Robert Richardson Quotes

I am tired of the position of the dried-up critic and doubter. The believer is the true full man. (from a biography of James by Robert D. Richardson)

Warm summer sun, shine friendly here Warm western wind, blow kindly here; Green sod above, rest light, rest light, Good-night, Annette! Sweetheart, good-night!

Lily la chilenita, la camarada Arlette, madame Robert Arnoux, Mrs. Richardson, Kuriko y madame Ricardo Somocurcio, se llamaba, en realidad, Otilia. Otilita.

Enmerson's interest is in the workshop phase, the birthing stage of art, not the museum moment, the embalming phase. Poetry mimics Creation and is therefore sacred. More precisely, just as God may indeed be a verb (as Mary Daly insists), poetry is the act of creating. The process of poetry also mimics the process of nature. 'This expression or naming is not art, but a second nature, grown out of the first, as a leaf out of a tree. What we call nature is a certain self-regulated motion or change.' Another aspect of nature is genius, which, as Emerson observes, 'is the activity which repairs the decays of things.

Yet however much he read, there were whole categories of books the mature Emerson would not read. He would not read theology or academic controversy. He wanted original accounts, first-hand experience, personal witness. He would read your poem or your novel, but not your opinion of someone else’s poem or novel, let alone your opinion of someone else’s opinion…

The first sentence of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s that reached me still jolts me every time I run into it. “Meek young men,” he wrote in “The American Scholar,” “grow up in libraries believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote those books…

But even italics fail to do justice to this magnificent outburst, the last stand of William James for the spirit of man. What can one say about the philosophical bravado, the cosmic effrontery, the sheer panache of this ailing philosopher with one foot in the grave talking down the second law of thermodynamics? It is a scene fit to set alongside the death of Socrates. The matchless incandescant spirit of the man!

What all three of these writers and thinkers teach, through their lives as much as their writings, is resilience—that is, how to recover from losses, how to get back up after being knocked down, how to construct prosperity out of the wreckage of disaster.

James had four years to live after the earthquake of 1906, and his work was far from done. In 1909 he was still trying to make sense of some of his most challenging and sweeping ideas in a book called A Pluralistic Universe. Here he firmly rejects what he calls the “stagnant felicity of the absolute’s own perfection.” He rejects, that is, the idea that everything will finally be seen to fit together in one grand, interlocked, necessary, benevolent system.10 For James there are many centers of the universe, many points of view, many systems, much conflict and evil, as well as much beauty and good. It is, he said, “a universe of eaches.”11

A distinguishing mark of both American and German transcendentalism is to insist on the connection between the mind and nature. In Emerson’s work, as in that of Thoreau later, the interest in nature is at least partly an interest in what science can teach us about nature. Emerson’s interest in science and his interest in the natural world reinforce each other. He read books of science and scientific biography. He became particularly fascinated with the working of the scientific mind, with the nature of scientific knowledge, and with the strange union of precision and wonder in scientific inquiry.

He flirted with the idea of founding a magazine. He read Carlyle’s essays on modern German literature and he began to think about the work of Goethe. He

His wife was dead, his career in the ministry finished. He was leaving theology and the pastoral office behind and setting out toward a goal he could not see but which he knew involved both literature and natural history. “Things seem flying to pieces,” Charles wrote Aunt Mary. Late in December 1832 the brig Jasper, 236 tons, cleared for Malta. There was a northeaster coming as Captain Ellis headed the ship, with Emerson aboard, out into the gray Atlantic swells. It was Christmas Day.7

William’s. She recalled how Coleridge left the high road as he approached and “leapt over a gate and bounded down the pathless field by which he cut off an angle.”13

The teacher of the coming age must occupy himself in the study and explanation of the moral constitution of man more than in the elucidation of difficult texts,” he wrote in his journal. In the sermon he expanded on the importance of the teacher: “Teaching is the perpetual end and office of all things. Teaching, instruction is the main design that shines through the sky and earth.

Quaker prohibitions (no music, no dancing, no novels, no theater, no destruction of animal life for pleasure), the peculiar Quaker customs (no separate salaried ministers, no officiated marriages, baptisms, or funerals, the use of singular “thee” and “thou” instead of the inaccurate plural “you”), and Quaker social activism (refusal to pay taxes for support of ministers, abolitionism, equality of women, pacifism) are all founded on simple positive religious principles. “God has given to all,” says Clarkson, “besides an intellectual, a spiritual understanding.  .  .  .  This spirit may be considered as the primary and infallible guide—and scriptures but a secondary means of importance.”5

Emerson further understood that the inner light is the irreducible source not only of personal religious experience but of modern political, indeed democratic ideals. The inner light is “the most republican principle,” he says. All religious movements in history and perhaps all political revolutions founded on claims of Rights, are only new examples of the deep emotion that can agitate a community of unthinking men, when a truth familiar in words, that “God is within us,” is made for a time a conviction.14 Part of Fox’s appeal

read that summer as if searching for the right recipe—how to do it. In Bob’s book I found familiar prescriptions: travel, reading, nature, friendship, journal-keeping, letter-writing. Yet all of this was delivered with heightened impact through a method Bob calls “documentary biography,” in words and scenes lifted straight from the past, as if the book were a documentary film.

Emerson insists that “the eye is filled with seeing.” He went on to suggest the main uses of natural history. The study of natural history is first of all healthy, leading to an outdoor life. Second, it is useful, to farmers and to others; it furnishes us with our commodities. Third, and of more importance to Emerson, science delights the mind. “It needs only to have the eye informed,” he said, “to make everything we see, every plant, every spider, every moss, every patch of mould upon the bark of a tree, give us the idea of fitness, as much as the order and accommodation of the most ingeniously packed dressing box.”8

I feel myself pledged,” he wrote, “to demonstrate that all necessary truth is its own evidence: that no doctrine of God need appeal to a book; that Christianity is wrongly received by all such as take it for a system of doctrines  .  .  .  it is a rule of life not a rule of faith.

Self-knowledge and self-cultivation he now sees not as a means to something but as the ends and goals of life itself. The insight was new to Emerson—and thus original in that sense—but it was hardly novel, as he knew. He told his hearers that this point of view revived old Stoic maxims and precepts. Emerson made a little sequence of them, beginning with “Know thyself.” If it was also true, as the Stoics claimed, that the good man differs from God in nothing but in duration, then the result was to “know thyself a man and be a God.” That realization leads in turn to the injunction “Revere thyself.

But the real strength and energy of the Quakers comes from neither prohibitions nor theology but from “the centering of life on the realities of inward intercourse with God.” Quakerism is supremely committed to the individual’s own experience. “No other religious community so deliberately and emphatically bases its individual and corporate life upon the supreme fact of the soul’s immediate contact with God,” says a modern Quaker historian.

the material will be familiar to readers and scholars. But the documentary method is intended to facilitate a personal, even a sympathetic, connection—rather than a detached, critical, or judgmental connection—between the reader and the subject.

It is always remembered of Thoreau that he required a daily walk of at least four hours “sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements.” It is not always recalled that he spent at least that much time every day at his desk, reading and writing.

His general mood in October was anything but resigned. “Why then shall I not go to my own heart first?” he asked. “A man must teach himself, because he can only read according to his state.” “The true philosophy is the only prophet.”4

He haunted the splendid Parisian reading rooms, some of which subscribed to four hundred journals. He marveled at the more than two hundred newspapers in Paris alone. His own lack of direction made him keenly aware of the same thing in others.

statement of the central truth of religious—not secular—humanism, the idea that is also the foundation of democratic individualism: “The highest revelation is that God is in every man.” This is not anthropomorphism but its antithesis, theomorphism.3

The Lyceum movement was just beginning, there was a demand for public lectures, and Emerson saw a possible new career as a Lyceum lecturer. With his new profession he had a new subject. Though he was no scientist, he was extremely interested in the mind of the scientist and in the meaning of science for modern life. In 1793 Thomas Paine had said, with his usual unforgivable but unforgettable bluntness, that “science is the true theology” because it is the study of the power and works of God. Emerson now recalled that Bacon had also said that “man is the minister and interpreter of nature” and that we are intended “not only to explain the sense of each passage but the scope and argument of the whole book [of nature].”6 Emerson was now consumingly interested in the connection between man and nature. He shares this concern with Kant, Schelling, and the English romantic poets. “There

Quaker ideas were deeply and powerfully congenial to Emerson. When asked point blank about his religion by a relative, David Haskins, around 1839, Emerson replied carefully “with greater deliberateness and longer pauses between his words than usual” that he was “more of a Quaker than anything else. I believe in the ‘still small voice’ and that voice is Christ within us.” Emerson’s familiarity with Quaker ideas is a good example of the difficulties of talking about the influences on Emerson. With Quakerism, as with de Staël, Coleridge, Carlyle, Kant, and Hinduism and Stoicism, Emerson was not so much converted as he was confirmed.

the life and labors of George Fox. Penn’s comments on the marks and fruits of Quakerism were particularly pertinent. “They were changed men themselves before they went about to change others,” Penn said. “They directed people to a principle in themselves though not of themselves.” It was not only Quaker words but Quaker lives that Emerson found fascinating. He read several lives of Fox, who had himself insisted, “What I am in words, the same I am in life.

Religion in the mind is not credulity and in the practice is not forms. It is a life. It is the order and soundness of a man. It is not something else to be got, to be added, but is a new life of those faculties you have.

new age of “dynamism” and a compensating new science of “dynamics” to “treat the primary unmodified forces and energies of man, the mysterious springs of love, and fear, and wonder, of Enthusiasm, Poetry, Religion, all which have a truly vital and infinite character.” The human, he says, “is not the creature and product of mechanism, but in a far truer sense, its creator and producer.” “Signs of the Times” is one of the best pieces Carlyle ever wrote. Critique is balanced by prospectus, denunciation by advocacy. “This deep paralysed subjection to physical objects comes not from nature, but from our own unwise mode of viewing nature.” Nowhere in English is there a more forceful statement of the importance of the German concept of Bildung. “To reform a world, to reform a nation, no wise man will undertake; all but foolish men know, that the only solid, though a far slower reformation, is what each begins and perfects in himself.”10

What is needed is that thought should again recover its earliest character of affirmation and sacred precept. What Carlyle says he has learned from “Kantism, Fichtism, Schellingism, Cousinism” is that “a faith in religion has again become possible and inevitable for the scientific mind.”11

Emerson was originally drawn to Carlyle’s work by the wild familiar style, but his real enthusiasm is for the Carlyle of “The State of German Literature” (1827), “Signs of the Times” (1829), and “Characteristics” (1831). These are great essays, each with a clear, positive position to advocate. They are written in forceful, colorful English and are wholly different from the intemperate and intolerant tirades, the soul-wearying complaints, and fustian blusterings of the later Carlyle. In denouncing the materialist and mechanical age of utilitarianism and in calling for a new age of mind, Carlyle in 1827 was a bold new prophet.

More than any other piece, “The State of German Literature” is the call-to-arms of transcendentalism. One can see Emerson’s American scholar and Whitman’s American poet in Carlyle’s praise of the Fichte who said, “There is a Divine Idea pervading the visible universe; which visible universe is indeed but a symbol and sensible manifestation,” and who then insisted that not theologians but literary men are the appointed interpreters of this Divine Idea: a perpetual priesthood, we might say, standing forth, generation after generation, as the dispensers and living types of God’s everlasting wisdom, to show and embody it in their writings and actions, in such particular forms as their own particular times require it in.

To the question of what exactly is this “Divine Idea,” Carlyle replies with a hint of the conception of the essential unity of all things. What the “Divine idea” means, says Carlyle, is “Under what other names and in what other formulas do I already know the same thing, which thou expressest by so strange and to me so unknown a symbol.” This is the germ of the philosophy of identity that Emerson later recognized in Schelling and in Hinduism. It holds that there is fundamental unity, a basic similarity in all human experience which is more important, finally, than the many obvious differences.8

Fourth, says Emerson, the study of nature has an educative, disciplining effect on the mind, making it exact and also generating enthusiasm, which he calls “the highest state of the character.

These people came from a variety of backgrounds and educations, but they came together now because they were in general if not complete agreement on a number of points. They were dissatisfied, individually and as a group, with the present state of philosophy, religion, and literature in America. They looked for hope to Europe, especially to Germany, to Kant in philosophy, to Schleiermacher in religion, and to Goethe in literature. They were mostly anti-Lockean; most believed in intuition. They were romanticists, not classicists or philosophes. They were radicals or liberals rather than conservatives in politics and almost all followed the logic of their belief in freedom and autonomy into one or another arena of social action.

of the individual—of all the individuals—is the basic purpose and ultimate justification for all social organizations and second that autonomous individuals cannot exist apart from others. In the transcendentalist vocabulary “association” is just as charged a word as “self.” Transcendentalism believes that the purpose of education is to facilitate the self-development of each individual. The political trajectory of transcendentalism begins in philosophical freedom and ends in democratic individualism.12

is the ambition, if it has not yet been the fate, of transcendentalism to provide a soul for modern liberalism and thereby to enlarge the possibilities of modern life.13

There is one mind common to all individual men.” This is Platonism; Emerson means we all have reason in common. Communication is possible because all human minds are, in important respects, similarly constituted. The second of Emerson’s Goose Pond principles is the Stoic ground law: “There is a relation between man and nature so that whatever is in matter is in mind.” This is the basis for language and for what the writer does. The third point is that expression is as basic a human drive as sex: “It is a necessity of the human nature that it should express itself outwardly and embody its thought.” “As all creatures are allured to reproduce themselves, so must the thought be imparted in speech.” He adds, as a corollary, “Action is as great a pleasure and cannot be foreborne.” Point four says, “It is the constant endeavor of the mind to idealize the actual, to accommodate the shows of things to the desires of the mind.” He gives architecture and art as examples.6 Point five is the theory of classification: “It is the constant tendency of the mind to unify all it beholds, or to reduce the remotest facts to a single law.” Point six extends point five and is a specific application of point two: “There is a parallel tendency/corresponding unity in nature which makes this [unification] just, as in the composition of a compound shell or leaf or animal from few elements.” Point seven describes, in Baconian fashion, an idol of the mind, the tendency to “separate particulars” and magnify them, from which come “all false views and particular sects.” Emerson’s last point is the intellectual parallax or corrective postulate for the previous point: “The remedy for all abuses, all error in thought or practice, is the conviction that underneath all appearances and causing all appearances are certain eternal laws which we call the Nature of Things.

He wrote approvingly to Aunt Mary about the “variety and velocity” of the new movements: “War, Slavery, Alcohol, Animal Food, Domestic Hired Service, Colleges, Creeds, and now at last Money also, have their spirited and unweariable assailants, and must pass out of use or must learn a law.

We all learn sooner or later that we must gather ourselves up and more or less arbitrarily concentrate our interests, throw much overboard to save any.

Not only was he exploring new subjects, he was recharting old ones. He had, for example, come to a new understanding of the evolution of modern Protestantism. Instead of tracing the Protestant movement back to Luther and Calvin, he now saw that the real Reformation—or at least that part of it that interested him—stemmed from the English Commonwealth period and came not from the Puritans but from their enemies, the Quakers. He quotes an account from Sewel’s History of the Quakers:

Emerson was accused of vagueness, inconsistency, impiety, nonsense, infidelity, blasphemy, and “foulest atheism.” His friend and successor at Boston’s Second Church, Chandler Robbins, now editor of the Christian Register, waffled helplessly, editorializing about Emerson as a good man and valuable friend despite his “unphilosophical and erroneous speculations.” Henry Ware, Jr., delivered and published a response critical of Emerson’s address but did it graciously and the two remained friends.

Obamacare, he claimed, was “about capitalism versus socialism.” Republicans opposed socialism, O’Reilly said, “but Republicans have not been able to convince the majority of Americans that income redistribution is harmful.”[4] There was another solution to that dilemma, though: flooding the zone with propaganda. In January 2010, the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts, whose professional career had been spent opposing the 1965 Voting Rights Act, handed down the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision. It ruled that corporations could spend unlimited money in campaign advertising so long as they were not formally working with a candidate or a party.

2013, the Roberts Supreme Court handed down the Shelby County v. Holder decision, which gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

And yet, in early January 2017, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper released a report that aggregated the findings of the FBI, the CIA, and the NSA (National Security Agency, which operates under the authority of the director of national intelligence), concluding that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election to help Trump. Over the next two years, two investigations, one by Special Counsel Robert Mueller from the Department of Justice and another by the Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee, found that the Trump campaign had, at the very least, played along.[1] The story was not just about Trump or Russia or the private dealings between the two. It was the story of authoritarianism undermining American democracy by using disinformation to manipulate voters.

Robert T. Richardson, Jr. Henry Thoreau, A Life of the Mind. University of California Press: Berkeley, 1986,

ornamental and suitably toffee-nosed pets of the wealthy, titled and privileged in their private gardens. He looked beyond the bird at a further manifestation of such diminished glories; the impressive seventeenth-century pile of Edenbridge House, formidable focus of the twelve hundred

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William found Rio and its approaches so overpoweringly grand that “no words of mine... can give any idea of [the] magnificence of this harbor and its approaches.

than Emerson, Fuller was Goethe’s reader in America.

The Greeks,” she said, “saw everything in forms which we are trying to ascertain as law, and classify as cause.

his, that ideas are ideas of particular persons. It seems altogether likely that Fuller, even in this first meeting, pushed Emerson away from the abstract and theoretical idealism toward which Nature kept drifting and pushed him toward what may be called biographical idealism—idealism that is concerned with ideas only as they can be lived, with laws only as they can be seen in events, with the word only when it becomes flesh, with the spiritual only when it animates the material.

Like Emerson’s moment standing on the bare hillside, Fuller’s moment of self-affirmation was accompanied at once by a sense that one is not an isolate self but a part of a central, all-pervading consciousness. “I saw,” she goes on, in her Ecclesiastes-like way, “that there was no self: that selfishness was all folly, and the result of circumstance; that it was only because I thought self real that I suffered.”5

The public consequences of such convictions for Emerson were a politics of social liberalism, abolitionism, women’s suffrage, American Indian rights, opposition to the Mexican War, and civil disobedience when government was wrong. The personal consequence of such perceptions was an almost intolerable awareness that every morning began with infinite promise. Any book may be read, any idea thought, any action taken. Anything that has ever been possible to human beings is possible to most of us every time the clock says six in the morning.

But like Nietzsche Emerson knew the value of being able to forget. He told his daughter Ellen in 1854, “You must finish a term and finish every day, and be done with it. For manners, and for wise living, it is a vice to remember.” He meant that one should not pick at the scabs of one’s little mistakes, rudenesses, oversights, and failures.

The constitutional disease from which I suffer,” he wrote, “is what the Germans call Zerrissenheit or torn-to-pieces-hood. The days are broken in pure zig-zag and interruption.

I am in his power who can gratify my wishes and inflict my fears. Not to be a slave, then, I must have neither desire nor aversion for anything in the power of others.

Anyone can amass an impressive amount of reading. But the active filtration and the tight focus of constant intention which convert that reading into real life experience and then into adequate expression, these are the exclusive properties of the great writer.

May 9, the Appalachicolas on October 11, the Chickasaws on October 20, the Kickapoos on October 24, the Pottawattomies on October 26, the Shawnees, Delawares, Piankashaws, and Peorias on October 26, and the Weas and Senecas on October 29. The Cherokees, under Chief Ross, refused. They had made twenty-eight previous treaties, each one guaranteed in perpetuity. All twenty-eight had been broken. Jackson’s

Coleridge notes that there are four kinds of readers: the hourglass, the sponge, the jelly bag, and the Golconda. In the first everything that runs in runs right out again. The sponge gives out all it took in, only a little dirtier. The jelly bag keeps only the refuse. The Golconda runs everything through a sieve and keeps only the diamonds.

encapsulate moments of high insight. Both

The highest state of which we have any experience,” he says, “is the act of adoration.” When we have learned that the sources of nature are in our own souls, then we will see that “the world is the perennial miracle which the soul worketh,” and we will understand that “there is no profane history, that all history is sacred.”7

or academies in South Carolina, Tennessee, and Connecticut.3 Literacy was fairly high among the Cherokees. Not many spoke or read English, but over half could read and write using the Cherokee alphabet devised by the Cherokee scholar Sequoya in 1821. The nation had a press that turned out a newspaper, hymnbooks, and pamphlets in Cherokee. They were essentially an agricultural people, living by the plow, the spinning wheel, and the anvil. The inventory of 1825 shows 17,531 cattle, 7,653 horses, 47,732 swine, 752 looms, 2,486 spinning wheels, 72 wagons, 921 plows, 10 sawmills, 31 gristmills, 62 blacksmith shops, 8 cotton machines, and 12 schools.4

Emerson’s address was indeed an attack on formal historical Christianity, but the talk was even more dangerous than that, for Emerson proposed as a counterweight to formal religion not atheism but a personal religious consciousness. “I deny personality to God because it is too little not too much,” he said. What Emerson produced for this occasion is a modern confession of faith, an announcement of the gospel according to the present moment, a belief not so much in pantheism as hypertheism, a declaration of the divinity of the human. Never content just to attack what he disapproved, Emerson puts the case for positive religious feeling.8

there was often a crowd for dinner. Ellen Emerson later said all her mother’s recipes began “beat two dozen eggs  .  .  .

For Schleiermacher, as for Emerson now, the religious impulse in human nature demands not only expression but communication with others. Great truths demand great utterance. The highest truths need the highest utterance, which means poetry. The religious nature finds its full expression only in communication between people. When poetry (or preaching or lecturing) achieves this, it is doing its job. Only when live religious feeling has been driven out of a society must it take refuge under the dead letter of a canonical bible.12

rethought Erasmianism and Arminianism in the light of Kant, Schelling, and Lyell. Speaking of his differences with the whole range of what he called historical Christianity, from orthodox Calvinism to orthodox Unitarianism, Emerson considered himself to have accepted the truth of Christianity. Where he differed was in his conviction that Christianity was founded on human nature, not on the Bible. “They call it Christianity. I call it consciousness.”15

Though he was firmly opposed to slavery, he still was not free of the casual racism of white society of the time. He now doubted, as he said, that “the African race have ever occupied or do promise ever to occupy any very high place in the human family.

By culture, Emerson does not mean official culture—what the Germans call Kultur, of museums, theater, and symphony performances—but self-development, education, Bildung. As always, Emerson is the philosophical idealist, but now he is at pains to emphasize the practical side of idealism, which he pointedly defines not as the pursuit of the best but of the better: “That Better we call the Ideal. Ideal is not opposed to Real, but to Actual. The Ideal is the Real. The Actual is but the apparent and the temporary.

was made.”6 If all that the newspapers said was true, Emerson thundered, the country stood on the brink of a terrible crime, a “crime that really deprives us as well as the Cherokees of a country;

individualism does not mean isolation or self-sufficiency. This is not a paradox, for it is only the strong individual who can frankly concede the sometimes surprising extent of his own dependence.8

Great truths demand great utterance. The highest truths need the highest utterance, which means poetry. The religious nature finds its full expression only in communication between people. When poetry (or preaching or lecturing) achieves this, it is doing its job.

Best of all was Henry James, Sr., then also thirty-two, with a son William just over a year old and another, the future novelist, Henry, just born in April. James had not yet undergone his conversion to Swedenborgianism or to living in Europe, but was already a gently persistent seeker. “I know of no one so patient and determined to have the good of you,” Thoreau wrote of him after a three-hour talk. “He is a refreshing forward-looking and forward-moving man, and he naturalized and humanized New York for me.”3 These men were all just slightly older than Thoreau. All were successful: James had family money, the others were writing with energy and publishing to general acclaim.

Emerson says that the “religious sentiment,” the religious feeling, is universal and that it derives from or is awakened by the “moral sentiment,” which is the even more fundamental perception that the world has an essential balance and wholeness. The feeling of veneration or reverence that arises from this perception is the basic building block of all religion. That feeling is an intuition, revealed to each person; it cannot be had at second hand.9 The divine nature is present in all persons. The mischief begins, says Emerson, when the divine nature is attributed to one or two persons, denied to all the rest, and “denied with fury.” Jesus’ life illustrates his central teaching, which is that the divine manifests itself in the human, much as the Hegelians say spirit manifests itself in matter.

as their obvious interest in Concord, in nature, in walks, and in Walden Pond. They were both modern Stoics, interested in self-rule and autonomy. Both believed in the stability of human nature, in the essential equivalence of all times and places, and in Kantian rather than in Lockean theories of mind. Both believed in the process of individuation and in the authority of individual conscience.

he was himself aware of the defects of a society in which everything and everybody had to endure what Robert Frost would call “trial by market.” But he thought that eventually “the historian of the world will see that trade was the principle of liberty, that trade planted America and destroyed feudalism, that it makes peace and keeps peace, and it will abolish slavery.

This is the good and the evil of trade, that it would put everything into market; talent, beauty, virtue, and man himself.

Perhaps the most interesting book Emerson read in early 1839 is William L. Stone’s Life of Joseph Brant-Thayendanegea, a two-volume biography in nine hundred closely printed pages. This is the masterpiece of a journalist who wrote on many subjects but who spent years in careful research and painstaking documentation for his life of the principal war-chief of the Five Nations and ally of the English during the American Revolution. What is remarkable about Stone’s book is its stance. Completely devoid of “savagism,” the condescending praise of the noble savage, appropriately self-conscious about who is writing the history of the Indian, and aware also of how hitherto “the white historian has drawn them with the characteristics of demons,

Here is Lidian’s whole duty of man for these new aspirants to moral perfection: Never hint at a providence, Particular or Universal . . . Never speak of sin. It is of no consequence to “The Being” whether you are good or bad. Never confess a fault. You should not have committed it and who cares whether you are sorry? Never speak of Happiness as the consequence of Holiness . . . Never speak of the hope of immortality. What do you know about it?  .  .  . Never speak of affliction being sent and sent in kindness; that is an old wives’ fable.

Emerson’s master metaphor now is metamorphosis, a metaphor that for the next ten years will increasingly dominate his thinking and writing. Now in his journal he writes boldly, “Metamorphosis is nature,” and he balances this bold statement by saying that while life is “a flux of moods,” there is “that which changes not, and which ranks all sensations and states of mind.”6 The other idea Emerson took from Plotinus, an idea that blazed up in Emerson like fire in a dry forest, is Plotinus’s conception of the final stage in the developing self-consciousness of the individual soul. This last stage is a mystical union of the self with the One “in an ecstasy characterized by the absence of all duality.

The Chartist movement was named after the charter they wished to see adopted; it had six points: universal male suffrage, equal-sized constituencies, no property qualification for members of Parliament, a secret ballot, annual Parliaments, and salaries for MPs.

treachery” called “Ichabod.” And on March 22, writing under the extraordinary pressure of events and seething at what he saw as Webster’s betrayal, Whitman abandoned conventional metrical rhymed verse forms—forever—and wrote the first of his poems in the free verse that completely transformed his own work and would transform modern American poetry as much as the Civil War would transform American life. The poem appeared in the New York Tribune; it was called “Blood Money” and it cast Webster as Judas:

with the heart of Darwin’s argument, “that species are only strongly marked and permanent varieties, and that each species first existed as a variety.”9 Emerson’s reading in Goethe long ago had prepared him for some of Darwin’s conclusions, for “the belief that all animals and plants have descended from some one prototype” and that “probably all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one primordial form, into which life was first breathed.

His book gives a courteous hearing to great saints, famous poets, itinerant preachers, illiterate converts, street-mission workers, anonymous responders to questionnaires, and Victorian gentlemen with three names.

We think of William James as an affirmer, like Emerson or Whitman, so it is sobering to note just how much of what one usually thinks of as religion James rejects at the start. He has no interest, he claims, in “your ordinary religious believer, who follows the conventional observances of his country, whether it be Buddhist, Christian, or Mohammedan. His religion has been made for him by others, communicated to him by tradition, determined to fixed forms by imitation and retained by habit.

idle at best, destructive at worst. Your work, as Ruskin says, should be the praise of what you love.

After 1858 Emerson still had fourteen years of active lecturing left, during which he gave an average of forty-seven lectures a year. In

Emerson disapproved of the war as long as it was fought only to hold the Union together. He continued lecturing, mostly on nonwar subjects. In

Emerson’s Thoreau is a transcendentalist; he perceived “the material world as a means and a symbol.

James thought all that could now be done was face the fact that “in every national soul there lie potentialities of the most barefaced piracy and our own American soul is no exception . . . It is good to rid ourselves of cant and humbug, and to know the truth about ourselves.

AS ALWAYS EMERSON WAS A LITTLE AHEAD OF HIMSELF. Perhaps the direct acceptance of age gave him a momentary sense that he had overcome it. During 1867 he gave eighty lectures; he made two western trips through fourteen states. Only once before, in 1856, had he taken on so heavy a schedule.

The “orthodox deduction of God’s attributes is nothing but a shuffling and matching of pedantic dictionary-adjectives, aloof from morals, aloof from human needs, something that might be worked out from the mere word ‘God’ by a logical machine of wood and brass as well as by a man of flesh and blood . . . The attributes which I have quoted,” he explains, “have absolutely nothing to do with religion, for religion is a living practical affair.

The bigger the unit you deal with, the hollower, the more brutal, the more mendacious is the life displayed. So I am against all big organizations as such, national ones first and foremost, and in favor of the eternal forces of truth which always work in the individual and immediately unsuccessful way, underdogs always, till history comes after they are long dead, and puts them on the top.”12

But now in 1865 so deeply was Emerson enmeshed in the war and in public life (he gave an astonishing seventy-seven lectures in 1865) that the public events and his reponses to them

he is too religious for the unbelievers and not religious enough for the believers.

There is nothing in this list that Emerson had not learned firsthand. These are not abstractions but practical rules for everyday life. The public consequences of such convictions for Emerson were a politics of social liberalism, abolitionism, women’s suffrage, American Indian rights, opposition to the Mexican War, and civil disobedience when government was wrong. The personal consequence of such perceptions was an almost intolerable awareness that every morning began with infinite promise. Any book may be read, any idea thought, any action taken. Anything that has ever been possible to human beings is possible to most of us every time the clock says six in the morning. On a day no different from the one now breaking, Shakespeare sat down to begin Hamlet and Fuller began her history of the Roman revolution of 1848.

he never knew the use of tobacco; and though a naturalist, he used neither trap nor gun.” Emerson understood Thoreau; he said there was something military in Thoreau’s nature and that he only really felt himself when in opposition: “He wanted a fallacy to expose, a blunder to pillory, I may say required a little sense of victory, a roll of the drum, to call his powers into full exercise.” Emerson insists on Thoreau’s Americanness (“his aversation from English and European manners and tastes almost reached contempt”) and on his originality. He had an eye for physical detail; Thoreau could “pace sixteen rods more accurately than another man could measure them with rod and chain.” He invented a better pencil, and “from a box containing a bushel or more of loose pencils, he could take up with his hands fast enough just a dozen pencils at every grasp.”4

The Emerson who ended each essay in Representative Men with an inventory of the defects of Plato or Shakespeare or Goethe now did the same for Thoreau. “I cannot help counting it a fault in him that he had no ambition,