standpoint from which to survey the virtues is the ‘new moment‘ — what he elsewhere calls truth rather than repose (CW2:202) — in which what once seemed important may appear “trivial” or “vain” (CW2:189). From this perspective (or more properly the developing set of such perspectives) the virtues do not disappear, but they may be fundamentally altered and rearranged.

Although Emerson is thus in no position to set forth a system of morality, he nevertheless delineates throughout his work a set of virtues and heroes, and a corresponding set of vices and villains. In “Circles” the vices are “forms of old age,” and the hero the “receptive, aspiring” youth (CW2:189). In the “Divinity School Address,” the villain is the “spectral” preacher whose sermons offer no hint that he has ever lived. “Self Reliance” condemns virtues that are really “penances” (CW2: 31), and the philanthropy of abolitionists who display an idealized “love” for those far away, but are full of hatred for those close by (CW2: 30).

Conformity is the chief Emersonian vice, the opposite or “aversion” of the virtue of “self-reliance.” We conform when we pay unearned respect to clothing and other symbols of status, when we show “the foolish face of praise” or the “forced smile which we put on in company where we do not feel at ease in answer to conversation which does not interest us” (CW2: 32). Emerson criticizes our conformity even to our own past actions-when they no longer fit the needs or aspirations of the present. This is the context in which he states that “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen, philosophers and divines” (CW2: 33). There is wise and there is foolish consistency, and it is foolish to be consistent if that interferes with the “main enterprise of the world for splendor, for extent,…the upbuilding of a man” (CW1: 65).

If Emerson criticizes much of human life, he nevertheless devotes most of his attention to the virtues. Chief among these is what he calls “self-reliance.” The phrase connotes originality and spontaneity, and is memorably represented in the image of a group of nonchalant boys, “sure of a dinner…who would disdain as much as a lord to do or say aught to conciliate one…” The boys sit in judgment on the world and the people in it, offering a free, “irresponsible” condemnation of those they see as “silly” or “troublesome,” and praise for those they find “interesting” or “eloquent.” (CW2: 29). The figure of the boys illustrates Emerson’s characteristic combination of the romantic (in the glorification of children) and the classical (in the idea of a hierarchy in which the boys occupy the place of lords or nobles).

Although he develops a series of analyses and images of self-reliance, Emerson nevertheless destabilizes his own use of the concept. “To talk of reliance,” he writes, “is a poor external way of speaking. Speak rather of that which relies, because it works and is” (CW 2:40). ‘Self-reliance’ can be taken to mean that there is a self already formed on which we may rely. The “self” on which we are to “rely” is, in contrast, the original self that we are in the process of creating. Such a self, to use a phrase from Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo, “becomes what it is.”

For Emerson, the best human relationships require the confident and independent nature of the self-reliant. Emerson’s ideal society is a confrontation of powerful, independent “gods, talking from peak to peak all round Olympus.” There will be a proper distance between these gods, who, Emerson advises, “should meet each morning, as from foreign countries, and spending the day together should depart, as into foreign countries” (CW 3:81). Even “lovers,” he advises, “should guard their strangeness” (CW3: 82). Emerson portrays himself as preserving such distance in the cool confession with which he closes “Nominalist and Realist,” the last of the Essays, Second Series :

I talked yesterday with a pair of philosophers: I endeavored to show my good men that I liked everything by turns and nothing long…. Could they but once understand, that I loved to know that they existed, and heartily wished them Godspeed, yet, out of my poverty of life and thought, had no word or welcome for them when they came to see me, and could well consent to their living in Oregon, for any claim I felt on them, it would be a great satisfaction (CW 3:145).

The self-reliant person will “publish” her results, but she must first learn to detect that spark of originality or genius that is her particular gift to the world. It is not a gift that is available on demand, however, and a major task of life is to meld genius with its expression. “The man,” Emerson states “is only half himself, the other half is his expression” (CW 3:4). There are young people of genius, Emerson laments in “Experience,” who promise “a new world” but never deliver: they fail to find the focus for their genius “within the actual horizon of human life” (CW 3:31). Although Emerson emphasizes our independence and even distance from one another, then, the payoff for self-reliance is public and social. The scholar finds that the most private and secret of his thoughts turn out to be “the most acceptable, most public, and universally true” (CW1: 63). And the great “representative men” Emerson identifies are marked by their influence on the world. Their names-Plato, Moses, Jesus, Luther, Copernicus, even Napoleon-are “ploughed into the history of this world” (CW1: 80).

Although self-reliance is central, it is not the only Emersonian virtue. Emerson also praises a kind of trust, and the practice of a “wise skepticism.” There are times, he holds, when we must let go and trust to the nature of the universe: “As the traveler who has lost his way, throws his reins on his horse’s neck, and trusts to the instinct of the animal to find his road, so must we do with the divine animal who carries us through this world” (CW3:16). But the world of flux and conflicting evidence also requires a kind of epistemological and practical flexibility that Emerson calls “wise skepticism” (CW4: 89). His representative skeptic of this sort is Michel de Montaigne, who as portrayed in Representative Men is no unbeliever, but a man with a strong sense of self, rooted in the earth and common life, whose quest is for knowledge. He wants “a near view of the best game and the chief players; what is best in the planet; art and nature, places and events; but mainly men” (CW4: 91). Yet he knows that life is perilous and uncertain, “a storm of many elements,” the navigation through which requires a flexible ship, “fit to the form of man.” (CW4: 91).

The son of a Unitarian minister, Emerson attended Harvard Divinity School and was employed as a minister for almost three years. Yet he offers a deeply felt and deeply reaching critique of Christianity in the “Divinity School Address,” flowing from a line of argument he establishes in “The American Scholar.” If the one thing in the world of value is the active soul, then religious institutions, no less than educational institutions, must be judged by that standard. Emerson finds that contemporary Christianity deadens rather than activates the spirit. It is an “Eastern monarchy of a Christianity” in which Jesus, originally the “friend of man,” is made the enemy and oppressor of man. A Christianity true to the life and teachings of Jesus should inspire “the religious sentiment” — a joyous seeing that is more likely to be found in “the pastures,” or “a boat in the pond” than in a church. Although Emerson thinks it is a calamity for a nation to suffer the “loss of worship” (CW1: 89) he finds it strange that, given the “famine of our churches” (CW1: 85) anyone should attend them. He therefore calls on the Divinity School graduates to breathe new life into the old forms of their religion, to be friends and exemplars to their parishioners, and to remember “that all men have sublime thoughts; that all men value the few real hours of life; they love to be heard; they love to be caught up into the vision of principles” (CW1: 90).

Power is a theme in Emerson’s early writing, but it becomes especially prominent in such middle- and late-career essays as “Experience,” “Montaigne, or the Skeptic” “Napoleon,” and “Power.” Power is related to action in “The American Scholar,” where Emerson holds that a “true scholar grudges every opportunity of action past by, as a loss of power” (CW1: 59). It is also a subject of “Self-Reliance,” where Emerson writes of each person that “the power which resides in him is new in nature” (CW2: 28). In “Experience” Emerson speaks of a life which “is not intellectual or critical, but sturdy” (CW3: 294); and in “Power” he celebrates the “bruisers” (CW6: 34) of the world who express themselves rudely and get their way. The power in which Emerson is interested, however, is more artistic and intellectual than political or military. In a characteristic passage from “Power,” he states:

In history the great moment, is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty:-and you have Pericles and Phidias,-not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astringency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity. (CW6: 37–8)

Power is all around us, but it cannot always be controlled. It is like “a bird which alights nowhere,” hopping “perpetually from bough to bough” (CW3: 34). Moreover, we often cannot tell at the time when we exercise our power that we are doing so: happily we sometimes find that much is accomplished in “times when we thought ourselves indolent” (CW3: 28).

At some point in many of his essays and addresses, Emerson enunciates, or at least refers to, a great vision of unity. He speaks in “The American Scholar” of an “original unit” or “fountain of power” (CW1: 53), of which each of us is a part. He writes in “The Divinity School Address” that each of us is “an inlet into the deeps of Reason.” And in “Self-Reliance,” the essay that more than any other celebrates individuality, he writes of “the resolution of all into the ever-blessed ONE” (CW2: 40). “The Oversoul” is Emerson’s most sustained discussion of “the ONE,” but he does not, even there, shy away from the seeming conflict between the reality of process and the reality of an ultimate metaphysical unity. How can the vision of succession and the vision of unity be reconciled?

Emerson never comes to a clear or final answer. One solution he both suggests and rejects is an unambiguous idealism, according to which a nontemporal “One” or “Oversoul” is the only reality, and all else is illusion. He suggests this, for example, in the many places where he speaks of waking up out of our dreams or nightmares. But he then portrays that to which we awake not simply as an unchanging “ONE,” but as a process or succession: a “growth” or “movement of the soul” (CW2: 189); or a “new yet unapproachable America” (CW3: 259).

Emerson undercuts his visions of unity (as of everything else) through what Stanley Cavell calls his “epistemology of moods.” According to this epistemology, most fully developed in “Experience” but present in all of Emerson’s writing, we never apprehend anything “straight” or in-itself, but only under an aspect or mood. Emerson writes that life is “a train of moods like a string of beads,” through which we see only what lies in each bead’s focus (CW3: 30). The beads include our temperaments, our changing moods, and the “Lords of Life” which govern all human experience. The Lords include “Succession,” “Surface,” “Dream,” “Reality,” and “Surprise.” Are the great visions of unity, then, simply aspects under which we view the world?

Emerson’s most direct attempt to reconcile succession and unity, or the one and the many, occurs in the last essay in the Essays, Second Series , entitled “Nominalist and Realist.” There he speaks of the universe as an “old Two-face…of which any proposition may be affirmed or denied” (CW3: 144). As in “Experience,” Emerson leaves us with the whirling succession of moods. “I am always insincere,” he skeptically concludes, “as always knowing there are other moods” (CW3: 145). But Emerson enacts as well as describes the succession of moods, and he ends “Nominalist and Realist” with the “feeling that all is yet unsaid,” and with at least the idea of some universal truth (CW3: 363).

Massachusetts ended slavery in 1783, when Chief Justice William Cushing instructed the jury in the case of Quock Walker, a former slave, that “the idea of slavery” was “inconsistent” with the Massachusetts Constitution’ guarantee that “all men are born free and equal” (Gougeon, 71). Emerson first encountered slavery when he went south for his health in the winter of 1827, when he was 23. He recorded the following scene in his journal from his time in Tallahasse, Florida:

A fortnight since I attended a meeting of the Bible Society. The Treasurer of this institution is Marshal of the district & by a somewhat unfortunate arrangement had appointed a special meeting of the Society & a Slave Auction at the same time & place, one being in the Government house & the other in the adjoining yard. One ear therefore heard the glad tidings of great joy whilst the other was regaled with “Going gentlemen, Going!” And almost without changing our position we might aid in sending the scriptures into Africa or bid for “four children without the mother who had been kidnapped therefrom” (JMN3: 117).

Emerson never questioned the iniquity of slavery, though it was not a main item on his intellectual agenda until the eighteen forties. He refers to abolition in the “Prospects” chapter of Nature when he speaks of the “gleams of a better light” in the darkness of history and gives as examples “the abolition of the Slave-trade,” “the history of Jesus Christ,” and “the wisdom of children” (CW1:43). He condemns slavery in some of his greatest essays, “Self-Reliance” (1841), so that even if we didn’t have the anti-slavery addresses of the 1840s and 1850s, we would still have evidence both of the existence of slavery and of Emerson’s opposition to it. He praises “the bountiful cause of Abolition,” although he laments that the cause had been taken over by “angry bigots.” Later in the essay he treats abolition as one of the great causes and movements of world history, along with Christianity, the Reformation, and Methodism. In a well-known statement he writes that an “institution is the shadow of one man,” giving as examples “the Reformation, of Luther; Quakerism, of Fox; Methodism, of Wesley; Abolition of Clarkson” (CW2: 35). The unfamiliar name in this list is that of Thomas Clarkson (1760–1846), a Cambridge-educated clergyman who helped found the British Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. Clarkson travelled on horseback throughout Britain, interviewing sailors who worked on slaving ships, and exhibiting such tools as manacles, thumbscews, branding irons, and other tools of the trade. His History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808) would be a major source for Emerson’s anti-slavery addresses.

Slavery also appears in “Politics,” from the Essays, Second Series of 1844, when Emerson surveys the two main American parties. One, standing for free trade, wide suffrage, and the access of the young and poor to wealth and power, has the “best cause” but the least attractive leaders; while the other has the most cultivated and able leaders, but is “merely defensive of property.” This conservative party, moreover, “vindicates no right, it aspires to no real good, it brands no crime, it proposes no generous policy, it does not build nor write, nor cherish the arts, nor foster religion, nor establish schools, nor encourage science, nor emancipate the slave, nor befriend the poor, or the Indian, or the immigrant” (CW3: 124). Emerson stands here for emancipation, not simply for the ending of the slave trade.

1844 was also the year of Emerson’s breakout anti-slavery address, which he gave at the annual celebration of the abolition of slavery in the British West Indies. In the background was the American war with Mexico, the annexation of Texas, and the likelihood that it would be entering the Union as a slave state. Although Concord was a hotbed of abolitionism compared to Boston, there were many conservatives in the town. No church allowed Emerson to speak on the subject, and when the courthouse was secured for the talk, the sexton refused to ring the church bell to announce it, a task the young Henry David Thoreau took upon himself to perform (Gougeon, 75). In his address, Emerson develops a critique of the language we use to speak about, or to avoid speaking about, black slavery:

Language must be raked, the secrets of slaughter-houses and infamous holes that cannot front the day, must be ransacked, to tell what negro-slavery has been. These men, our benefactors, as they are producers of corn and wine, of coffee, of tobacco, of cotton, of sugar, of rum, and brandy, gentle and joyous themselves, and producers of comfort and luxury for the civilized world.… I am heart-sick when I read how they came there, and how they are kept there. Their case was left out of the mind and out of the heart of their brothers ( Emerson’s Antislavery Writings , 9).

Emerson’s long address is both clear-eyed about the evils of slavery and hopeful about the possibilities of the Africans. Speaking with the black abolitionist Frederick Douglass beside him on the dais, Emerson states: “The black man carries in his bosom an indispensable element of a new and coming civilization.” He praises “such men as” Toussaint [L]Ouverture, leader of the Haitian slave rebellion, and announces: “here is the anti-slave: here is man; and if you have man, black or white is an insignificance.” (Wirzrbicki, 95; Emerson’s Antislavery Writings, 31).

The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 effectively nationalized slavery, requiring officials and citizens of the free states to assist in returning escaped slaves to their owners. Emerson’s 1851 “Address to the Citizens of Concord” calls both for the abrogation of the law and for disobeying it while it is still current. In 1854, the escaped slave Anthony Burns was shipped back to Virginia by order of the Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, an order carried out by U. S. Marines, in accordance with the new law. This example of “Slavery in Massachusetts” (as Henry Thoreau put it in a well-known address) is in the background of Emerson’s 1855 “Lecture on Slavery,” where he calls the recognition of slavery by the original 1787 Constitution a “crime.” Emerson gave these and other antislavery addresses multiple times in various places from the late 1840s till the beginning of the Civil War. On the eve of the war Emerson supported John Brown, the violent abolitionist who was executed in 1859 by the U. S. government after he attacked the U. S. armory in Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia. In the middle of the War, Emerson raised funds for black regiments of Union soldiers (Wirzbicki, 251–2) and read his “Boston Hymn” to an audience of 3000 celebrating President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. “Pay ransom to the owner,” Emerson wrote, “and fill the bag to the brim. Who is the owner? The slave is owner. And ever was. Pay him” (CW9: 383).

Emerson’s magisterial essay “Fate,” published in The Conduct of Life (1860) is distinguished not only by its attempt to reconcile freedom and necessity, but by disturbing pronouncements about fate and race, for example:

The population of the world is a conditional population, not the best, but the best that could live now; and the scale of tribes, and the steadiness with which victory adheres to one tribe, and defeat to another, is as uniform as the superposition of strata. We know in history what weight belongs to race. We see the English, French, and Germans planting themselves on every shore and market of America and Australia, and monopolizing the commerce of these countries. We like the nervous and victorious habit of our own branch of the family. We follow the step of the Jew, of the Indian, of the Negro. We see how much will has been expended to extinguish the Jew, in vain.… The German and Irish millions, like the Negro, have a great deal of guano in their destiny. They are ferried over the Atlantic, and carted over America, to ditch and to drudge, to make corn cheap, and then to lie down prematurely to make a spot of green grass on the prairie (CW6: 8–9).

The references to race here show the influence of a new “scientific” interest in both England and America in the role that race—often conflated with culture or nation—plays in human evolution. In America, this interest was entangled with the institution of slavery, the encounters with Native American tribes, and with the notion of “Anglo-Saxon liberties” that came to prominence during the American Revolution, and developed into the idea that there was an Anglo-Saxon race (see Horsman).

Emerson would not be Emerson, however, if he did not conduct a critique of his terms, and “race” is a case in point. He takes it up in a non-American context, however: in the essay “Race” from English Traits (1856). Emerson’s critique of his title begins in the essay’s first paragraph when he writes that “each variety shades down imperceptibly into the next, and you cannot draw the line where a race begins or ends.” Civilization “eats away the old traits,” he continues, and religions construct new forms of character that cut against old racial divisions. More deeply still, he identifies considerations that “threaten to undermine” the concept of race. The “fixity … of races as we see them,” he writes, “is a weak argument for the eternity of these frail boundaries, since all our historical period is a point” in the long duration of nature (CW 5:24). The patterns we see today aren’t pure anyway:

though we flatter the self-love of men and nations by the legend of pure races, all our experience is of the gradation and resolution of races, and strange resemblances meet us every where, It need not puzzle us that Malay and Papuan, Celt and Roman, Saxon and Tartar should mix, when we see the rudiments of tiger and baboon in our human form, and know that the barriers of races are not so firm, but that some spray sprinkles us from the antidiluvian seas.

As in Nature and his great early works, Emerson asserts our intimate relations with the natural world, from the oceans to the animals. Why, one might think, should one of the higher but still initial forms be singled out for separation, abasement, and slavery? Emerson works out his views in “Race” without referring to American slavery, however, in a book about England where he sees a healthy mixture, not a pure race. England’s history, he writes, is not so much “one of certain tribes of Saxons, Jutes, or Frisians, coming from one place, and genetically identical, as it is an anthology of temperaments out of them all.… The English derive their pedigree from such a range of nationalities.… The Scandinavians in her race still hear in every age the murmurs of their mother, the ocean; the Briton in the blood hugs the homestead still” (CW5: 28). Still, it is striking that Emerson never mentions slavery in either “Fate” or “Race,” both of which were written during his intense period of public opposition to American slavery.

4. Some Questions about Emerson

Emerson routinely invites charges of inconsistency. He says the world is fundamentally a process and fundamentally a unity; that it resists the imposition of our will and that it flows with the power of our imagination; that travel is good for us, since it adds to our experience, and that it does us no good, since we wake up in the new place only to find the same “ sad self” we thought we had left behind (CW2: 46).

Emerson’s “epistemology of moods” is an attempt to construct a framework for encompassing what might otherwise seem contradictory outlooks, viewpoints, or doctrines. Emerson really means to “accept,” as he puts it, “the clangor and jangle of contrary tendencies” (CW3: 36). He means to be irresponsible to all that holds him back from his self-development. That is why, at the end of “Circles,” he writes that he is “only an experimenter…with no Past at my back” (CW2: 188). In the world of flux that he depicts in that essay, there is nothing stable to be responsible to: “every moment is new; the past is always swallowed and forgotten, the coming only is sacred” (CW2: 189).

Despite this claim, there is considerable consistency in Emerson’s essays and among his ideas. To take just one example, the idea of the “active soul” – mentioned as the “one thing in the world, of value” in ‘The American Scholar’ – is a presupposition of Emerson’s attack on “the famine of the churches” (for not feeding or activating the souls of those who attend them); it is an element in his understanding of a poem as “a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own …” (CW3: 6); and, of course, it is at the center of Emerson’s idea of self-reliance. There are in fact multiple paths of coherence through Emerson’s philosophy, guided by ideas discussed previously: process, education, self-reliance, and the present.

It is hard for an attentive reader not to feel that there are important differences between early and late Emerson: for example, between the buoyant Nature (1836) and the weary ending of “Experience” (1844); between the expansive author of “Self-Reliance” (1841) and the burdened writer of “Fate” (1860). Emerson himself seems to advert to such differences when he writes in “Fate”: “Once we thought, positive power was all. Now we learn that negative power, or circumstance, is half” (CW6: 8). Is “Fate” the record of a lesson Emerson had not absorbed in his early writing, concerning the multiple ways in which circumstances over which we have no control — plagues, hurricanes, temperament, sexuality, old age — constrain self-reliance or self-development?

“Experience” is a key transitional essay. “Where do we find ourselves?” is the question with which it begins. The answer is not a happy one, for Emerson finds that we occupy a place of dislocation and obscurity, where “sleep lingers all our lifetime about our eyes, as night hovers all day in the boughs of the fir-tree” (CW3: 27). An event hovering over the essay, but not disclosed until its third paragraph, is the death of his five-year old son Waldo. Emerson finds in this episode and his reaction to it an example of an “unhandsome” general character of existence-it is forever slipping away from us, like his little boy.

“Experience” presents many moods. It has its moments of illumination, and its considered judgment that there is an “Ideal journeying always with us, the heaven without rent or seam” (CW3: 41). It offers wise counsel about “skating over the surfaces of life” and confining our existence to the “mid-world.” But even its upbeat ending takes place in a setting of substantial “defeat.” “Up again, old heart!” a somewhat battered voice states in the last sentence of the essay. Yet the essay ends with an assertion that in its great hope and underlying confidence chimes with some of the more expansive passages in Emerson’s writing. The “true romance which the world exists to realize,” he states, “will be the transformation of genius into practical power” (CW3: 49).

Despite important differences in tone and emphasis, Emerson’s assessment of our condition remains much the same throughout his writing. There are no more dire indictments of ordinary human life than in the early work, “The American Scholar,” where Emerson states that “Men in history, men in the world of to-day, are bugs, are spawn, and are called ‘the mass’ and ‘the herd.’ In a century, in a millennium, one or two men; that is to say, one or two approximations to the right state of every man” (CW1: 65). Conversely, there is no more idealistic statement in his early work than the statement in “Fate” that “[t]hought dissolves the material universe, by carrying the mind up into a sphere where all is plastic” (CW6: 15). All in all, the earlier work expresses a sunnier hope for human possibilities, the sense that Emerson and his contemporaries were poised for a great step forward and upward; and the later work, still hopeful and assured, operates under a weight or burden, a stronger sense of the dumb resistance of the world.

Emerson read widely, and gave credit in his essays to the scores of writers from whom he learned. He kept lists of literary, philosophical, and religious thinkers in his journals and worked at categorizing them.

Among the most important writers for the shape of Emerson’s philosophy are Plato and the Neoplatonist line extending through Plotinus, Proclus, Iamblichus, and the Cambridge Platonists. Equally important are writers in the Kantian and Romantic traditions (which Emerson probably learned most about from Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria ). Emerson read avidly in Indian, especially Hindu, philosophy, and in Confucianism. There are also multiple empiricist, or experience-based influences, flowing from Berkeley, Wordsworth and other English Romantics, Newton’s physics, and the new sciences of geology and comparative anatomy. Other writers whom Emerson often mentions are Anaxagoras, St. Augustine, Francis Bacon, Jacob Behmen, Cicero, Goethe, Heraclitus, Lucretius, Mencius, Pythagoras, Schiller, Thoreau, August and Friedrich Schlegel, Shakespeare, Socrates, Madame de Staël and Emanuel Swedenborg.

Emerson’s works were well known throughout the United States and Europe in his day. Nietzsche read German translations of Emerson’s essays, copied passages from “History” and “Self-Reliance” in his journals, and wrote of the Essays : that he had never “felt so much at home in a book.” Emerson’s ideas about “strong, overflowing” heroes, friendship as a battle, education, and relinquishing control in order to gain it, can be traced in Nietzsche’s writings. Other Emersonian ideas-about transition, the ideal in the commonplace, and the power of human will permeate the writings of such classical American pragmatists as William James and John Dewey.

Stanley Cavell’s engagement with Emerson is the most original and prolonged by any philosopher, and Emerson is a primary source for his writing on “moral perfectionism.” In his earliest essays on Emerson, such as “Thinking of Emerson” and “Emerson, Coleridge, Kant,” Cavell considers Emerson’s place in the Kantian tradition, and he explores the affinity between Emerson’s call in “The American Scholar” for a return to “the common and the low” and Wittgenstein’s quest for a return to ordinary language. In “Being Odd, Getting Even” and “Aversive Thinking,” Cavell considers Emerson’s anticipations of existentialism, and in these and other works he explores Emerson’s affinities with Nietzsche and Heidegger.

In Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome and Cities of Words , Cavell develops what he calls “Emersonian moral perfectionism,” of which he finds an exemplary expression in Emerson’s “History”: “So all that is said of the wise man by Stoic, or oriental or modern essayist, describes to each reader his own idea, describes his unattained but attainable self.” Emersonian perfectionism is oriented towards a wiser or better self that is never final, always initial, always on the way.

Cavell does not have a neat and tidy definition of perfectionism, and his list of perfectionist works ranges from Plato’s Republic to Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations , but he identifies “two dominating themes of perfectionism” in Emerson’s writing: (1) “that the human self … is always becoming, as on a journey, always partially in a further state. This journey is described as education or cultivation”; (2) “that the other to whom I can use the words I discover in which to express myself is the Friend—a figure that may occur as the goal of the journey but also as its instigation and accompaniment” ( Cities of Words , 26–7). The friend can be a person but it may also be a text. In the sentence from “History” cited above, the writing of the “Stoic, or oriental or modern essayist” about “the wise man” functions as a friend and guide, describing to each reader not just any idea, but “his own idea.” This is the text as instigator and companion.

Cavell’s engagement with perfectionism springs from a response to his colleague John Rawls, who in A Theory of Justice condemns Nietzsche (and implicitly Emerson) for his statement that “mankind must work continually to produce individual great human beings.” “Perfectionism,” Rawls states, “is denied as a political principle.” Cavell replies that Emerson’s (and Nietzsche’s) focus on the great man has nothing to do with a transfer of economic resources or political power, or with the idea that “there is a separate class of great men …for whose good, and conception of good, the rest of society is to live” (CHU, 49). The great man or woman, Cavell holds, is required for rather than opposed to democracy: “essential to the criticism of democracy from within” (CHU, 3).

• [ CW ] The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson , ed. Robert Spiller et al, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971–
• [ E ] “Education,” in Lectures and Biographical Sketches , in The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson , ed. Edward Waldo Emerson, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1883, pp. 125–59
• The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson , ed. Edward Waldo Emerson, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 12 volumes, 1903–4
• The Annotated Emerson , ed. David Mikics, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012.
• The Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson , ed. Edward Waldo Emerson and Waldo Emerson Forbes. 10 vols., Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1910–14.
• The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson , ed. William Gillman, et al., Cambridge: Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 1960–
• The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson , 3 vols, Stephen E. Whicher, Robert E. Spiller, and Wallace E. Williams, eds., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961–72.
• The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson , ed. Ralph L. Rusk and Eleanor M. Tilton. 10 vols. New York: Columbia University Press, 1964–95.
• (with Thomas Carlyle), The Correspondence of Emerson and Carlyle , ed. Joseph Slater, New York: Columbia University Press, 1964.
• Emerson’s Antislavery Writings , eds. Len Gougeon and Joel Myerson, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995.
• The Later Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson , eds. Ronald Bosco and Joel Myerson, Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2003.
• Emerson: Political Writings (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought) , ed. Kenneth Sacks, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
• (See Chronology for original dates of publication.)
• Alcott, Amos Bronson, 1882, Ralph Waldo Emerson: An Estimate of His Character and Genius: In Prose and in Verse , Boston: A. Williams and Co., 1882)
• Allen, Gay Wilson, 1981, Waldo Emerson , New York: Viking Press.
• Arsić, Branka, 2010. On Leaving: A Reading in Emerson , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Arsić, Branka, and Carey Wolfe (eds.), 2010. The Other Emerson , Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
• Bishop, Jonathan, 1964, Emerson on the Soul , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Buell, Lawrence, 2003, Emerson , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Cameron, Sharon, 2007, Impersonality , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Carpenter, Frederick Ives, 1930, Emerson and Asia , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Cavell, Stanley, 1981, “Thinking of Emerson” and “An Emerson Mood,” in The Senses of Walden, An Expanded Edition , San Francisco: North Point Press.
• –––, 1988, In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• –––, 1990, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism , Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (Abbreviated CHU in the text.).
• –––, 2004, Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes , Stanford: Stanford University Press.
• –––, 2004, Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life , Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
• Conant, James, 1997, “Emerson as Educator,” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance , 43: 181–206.
• –––, 2001, “Nietzsche as Educator,” Nietzsche’s Post-Moralism: Essays on Nietzsche’s Prelude to Philosophy’s Future , Richard Schacht (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 181–257.
• Constantinesco, Thomas, 2012, Ralph Waldo Emerson: L’Amérique à l’essai , Paris: Editions Rue d’Ulm.
• Ellison, Julie, 1984, Emerson’s Romantic Style , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Firkins, Oscar W., 1915, Ralph Waldo Emerson , Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
• Follett, Danielle, 2015, “The Tension Between Immanence and Dualism in Coleridge and Emerson,” in Romanticism and Philosophy: Thinking with Literature , Sophie Laniel-Musitelli and Thomas Constantinesco (eds.), London: Routledge, 209–221.
• Friedl, Herwig, 2018, Thinking in Search of a Language: Essays on American Intellect and Intuition , New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic.
• Goodman, Russell B., 1990a, American Philosophy and the Romantic Tradition , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Chapter 2.
• –––, 1990b, “East-West Philosophy in Nineteenth Century America: Emerson and Hinduism,” Journal of the History of Ideas , 51(4): 625–45.
• –––, 1997, “Moral Perfectionism and Democracy in Emerson and Nietzsche,” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance , 43: 159–80.
• –––, 2004, “The Colors of the Spirit: Emerson and Thoreau on Nature and the Self,” Nature in American Philosophy , Jean De Groot (ed.), Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1–18.
• –––, 2008, “Emerson, Romanticism, and Classical American Pragmatism,” The Oxford Handbook of American Philosophy , Cheryl Misak (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 19–37.
• –––, 2015, American Philosophy Before Pragmatism , Oxford: Oxford University Press, 147–99, 234–54.
• –––, 2021, “Transcendentalist Legacies in American Philosophy,” Handbook of American Romanticism, Philipp Löffler, Clemens Spahr, Jan Stievermann (ed.), Berlin and Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 517–536.
• Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 1885, Ralph Waldo Emerson , Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
• Horsman, Reginald, 1981, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism, Cambridge, and London: Harvard University Press.
• Lysaker, John, 2008, Emerson and Self-Culture , Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
• Matthiessen, F. O., 1941, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman , New York: Oxford University Press.
• Packer, B. L., 1982, Emerson’s Fall , New York: Continuum.
• –––, 2007, The Transcendentalists , Athens: University of Georgia Press.
• Poirier, Richard, 1987, The Renewal of Literature: Emersonian Reflections , New York: Random House.
• –––, 1992, Poetry and Pragmatism , Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press.
• Porte, Joel, and Morris, Saundra (eds.), 1999, The Cambridge Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Richardson, Robert D. Jr., 1995, Emerson: The Mind on Fire , Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
• Sacks, Kenneth, 2003, Understanding Emerson: “The American Scholar” and His Struggle for Self-Reliance , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Urbas, Joseph, 2016, Emerson’s Metaphysics: A Song of Laws and Causes , Lanham, MD and London: Lexington Books.
• –––, 2021, The Philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson , New York and London: Routledge.
• Versluis, Arthur, 1993, American Transcendentalism and Asian Religions , New York: Oxford University Press.
• Whicher, Stephen, 1953, Freedom and Fate: An Inner Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson , Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
• Wirzbicki, Peter, 2021, Fighting for the Higher Law: Black and White Transcendentalists Against Slavery , Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
• Zavatta, Benedetta, 2019, Individuality and Beyond: Nietzsche Reads Emerson, trans. Alexander Reynolds , New York: Oxford University Press.

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Biography of Ralph Waldo Emerson, American Essayist

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Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803- April 27, 1882) was an American essayist, poet, and philosopher. Emerson is known as one of the leaders of the transcendentalist movement, which reached its height in mid-19th century New England. With its emphasis on the dignity of the individual, equality, hard work, and respect for nature, Emerson's work remains influential and pertinent to this day.

Fast Facts: Ralph Waldo Emerson

• Known For: Founder and leader of the transcendentalist movement
• Born: May 25, 1803 in Boston, Massachusetts
• Parents: Ruth Haskins and Rev. William Emerson
• Died: April 27, 1882 in Concord, Massachusetts
• Education: Boston Latin School, Harvard College
• Selected Published Works: Nature (1832), "The American Scholar" (1837), "Divinity School Address" (1838), Essays: First Series , including "Self-Reliance" and "The Over-Soul" (1841), Essays: Second Series (1844)
• Spouse(s): Ellen Louisa Tucker (m. 1829-her death in 1831), Lidian Jackson (m. 1835-his death in 1882)
• Children: Waldo, Ellen, Edith, Edward Waldo
• Notable Quote: "Let me admonish you, first of all, to go alone: to refuse the good models, even those which are sacred in the imagination of men, and dare to love God without mediator or veil."

Early Life and Education (1803-1821)

Emerson was born on May 25, 1803 in Boston, Massachusetts, the son of Ruth Haskins, daughter of a prosperous Boston distiller, and Reverend William Emerson, pastor of Boston’s First Church and the son of the “patriot minister of the Revolution” William Emerson Sr. Although the family had eight children, only five sons lived to adulthood, and Emerson was the second of these. He was named after his mother’s brother Ralph and his father’s great-grandmother Rebecca Waldo.

Ralph Waldo was just 8 years old when his father died. Emerson’s family was not wealthy; his brothers were taunted for only having one coat to share between the five of them, and the family moved several times to stay with whichever family members and friends could accommodate them. Emerson’s education was cobbled together from various schools in the area; primarily he attended Boston Latin School to learn Latin and Greek, but he also attended a local grammar school to study mathematics and writing, and learned French at a private school. Already by the age of 9 he was writing poetry in his free time. In 1814, his aunt Mary Moody Emerson returned to Boston to help with the children and managing the household, and her Calvinist outlook, early individualism—with its belief that the individual both has power and responsibility—and hardworking nature clearly inspired Emerson throughout his life.

At the age of 14, in 1817, Emerson entered Harvard College, the youngest member of the class of 1821. His tuition was paid partially through the “Penn legacy,” from the First Church of Boston of which his father had been pastor. Emerson also worked as Harvard president John Kirkland’s assistant, and earned extra money by tutoring on the side. He was an unremarkable student, although he won a few prizes for essays and was elected Class Poet. At this time he began writing his journal, which he called “The Wide World,” a habit which was to last for most of his life. He graduated in the exact middle of his class of 59.

Teaching and Ministry (1821-1832)

Upon graduating, Emerson taught for a time at a school for young women in Boston set up by his brother William and which he eventually headed. At this time of transition, he noted in his journal that his childhood dreams “are all fading away and giving place to some very sober and very disgusting views of a quiet mediocrity of talents and condition.” He decided not long thereafter to devote himself to God, in the long tradition of his very religious family, and entered Harvard Divinity School in 1825.

His studies were interrupted by sickness, and Emerson moved south for a time to recover, working on poetry and sermons. In 1827, he returned to Boston and preached at several churches in New England. On a visit to Concord, New Hampshire, he met the 16-year-old Ellen Louisa Tucker, whom he loved deeply and married in 1829, despite the fact that she suffered from tuberculosis. That same year he became a Unitarian minister of the Second Church of Boston.

Just two years after their marriage, in 1831, Ellen died at the age of 19. Emerson was deeply distraught by her death, visiting her tomb every morning and even opening her coffin once. He became disenchanted with the church, finding it blindly obedient to tradition, repetitive of the words of men long dead, and dismissive of the individual. After he found he could not under good conscience offer communion, he resigned his pastorate in September of 1832.

Transcendentalism and 'The Sage of Concord' (1832-1837)

• Nature (1832)
• “The American Scholar” (1837)

The following year, Emerson sailed to Europe, where he met William Wordsworth , Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Stuart Mill , and Thomas Carlyle, with whom he struck up a lifelong friendship and whose Romantic individualism can be seen as an influence in Emerson’s later work. Back in the U.S., he met Lydia Jackson and married her in 1835, calling her “Lidian.” The couple settled in Concord, Massachusetts, and they began a practical and content marriage. Although the marriage was somewhat marked by Emerson’s frustration with Lidian’s conservatism, and her frustration with his lack of passion and his controversial—and at times almost heretical—views, it was to last for a solid and stable 47 years. The couple had four children: Waldo, Ellen (named after Ralph Waldo’s first wife, at Lidian’s suggestion), Edith, and Edward Waldo. At this time, Emerson was receiving money from Ellen’s estate, and was able to support his family as a writer and lecturer because of it.

From Concord, Emerson preached throughout New England and joined a literary society called the Symposium, or Hedge’s Club, and which later morphed into the Transcendental Club, which discussed the philosophy of Kant, the writings of Goethe and Carlyle, and the reform of Christianity. Emerson's preaching and writing caused him to become known in local literary circles as “The Sage of Concord.” At the same time, Emerson was establishing a reputation as a challenger of traditional thought, disgusted with American politics and in particular Andrew Jackson , as well as frustrated with the refusal of the Church to innovate. He wrote in his journal that he will never “utter any speech, poem, or book that is not entirely and peculiarly my work.”

During this time he was working steadily to develop his philosophical ideas and articulate them in writing. In 1836 he published Nature , which expressed his philosophy of transcendentalism and its assertion that nature is suffused by God. Emerson maintained the forward momentum of his career; in 1837, he gave a speech to the Harvard Phi Beta Kappa Society, of which he had been elected an honorary member. Entitled “The American Scholar,” the speech demanded that Americans establish a writing style liberated from European conventions, and was hailed by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. as “the intellectual Declaration of Independence.” The success of Nature and “The American Scholar” set the foundation for Emerson’s literary and intellectual career.

Transcendentalism Continued: The Dial and Essays (1837-1844)

• "Divinity School Address” (1838)
• Essays (1841)
• Essays: Second Series (1844)

Emerson was invited in 1838 to Harvard Divinity School to deliver the graduation address, which became known as his divisive and influential “Divinity School Address.” In this speech, Emerson asserted that while Jesus was a great figure, he was no more divine than any other individual is. He suggested, in true transcendentalist style, that the faith of the church was dying under its own traditionalism, its belief in miracles, and its obsequious praise of historical figures, losing sight of the divinity of the individual. This claim was outrageous to the general Protestant population at the time, and Emerson was not invited back to Harvard for another 30 years.

However, this controversy did nothing to discourage Emerson and his developing point of view. He and his friend, the writer Margaret Fuller , brought out the first issue of The Dial in 1840 , the magazine of the transcendentalists. Its publication gave platform to writers as notable as Henry David Thoreau , Bronson Alcott, W.E. Channing, and Emerson and Fuller themselves. Next, in March of 1841, Emerson published his book, Essays, which had a hugely popular reception, including from Emerson’s friend Thomas Carlyle in Scotland (though it was received, sadly, with ambivalence by his beloved aunt Mary Moody). Essays contains some of Emerson’s most influential and lasting works, “Self-Reliance,” as well as “The Over-Soul” and other classics.

Emerson’s son Waldo died in January of 1842, to his parents’ devastation. At the same time, Emerson had to take up editorship of the financially struggling Dial , as Margaret Fuller resigned due to her lack of pay. By 1844 Emerson closed the journal down, due to ongoing financial troubles; despite Emerson’s growing prominence, the journal was simply not being bought by the general public. Emerson, however, experienced unrelenting productivity despite these setbacks, publishing Essays: Second Series in October of 1844, including “Experience,” which draws on his sadness at his son’s death, “The Poet,” and yet another essay called “Nature.” Emerson also began exploring other philosophical traditions at this time, reading an English translation of the Bhagavad-Gita and recording notes in his journal.

Emerson had become close friends with Thoreau, whom he had met in 1837. In his eulogy, which Emerson gave after his death in 1862, he called Thoreau his best friend. Indeed, it was Emerson who bought the land at Walden Pond upon which Thoreau conducted his famous experiment.

After Transcendentalism: Poetry, Writings, and Travels (1846-1856)

• Poems (1847)
• Reprint of Essays: First Series (1847)
• Nature, Addresses, and Lectures (1849)
• Representative Men (1849)
• Margaret Fuller Ossoli (1852)
• English Traits (1856)

By this time the unity among the transcendentalists was fading, as they began to differ in their beliefs regarding how to achieve the reform they so desired. Emerson decided to leave for Europe in 1846-1848, sailing to Britain to give a series of lectures, which were received to great acclaim. Upon his return he published Representative Men , an analysis of six great figures and their roles: Plato the philosopher, Swedenborg the mystic, Montaigne the skeptic, Shakespeare the poet, Napoleon the man of the world, and Goethe the writer. He suggested that each man was representative of his time and of the potential of all peoples.

Emerson also co-edited a compilation of the writings of his friend Margaret Fuller, who had died in 1850. Although this work, Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (1852) , featured Fuller’s writings, they were mostly rewritten and the book was published in a rush, as it was believed interest in her life and work would not last.

When Walt Whitman sent him a draft of his 1855 Leaves of Grass, Emerson sent back a letter praising the work, although he would withdraw his support from Whitman later on. Emerson also published English Traits (1856), in which he discussed his observations of the English during his trip there, a book that was met with mixed reception.

Anti-Enslavement Activism and Civil War (1860-1865)

• The Conduct of Life (1860)

At the beginning of the 1860s, Emerson published The Conduct of Life (1860), where he begins to explore the concept of fate, a route notably different from his previous insistence on the complete freedom of the individual.

Emerson was not unaffected by the growing disagreements in national politics in this decade. The 1860s saw him strengthen an already potent and vocal support of North American 19th-century anti-enslavement activism, an idea that clearly fit in well with his emphasis on the dignity of the individual and human equality. Even in 1845 he had already refused to give a lecture in New Bedford because the congregation refused membership to Black people, and by the 1860s, with the Civil War looming, Emerson took up a strong stance. Denouncing Daniel Webster’s unionist position and fiercely opposing the Fugitive Slave Act , Emerson called for the immediate emancipation of the enslaved people. When John Brown led the raid on Harper’s Ferry , Emerson welcomed him at his house; when Brown was hanged for treason, Emerson helped raise money for his family.

Later Years and Death (1867-1882)

• May-Day and Other Pieces (1867)
• Society and Solitude (1870)
• Parnassus (editor, 1875)
• Letters and Social Aims (1876)

In 1867 Emerson’s health began to decline. Although he did not stop lecturing for another 12 years and would live another 15, he began to suffer from memory problems, unable to recall names or the words for even common objects. Society and Solitude (1870) was the last book that he published on his own; the rest relied on help from his children and friends, including Parnassus, an anthology of poetry from writers as varied as Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Julia Caroline Dorr, Henry David Thoreau, and Jones Very, among others. By 1879, Emerson stopped appearing publicly, too embarrassed and frustrated by his memory difficulties.

On April 21, 1882, Emerson was diagnosed with pneumonia. He died six days later in Concord on April 27, 1882 at the age of 78. He was buried at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, close to the graves of his dear friends and many great figures of American literature.

Emerson is one of the greatest figures of American literature; his work has influenced to an incredible degree American culture and the American identity. Seen as radical in his own time, Emerson was often labeled an atheist or a heretic whose dangerous views attempted to remove the figure of God as "father" of the universe and to supplant him with humanity. Even still, Emerson did enjoy literary fame and great respect, and especially in the latter half of his life he was accepted and celebrated in radical and establishment circles alike. He was friends with important figures like Nathaniel Hawthorne (even though he himself was against transcendentalism), Henry David Thoreau, and Bronson Alcott (prominent educator and father of Louisa May), Henry James Sr. (father of novelist Henry and philosopher William James), Thomas Carlyle, and Margaret Fuller, among many others.

He also a marked influence on later generations of writers. As noted, the young Walt Whitman received his blessing, and Thoreau was a great friend and mentee of his. While during the 19th century Emerson was seen as canon and the radical power of his views were less appreciated, interest particularly in Emerson's peculiar writing style has revived in academic circles. Moreover, his themes of hard work, the dignity of the individual, and faith arguably form some of the underpinnings of the cultural understanding of the American Dream, and are likely still a huge influence on American culture to this day. Emerson and his vision of equality, human divinity, and justice are celebrated around the world.

• Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Emerson, Essays and Poems. New York, Library of America, 1996.
• Porte, Joel; Morris, Saundra, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
• Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803-1882), Lecturer and Author | American National Biography. https://www.anb.org/view/10.1093/anb/9780198606697.001.0001/anb-9780198606697-e-1600508. Accessed 12 Oct. 2019.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson

American poet, essayist, and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson was born on May 25, 1803, in Boston. After studying at Harvard and teaching for a brief time, Emerson entered the ministry. He was appointed to the Old Second Church in his native city, but soon became an unwilling preacher. Unable in conscience to administer the sacrament of the Lord’s Soon after the death of his nineteen-year-old wife of tuberculosis, Emerson resigned his pastorate in 1831.

The following year, Emerson sailed for Europe, visiting Thomas Carlyle and Samuel Taylor Coleridge . Carlyle, the Scottish-born English writer, was famous for his explosive attacks on hypocrisy and materialism, his distrust of democracy, and his highly romantic belief in the power of the individual. Emerson’s friendship with Carlyle was both lasting and significant; the insights of the British thinker helped Emerson formulate his own philosophy.

On his return to New England, Emerson became known for challenging traditional thought. In 1835, he married his second wife, Lydia Jackson, and settled in Concord, Massachusetts. Known in the local literary circle as “The Sage of Concord,” Emerson became the chief spokesman for Transcendentalism, the American philosophic and literary movement. Centered in New England during the nineteenth century, Transcendentalism was a reaction against scientific rationalism.

Emerson’s first book, Nature (1836), is perhaps the best expression of his Transcendentalism, the belief that everything in our world—even a drop of dew—is a microcosm of the universe. His concept of the Over-Soul—a Supreme Mind that every man and woman share—allowed Transcendentalists to disregard external authority and to rely instead on direct experience. “Trust thyself,” Emerson’s motto, became the code of Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott, Henry David Thoreau, and W. E. Channing. From 1842 to 1844, Emerson edited the Transcendentalist journal, The Dial .

Emerson wrote a poetic prose, ordering his essays by recurring themes and images. His poetry, on the other hand, is often called harsh and didactic. Among Emerson’s most well known works are Essays, First and Second Series (1841, 1844). The First Series includes Emerson's famous essay, “Self-Reliance,” in which the writer instructs his listener to examine his relationship with Nature and God, and to trust his own judgment above all others.

Emerson’s other volumes include Poems (1847), Representative Men (1850), The Conduct of Life (1860), and English Traits (1865). His best-known addresses are The American Scholar (1837) and The Divinity School Address , which he delivered before the graduates of the Harvard Divinity School, shocking Boston’s conservative clergymen with his descriptions of the divinity of man and the humanity of Jesus.

Emerson’s philosophy is characterized by its reliance on intuition as the only way to comprehend reality, and his concepts owe much to the works of Plotinus, Emanuel Swedenborg, and Jakob Böhme. A believer in the “divine sufficiency of the individual,” Emerson was a steady optimist. His refusal to grant the existence of evil caused Herman Melville , Nathaniel Hawthorne , and Henry James, Sr., among others, to doubt his judgment. In spite of their skepticism, Emerson’s beliefs are of central importance in the history of American culture.

Ralph Waldo Emerson died of pneumonia on April 27, 1882.

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• Thoreau, Emerson, and Transcendentalism
• Literature Notes
• Introduction to Emerson's Writing
• What Is Transcendentalism?
• Introduction
• Major Tenets
• Reasons for the Rise of the Movement
• Forms of Expressing Transcendental Philosophy
• Lasting Impact of the Movement
• Introduction to the Times
• Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Life and Background of Emerson
• Selective Chronology of Emerson's Writings
• Emerson's Reputation and Influence
• Emerson's "Nature"
• Summary and Analysis
• Major Themes
• Emerson's "The Divinity School Address"
• Emerson's "Experience"
• Emerson's "Hamatreya"
• Henry David Thoreau
• Life and Background of Thoreau
• Introduction to Thoreau's Writing
• Selected Chronology of Thoreau's Writings
• Thoreau's Reputation and Influence
• Thoreau's "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers"
• Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience"
• Thoreau's "Walden"
• Thoreau's "Walking"
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Introduction to Emerson's Writing

Nearly a century and a quarter after his death, Emerson remains one of the most widely read and frequently quoted of American authors. The newness of his ideas and the vigor of his style captured the attention of his lecture audiences and contemporary readers, and continue to move readers today. Emerson expressed the idealistic philosophy underlying his writings with conviction. The degree to which he himself was moved by his thoughts on God, man, and nature enabled him to strike emotional chords and to inspire understanding in the reader.

Emerson's influence as a prose writer derives in part from his incisive observation and his vivid expression. Although he dealt with abstruse concepts, his writing nevertheless possesses clarity, directness, and careful progression from one idea to the next. Difficult concepts are elucidated through analogy and metaphor. Moreover, individual perceptions and ideas progress toward broad generalizations that sweep the reader along. Emerson's phraseology and construction frequently and engagingly suggest the spoken rather than the written word. This impression is reinforced by his propensity for adapting existing words into his own unique creations and for employing quotable maxims. His rhetorical style builds up to peaks of language and emotion. Indeed, Emerson's appeal as a writer — his ability to affect his audience — owes much to his experience as a preacher and public speaker and to the fact that many of his essays were delivered as lectures before they were revised for publication.

Emerson's poetry presents, symbolically and in compressed form, the same major themes found in his addresses and prose writings. The rise and fall of emotional intensity in the poetry parallel the crescendos and cadences of the essays. There are considerable stylistic differences among the poems. Critics have varied widely in assessing the technical success and overall merit of Emerson's poems.

Emerson's thought was informed by a variety of influences, among them New England Calvinism and Unitarianism, the writings of Plato, the Neoplatonists, Coleridge, Carlyle, Wordsworth, Montaigne, and Swedenborg, and eastern sacred texts like the Bhagavad Gita. But his interpretation and synthesis of his antecedents and contemporaries were his own. More than any other thinker and writer of his period, Emerson defined in his work what we think of as American Transcendentalism.

At the end of his life, Emerson looked back on the rise of New England Transcendentalism in the essay "Historic Notes on Life and Letters in Massachusetts," later published under the title "Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England." He wrote of this vital period: "The idea, roughly written in revolutions and national movements, in the mind of the philosopher had far more precision; the individual is the world." Although disinclined to take credit for his own influence, he himself did much to advance the central position of mankind and of the individual in relation to God, nature, and human institutions. From before the 1836 publication of Nature (his first, most comprehensive exposition of the principles of Transcendental philosophy), every lecture that he gave and every piece that he wrote elevated the importance and dignity of man as an expression of God, as a part of the unity of God, man, and nature in the Oversoul. The assumptions underlying Nature invalidated the subordination of the individual in more traditional religious, social, and political frameworks. In Chapter VII of Nature ("Spirit"), Emerson wrote:

. . . that spirit, that is, the Supreme Being, does not build up nature around us, but puts it forth through us, as the life of the tree puts forth new branches and leaves through the pores of the old. As a plant upon the earth, so a man rests upon the bosom of God; he is nourished by unfailing fountains, and draws, at his need, inexhaustible power. Who can set bounds to the possibilities of man? . . . man has access to the entire mind of the Creator, is himself the creator in the finite.

This outlook was radically humanistic, and challenged the distant sovereignty of God that formed part of New England's Calvinistic heritage.

Emerson not only uplifted mankind to oneness with, rather than subservience to, God. He also suggested a distinctly democratic view of each man as equal in worth and capacity to all other men. Human hierarchies, distinctions between the great and the humble, were irrelevant in measuring the value of the individual. Emerson wrote in Chapter VIII of Nature ("Prospects"):

All that Adam had, all that Cæsar could, you have and can do. Adam called his house, heaven and earth; Cæsar called his house, Rome; you perhaps call yours, a cobler's trade; a hundred acres of ploughed land; or a scholar's garret. Yet line for line and point for point, your dominion is as great as theirs, though without fine names. Build, therefore, your own world.

This affirmative vision of equality among men, all possessing divinity in some degree, appeals to us today as powerfully as it did to Emerson's contemporaries. Emerson asserted a kind of democracy far more basic than any political or social system can promote. Moreover, he strengthened the individual's claim to significance and respect by philosophically framing extraordinary expressions of human ability within the context of humanity as a whole. Emerson perceived the particular man who had achieved distinction in some way as a demonstration of the possibilities of all men. He proclaimed in "The American Scholar"

The main enterprise of the world for splendor, for extent, is the upbuilding of a man. Here are the materials strown along the ground. The private life of one man shall be a more illustrious monarchy, — more formidable to its enemy, more sweet and serene in its influence to its friend, than any kingdom in history. For a man, rightly viewed, comprehendeth the particular natures of all men. Each philosopher, each bard, each actor, has only done for me, as by a delegate, what one day I can do for myself.

Emerson was fascinated by the attributes — both positive and negative — of a variety of exceptional individuals. He delivered lectures and published essays (contained within his Representative Men ) on Plato, Swedenborg, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Napoleon, and Goethe. But he focused on these men not so much to highlight their particular excellences as to suggest the potentialities and aspirations of humanity as a whole. He wrote in "Uses of Great Men" (the first piece in Representative Men ):

As to what we call the masses, and common men; — there are no common men. All men are at last of a size; and true art is only possible, on the conviction that every talent has its apotheosis somewhere. Fair play, and an open field, and freshest laurels to all who have won them! But heaven reserves an equal scope for every creature. Each is uneasy until he has produced his private ray unto the concave sphere, and beheld his talent also in its last nobility and exaltation.

Emerson saw the external limitations imposed by civilization, society, institutions, and materialism as greater impediments to individual self-realization than the differences of gifts among men.

Emerson's exaltation of the individual was based upon his view of the integral connection between God, man, and nature. Man is capable of much — imagination, insight, morality, and more — but all of his aptitudes derive from his intimate relationship with a larger, higher entity than himself. Emerson expressed the essential oneness of man with the divine in his essay "The Over-Soul":

We know that all spiritual being is in man. . . . [A]s there is no screen or ceiling between our heads and the infinite heavens, so there is no bar or wall in the soul, where man, the effect, ceases, and God, the cause, begins. The walls are taken away. We lie open on one side to the deeps of spiritual nature, to the attributes of God.

The divine is accessible because God communicates directly to man. Moreover, the influence of the divine on each individual grants the unlimited possibility of higher development, "the infinite enlargement of the heart with a power of growth." The individual may approach ever closer to the perfection of God: "Ineffable is the union of man and God in every act of the soul. The simplest person, who in his integrity worships God, becomes God; yet forever and ever the influx of this better and universal self is new and unsearchable." Self-improvement — moral and spiritual elevation toward the divine — is unbounded, growth an open-ended process.

Nature, which, as Emerson wrote in "Idealism" (Chapter VII of Nature ), "is made to conspire with spirit to emancipate us," forms a third part of the equation between the divine, the human, and the material. It is a key element in man's realization of his relationship with God: "The world proceeds from the same spirit as the body of man. It is a remoter and inferior incarnation of God, a projection of God in the unconscious." Man's understanding of the importance and meaning of nature is essential to his achieving the insight into God that is available to all. The failure to recognize nature results in distance from God: "As we degenerate, the contrast between us and our house is more evident. We are as much strangers in nature, as we are aliens from God." The channels of interaction between man, God, and nature must remain unobstructed for the universal to express itself in the particular mind and existence of the individual.

Emerson explained the means by which the individual understands his place in the encompassing as oracular and revelatory. He wrote in "The Over-Soul":

And this deep power in which we exist, and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one. We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are the shining parts, is the soul. Only by the vision of that Wisdom can the horoscope of the ages be read, and by falling back on our better thoughts, by yielding to the spirit of prophecy which is innate in every man, we can know what it saith.

The broad scope of the universe and man's position in it are fathomable not by the logic of the human intellect, but by the divine spark of intuition. In his glorification of intuitive "reason" (a usage adopted from the English Romantic poets) over more rational, experiential "understanding," Emerson was influenced by Kant and by the interpretation of German idealistic philosophy offered by the English Romantics, particularly Coleridge.

Emerson saw that there was no way to explain intuition in terms of ordinary mental processes. "We know truth when we see it . . . as we know when we are awake that we are awake," he wrote in "The Over-Soul." If mysteriously inexplicable, however, intuition is exhilarating

We distinguish the announcements of the soul, its manifestations of its own nature, by the term Revelation . These are always attended by the emotion of the sublime. For this communication is an influx of the Divine mind into our mind. . . . Every distinct apprehension of this central commandment agitates men with awe and delight. . . . By the necessity of our constitution, a certain enthusiasm attends the individual's consciousness of that divine presence. The character and duration of this enthusiasm varies with the state of the individual, from an extasy and trance and prophetic inspiration . . . to the faintest glow of virtuous emotion. . . .

Indeed, Emerson added, intuitive insight and religious revelation are similar to insanity, another intense expression of a force beyond the control of the individual.

To remain receptive to the intuitive process, a man must trust in himself. In "Self-Reliance," Emerson wrote of the need for each man to think for himself, to trust in his own ability to understand, evaluate, and act. He warned his audiences and his readers not to give up their freedom as individuals to constricting beliefs and customs, to common values, to established institutions:

But now we are a mob. Man does not stand in awe of man, nor is his genius admonished to stay at home, to put itself in communication with the internal ocean, but it goes abroad to beg a cup of water of the urns of other men. We must go alone. I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching. . . . Why should we assume the faults of our friend, or wife, or father, or child, because they sit around our hearth, or are said to have the same blood? All men have my blood, and I have all men's. Not for that will I adopt their petulance or folly. . . . But your isolation must not be mechanical, but spiritual, that is, must be elevation.

The intellectually, morally, and spiritually independent individual maintains his ability to come to a direct understanding of the world around him and of his place in it and in the universe.

Emerson argued against reliance on the thought of the past in "The American Scholar," and against conformity to established religion in the "Divinity School Address." Unquestioning acceptance and compliance close off spontaneous communication with the divine and limit the fulfillment of human potential. Self-reliance is equivalent to trust in the divine. Emerson wrote in "Self-Reliance":

The magnetism which all original action exerts is explained when we inquire the reason of self-trust. . . . What is the aboriginal Self on which a universal reliance may be grounded? What is the nature and power of that science-baffling star, without parallax, without calculable elements, which shoots a ray of beauty even into trivial and impure actions, if the least mark of independence appear? The inquiry leads us to that source, at once the essence of genius, of virtue, and of life, which we call Spontaneity or Instinct. We denote this primary wisdom as Intuition. . . . In that deep force, the last fact behind which analysis cannot go, all things find their common origin.

Thus, self-reliance permits intuition, which allows the individual to grasp the divinity that enfolds the human and natural realms. Conformity is passive, while openness to intuition is part of an active, dynamic process. Reliance on tradition fixes values and understanding, preventing growth. Intuition, on the other hand, a force of intense flux, results in the ever-higher perfection of man toward godliness.

Idealist though he was, Emerson was keenly aware of the difficulty of reconciling the material and the spiritual. He attempted to bridge the gap between the two with the theory of correspondence, which he understood in large part through the thought and work of mystical Swedish theologian Emanuel Swedenborg, and through that of Sampson Reed, Swedenborg's American disciple. Emerson developed the idea of correspondence in Nature . He perceived the physical world as a manifestation of spirit — of the creator's mind — and therefore as symbolic of the divine, and saw a one-for-one correspondence between natural laws and spiritual laws. In its symbolism, he wrote, nature is designed to afford man comprehension of God. Human expressions and constructs such as language, architecture, and even morality are based upon and reflect the forms and laws of nature, and consequently also provide evidence of and insight into God.

The principle of correspondence allowed Emerson to frame external reality within the context of divine absolutes and, at the same time, to harness the material world to man's striving to spiritualize and to make himself a more perfect reflection of God. Emerson wrote of correspondence in "Language," Chapter IV of Nature :

This relation between the mind and matter is not fancied by some poet, but stands in the will of God, and so is free to be known by all men. . . . There seems to be a necessity in spirit to manifest itself in material forms; and day and night, river and storm, beast and bird, acid and alkali, preëxist in necessary Ideas in the mind of God, and are what they are by the virtue of preceding affections, in the world of spirit. . . . The visible creation is the terminus or the circumference of the invisible world.

Toward the end of understanding correspondence and of perceiving the divine through it, Emerson advocated a "life in harmony with nature, the love of truth and of virtue." Gradually, he wrote, the relationship between the material world and the ideal in the mind of God will be understood. Through intuition, which works on the human mind as it observes nature, "the world shall be to us an open book, and every form significant of its hidden life and final cause."

Emerson and Thoreau both regarded poetry as a form of literature peculiarly suited to express Transcendental insight into the divine. Emerson also presented poetry as a kind of demonstration of correspondence, a simultaneous manifestation of the properties of physical form and ethereal spirit. He wrote in his essay "The Poet":

For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem, — a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing. The thought and the form are equal in the order of time, but in the order of genesis the thought is prior to the form.

Ultimately, then, the spiritual origin of the poem precedes the poem as "thing," as an object possessing physical form as well as idea. And through the beauty of its form, something of the underlying spiritual impetus behind the poem is revealed.

Emerson not only explored the relationship between the material and the spiritual in his writings, but also directly addressed the discrepancy between philosophy and our experience of life, notably in the essay "Experience." While he rejected narrow and limiting approaches and institutions, he was tolerant of humanity and of social forms. On a basic level, he accepted the world he lived in as it was, and sought to reconcile it with the higher spiritual reality that he perceived beyond.

In Nature , "The American Scholar," "The Divinity School Address," and a few other key early pieces, Emerson expressed most of the major ideas that he explored throughout the rest of his work. In the course of his career, he examined a broad range of subjects — poets and poetry, education, history, society, art, politics, reform, and the lives of particular individuals among them — within the Transcendental framework that he set forth early in his career as a lecturer and a man of letters.

Previous Life and Background of Emerson

Next Selective Chronology of Emerson's Writings

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Ralph Waldo Emerson

What accounts for emerson's endurance as a writer.

As a teenager in 1960, Clyde Edgerton was trying to find a name for the doubts he was feeling about his conventional, small-town life in Bethesda, North Carolina.

Then, a high school assignment offered up a tutor for life. Edgerton’s epiphany came while reading Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Nature”:

The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should we not also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should we not have a poetry and philosophy of insight  and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history  of theirs? . . . The sun shines today also. . . . Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.

In Emerson, Edgerton found someone who let him know that questioning orthodox belief was not only acceptable, but vital. “My mind was set afire as if soaked in gasoline,” Edgerton would recall many years later in an essay. “Emerson had served me up a bowl of intellectual rebellion at just the right time in my young life” The encounter steered Edgerton toward college, which he had planned to skip, and onward to a successful career as the novelist behind such celebrated works as  Raney  and  Walking Across Egypt .

“Here was a writer who wrote about ideas—ideas that heated my blood,” Edgerton writes of Emerson. “He was moral, but not dictatorial and narrow. He was kind. He loved the world, and it seemed as if he had written some sentences for no one but me.”

Edgerton’s testimonial seems all the more vivid because of its rarity. Few people these days talk deeply about Emerson, the quintessential nineteenth-century New Englander, as an agent of passion or personal revolution. Emerson, a founding father of American letters, who famously declared that “every hero becomes a bore at last,” would perhaps not be too surprised to learn that even some of his modern-day admirers occasionally find him boring, too.

Some of Emerson’s most discriminating champions over the years have tended, despite their support, to damn him with faint praise. Typical of this view was the late Clifton Fadiman, who included Emerson’s essays in  The Lifetime Reading Plan , a popular 1960 book meant to highlight works that the great literary critic thought every American should read.

While recommending him as a seminal writer, Fadiman notes Emerson’s “gassiness and repetitiousness” and cautions readers, when dipping into the Sage of Concord, to “beware of overlarge doses. At times he offers fine words in lieu of fine thoughts, and he never understood how to organize or compress large masses of material.”

Emerson’s sweeping pronouncements, which sometimes read like a patchwork of fortune cookie aphorisms, give his prose a mystical sensibility that can sometimes feel unmoored from daily concerns. Henry David Thoreau, an Emerson protégé who excelled at grounding his philosophical musings within detailed observations of Concord, seems much more approachable by comparison.“Thoreau, reaping the reward of greater daring and a firmer grasp on rude fact, casts the longer shadow,” Fadiman flatly declares.

But if Emerson is better known as a maker of proverbs than as a master of sustained prose narratives, his one-liners have proven memorable enough to secure his reputation as a cultural icon. Even those who have never cracked the spine of an Emerson anthology are familiar with many of his sayings. The seventeenth edition of  Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations , with its one hundred fifty Emerson entries, affirms that he was a heavy-hitter of witticisms. To read them is to be reminded of his rhetorical greatest hits:

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.”

“To be great is to be misunderstood.”

“The only reward of virtue is virtue; the only way to have a friend is to be one.”

“Wit makes its own welcome, and levels all distinctions.”

“Life is not so short but that there is always time enough for courtesy.”

“Things are in the saddle, and ride mankind.”

Emerson’s “things-are-in-the-saddle” comment, extracted from one of his poems, invites an obvious comparison with a similar Thoreau observation on the limits of materialism: “We do not ride upon the railroad; it rides upon us.” Notice the subtle difference between their grasp of the same subject: humanity’s habit of owning possessions—and, in turn, being owned by them. Emerson goes to the brisk generalization,“things,” while Thoreau gravitates toward the more concrete image of the railroad. Emerson’s public writing tends to resemble a newspaper editorial, with its ambition aimed at the broad conclusion, while Thoreau’s resonates with the urgency of tangible detail.The distinction here is far from absolute. There are some very nice turns in Emerson’s poems and essays in which he drops his guard as a public commentator to reveal an engaging private face. Here, for example, is a much-quoted interlude from “Nature” in which Emerson offers a personal anecdote:

Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear.

In passages like this one, Emerson most closely approximates the ideal represented by Michel de Montaigne, the sixteenth-century Frenchman who essentially created the personal essay and, in doing  so, became one of Emerson’s heroes.  “A single odd volume of Cotton’s translation of (Montaigne’s) ‘Essays’ remained to me from my father’s library, when a boy,” Emerson tells readers. “It lay long neglected, until, after many years, when I was newly escaped from college, I read the book, and procured the remaining volumes. I remember the delight and  wonder in which I lived with it.”

What Emerson appreciates about Montaigne is his literary idol’s genius for appearing whole on the page.“The sincerity and marrow of the man reaches to his sentences,” Emerson writes of Montaigne. “I know not anywhere the book that seems less written. It is the language of conversation transferred to a book. Cut these words, and they would bleed; they are vascular and alive.” Emerson admires these qualities, one gathers, because they seem so elusive in his own essays. In his essay on Montaigne, Emerson clears his throat for eight pages before finally sitting beside the reader to share his intimate reflections on a book that changed his life.The long windup to the topic at hand includes a rather dry discourse on epistemology, a preamble that seems neither vascular nor alive.

But Emerson’s kinship with Montaigne also grew from a shared anxiety about the excesses of orthodoxy. While Montaigne had confronted the consequences of religious absolutism during the French Wars of Religion, Emerson faced his own struggles with organized religion when he felt compelled to give up his ministry over differences in church doctrine.

Ralph Waldo Emerson was born on May 25, 1803, in Boston, entering a household in which nine previous generations of men had been well-known ministers. His father, a prominent Unitarian preacher, died when Emerson was eight, throwing the family into financial distress. With help from the church, and income from boarders kept by his mother, the family muddled through, eventually scraping together enough money for Emerson to attend Harvard. After graduating and  trying school teaching, Emerson entered the family business of preaching and was ordained as junior pastor of Boston’s Second Church in 1829. That same year, he married young Ellen Tucker, who died sixteen months later of tuberculosis, the same disease that plagued Emerson and other members of his family. Devastated, Emerson began a period of deeper reflection on his faith, resigning from the ministry in 1832, and embarking on an extended trip to England and mainland Europe.

An inheritance from his wife allowed Emerson to pursue a career as a writer and lecturer. His work led him toward transcendentalism, a loosely defined philosophy that stressed indvidual intuition, as opposed to tradition and institutional authority, as the path to knowledge. With its skeptical view of the establishment and its emphasis on nature as a source of spiritual insight, transcendentalism seemed well suited to a frontier nation where memories of the American Revolution still resonated in a land thick with trees.

In “The American Scholar,” an address he gave at Harvard in 1837, Emerson captivated his listeners when he urged them to do their own thinking instead of using imported ideas from the Old World. Emerson’s point  was not that English and European thinking was uniformly bad; he had, after all, derived many of his own insights from the German intellectuals Johann Goethe and Immanuel Kant, and he was also an avid student of Eastern religion. But Emerson argued that all ideas should be tested by individual experience, and not merely accepted based on the power of precedent. “Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which  Bacon have given,” said Emerson, “forgetful that Cicero, Locke and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote these books.”

Addressing Harvard Divinity School students a year later, Emerson questioned common assumptions of organized religion—a gesture that inspired charges of heresy among his critics, prompting officials to ban him from speaking at Harvard for three decades. Emerson’s willingness to challenge society contrasts with his modern reputation as a boring Brahmin. Emerson scholar Donald McQuade has pointed out how easy it is to forget Emerson’s radical streak. “Faith in human potential, belief in self-reliant individualism, resolute optimism, moral idealism, worshipful return to nature—these are but a few of Emerson’s principles that remain central to the national ideology he helped articulate and popularize,” McQuade writes. “Repeated and adapted so often by scores of admirers and apprentices . . . Emerson’s  terms now seem so familiar that it is hard to credit him with all of his originality. The challenge for today’s readers of Emerson is to recover the freshness of a creative thinker whose original ideas no longer sound unique.”

Emerson’s challenge to the ecclesiastical and intellectual status quo coincided with equally vigorous activism on the political scene. Because Emerson “rose to national prominence in one of the most turbulent and formative periods in the United States,” scholar David M. Robinson has observed, “political questions grew in importance for him, becoming by the 1850s and 1860s one of his chief concerns as a public intellectual.”

In 1838, the same year as his Divinity School address, Emerson wrote a letter to President Martin Van Buren, protesting the removal of the Cherokee people to Oklahoma, the forced march that resulted in the infamous Trail of Tears in which thousands died. Emerson was also an active abolitionist and champion of women’s rights. Not always eager to enter political frays, he often found this kind of engagement inevitable for a public figure of his stature. “You can no more keep out of politics,” Emerson said, “than you can keep out of the frost.”

The tensions in Emerson’s public life occasionally paralleled equally formidable struggles at home. After Ellen’s death, Emerson moved to Concord and remarried in 1835, taking Lydia Jackson as his new wife. But his relatively tranquil life with Lydia was complicated by the death of his brothers and the loss of his young son, Waldo, who died at age five in 1842. A big fire at Emerson’s Concord home in1872 seemed to foreshadow a decade of physical and mental decline for Emerson that culminated with his death on April 27, 1882.

The darker aspects of Emerson’s biography challenge the notion that he was a sunny-faced optimist untested by hardship. “Sometimes we have vulgarized his affirmative doctrine,” Fadiman noted of Emerson. “It is but a short series of missteps from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Billy Graham.” But when Emerson urges his readers to have courage, one sometimes senses that he is trying to talk himself through self-doubt. Writer Scott Russell Sanders, a contemporary nature essayist in the best Emersonian tradition, suggests that in a close reading of Emerson, “we can see that the greatest of his essays were those he wrote not to proclaim certainties but to overcome uncertainties.”

If Emerson’s life, despite its periods of public controversy and private pain, seemed placid when compared with the lives of many other writers, it is perhaps because his home thrived on order and  unassuming routine, making its drama less visible. He was, as McQuade puts it, “an intellectual radical who led a rather conventional external life.” Phillip Lopate, a modern-day essayist who counts himself a big Emerson fan, suggests that “Emerson has become  an afterthought in the American literary canon because he lacks that outsider romance of our other mid-nineteenth century giants. We tend to value renegades like Thoreau, doomed alcoholics like Poe, recluses like Dickinson, misunderstood visionaries like Melville, expansive gay bards like Whitman.”

Emerson’s stability made him a natural mentor to writers such as Thoreau—who borrowed Emerson’s land to make his famous home near Walden Pond—and fellow transcendentalist Bronson Alcott. Emerson had an uneven relationship with Thoreau, who was not always happy in the role of disciple to his Concord benefactor, but Emerson was grief-stricken when Thoreau died of tuberculosis on May 6, 1862.

Emerson, writes biographer Robert D. Richardson Jr., would always remember Thoreau as his best friend, “even when his memory loss was so far advanced that he could not pull up the name.” Richardson notes that Emerson’s eulogy  for Thoreau was his “last sustained major piece of writing.” Later published in essay form, Emerson’s tribute to the author of  Walden  exhibits a directness and vulnerability seldom found in Emerson’s other public writings:

It was a pleasure and a privilege to walk with him. He knew the country like a fox or a bird, and passed through it as freely by paths of his own. He knew every track in the snow or on the ground, and what creature had taken this path before him. One must submit abjectly to such a guide, and  the reward was great. Under his arm he carried  an old music-book to press plants; in his pocket, his diary and pencil, a spy-glass for birds, microscope, jack-knife and twine. He wore straw hat, stout shoes, strong gray trousers, to brave scrub-oaks and smilax, and to climb a tree for a hawk’s or a squirrel’s nest.

Emerson’s eulogy for Thoreau is a reminder that most of his printed essays originated as texts that were meant to be spoken, which may explain why some of his essays do not seem fully realized,reading like scripts for plays that retain their most vital spark only in live performance. Emerson’s chief livelihood was as a speaker, a man who was a regular on the lyceum circuit, which was the nineteenth-century equivalent of the talk-show tour. He was apparently quite good at it—so much so that the poet James Russell Lowell remarked, “We do not go to hear what Emerson says so much as to hear Emerson . . .” As a speaker, according to McQuade, Emerson cut a dramatic figure:

He was tall, but years of poor health had already worn at his body, sloped his shoulders, and made him appear gaunt—certainly older than a man in his mid-thirties. Emerson had a chiseled look—a long, narrow, weathered face beneath a furrowed brow and thick brown hair, with deeply recessed blue eyes set off by a prominent nose and an angular chin. He had a broad mouth, but one that would remain unaccustomed to laughter. There was always something highly serious, almost lofty, even ethereal, about him. There was also a calm dignity evident immediately in his voice; it had the polished cadences of a first-rate preacher.

If quite a number of Emerson's essays seem longish and redundant, it could be because they retain material that worked better on the stump than on the page. Although he left church ministry early in his career, Emerson retained the rhetorical habits of the pulpit, and the hortatory flavor of his essays can, in lengthy doses, wear thin. But luckily, renewed interest in Emerson’s journals is throwing light on a softer, less formal voice than the one expressed in his essays and poems. Those journals, circulated in excerpt form in various new editions, are winning new converts to Emerson’s prose.

The Library of America published a two-volume selection of Emerson’s journals in 2010, prompting Lopate to take a fresh look at a writer who had previously left him cold. “Truthfully, I never felt that close to Emerson in the past,” Lopate  confessed. “I admired his prose style, but his essays seemed too impersonal for my taste. They sounded oracular, abstract, dizzyingly inspired, like visionary sermons: the thinking and language spectacular, the man somehow missing. It took reading his journals to appreciate the man and the work.” In the journals, Lopate concludes, Emerson seems better able to advance the familiar, discursive style of his old hero, Montaigne.

Like Lopate, Sanders thinks that Emerson’s most appealing presence rests not in his essays, but in his journals. “When I first read a handful of his essays in college, I didn’t much care for Ralph Waldo Emerson,” Sanders writes. “He seemed too high-flown, too cocksure, too earnest. I couldn’t imagine he had ever sweated or doubted. His sentences rang with a magisterial certainty that I could never muster.”

But, in Emerson’s journals, Sanders discovered a different writer. “From beginning to end,” adds Sanders, “I found in Emerson’s journals a writer struggling to describe what lurked at the edges of perception, what loomed in the depths of consciousness. Instead of the Olympian, cocksure figure who spoke through the essays, here was an explorer who left the well-trodden ways, brushed against mysteries, and tried to describe what he had experienced.”

Another good selection of Emerson’s journals is   A Year With Emerson: A Daybook , published by David R. Godine in 2003. In one entry, Emerson, perhaps anticipating the ebbs and flows that his literary reputation would undergo far into the future, asserts that he is actually more comfortable with critical brickbats than bouquets. “I hate to be defended in a newspaper,” he writes. “As long as all that is said is said  against  me, I feel a certain sublime assurance of success, but as soon as honied words of praise are spoken for me, I feel as one that lies unprotected before his enemies.”

Even so, Emerson probably wouldn’t protest too much at Lopate’s assessment of his legacy: “He wrote  some of the best reflective prose we have; he was a hero of intellectual labor, a loyal friend  and, taking all flaws into account, a good egg.”

Danny Heitman is the editor of Phi Kappa Phi’s Forum magazine and a columnist for the  Advocate newspaper in Louisiana. He writes frequently about arts and culture for national publications, including the Wall Street Journal and the  Christian Science Monitor.

Funding information

NEH has funded numerous educational projects related to Ralph Waldo Emerson. Among them are  “Reading Emerson’s Essays,”  a four-week seminar for college teachers, and  “Concord, Massachusetts: Fervent Feminists, Utopian Dreamers, and Social Reform in the Age of Emerson and Thoreau,”  a Landmarks of American History  workshop for community college faculty. In July, there will be a summer institute for college and  university teachers on  “Transcendentalism and Social Action in the Age of Emerson, Thoreau, and Fuller.”

The Library of America, which has published several Emerson volumes, received a $1.2 million grant  from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1979 to begin publishing titles of classic American literature and keep them in print.

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Literature › Literary Criticism of Ralph Waldo Emerson

Literary Criticism of Ralph Waldo Emerson

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on November 30, 2017 • ( 7 )

Emerson (1803–1882), the most articulate exponent of American Romanticism , was a poet; but he was distinguished primarily by his contributions to literary and cultural criticism. He was the leading advocate of American “ transcendentalism ” with its insistence on the value of intuition, individuality of perception, the goodness of human nature, and the unity of the entire creation. His views of nature and self-reliance not only influenced American literary figures of his own day, such as Thoreau , Whitman, and Dickinson , but also left their mark on European writers such as George Eliot and Nietzsche , as well as the American pragmatist philosophers William James and John Dewey .

Though he graduated from Harvard Divinity School and became a minister at a Unitarian church in Boston, his personal circumstances (his first wife dying of tuberculosis) and intellectual development led him to harbor doubts about conventional Christian doctrine. He traveled to Europe in 1832, meeting with Wordsworth and Coleridge , as well as Thomas Carlyle , with whom he maintained a long correspondence. Beyond the influences of these European literary figures, Emerson’s work bears traces of the ideas of Kant, Hegel, and Schleiermacher . His most renowned volumes and essays include Nature (1836), The American Scholar (1837), the Address Delivered before the Senior Class in Divinity College  (1838) (where he criticized institutional religion for thwarting individual self-discovery), History ,   Self-Reliance ,  and The Poet.

Emerson’s essay Nature  is one of the most powerful and succinct expressions of a Romantic world view. Emerson sees the universe as composed of “Nature” and the “Soul,” taking up a distinction of Carlyle and some German philosophers such as Fichte between the “self ” and the “not-self.” Everything that falls under the “not-self ” or the “not-me” is considered by Emerson to fall under the term Nature . Characteristically of Romanticism , Emerson believes that nature is apprehensible not to most adults but to the “eye and the heart of the child,” of someone who “has retained the spirit of infancy” (25). He stresses that nature is part of God and through it circulate the “currents of the Universal Being” (26). Whatever is furnished to our senses by nature Emerson calls “commodities.” A higher gift of nature is the love of beauty. Emerson sees beauty as having three aspects: at the lowest level, we derive pleasure from the “simple perception of natural forms.” But this beauty is merely “seen and felt,” and its elements are the mere physical appearances of nature which in themselves have no reality (29–30). Such nature reflects a higher and divine beauty which inspires man to virtue. The highest form under which beauty may be viewed is when it becomes “an object of the intellect,” which “searches out the absolute order of things as they stand in the mind of God” (32). Hence the beauty in nature “is not ultimate. It is the herald of inward and eternal beauty” (33).

A third use provided by nature to man is language. Nature, says Emerson, is “the vehicle of thought,” in a threefold manner. Firstly, words are “signs of natural facts”: the root of every word is ultimately “borrowed from some material appearance.” For example, “right” originally meant “straight” and “wrong” meant “twisted” (33). Secondly, “it is not words only that are emblematic; it is things which are emblematic. Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual facts. Every appearance in nature corresponds to some state of the mind” (34). For example, light and darkness are familiarly associated with knowledge and ignorance; a river expresses the flux of all things. Nature makes man conscious of “a universal soul within or behind his individual life, wherein, as in a firmament, the natures of Justice, Truth, Love, Freedom, arise and shine. This universal soul he calls Reason . . . That which intellectually considered we call Reason, considered in relation to nature, we call Spirit. Spirit is the Creator” (34). What Emerson is indicating here is that nature taken in itself is a mere catalogue of facts. But once it is married to human history, it becomes alive, expressing a “radical correspondence between visible things and human thoughts.” In this sense, nature is an “interpreter.” It remains for wise men and poet to redeem language from its corruption and to “fasten words again to visible things” (35–36). In other words, language is reconnected with material images, and good writing and discourse are “perpetual allegories.” Like Wordsworth , Emerson advocates the life of the country, a withdrawal from “the roar of cities or the broil of politics,” in order to facilitate such a rejuvenation of language. Emerson goes on to explain that the “world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind” (36). In a Hegelian sentiment, Emerson notes that “there seems to be a necessity in spirit to manifest itself in material forms.” Material phenomena “pre-exist in necessary Ideas in the mind of God . . . A Fact is the end or last issue of spirit” (37). Hence language is rooted in the divinely overseen and progressive connection between the human spirit and nature; things in the world are themselves signs, are themselves allegorical enactments of higher truths; nature or the world does not exist in and for itself but as a vehicle of man’s spiritual expression.

Nature, according to Emerson, also provides a “discipline” to our understanding, offering an immense variety of material which can educate our understanding and reason (38–39). Moreover, nature disposes us toward “idealism,” toward overcoming our immersion in material things and recognizing that the material world is merely an expression of something higher, namely, a system of truth, morality, and beauty. Nature “is made to conspire with spirit to emancipate us” (45). The poet communicates this detached pleasure, arising from his ability to lift things from their immediate context and to situate them in larger, spiritual and intellectual realms: “The sensual man conforms thoughts to things; the poet conforms things to his thoughts” (45). The poet has a freedom whereby he can rearrange elements of the given world into a more profound, symbolic reality, effectively asserting the “predominance of the soul” over nature (47).

The poet, says Emerson, “proposes Beauty as his main end,” whereas the philosopher proposes Truth. Nonetheless, they both seek to ground the world of phenomena in stable and permanent laws in an idea whose beauty is infinite. Hence, the “true philosopher and the true poet are one, and a beauty, which is truth, and a truth, which is beauty, is the aim of both” (47). Whereas later writers such as Poe will subordinate the considerations of truth and morality to the overarching aim of beauty, Emerson holds these together in a precarious balance flown into the modern world direct from Plato’s Athens.

Like many Romantics, Emerson laments that the current age is reduced to a mechanical understanding of the world. Man at present, says Emerson, “works on the world with his understanding alone. He lives in it and masters it by a penny-wisdom” (55). Understanding, we recall, is regarded by most Romantics as a categorizing faculty, able to divide up the world in a mechanical way but unable to reach the unifying vision of reason or imagination. In such a view of the world, says Emerson, the “axis of vision is not coincident with the axis of things . . . The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is because man is disunited with himself.” The problem of “restoring to the world original and eternal beauty is solved by the redemption of the soul” (56). By altering ourselves, by transforming the spirit that moves within us, we will transform the world of nature, since the latter is moved and molded by spirit (57).

It is Emerson’s essay The American Scholar  that perhaps best articulates some of the distinctive concerns of American Romanticism. Emerson here attempts to give voice to the composition and duties of the American scholar in the context not only of contemporary American culture but also of the broader implications of Emerson’s transcendental beliefs in the unity of the world, and of the human soul, as well as the nature of their connection. At the beginning of the essay, Emerson declares that America’s “day of dependence” on foreign learning is drawing to a close (58). At one level, the essay might be read as a justification of, or as arguing the need for, such cultural and intellectual independence, and a relative freedom from the past. But Emerson’s text skillfully integrates the parameters of this freedom, this independence, this cultural nationalism, within a vision of the overall unity of humankind. His most fundamental premise is that “there is One Man,” who is present to a partial degree in all men: “Man is not a farmer, or a professor, or an engineer, but he is all. Man is priest, and scholar, and statesman, and producer, and soldier. In the divided or social state, these functions are parcelled out to individuals,” and the “original unit, this fountain of power . . . has been so minutely subdivided and peddled out, that it is spilled into drops, and cannot be gathered . . . Man is thus metamorphosed into a thing, into many things” (59). Hence, instead of envisioning these subdivisions as “Man farming” or “Man trading” or “Man thinking,” we have effectively reduced man to the specific functions of “farmer,” “trader,” or “scholar” (59). None of these is equipped to look beyond his narrow function; the trader, for example, loses sight of the “ideal worth” of his work and, being entrenched within the “routine of his craft,” his “soul is subject to dollars” (59).

Like Marx , what Emerson is bemoaning here is the fragmentation of the human by division of labor into various isolated and ossified aspects, a fragmentation that has reached a new intensity with the extreme specialization of function in bourgeois society. This specialization has effectively caused the various human faculties to be separated out according to function, losing sight of their original coexistence and unity. Emerson’s proposed remedy for this fragmentation of the human being is, of course, markedly different from the revolutionary strategies of Marx . But it is worth noting the overlap between their perceptions of the circumstance of alienation in the emerging capitalist world. For Emerson, as for many of the Romantic and Victorian thinkers, it is the man of letters, rather than any economic or political agency, who holds the keys to salvation.

In the foregoing statements Emerson expresses a characteristically Romantic vision in his own exquisite mode. Like other Romantics, he rejects the world of mainstream bourgeois philosophy, the world of separate, atomistically conceived entities; a world where the human faculties have fallen from their original unity, and grope in presumed independence; a world of dualism, where nature is viewed as external to the human self, where object and subject, no longer coterminous and enjoying mutual harmony, glide beyond each other’s limits in the mode of alienation and incommensurability. Emerson is not returning to some pre-bourgeois vision of pre-established harmony between the self and world; he seems to be articulating a more Hegelian position, one that sees subjectivity and objectivity arising as part of the same movement and in necessary mutual relation. The atomism and fragmentation of the bourgeois world is effectively seen as an intellectual regression to a vision that remains frozen in the mode of separateness, a vision that denies the reality of relation and relatedness, a vision that places the part before the whole, a vision that denudes the immediate “fact” of its constituting contexts. Though Emerson talks of nature as the “web of God,” he also identifies nature with the expanse of the human self; hence, his vision of unity is based less on the idea of the divine than on a particular notion of human subjectivity influenced directly or indirectly by Kant and Hegel, one that sees the apparatus of subjectivity and objectivity as intrinsically commensurate; in other words, our minds and the objects we perceive are mutually adapted to (and constrained by) each other. Kant had said, for example, that we see objects “in” space because spatiality is part of our subjective apparatus for perceiving the world.

The major influences on the scholar include not only nature but also “the mind of the Past,” which is transmitted most clearly by books. For Emerson, a book represents the attempt of a previous scholar to receive raw data from the world, to reflect on this, and to give it the “new arrangement of his own mind . . . It came into him, life; it went out from him, truth. It came to him, short-lived actions; it went out from him, immortal thoughts. It came to him, business; it went from him, poetry.” Hence, scholarship (which Emerson is using in a broad sense, to encompass, among other things, poetry) is a process of “transmuting life into truth” (61). However, since no scholar or artist can entirely exclude “the conventional, the local, the perishable” from his book, each age must renew the task of interpreting the world: “Each age . . . must write its own books,” and cannot simply stand on the authority of books written for an earlier generation or era (61). If books are overprized, as they are by the “sluggish and perverted mind of the multitude” (the similarities to Marx having somewhat receded in Emerson’s text), the influence of books becomes tyrannical: they encourage the reliance by scholars on “accepted dogmas” rather than “their own sight of principles.” And instead of Man thinking, “we have the bookworm,” the book-learned class who would rank books as a third estate along with the world of nature and the soul. Unfortunately, says Emerson, colleges and institutions are built on the book, on the authority of the “past utterance of genius.” But the active soul, the true genius, who sees “absolute truth,” will not be constrained by the insights of the past, and looks forward. The scholar should rely on books only in times when he cannot “read God directly” (62). In a sense, Emerson’s argument here presents an inverted form of what Eliot will later claim in his influential essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Eliot urged the individual writer to subordinate himself to tradition, to the “mind of Europe,” which itself enabled and set the archetypal patterns of the individual poet’s insight into his own present. For Emerson, the “mind of the past,” being restrictive, is precisely what the contemporary writer must transcend in expressing the reality of his own era.

The final educative influence on the scholar, according to Emerson, is “action” (as opposed to a life composed exclusively of speculation). Emerson concedes that action is “subordinate” with the scholar but essential: “Without it, he is not yet man. Without it, thought can never ripen into truth.” He insists that we possess knowledge only to the extent that we have lived; “we know,” he says, “whose words are loaded with life, and whose not” (64). The point here, of course, is that made by all empiricist philosophies: that knowledge arises from experience and cannot indeed go beyond the limits of our actual experience. In other words, we cannot know about the world or about life through abstract reasoning, through the mere testimony of others, or through obeisance to religious or political authority. To this extent, the scholar must seek out varieties of experience, and must be “covetous of action. Life is our dictionary . . . This is the way to learn grammar. Colleges and books only copy the language which the field and the work-yard made” (65). The implication is that the meanings of words are first found in experience; dictionaries merely formalize and artificially stabilize those meanings, while academic institutions provide frameworks of interpretation of experiences after the fact, after they have occurred.

Emerson concludes his essay by outlining the duties and virtues of the scholar: all of these, he says, are comprised in “self-trust,” a notion that has several dimensions. To begin with, the scholar is “self-relying and self-directed,” being constrained neither by tradition or religion, nor by fashion and the opinion of popular judgment. Indeed, he seems to stand in a relation of “virtual hostility” to society (67). Emerson anticipates Nietzsche in his view that the mass of contemporary humanity are bugs, a mass which acts like a herd; in a thousand years, only one or two men will approximate “to the right state of every man.” The remainder are content to bask in the light and dignity of a great man or hero (70). Yet the task of Emerson’s heroic scholar, unlike that of Nietzsche’s overman who rises above common morality, is to reaffirm and re-establish man’s lost connections with his universal, unified self. By having the courage and wisdom to descend into the secrets of his own mind, he fathoms the secrets of all minds and reveals what is “universally true” (68). He is the one who sees “facts amidst appearances,” who “raises himself from private considerations” and momentary opinions that cloud the enduring judgment of “Reason from her inviolable seat.” It is the scholar alone who knows the world: “He is the world’s eye. He is the world’s heart” (67). It is he who wakes people from their sleep-walking dream in search of money and power, leading them to this fundamental lesson: “The world is nothing, the man is all; in yourself is the law of all nature . . . in yourself slumbers the whole of Reason.” In somewhat Hegelian fashion, Emerson even sees successive scholars as embodying the points of view taken by “the universal mind” (70–71).

Notwithstanding these universalizing functions of the scholar, Emerson welcomes recent literature that explores, not the sublime and the beautiful, but the low and the common, the local and the contemporary (71). Ironically, Emerson’s notion of universality is sustained precisely by its refusal to be constrained by past wisdom, by the need to confront what is true and enduring in the present era. And it is here that the duties of the scholar devolve into the particular duties of the American scholar: “this confidence in the unsearched might of man belongs, by all motives, by all prophecy, by all preparation, to the American scholar. We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe” (73). He appeals to the young man of America to “plant himself indomitably on his instincts,” and to attain the perspective of his “own infinite life.” He ends with an eloquent call for an independence that is based on relation, on integration within a totality: “We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds . . . A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men” (74). Emerson’s is a powerful voice attempting to situate American ideals such as self-reliance and independence (at both national and individual levels) within a pre-capitalist harmony of self and world, a harmony equated with attunement to the workings of the divine and thereby precariously balanced between secular and religious vision.

In his Address Delivered before the Senior Class in Divinity College  at Harvard (1838), Emerson undertakes a critique of institutional Christianity in America. Emerson’s central criticism is that religion has lost contact with its original impetus, which was exploratory, creative, and intuitive; it is now based on mere precedent, tradition, and expediency. The current decaying state of the Church and the condition of “wasting unbelief ” mark the greatest calamity that can befall a nation – loss of worship: “then all things go to decay. Genius leaves the temple to haunt the senate or the market. Literature becomes frivolous. Science . . . Society lives to trifles” (89). Emerson also spurns modern attempts to found a new system of religion, such as the worship of the “goddess of Reason,” which ends in “madness and murder” (92).

Emerson’s proposed solution to this dismal state of affairs is partly founded on the Stoic doctrine “Obey thyself ” (84). He admonishes the future preachers at the Divinity School “to go alone; to refuse the good models . . . and dare to love God without mediator or veil,” to cast away “all conformity, and acquaint men at first hand with Deity” (90–91). As he has said in other essays, he reaffirms here that it is in the soul that “redemption must be sought,” and it is through such redemption that the world can be transformed, since the world is the mirror of the soul (89, 93). Only such redemption can counter the “loss of the universal” in modern secular democracy, along with the latter’s “exaggeration of the finite and selfish” (91). Emerson’s essay is an articulate expression of a Romantic view of religion, and indeed of the rootedness of a Romantic view of letters in a transformed conception of religion, one that stresses individuality, creativity, and exploration even in the realm of morality.

In fact, in his essay The Transcendentalist (1842), Emerson derides the supposedly “sturdy capitalist” whose apparently solid enterprise actually rests on “quaking foundations” (141). Interestingly, Emerson’s very definitions of transcendentalism are forged in the heat of his opposition to the bourgeois obsession with materialism (both as a philosophy and as a way of life, according prominence to economic interests above all else). The term “transcendental,” says Emerson, derives from Kant’s philosophy, which laid stress on certain forms of perception that belonged to the subjective apparatus (145). Emerson points out that transcendentalism is a form of idealism, and that the transcendentalist’s experience “inclines him to behold the procession of facts you call the world, as flowing perpetually outward from an invisible, unsounded center in himself . . . necessitating him to regard all things as having a subjective or relative existence . . . He believes in miracle, in the perpetual openness of the human mind to new influx of light and power; he believes in inspiration, and in ecstasy” (142). Transcendentalists, says Emerson, are characterized by their withdrawal from society, their disinclination even to vote, and their passion for “what is great and extraordinary” (146, 148). They stand aloof from contemporary society, which is marked by “a spirit of cowardly compromise and seeming which intimates a frightful skepticism, a life without love, and an activity without an aim” (149). Their attachment is to “what is permanent,” and they speak for “thoughts and principles not marketable or perishable” (153–154). It is clear that the term “transcendental” has acquired a meaning here very different from that which it sustains in Kant’s work: it signifies not merely an idealism which rises above the immediacy of the senses, a localized emphasis on materialism, and a mutual isolation or disconnectedness of the phenomena of the world, toward a more unified and longer-term perspective that sees the various elements of the world as the cumulative product of the human mind or spirit; but also a transcendence that refuses to take the bourgeois world as real, that seeks to locate reality itself in another, higher, realm insulated from space, time, and history.

Emerson’s essay Politics  (1844) expresses his skepticism regarding the functioning of government and political parties. He observes that governments exist to protect two types of rights, personal rights and property rights (156). Emerson cautions against the dangers of the “turbulent freedom” of modern times and warns that “in the despotism of public opinion, we have no anchor” (161). Hence he believes in less government and advocates instead, like Socrates, the “influence of private character.” The state exists, he says, to “educate the wise man . . . and with the appearance of the wise man, the State expires” (163). The cultivation of character, attuned to nature and higher, spiritual interests, “promises a recognition of higher rights than those of personal freedom, or the security of property” (165).

Many of the foregoing themes, concerning nature, the religious sentiment, and the transcendentalist attitude of withdrawal from the currently degraded state of politics, are brought together in Emerson’s essay The Poet (1844). In Emerson’s eyes, the poet is of course a transcendentalist. The universe, he says, has three children, “the Knower, the Doer and the Sayer. These stand respectively for the love of truth, for the love of good, and for the love of beauty.” These three are equal, and the poet “is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty” (189).

It is the poet whose province is language; nature offers its vast variety to him as a “picture-language.” He uses the things in nature as types, as symbols; hence, objects in nature acquire a second value, and nature “is a symbol, in the whole, and in every part” (192). Emerson helps us to make sense of this by reminding us that the “Universe is the externization of the soul,” and that its symbolic value lies in its pointing beyond itself, toward the supernatural (193). In this way, the world is a “temple” whose walls are covered with emblems and symbols. The poet, in articulating these symbols, provides a remedy for the “dislocation and detachment from the life of God that makes things ugly.” The poet “re-attaches things to nature and the Whole,” seeing things “within the great Order” (195). In other words, whereas ordinary perception is filled with images of discrete and unrelated objects, the poet, by “ulterior intellectual perception,” is able to see the connectedness of things, especially the symbolic connection between material and spiritual elements (196). Hence the poet’s very language, as well as the nature of his perception, is attuned to the workings, the perpetual flux, of nature. By this token, the poet is “the Namer or Language-maker,” naming things by their appearance or essence, but always intuitively aware of the connection between these, of the broader, perhaps teleological, picture in which each object exists. Such insight, which Emerson describes as “a very high sort of seeing,” is effected by the faculty of imagination (198), which is effectively “the intellect released from all service and suffered to take its direction from its celestial life” (199). In other words, the intellect is freed from its bondage to the restrictive bodily sphere of practical interests and survival.

Emerson refers to poets as “liberating gods . . . They are free, and they make free” (201). They liberate us from the tyranny and fragmentation of conventional perception, from “the jail-yard of individual relations,” and enable us to see ourselves and the world in a more comprehensive and far-reaching light (199, 201). Every thought is a prison, says Emerson, and the poet liberates by yielding a new thought. We prize this  liberation because “we are miserably dying” (202). As with his essay The American Scholar , Emerson concludes by calling for poetic universality to comprehend what is peculiarly American. There exists, as yet, no poet of genius in America: “our fisheries, our Negroes and Indians . . . the northern trade, the southern planting . . . are yet unsung. Yet America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for meters” (204). Emerson’s words proved prophetic in Whitman’s “I sing America.” As with the transcendentalist, Emerson calls on the poet to “leave the world, and know the muse only,” to “abdicate a manifold and duplex life,” and to “lie close hid with nature,” away from “the Capitol or the Exchange.” The poet is he for whom “the ideal shall be real” (206). Emerson is true to the Romantic inversion of the categories of the bourgeois world: that world is insular, incomplete, and denuded of all relation, all context in which it would find its true meaning. To redeem such relation is the poet’s task.

Source: A History of  Literary Criticism : From Plato to the Present Editor(s): M. A. R. Habib

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Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson was born on 25 May 1803 and died on 27 April 1882. He was an American lecturer, essayist, poet, and philosopher. In the mid-nineteenth century, he was the founding member of the transcendentalist movement in America. He advocated individualism against the pressure of society and became a clairvoyant critic of it. He wrote dozens of essays and delivered more than 1500 public lectures across the country to disseminate his thoughts.

Emerson boycotted contemporary social and religious beliefs. In 1836, he formulated his philosophy of transcendentalism in his most famous essay, “Nature.” After the publication of the essay, he delivered a speech in 1837, titled “The American Scholar.” Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. regarded this speech as America’s “intellectual Declaration of Independence.” Emerson was also an important member of the Romantic movement of America. A great number of writers, thinkers, and poets have been greatly influenced by his philosophy and works.

A Short Biography of Ralph Waldo Emerson

Emerson was born in Boston, Massachusetts, to the Rev. William Emerson and Ruth Haskins. His father was a Unitarian minister. Ralph had four siblings: Edward, William, Charles, and Robert Bulkeley. They survived into adulthood with Ralph Waldo, whereas the other three – Phebe, Mary Caroline, and John Clarke – died in childhood. The ancestry of Emerson was completely English. They had been living in New England since the colonial period started.

On 12 May 1811, the father of Emerson died because of stomach cancer. At that time, Emerson was almost eight years old. With the help of other women of the family, Emerson’s mother raised him. He had been greatly influenced by his aunt Mary Moody Emerson. She had often been living with his family and was in touch with Emerson until she died in 1863.

In 1812, at the age of nine, Emerson started his schooling at the Boston Latin School. He then went to Harvard College in 1817 and was appointed as the messenger for the president. He was required to raise negligent students and deliver messages to faculty. In the same years, Emerson started writing a list of the books he had already read, and in a series of notebooks, he started a journal “Wide World.”

To cover his expenses, he sought some jobs that included a waiter for Junior Commons and occasional teacher at Waltham, Massachusetts. When he was in senior year, he started using his middle name, “Waldo.” He also served the Class Poet and presented his original poem on the Class Day, at the age of 18. He graduated in September 1821.

In 1826, Emerson’s health was getting poor. He decided to go to a place of a warmer climate. First, he went to Charleston; however, the weather was cold, which does not suit him. Then he went to St. Augustine, Florida. Over there, he would take long walks on the beach and start writing poetry. He also became a good friend of Prince Achille Murat, the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, in St. Augustine. Murat and Emerson would often discuss society, religion, government, and philosophy. Emerson regarded Murat as the most significant influencer and intellectual educator. 

In 1829, he married Ellen Tucker. However, she was diagnosed with Tuberculosis and died in 1831. Her death made him skeptical of faith, and he resigned from his job of the clergy.

He traveled to Europe in 1832. There he met with well-known literary figures William Wordsworth, S.T Coleridge, and Thomas Carlyle. He returned in 1833 and started delivering lectures of spiritualism; in 1834, he shifted to Concord, Massachusetts, and married Lydia in 1835.

In the 1830s, he delivered some lectures that he later published in the essay form. These essays were the basis of his transcendental philosophy. Moreover, his lecture “The American Scholar” in 1837 motivated American authors to be more distinctive in their own art than following the foreigners.

In the 1840s, he founded his own magazine, “The Dial,” and published his two volumes of essays. The most well-known essay was published in these years. Moreover, his four children were also born in these years.  In the 1850s, he advocated the idea of nonconformity and abolition of slavery. In the 1870s, Emerson was well known as “the sage of Concord.” He died in 1882 in concord.

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Writing Style

In the mid-nineteenth century and twentieth century, the works of Emerson were the most read and frequently quoted. His works were based on the entirely new ideas of transcendentalism and mysticism that captured the attention of the readers of his time and audience of his lectures. In fact, his ideas also continue to influence the readers of the 21 st century. In his writings, Emerson focuses on his idealistic philosophies and the true relationship of man with God and nature. 

Emerson’s rich expression and keen observation made him one of the best prose writers of the century. Though he, most of the time, emphasizes on the obscure and complex concepts, his writing keeps directness , clarity , and careful development of new ideas. He elucidates difficult ideas with metaphor and analogy . He moves his ideas from the perceptions of an individual to the broad generalization that bends the readers.

The way Emerson constructs his sentences and phases engages the readers as if he has not written it on the piece of paper but is speaking it to them. This impression is strengthened by his use of common words and maxims in his works. His language and emotions attained the peak of expression with his rhetorical style .

His poetry is also based on the same major themes as found in his essays and speeches. The crescendos and cadences in the essays parallel the rise and fall of the intensity of emotions in the poetry. His poetry is stylistically unique and different from the poetry of contemporary poets.

Various things greatly influenced Emerson’s writing. The most significant among them were Unitarianism, New England Calvinism, the Neo-Platonists, Plato’s writings, Carlyle, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Swedenborg, Montaigne, and eastern sacred texts.   However, his ideas he put in his lectures and essays were totally his own what we now called “American Transcendentalism.”

Characteristics of Emerson’s work

He talks about the truth of man, God, nature, and existence in most of his works. He considers man as an expression of God, thus elevating the dignity and significance of man. In his essay “Nature,” he writes that the “Supreme Being,” i.e., God is the spirit who does not create nature around men.

However, he put nature into view through men, just like the new branches and tree of the trees put forth by the life of the tree through an old pore. The way plants breathe upon the bosom of Earth, a man also breathes on the “bosom of God.” Man is sustained by consistent cascades, and pulls, at his need, unlimited power. Who can put restrictions on the potentials of a man? He says that it is the man who can get access to the mind of the Creator; even he himself is the creator with some restrictions.

Emerson’s outlook was highly humanistic and challenged the beliefs of the Calvinistic tradition of New England that formed the remote sovereignty of God. 

Emerson not only made humanity to believe in the oneness of God but made them obey him without questionings. He was in view that all men are equal in worth and capacity. To measure the value of an individual based on his social status and human hierarchies is baseless, Emerson says. In his essay “Nature” (Chapter VIII; Prospects), Emerson wrote that it is either Adam or Caesar; everyone is equal.

Whatever Adam had, and whatever Caesar could do, an ordinary man can also have it and do it. Adam would call his house earth and heaven, whereas Caesar would call it Rome, you can have your house, what if it is called as Cobbler’s trade; it does not matter how much amount of and you have, or of what worth, if you have your own dominion, it is as worth as theirs though it does not have a fine name. Therefore, build your own world.

The notion of equality among men and the idea that God equally creates all men, thus all processes divinity is a degree, were strongly appealing to the contemporary readers as they are in the 21 st century. The idea of democracy that Emerson gave in his works is more basic and does not promote any social or political system.

Moreover, it reinforced the claim of the individual to be respected by philosophy; therefore, highlighting the extraordinary abilities of humans in the framework of the whole of humanity. For Emerson, those men who had achieved peculiarity in some ways are the representatives of human abilities. In his speech “The American Scholar,” he asserts that the building up of a man is the main initiative of the world for magnitude and grandeur.

He says that the personal life of the individual should be his more renowned dominion suggesting to be harsh for its enemy; however, to influence his friends, it must be sweet and serene, that any monarchy in history. If one man is perceived rightly, it comprehends the nature of all men. “Each philosopher, each bard, each actor, has only done for me, as by a delegate, what one day I can do for myself.”

He was greatly charmed by both positive and negative characteristics of various extraordinary individuals . His collection of “Representative Essay” contains the lectures and essays on Plato, Montaigne, Swedenborg, Shakespeare, Goethe, and Napoleon.

However, he does not focus only on the positive attributes but on the negative as well, suggesting the abilities and aspirations of the whole of humanity. In his essay “Uses of Great Men,” he writes that the people whom we call masses and common men; in fact, they are not the common man. Every man has hidden talents, and true art is only possible if a man has strong beliefs that somewhere his art will be admired at best. “Fair play, and an open field, and freshest laurels to all who have won them!”

However, heaven has reserved an equal possibility for every creature. Each is uncomfortable till he has formed his reserved gleam unto the “concave sphere,” and also witnessed his ability in its last decency and adulation.

He also talks about the restriction imposed on an individual by society, civilization, materialism, and institutions that greatly affect the abilities of individuals. He says that the limitations imposed by these institutions do not work to highlight the distinctiveness among men. However, they suppress the self-realization of the individual.

Emerson’s view of the essential link between the man, God, and nature made him exalt the status of the individual.

According to him, man is more capable of insight, imagination, and morality; however, his abilities stem from his close association with a greater, sophisticated entity than himself.

In the essay “The Over-Soul,” Emerson focuses on his mans’ indispensable harmony with the divine that man is a spiritual being. The way there is “no ceiling” or “screen” between the heavens and the heads of man, there is no wall or stopping point where we can point out starting and ending points of effect, the man, and God, the cause. The walls have been removed, and man is lying open to the spiritual nature, which are the attributes of God. 

Emerson also talks about the inconsistency between daily life experiences and philosophy, particularly in his essay “Experience.” In his career and writings, he examined a range of subjects. It includes poetry and poets, history, education, art, society, reforms, politics, and the individual’s life. He examined all these subjects in the framework of transcendentalism.

Works Of Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson : Essays & Lectures

“The Emerson who speaks to us through these essays understood America as few have done before or since. By nature a dualistic thinker, he fully realized the polarities of American experience—between action and reflection, self-reliance and community, unity and diversity, idealism and materialism, past and future…. In doing so, he tried to forge a new identity for the new representative American—serene, self-confident, democratic, progressive and pluralistic.” — St. Petersburg Times

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The Living Legacy of Ralph Waldo Emerson

Emerson was directly responsible for having the work of his friend, the Englishman Thomas Carlyle, Harvard Divinity School. published in America including The French Revolution which Emerson had “contracted for, financed, advertised, promoted and reviewed.” His hospitality, sympathy, friendship, and encouragement helped to steer Henry David Thoreau toward great achievement. It has even been said that Thoreau would not have been Thoreau without Emerson. Whether or not that is true, Emerson is forever linked to Walden (Henry Thoreau built his cabin on land owned by Emerson) and to Thoreau’s later literary investigations of nature. The poet Walt Whitman heard Emerson speak and wrote that his own ideas were “simmering and simmering and Emerson brought them to a boil.” When, in 1855, he sent Emerson his book of poetry entitled Leaves of Grass, Emerson wrote to him, “I greet you at the beginning of a great career.” Emily Dickinson called Emerson’s Representative Men an investigation of equality and individual talent—“a little granite book you can lean on.”

Through the ages, the words of these and hundreds more echo Ralph Waldo Emerson. Modern writers, environmentalists, motivational speakers, philosophers, politicians, and activists claim him. As James Truslow Adams wrote, “In no other author can we get so close to the whole of the American spirit.”

When Thoreau built his cabin on Emerson’s property at Walden Pond, his writing on the subject would forever change American literature. Courtesy of the Concord Free Public Library.

“As for where I ventured—that was first of all down the street to tangle…with Emerson. Was there ever a thinker more at odds with Confucius? Self-reliance! What an idea. For anyone Emerson threatens to burn down the house; for this nice Chinese girl he seemed to torch the whole countryside. And yet his call, not only for a new literature, but for a literature endlessly new, for writers who write not only against the past but against their own best inventions—that seemed a call I could hear. There was room in his program for me, for anyone; anyone could be an American writer, she only had to find her power, then find it again; to name herself Man Thinking. Emerson was the first subversive, and still inspires every serious writer. The goal is still to gather up our times’ rejected thoughts, and to return them, if we can, with a certain alienated majesty.” —Gish Jen

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NPR defends its journalism after senior editor says it has lost the public's trust

David Folkenflik

NPR is defending its journalism and integrity after a senior editor wrote an essay accusing it of losing the public's trust. Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

NPR is defending its journalism and integrity after a senior editor wrote an essay accusing it of losing the public's trust.

NPR's top news executive defended its journalism and its commitment to reflecting a diverse array of views on Tuesday after a senior NPR editor wrote a broad critique of how the network has covered some of the most important stories of the age.

"An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don't have an audience that reflects America," writes Uri Berliner.

A strategic emphasis on diversity and inclusion on the basis of race, ethnicity and sexual orientation, promoted by NPR's former CEO, John Lansing, has fed "the absence of viewpoint diversity," Berliner writes.

NPR's chief news executive, Edith Chapin, wrote in a memo to staff Tuesday afternoon that she and the news leadership team strongly reject Berliner's assessment.

"We're proud to stand behind the exceptional work that our desks and shows do to cover a wide range of challenging stories," she wrote. "We believe that inclusion — among our staff, with our sourcing, and in our overall coverage — is critical to telling the nuanced stories of this country and our world."

NPR names tech executive Katherine Maher to lead in turbulent era

She added, "None of our work is above scrutiny or critique. We must have vigorous discussions in the newsroom about how we serve the public as a whole."

A spokesperson for NPR said Chapin, who also serves as the network's chief content officer, would have no further comment.

Praised by NPR's critics

Berliner is a senior editor on NPR's Business Desk. (Disclosure: I, too, am part of the Business Desk, and Berliner has edited many of my past stories. He did not see any version of this article or participate in its preparation before it was posted publicly.)

Berliner's essay , titled "I've Been at NPR for 25 years. Here's How We Lost America's Trust," was published by The Free Press, a website that has welcomed journalists who have concluded that mainstream news outlets have become reflexively liberal.

Berliner writes that as a Subaru-driving, Sarah Lawrence College graduate who "was raised by a lesbian peace activist mother ," he fits the mold of a loyal NPR fan.

Yet Berliner says NPR's news coverage has fallen short on some of the most controversial stories of recent years, from the question of whether former President Donald Trump colluded with Russia in the 2016 election, to the origins of the virus that causes COVID-19, to the significance and provenance of emails leaked from a laptop owned by Hunter Biden weeks before the 2020 election. In addition, he blasted NPR's coverage of the Israel-Hamas conflict.

On each of these stories, Berliner asserts, NPR has suffered from groupthink due to too little diversity of viewpoints in the newsroom.

The essay ricocheted Tuesday around conservative media , with some labeling Berliner a whistleblower . Others picked it up on social media, including Elon Musk, who has lambasted NPR for leaving his social media site, X. (Musk emailed another NPR reporter a link to Berliner's article with a gibe that the reporter was a "quisling" — a World War II reference to someone who collaborates with the enemy.)

When asked for further comment late Tuesday, Berliner declined, saying the essay spoke for itself.

The arguments he raises — and counters — have percolated across U.S. newsrooms in recent years. The #MeToo sexual harassment scandals of 2016 and 2017 forced newsrooms to listen to and heed more junior colleagues. The social justice movement prompted by the killing of George Floyd in 2020 inspired a reckoning in many places. Newsroom leaders often appeared to stand on shaky ground.

Leaders at many newsrooms, including top editors at The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times , lost their jobs. Legendary Washington Post Executive Editor Martin Baron wrote in his memoir that he feared his bonds with the staff were "frayed beyond repair," especially over the degree of self-expression his journalists expected to exert on social media, before he decided to step down in early 2021.

Since then, Baron and others — including leaders of some of these newsrooms — have suggested that the pendulum has swung too far.

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Legendary editor marty baron describes his 'collision of power' with trump and bezos.

New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger warned last year against journalists embracing a stance of what he calls "one-side-ism": "where journalists are demonstrating that they're on the side of the righteous."

"I really think that that can create blind spots and echo chambers," he said.

Internal arguments at The Times over the strength of its reporting on accusations that Hamas engaged in sexual assaults as part of a strategy for its Oct. 7 attack on Israel erupted publicly . The paper conducted an investigation to determine the source of a leak over a planned episode of the paper's podcast The Daily on the subject, which months later has not been released. The newsroom guild accused the paper of "targeted interrogation" of journalists of Middle Eastern descent.

Heated pushback in NPR's newsroom

Given Berliner's account of private conversations, several NPR journalists question whether they can now trust him with unguarded assessments about stories in real time. Others express frustration that he had not sought out comment in advance of publication. Berliner acknowledged to me that for this story, he did not seek NPR's approval to publish the piece, nor did he give the network advance notice.

Some of Berliner's NPR colleagues are responding heatedly. Fernando Alfonso, a senior supervising editor for digital news, wrote that he wholeheartedly rejected Berliner's critique of the coverage of the Israel-Hamas conflict, for which NPR's journalists, like their peers, periodically put themselves at risk.

Alfonso also took issue with Berliner's concern over the focus on diversity at NPR.

"As a person of color who has often worked in newsrooms with little to no people who look like me, the efforts NPR has made to diversify its workforce and its sources are unique and appropriate given the news industry's long-standing lack of diversity," Alfonso says. "These efforts should be celebrated and not denigrated as Uri has done."

After this story was first published, Berliner contested Alfonso's characterization, saying his criticism of NPR is about the lack of diversity of viewpoints, not its diversity itself.

"I never criticized NPR's priority of achieving a more diverse workforce in terms of race, ethnicity and sexual orientation. I have not 'denigrated' NPR's newsroom diversity goals," Berliner said. "That's wrong."

Questions of diversity

Under former CEO John Lansing, NPR made increasing diversity, both of its staff and its audience, its "North Star" mission. Berliner says in the essay that NPR failed to consider broader diversity of viewpoint, noting, "In D.C., where NPR is headquartered and many of us live, I found 87 registered Democrats working in editorial positions and zero Republicans."

Berliner cited audience estimates that suggested a concurrent falloff in listening by Republicans. (The number of people listening to NPR broadcasts and terrestrial radio broadly has declined since the start of the pandemic.)

Former NPR vice president for news and ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin tweeted , "I know Uri. He's not wrong."

Others questioned Berliner's logic. "This probably gets causality somewhat backward," tweeted Semafor Washington editor Jordan Weissmann . "I'd guess that a lot of NPR listeners who voted for [Mitt] Romney have changed how they identify politically."

Similarly, Nieman Lab founder Joshua Benton suggested the rise of Trump alienated many NPR-appreciating Republicans from the GOP.

In recent years, NPR has greatly enhanced the percentage of people of color in its workforce and its executive ranks. Four out of 10 staffers are people of color; nearly half of NPR's leadership team identifies as Black, Asian or Latino.

"The philosophy is: Do you want to serve all of America and make sure it sounds like all of America, or not?" Lansing, who stepped down last month, says in response to Berliner's piece. "I'd welcome the argument against that."

"On radio, we were really lagging in our representation of an audience that makes us look like what America looks like today," Lansing says. The U.S. looks and sounds a lot different than it did in 1971, when NPR's first show was broadcast, Lansing says.

A network spokesperson says new NPR CEO Katherine Maher supports Chapin and her response to Berliner's critique.

The spokesperson says that Maher "believes that it's a healthy thing for a public service newsroom to engage in rigorous consideration of the needs of our audiences, including where we serve our mission well and where we can serve it better."

Disclosure: This story was reported and written by NPR Media Correspondent David Folkenflik and edited by Deputy Business Editor Emily Kopp and Managing Editor Gerry Holmes. Under NPR's protocol for reporting on itself, no NPR corporate official or news executive reviewed this story before it was posted publicly.

T he lords of life, the lords of life,— I saw them pass, In their own guise, Like and unlike, Portly and grim, Use and Surprise, Surface and Dream, Succession swift, and spectral Wrong, Temperament without a tongue, And the inventor of the game Omnipresent without name; — Some to see, some to be guessed, They marched from east to west: Little man, least of all, Among the legs of his guardians tall, Walked about with puzzled look: — Him by the hand dear nature took; Dearest nature, strong and kind, Whispered, 'Darling, never mind! Tomorrow they will wear another face, The founder thou! these are thy race!'

W here do we find ourselves? In a series of which we do not know the extremes, and believe that it has none. We wake and find ourselves on a stair; there are stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended; there are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward and out of sight. But the Genius which, according to the old belief, stands at the door by which we enter, and gives us the lethe to drink, that we may tell no tales, mixed the cup too strongly, and we cannot shake off the lethargy now at noonday. Sleep lingers all our lifetime about our eyes, as night hovers all day in the boughs of the fir-tree. All things swim and glitter. Our life is not so much threatened as our perception. Ghostlike we glide through nature, and should not know our place again. Did our birth fall in some fit of indigence and frugality in nature, that she was so sparing of her fire and so liberal of her earth, that it appears to us that we lack the affirmative principle, and though we have health and reason, yet we have no superfluity of spirit for new creation? We have enough to live and bring the year about, but not an ounce to impart or to invest. Ah that our Genius were a little more of a genius! We are like millers on the lower levels of a stream, when the factories above them have exhausted the water. We too fancy that the upper people must have raised their dams.

If any of us knew what we were doing, or where we are going, then when we think we best know! We do not know today whether we are busy or idle. In times when we thought ourselves indolent, we have afterwards discovered, that much was accomplished, and much was begun in us. All our days are so unprofitable while they pass, that 'tis wonderful where or when we ever got anything of this which we call wisdom, poetry, virtue. We never got it on any dated calendar day. Some heavenly days must have been intercalated somewhere, like those that Hermes won with dice of the Moon, that Osiris might be born. It is said, all martyrdoms looked mean when they were suffered. Every ship is a romantic object, except that we sail in. Embark, and the romance quits our vessel, and hangs on every other sail in the horizon. Our life looks trivial, and we shun to record it. Men seem to have learned of the horizon the art of perpetual retreating and reference. 'Yonder uplands are rich pasturage, and my neighbor has fertile meadow, but my field,' says the querulous farmer, 'only holds the world together.' I quote another man's saying; unluckily, that other withdraws himself in the same way, and quotes me. 'Tis the trick of nature thus to degrade today; a good deal of buzz, and somewhere a result slipped magically in. Every roof is agreeable to the eye, until it is lifted; then we find tragedy and moaning women, and hard-eyed husbands, and deluges of lethe, and the men ask, 'What's the news?' as if the old were so bad. How many individuals can we count in society? how many actions? how many opinions? So much of our time is preparation, so much is routine, and so much retrospect, that the pith of each man's genius contracts itself to a very few hours. The history of literature — take the net result of Tiraboschi, Warton, or Schlegel, — is a sum of very few ideas, and of very few original tales, — all the rest being variation of these. So in this great society wide lying around us, a critical analysis would find very few spontaneous actions. It is almost all custom and gross sense. There are even few opinions, and these seem organic in the speakers, and do not disturb the universal necessity.

What opium is instilled into all disaster! It shows formidable as we approach it, but there is at last no rough rasping friction, but the most slippery sliding surfaces. We fall soft on a thought. Ate Dea is gentle,

"Over men's heads walking aloft, With tender feet treading so soft."

People grieve and bemoan themselves, but it is not half so bad with them as they say. There are moods in which we court suffering, in the hope that here, at least, we shall find reality, sharp peaks and edges of truth. But it turns out to be scene-painting and counterfeit. The only thing grief has taught me, is to know how shallow it is. That, like all the rest, plays about the surface, and never introduces me into the reality, for contact with which, we would even pay the costly price of sons and lovers. Was it Boscovich who found out that bodies never come in contact? Well, souls never touch their objects. An innavigable sea washes with silent waves between us and the things we aim at and converse with. Grief too will make us idealists. In the death of my son, now more than two years ago, I seem to have lost a beautiful estate, — no more. I cannot get it nearer to me. If tomorrow I should be informed of the bankruptcy of my principal debtors, the loss of my property would be a great inconvenience to me, perhaps, for many years; but it would leave me as it found me, — neither better nor worse. So is it with this calamity: it does not touch me: some thing which I fancied was a part of me, which could not be torn away without tearing me, nor enlarged without enriching me, falls off from me, and leaves no scar. It was caducous. I grieve that grief can teach me nothing, nor carry me one step into real nature. The Indian who was laid under a curse, that the wind should not blow on him, nor water flow to him, nor fire burn him, is a type of us all. The dearest events are summer-rain, and we the Para coats that shed every drop. Nothing is left us now but death. We look to that with a grim satisfaction, saying, there at least is reality that will not dodge us.

I take this evanescence and lubricity of all objects, which lets them slip through our fingers then when we clutch hardest, to be the most unhandsome part of our condition. Nature does not like to be observed, and likes that we should be her fools and playmates. We may have the sphere for our cricket-ball, but not a berry for our philosophy. Direct strokes she never gave us power to make; all our blows glance, all our hits are accidents. Our relations to each other are oblique and casual.

Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus. From the mountain you see the mountain. We animate what we can, and we see only what we animate. Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them. It depends on the mood of the man, whether he shall see the sunset or the fine poem. There are always sunsets, and there is always genius; but only a few hours so serene that we can relish nature or criticism. The more or less depends on structure or temperament. Temperament is the iron wire on which the beads are strung. Of what use is fortune or talent to a cold and defective nature? Who cares what sensibility or discrimination a man has at some time shown, if he falls asleep in his chair? or if he laugh and giggle? or if he apologize? or is affected with egotism? or thinks of his dollar? or cannot go by food? or has gotten a child in his boyhood? Of what use is genius, if the organ is too convex or too concave, and cannot find a focal distance within the actual horizon of human life? Of what use, if the brain is too cold or too hot, and the man does not care enough for results, to stimulate him to experiment, and hold him up in it? or if the web is too finely woven, too irritable by pleasure and pain, so that life stagnates from too much reception, without due outlet? Of what use to make heroic vows of amendment, if the same old law-breaker is to keep them? What cheer can the religious sentiment yield, when that is suspected to be secretly dependent on the seasons of the year, and the state of the blood? I knew a witty physician who found theology in the biliary duct, and used to affirm that if there was disease in the liver, the man became a Calvinist, and if that organ was sound, he became a Unitarian. Very mortifying is the reluctant experience that some unfriendly excess or imbecility neutralizes the promise of genius. We see young men who owe us a new world, so readily and lavishly they promise, but they never acquit the debt; they die young and dodge the account: or if they live, they lose themselves in the crowd.

Temperament also enters fully into the system of illusions, and shuts us in a prison of glass which we cannot see. There is an optical illusion about every person we meet. In truth, they are all creatures of given temperament, which will appear in a given character, whose boundaries they will never pass: but we look at them, they seem alive, and we presume there is impulse in them. In the moment it seems impulse; in the year, in the lifetime, it turns out to be a certain uniform tune which the revolving barrel of the music-box must play. Men resist the conclusion in the morning, but adopt it as the evening wears on, that temper prevails over everything of time, place, and condition, and is inconsumable in the flames of religion. Some modifications the moral sentiment avails to impose, but the individual texture holds its dominion, if not to bias the moral judgments, yet to fix the measure of activity and of enjoyment.

I thus express the law as it is read from the platform of ordinary life, but must not leave it without noticing the capital exception. For temperament is a power which no man willingly hears any one praise but himself. On the platform of physics, we cannot resist the contracting influences of so-called science. Temperament puts all divinity to rout. I know the mental proclivity of physicians. I hear the chuckle of the phrenologists. Theoretic kidnappers and slave-drivers, they esteem each man the victim of another, who winds him round his finger by knowing the law of his being, and by such cheap signboards as the color of his beard, or the slope of his occiput, reads the inventory of his fortunes and character. The grossest ignorance does not disgust like this impudent knowingness. The physicians say, they are not materialists; but they are: — Spirit is matter reduced to an extreme thinness: O so thin! — But the definition of spiritual should be, that which is its own evidence. What notions do they attach to love! what to religion! One would not willingly pronounce these words in their hearing, and give them the occasion to profane them. I saw a gracious gentleman who adapts his conversation to the form of the head of the man he talks with! I had fancied that the value of life lay in its inscrutable possibilities; in the fact that I never know, in addressing myself to a new individual, what may befall me. I carry the keys of my castle in my hand, ready to throw them at the feet of my lord, whenever and in what disguise soever he shall appear. I know he is in the neighborhood hidden among vagabonds. Shall I preclude my future, by taking a high seat, and kindly adapting my conversation to the shape of heads? When I come to that, the doctors shall buy me for a cent.—— 'But, sir, medical history; the report to the Institute; the proven facts!' -- I distrust the facts and the inferences. Temperament is the veto or limitation-power in the constitution, very justly applied to restrain an opposite excess in the constitution, but absurdly offered as a bar to original equity. When virtue is in presence, all subordinate powers sleep. On its own level, or in view of nature, temperament is final. I see not, if one be once caught in this trap of so-called sciences, any escape for the man from the links of the chain of physical necessity. Given such an embryo, such a history must follow. On this platform, one lives in a sty of sensualism, and would soon come to suicide. But it is impossible that the creative power should exclude itself. Into every intelligence there is a door which is never closed, through which the creator passes. The intellect, seeker of absolute truth, or the heart, lover of absolute good, intervenes for our succor, and at one whisper of these high powers, we awake from ineffectual struggles with this nightmare. We hurl it into its own hell, and cannot again contract ourselves to so base a state.

That immobility and absence of elasticity which we find in the arts, we find with more pain in the artist. There is no power of expansion in men. Our friends early appear to us as representatives of certain ideas, which they never pass or exceed. They stand on the brink of the ocean of thought and power, but they never take the single step that would bring them there. A man is like a bit of Labrador spar, which has no lustre as you turn it in your hand, until you come to a particular angle; then it shows deep and beautiful colors. There is no adaptation or universal applicability in men, but each has his special talent, and the mastery of successful men consists in adroitly keeping themselves where and when that turn shall be oftenest to be practised. We do what we must, and call it by the best names we can, and would fain have the praise of having intended the result which ensues. I cannot recall any form of man who is not superfluous sometimes. But is not this pitiful? Life is not worth the taking, to do tricks in.

Of course, it needs the whole society, to give the symmetry we seek. The parti-colored wheel must revolve very fast to appear white. Something is learned too by conversing with so much folly and defect. In fine, whoever loses, we are always of the gaining party. Divinity is behind our failures and follies also. The plays of children are nonsense, but very educative nonsense. So it is with the largest and solemnest things, with commerce, government, church, marriage, and so with the history of every man's bread, and the ways by which he is to come by it. Like a bird which alights nowhere, but hops perpetually from bough to bough, is the Power which abides in no man and in no woman, but for a moment speaks from this one, and for another moment from that one.

But what help from these fineries or pedantries? What help from thought? Life is not dialectics. We, I think, in these times, have had lessons enough of the futility of criticism. Our young people have thought and written much on labor and reform, and for all that they have written, neither the world nor themselves have got on a step. Intellectual tasting of life will not supersede muscular activity. If a man should consider the nicety of the passage of a piece of bread down his throat, he would starve. At Education-Farm, the noblest theory of life sat on the noblest figures of young men and maidens, quite powerless and melancholy. It would not rake or pitch a ton of hay; it would not rub down a horse; and the men and maidens it left pale and hungry. A political orator wittily compared our party promises to western roads, which opened stately enough, with planted trees on either side, to tempt the traveller, but soon became narrow and narrower, and ended in a squirrel-track, and ran up a tree. So does culture with us; it ends in head-ache. Unspeakably sad and barren does life look to those, who a few months ago were dazzled with the splendor of the promise of the times. "There is now no longer any right course of action, nor any self-devotion left among the Iranis." Objections and criticism we have had our fill of. There are objections to every course of life and action, and the practical wisdom infers an indifferency, from the omnipresence of objection. The whole frame of things preaches indifferency. Do not craze yourself with thinking, but go about your business anywhere. Life is not intellectual or critical, but sturdy. Its chief good is for well-mixed people who can enjoy what they find, without question. Nature hates peeping, and our mothers speak her very sense when they say, "Children, eat your victuals, and say no more of it." To fill the hour, — that is happiness; to fill the hour, and leave no crevice for a repentance or an approval. We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate well on them. Under the oldest mouldiest conventions, a man of native force prospers just as well as in the newest world, and that by skill of handling and treatment. He can take hold anywhere. Life itself is a mixture of power and form, and will not bear the least excess of either. To finish the moment, to find the journey's end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom. It is not the part of men, but of fanatics, or of mathematicians, if you will, to say, that, the shortness of life considered, it is not worth caring whether for so short a duration we were sprawling in want, or sitting high. Since our office is with moments, let us husband them. Five minutes of today are worth as much to me, as five minutes in the next millennium. Let us be poised, and wise, and our own, today. Let us treat the men and women well: treat them as if they were real: perhaps they are. Men live in their fancy, like drunkards whose hands are too soft and tremulous for successful labor. It is a tempest of fancies, and the only ballast I know, is a respect to the present hour. Without any shadow of doubt, amidst this vertigo of shows and politics, I settle myself ever the firmer in the creed, that we should not postpone and refer and wish, but do broad justice where we are, by whomsoever we deal with, accepting our actual companions and circumstances, however humble or odious, as the mystic officials to whom the universe has delegated its whole pleasure for us. If these are mean and malignant, their contentment, which is the last victory of justice, is a more satisfying echo to the heart, than the voice of poets and the casual sympathy of admirable persons. I think that however a thoughtful man may suffer from the defects and absurdities of his company, he cannot without affectation deny to any set of men and women, a sensibility to extraordinary merit. The coarse and frivolous have an instinct of superiority, if they have not a sympathy, and honor it in their blind capricious way with sincere homage.

The fine young people despise life, but in me, and in such as with me are free from dyspepsia, and to whom a day is a sound and solid good, it is a great excess of politeness to look scornful and to cry for company. I am grown by sympathy a little eager and sentimental, but leave me alone, and I should relish every hour and what it brought me, the pot-luck of the day, as heartily as the oldest gossip in the bar-room. I am thankful for small mercies. I compared notes with one of my friends who expects everything of the universe, and is disappointed when anything is less than the best, and I found that I begin at the other extreme, expecting nothing, and am always full of thanks for moderate goods. I accept the clangor and jangle of contrary tendencies. I find my account in sots and bores also. They give a reality to the circumjacent picture, which such a vanishing meteorous appearance can ill spare. In the morning I awake, and find the old world, wife, babes, and mother, Concord and Boston, the dear old spiritual world, and even the dear old devil not far off. If we will take the good we find, asking no questions, we shall have heaping measures. The great gifts are not got by analysis. Everything good is on the highway. The middle region of our being is the temperate zone. We may climb into the thin and cold realm of pure geometry and lifeless science, or sink into that of sensation. Between these extremes is the equator of life, of thought, of spirit, of poetry, — a narrow belt. Moreover, in popular experience, everything good is on the highway. A collector peeps into all the picture-shops of Europe, for a landscape of Poussin, a crayon-sketch of Salvator; but the Transfiguration, the Last Judgment, the Communion of St. Jerome, and what are as transcendent as these, are on the walls of the Vatican, the Uffizii, or the Louvre, where every footman may see them; to say nothing of nature's pictures in every street, of sunsets and sunrises every day, and the sculpture of the human body never absent. A collector recently bought at public auction, in London, for one hundred and fifty-seven guineas, an autograph of Shakespeare : but for nothing a school-boy can read Hamlet, and can detect secrets of highest concernment yet unpublished therein. I think I will never read any but the commonest books, — the Bible, Homer, Dante, Shakespeare , and Milton. Then we are impatient of so public a life and planet, and run hither and thither for nooks and secrets. The imagination delights in the wood-craft of Indians, trappers, and bee-hunters. We fancy that we are strangers, and not so intimately domesticated in the planet as the wild man, and the wild beast and bird. But the exclusion reaches them also; reaches the climbing, flying, gliding, feathered and four-footed man. Fox and woodchuck, hawk and snipe, and bittern, when nearly seen, have no more root in the deep world than man, and are just such superficial tenants of the globe. Then the new molecular philosophy shows astronomical interspaces betwixt atom and atom, shows that the world is all outside: it has no inside.

The mid-world is best. Nature, as we know her, is no saint. The lights of the church, the ascetics, Gentoos and Grahamites, she does not distinguish by any favor. She comes eating and drinking and sinning. Her darlings, the great, the strong, the beautiful, are not children of our law, do not come out of the Sunday School, nor weigh their food, nor punctually keep the commandments. If we will be strong with her strength, we must not harbor such disconsolate consciences, borrowed too from the consciences of other nations. We must set up the strong present tense against all the rumors of wrath, past or to come. So many things are unsettled which it is of the first importance to settle, — and, pending their settlement, we will do as we do. Whilst the debate goes forward on the equity of commerce, and will not be closed for a century or two, New and Old England may keep shop. Law of copyright and international copyright is to be discussed, and, in the interim, we will sell our books for the most we can. Expediency of literature, reason of literature, lawfulness of writing down a thought, is questioned; much is to say on both sides, and, while the fight waxes hot, thou, dearest scholar, stick to thy foolish task, add a line every hour, and between whiles add a line. Right to hold land, right of property, is disputed, and the conventions convene, and before the vote is taken, dig away in your garden, and spend your earnings as a waif or godsend to all serene and beautiful purposes. Life itself is a bubble and a skepticism, and a sleep within a sleep. Grant it, and as much more as they will, — but thou, God's darling! heed thy private dream: thou wilt not be missed in the scorning and skepticism: there are enough of them: stay there in thy closet, and toil, until the rest are agreed what to do about it. Thy sickness, they say, and thy puny habit, require that thou do this or avoid that, but know that thy life is a flitting state, a tent for a night, and do thou, sick or well, finish that stint. Thou art sick, but shalt not be worse, and the universe, which holds thee dear, shall be the better.

Human life is made up of the two elements, power and form, and the proportion must be invariably kept, if we would have it sweet and sound. Each of these elements in excess makes a mischief as hurtful as its defect. Everything runs to excess: every good quality is noxious, if unmixed, and, to carry the danger to the edge of ruin, nature causes each man's peculiarity to superabound. Here, among the farms, we adduce the scholars as examples of this treachery. They are nature's victims of expression. You who see the artist, the orator, the poet, too near, and find their life no more excellent than that of mechanics or farmers, and themselves victims of partiality, very hollow and haggard, and pronounce them failures, — not heroes, but quacks, — conclude very reasonably, that these arts are not for man, but are disease. Yet nature will not bear you out. Irresistible nature made men such, and makes legions more of such, every day. You love the boy reading in a book, gazing at a drawing, or a cast: yet what are these millions who read and behold, but incipient writers and sculptors? Add a little more of that quality which now reads and sees, and they will seize the pen and chisel. And if one remembers how innocently he began to be an artist, he perceives that nature joined with his enemy. A man is a golden impossibility. The line he must walk is a hair's breadth. The wise through excess of wisdom is made a fool.

How easily, if fate would suffer it, we might keep forever these beautiful limits, and adjust ourselves, once for all, to the perfect calculation of the kingdom of known cause and effect. In the street and in the newspapers, life appears so plain a business, that manly resolution and adherence to the multiplication-table through all weathers, will insure success. But ah! presently comes a day, or is it only a half-hour, with its angel-whispering, — which discomfits the conclusions of nations and of years! Tomorrow again, everything looks real and angular, the habitual standards are reinstated, common sense is as rare as genius, — is the basis of genius, and experience is hands and feet to every enterprise; — and yet, he who should do his business on this understanding, would be quickly bankrupt. Power keeps quite another road than the turnpikes of choice and will, namely, the subterranean and invisible tunnels and channels of life. It is ridiculous that we are diplomatists, and doctors, and considerate people: there are no dupes like these. Life is a series of surprises, and would not be worth taking or keeping, if it were not. God delights to isolate us every day, and hide from us the past and the future. We would look about us, but with grand politeness he draws down before us an impenetrable screen of purest sky, and another behind us of purest sky. 'You will not remember,' he seems to say, 'and you will not expect.' All good conversation, manners , and action, come from a spontaneity which forgets usages, and makes the moment great. Nature hates calculators; her methods are saltatory and impulsive. Man lives by pulses; our organic movements are such; and the chemical and ethereal agents are undulatory and alternate; and the mind goes antagonizing on, and never prospers but by fits. We thrive by casualties. Our chief experiences have been casual. The most attractive class of people are those who are powerful obliquely, and not by the direct stroke: men of genius, but not yet accredited: one gets the cheer of their light, without paying too great a tax. Theirs is the beauty of the bird, or the morning light, and not of art. In the thought of genius there is always a surprise; and the moral sentiment is well called "the newness," for it is never other; as new to the oldest intelligence as to the young child, — "the kingdom that cometh without observation." In like manner, for practical success, there must not be too much design. A man will not be observed in doing that which he can do best. There is a certain magic about his properest action, which stupefies your powers of observation, so that though it is done before you, you wist not of it. The art of life has a pudency, and will not be exposed. Every man is an impossibility, until he is born; every thing impossible, until we see a success. The ardors of piety agree at last with the coldest skepticism, — that nothing is of us or our works, — that all is of God. Nature will not spare us the smallest leaf of laurel. All writing comes by the grace of God, and all doing and having. I would gladly be moral, and keep due metes and bounds, which I dearly love, and allow the most to the will of man, but I have set my heart on honesty in this chapter, and I can see nothing at last, in success or failure, than more or less of vital force supplied from the Eternal. The results of life are uncalculated and uncalculable. The years teach much which the days never know. The persons who compose our company, converse, and come and go, and design and execute many things, and somewhat comes of it all, but an unlooked for result. The individual is always mistaken. He designed many things, and drew in other persons as coadjutors, quarrelled with some or all, blundered much, and something is done; all are a little advanced, but the individual is always mistaken. It turns out somewhat new, and very unlike what he promised himself.

The ancients, struck with this irreducibleness of the elements of human life to calculation, exalted Chance into a divinity, but that is to stay too long at the spark, — which glitters truly at one point, — but the universe is warm with the latency of the same fire. The miracle of life which will not be expounded, but will remain a miracle, introduces a new element. In the growth of the embryo, Sir Everard Home, I think, noticed that the evolution was not from one central point, but co-active from three or more points. Life has no memory. That which proceeds in succession might be remembered, but that which is coexistent, or ejaculated from a deeper cause, as yet far from being conscious, knows not its own tendency. So is it with us, now skeptical, or without unity, because immersed in forms and effects all seeming to be of equal yet hostile value, and now religious, whilst in the reception of spiritual law . Bear with these distractions, with this coetaneous growth of the parts: they will one day be members , and obey one will. On that one will, on that secret cause, they nail our attention and hope. Life is hereby melted into an expectation or a religion. Underneath the inharmonious and trivial particulars, is a musical perfection, the Ideal journeying always with us, the heaven without rent or seam. Do but observe the mode of our illumination. When I converse with a profound mind, or if at any time being alone I have good thoughts, I do not at once arrive at satisfactions, as when, being thirsty, I drink water, or go to the fire, being cold: no! but I am at first apprised of my vicinity to a new and excellent region of life. By persisting to read or to think, this region gives further sign of itself, as it were in flashes of light, in sudden discoveries of its profound beauty and repose, as if the clouds that covered it parted at intervals, and showed the approaching traveller the inland mountains, with the tranquil eternal meadows spread at their base, whereon flocks graze, and shepherds pipe and dance. But every insight from this realm of thought is felt as initial, and promises a sequel. I do not make it; I arrive there, and behold what was there already. I make! O no! I clap my hands in infantine joy and amazement, before the first opening to me of this august magnificence, old with the love and homage of innumerable ages, young with the life of life, the sunbright Mecca of the desert. And what a future it opens! I feel a new heart beating with the love of the new beauty. I am ready to die out of nature, and be born again into this new yet unapproachable America I have found in the West.

"Since neither now nor yesterday began These thoughts, which have been ever, nor yet can A man be found who their first entrance knew."

If I have described life as a flux of moods, I must now add, that there is that in us which changes not, and which ranks all sensations and states of mind. The consciousness in each man is a sliding scale, which identifies him now with the First Cause, and now with the flesh of his body; life above life, in infinite degrees. The sentiment from which it sprung determines the dignity of any deed, and the question ever is, not, what you have done or forborne, but, at whose command you have done or forborne it.

Fortune, Minerva, Muse, Holy Ghost, — these are quaint names, too narrow to cover this unbounded substance. The baffled intellect must still kneel before this cause, which refuses to be named, — ineffable cause, which every fine genius has essayed to represent by some emphatic symbol, as, Thales by water, Anaximenes by air, Anaxagoras by (Nous) thought, Zoroaster by fire, Jesus and the moderns by love: and the metaphor of each has become a national religion. The Chinese Mencius has not been the least successful in his generalization. "I fully understand language," he said, "and nourish well my vast-flowing vigor." — "I beg to ask what you call vast-flowing vigor?" — said his companion. "The explanation," replied Mencius, "is difficult. This vigor is supremely great, and in the highest degree unbending. Nourish it correctly, and do it no injury, and it will fill up the vacancy between heaven and earth. This vigor accords with and assists justice and reason, and leaves no hunger." — In our more correct writing, we give to this generalization the name of Being, and thereby confess that we have arrived as far as we can go. Suffice it for the joy of the universe, that we have not arrived at a wall, but at interminable oceans. Our life seems not present, so much as prospective; not for the affairs on which it is wasted, but as a hint of this vast-flowing vigor. Most of life seems to be mere advertisement of faculty: information is given us not to sell ourselves cheap; that we are very great. So, in particulars, our greatness is always in a tendency or direction, not in an action. It is for us to believe in the rule, not in the exception. The noble are thus known from the ignoble. So in accepting the leading of the sentiments, it is not what we believe concerning the immortality of the soul, or the like, but the universal impulse to believe , that is the material circumstance, and is the principal fact in the history of the globe. Shall we describe this cause as that which works directly? The spirit is not helpless or needful of mediate organs. It has plentiful powers and direct effects. I am explained without explaining, I am felt without acting, and where I am not. Therefore all just persons are satisfied with their own praise. They refuse to explain themselves, and are content that new actions should do them that office. They believe that we communicate without speech, and above speech, and that no right action of ours is quite unaffecting to our friends, at whatever distance; for the influence of action is not to be measured by miles. Why should I fret myself, because a circumstance has occurred, which hinders my presence where I was expected? If I am not at the meeting, my presence where I am, should be as useful to the commonwealth of friendship and wisdom, as would be my presence in that place. I exert the same quality of power in all places. Thus journeys the mighty Ideal before us; it never was known to fall into the rear. No man ever came to an experience which was satiating, but his good is tidings of a better. Onward and onward! In liberated moments, we know that a new picture of life and duty is already possible; the elements already exist in many minds around you, of a doctrine of life which shall transcend any written record we have. The new statement will comprise the skepticisms, as well as the faiths of society, and out of unbeliefs a creed shall be formed. For, skepticisms are not gratuitous or lawless, but are limitations of the affirmative statement, and the new philosophy must take them in, and make affirmations out-side of them, just as much as it must include the oldest beliefs.

It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped, the discovery we have made, that we exist. That discovery is called the Fall of Man. Ever afterwards, we suspect our instruments. We have learned that we do not see directly, but mediately, and that we have no means of correcting these colored and distorting lenses which we are, or of computing the amount of their errors. Perhaps these subject-lenses have a creative power; perhaps there are no objects. Once we lived in what we saw; now, the rapaciousness of this new power, which threatens to absorb all things, engages us. Nature, art, persons, letters, religions, — objects, successively tumble in, and God is but one of its ideas. Nature and literature are subjective phenomena; every evil and every good thing is a shadow which we cast. The street is full of humiliations to the proud. As the fop contrived to dress his bailiffs in his livery, and make them wait on his guests at table, so the chagrins which the bad heart gives off as bubbles, at once take form as ladies and gentlemen in the street, shopmen or barkeepers in hotels, and threaten or insult whatever is threatenable and insultable in us. 'Tis the same with our idolatries. People forget that it is the eye which makes the horizon, and the rounding mind's eye which makes this or that man a type or representative of humanity with the name of hero or saint. Jesus the "providential man," is a good man on whom many people are agreed that these optical laws shall take effect. By love on one part, and by forbearance to press objection on the other part, it is for a time settled, that we will look at him in the centre of the horizon, and ascribe to him the properties that will attach to any man so seen. But the longest love or aversion has a speedy term. The great and crescive self, rooted in absolute nature, supplants all relative existence, and ruins the kingdom of mortal friendship and love. Marriage (in what is called the spiritual world) is impossible, because of the inequality between every subject and every object. The subject is the receiver of Godhead, and at every comparison must feel his being enhanced by that cryptic might. Though not in energy, yet by presence, this magazine of substance cannot be otherwise than felt: nor can any force of intellect attribute to the object the proper deity which sleeps or wakes forever in every subject. Never can love make consciousness and ascription equal in force. There will be the same gulf between every me and thee, as between the original and the picture. The universe is the bride of the soul. All private sympathy is partial. Two human beings are like globes, which can touch only in a point, and, whilst they remain in contact, all other points of each of the spheres are inert; their turn must also come, and the longer a particular union lasts, the more energy of appetency the parts not in union acquire.

Life will be imaged, but cannot be divided nor doubled. Any invasion of its unity would be chaos. The soul is not twin-born, but the only begotten, and though revealing itself as child in time, child in appearance, is of a fatal and universal power, admitting no co-life. Every day, every act betrays the ill-concealed deity. We believe in ourselves, as we do not believe in others. We permit all things to ourselves, and that which we call sin in others, is experiment for us. It is an instance of our faith in ourselves, that men never speak of crime as lightly as they think: or, every man thinks a latitude safe for himself, which is nowise to be indulged to another. The act looks very differently on the inside, and on the outside; in its quality, and in its consequences. Murder in the murderer is no such ruinous thought as poets and romancers will have it; it does not unsettle him, or fright him from his ordinary notice of trifles: it is an act quite easy to be contemplated, but in its sequel, it turns out to be a horrible jangle and confounding of all relations. Especially the crimes that spring from love, seem right and fair from the actor's point of view, but, when acted, are found destructive of society. No man at last believes that he can be lost, nor that the crime in him is as black as in the felon. Because the intellect qualifies in our own case the moral judgments. For there is no crime to the intellect. That is antinomian or hypernomian, and judges law as well as fact. "It is worse than a crime, it is a blunder," said Napoleon, speaking the language of the intellect. To it, the world is a problem in mathematics or the science of quantity, and it leaves out praise and blame, and all weak emotions. All stealing is comparative. If you come to absolutes, pray who does not steal? Saints are sad, because they behold sin, (even when they speculate,) from the point of view of the conscience, and not of the intellect; a confusion of thought. Sin seen from the thought, is a diminution or less : seen from the conscience or will, it is pravity or bad . The intellect names it shade, absence of light, and no essence. The conscience must feel it as essence, essential evil. This it is not: it has an objective existence, but no subjective.

Thus inevitably does the universe wear our color, and every object fall successively into the subject itself. The subject exists, the subject enlarges; all things sooner or later fall into place. As I am, so I see; use what language we will, we can never say anything but what we are; Hermes, Cadmus, Columbus, Newton, Buonaparte, are the mind's ministers. Instead of feeling a poverty when we encounter a great man, let us treat the new comer like a travelling geologist, who passes through our estate, and shows us good slate, or limestone, or anthracite, in our brush pasture. The partial action of each strong mind in one direction, is a telescope for the objects on which it is pointed. But every other part of knowledge is to be pushed to the same extravagance, ere the soul attains her due sphericity. Do you see that kitten chasing so prettily her own tail? If you could look with her eyes, you might see her surrounded with hundreds of figures performing com-plex dramas, with tragic and comic issues , long conversations, many characters, many ups and downs of fate, — and meantime it is only puss and her tail. How long before our masquerade will end its noise of tamborines, laughter, and shouting, and we shall find it was a solitary performance? — A subject and an object, — it takes so much to make the galvanic circuit complete, but magnitude adds nothing. What imports it whether it is Kepler and the sphere; Columbus and America; a reader and his book; or puss with her tail?

It is true that all the muses and love and religion hate these developments, and will find a way to punish the chemist, who publishes in the parlor the secrets of the laboratory. And we cannot say too little of our constitutional necessity of seeing things under private aspects, or saturated with our humors. And yet is the God the native of these bleak rocks. That need makes in morals the capital virtue of self-trust. We must hold hard to this poverty, however scandalous, and by more vigorous self-recoveries, after the sallies of action, possess our axis more firmly. The life of truth is cold, and so far mournful; but it is not the slave of tears, contritions, and perturbations. It does not attempt another's work, nor adopt another's facts. It is a main lesson of wisdom to know your own from another's. I have learned that I cannot dispose of other people's facts; but I possess such a key to my own, as persuades me against all their denials, that they also have a key to theirs. A sympathetic person is placed in the dilemma of a swimmer among drowning men, who all catch at him, and if he give so much as a leg or a finger, they will drown him. They wish to be saved from the mischiefs of their vices, but not from their vices. Charity would be wasted on this poor waiting on the symptoms. A wise and hardy physician will say, Come out of that , as the first condition of advice.

In this our talking America, we are ruined by our good nature and listening on all sides. This compliance takes away the power of being greatly useful. A man should not be able to look other than directly and forthright. A preoccupied attention is the only answer to the importunate frivolity of other people: an attention, and to an aim which makes their wants frivolous. This is a divine answer, and leaves no appeal, and no hard thoughts. In Flaxman's drawing of the Eumenides of Aeschylus, Orestes supplicates Apollo, whilst the Furies sleep on the threshold. The face of the god expresses a shade of regret and compassion, but calm with the conviction of the irreconcilableness of the two spheres. He is born into other politics, into the eternal and beautiful. The man at his feet asks for his interest in turmoils of the earth, into which his nature cannot enter. And the Eumenides there lying express pictorially this disparity. The god is surcharged with his divine destiny.

Illusion, Temperament, Succession, Surface, Surprise, Reality, Subjectiveness, — these are threads on the loom of time, these are the lords of life. I dare not assume to give their order, but I name them as I find them in my way. I know better than to claim any completeness for my picture. I am a fragment, and this is a fragment of me. I can very confidently announce one or another law, which throws itself into relief and form, but I am too young yet by some ages to compile a code. I gossip for my hour concerning the eternal politics. I have seen many fair pictures not in vain. A wonderful time I have lived in. I am not the novice I was fourteen, nor yet seven years ago. Let who will ask, where is the fruit? I find a private fruit sufficient. This is a fruit, — that I should not ask for a rash effect from meditations, counsels, and the hiving of truths. I should feel it pitiful to demand a result on this town and county, an overt effect on the instant month and year. The effect is deep and secular as the cause. It works on periods in which mortal lifetime is lost. All I know is reception; I am and I have: but I do not get, and when I have fancied I had gotten anything, I found I did not. I worship with wonder the great Fortune. My reception has been so large, that I am not annoyed by receiving this or that superabundantly. I say to the Genius, if he will pardon the proverb, I n for a mill, in for a million . When I receive a new gift, I do not macerate my body to make the account square, for, if I should die, I could not make the account square. The benefit overran the merit the first day, and has overran the merit ever since. The merit itself, so-called, I reckon part of the receiving.

Also, that hankering after an overt or practical effect seems to me an apostasy. In good earnest, I am willing to spare this most unnecessary deal of doing. Life wears to me a visionary face. Hardest, roughest action is visionary also. It is but a choice between soft and turbulent dreams. People disparage knowing and the intellectual life, and urge doing. I am very content with knowing, if only I could know. That is an august entertainment, and would suffice me a great while. To know a little, would be worth the expense of this world. I hear always the law of Adrastia, "that every soul which had acquired any truth, should be safe from harm until another period."

I know that the world I converse with in the city and in the farms, is not the world I think . I observe that difference and shall observe it. One day, I shall know the value and law of this discrepance. But I have not found that much was gained by manipular attempts to realize the world of thought. Many eager persons successively make an experiment in this way, and make themselves ridiculous. They acquire democratic manners , they foam at the mouth, they hate and deny. Worse, I observe, that, in the history of mankind, there is never a solitary example of success, — taking their own tests of success. I say this polemically, or in reply to the inquiry, why not realize your world? But far be from me the despair which prejudges the law by a paltry empiricism, — since there never was a right endeavor, but it succeeded. Patience and patience, we shall win at the last. We must be very suspicious of the deceptions of the element of time. It takes a good deal of time to eat or to sleep, or to earn a hundred dollars, and a very little time to entertain a hope and an insight which becomes the light of our life. We dress our garden, eat our dinners, discuss the household with our wives, and these things make no impression, are forgotten next week; but in the solitude to which every man is always returning, he has a sanity and revelations, which in his passage into new worlds he will carry with him. Never mind the ridicule, never mind the defeat: up again, old heart! — it seems to say, — there is victory yet for all justice; and the true romance which the world exists to realize, will be the transformation of genius into practical power.

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By the Book

Doris Kearns Goodwin Wasn’t Competing With Her Husband

Richard Goodwin, an adviser to presidents, “was more interested in shaping history,” she says, “and I in figuring out how history was shaped.” Their bond is at the heart of her new book, “An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s.”

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Describe your ideal reading experience.

The early hours before dawn have always been best. I have all that is necessary: quiet, a bathrobe, a comfortable old blue leather couch, a table stacked with books and research.

What books are on your night stand?

Right now: “Three Roads Back,” a powerful book (especially after the death of my husband, Dick Goodwin ) on how Emerson, Thoreau and William James dealt with grief. “The Facts,” by Philip Roth, in which I am delighted to find a hilarious dinnertime conversation concerning the politics of divorce between Roth, Robert Kennedy and my husband. And, in readiness for reading time with my grandson, “Frog and Toad Are Friends” and “Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!”

How do you organize your books?

I’ve come to realize my books organize me more than I organize them! Every book I’ve written has required its own library. Before I knew it, I had amassed full-blown libraries, including fiction as well as nonfiction, for Lincoln, the Civil War, Theodore Roosevelt, the muckraker journalists, F.D.R., World War II and the 1960s. I even built an extended alcove to hold baseball books and memorabilia. Not to mention my husband’s extensive library of plays, poetry, science and philosophy. Books took over every room of the house Dick and I shared in Concord, Mass., as they do now in my Boston home.

What books would people be surprised to find on your shelves?

Stacks and stacks of mystery and detective stories. As W.H. Auden wrote, “The reading of detective stories is an addiction like tobacco or alcohol.”

Did spending so much time with your husband’s letters and journals influence your beliefs about how history gets told?

Too often, history is told and remembered with the knowledge of how events turned out. For 50 years, Dick had resisted opening the 300 boxes he had saved, a time capsule of the 1960s. The ending of the decade — the Vietnam War, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Dick’s close friend Robert Kennedy, the riots, the violence on college campuses — had cast a dark curtain on the entire era for him and the country.

But when Dick turned 80 and we finally opened the boxes in chronological order, what struck both of us were not the tremendous sorrows of the time, but the exhilarating convictions that individuals could make a difference. This was the impulse that led tens of thousands of young people to join the Peace Corps, participate in sit-ins, freedom rides, marches against segregation and the denial of the vote.

Reading all that alongside him must have been head-spinning.

I‘ve often called the subjects of my books — Abraham Lincoln and both Roosevelts — “my guys,” because I spent decades immersing myself in their letters, diaries and memoirs. I would often talk to them and ask them questions. They never answered. But now, my actual guy, my husband, was sitting across the room from me — arguing, correcting, laughing as he read aloud from his own letters and diaries. Head-spinning for sure!

Which of you was the better writer?

I could never have withstood the pressure and time constraint under which Dick drafted his most important presidential speeches. History is far more patient, far better suited to my slow pace of research and writing. It took me twice as long to unwind the interrelated stories I wanted to tell about the Civil War and World War II as it took those wars to be fought. Dick and I were never in competition. We complemented one another. He was more interested in shaping history, and I in figuring out how history was shaped.

What’s the best book you’ve ever received as a gift?

This past Christmas my son and daughter-in-law, Joe and Veronika, gave me a signed first edition of Barbara Tuchman’s “The Guns of August” — a gift that carried me back to the first time I read the book 60 years ago in college. Here was a woman writing about the field of war traditionally reserved for men. Here was a master storyteller who believed historians must write only what was known by the people at the time, resisting the urge to reference future events.

What’s the most terrifying book you’ve ever read?

“2666,” by Roberto Bolaño.

What do you plan to read next?

James McBride’s “The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store” and Geraldine Brooks’s “Horse.”

You’re organizing a dinner party. Which three storytellers, dead or alive, do you invite?

Lincoln, F.D.R. and L.B.J. I know what they liked to drink and eat. So I would serve water, oyster stew and chicken fricassee with biscuits for Lincoln; martinis and hot dogs with all the fixings for F.D.R.; and Cutty Sark Scotch, chicken fried steak and mashed potatoes for L.B.J. And for once I would keep my mouth shut and listen to three of the most entertaining and enlightening storytellers America has ever produced.

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