Emerson's Life in Science

by Walls, Laura Dassow

• ISBN13: 9780801440441
• ISBN10: 0801440440
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-03-06
• Publisher: Cornell Univ Pr

Summary

Ralph Waldo Emerson has traditionally been cast as a dreamer and a mystic, concerned with the ideals of transcendentalism rather than the realities of contemporary science and technology. In Laura Dassow Walls's view Emerson was a leader of the secular avant-garde in his day. He helped to establish science as the popular norm of truth in America and to modernize American popular thought. In addition, he became a hero to a post-Darwinian generation of Victorian Dissenters, exemplifying the strong connection between transcendentalism and later nineteenth-century science. In his early years as a minister, Emerson read widely in natural philosophy (or physics), chemistry, geology, botany, and comparative anatomy. When he left the church, it was to seek the truths written in the book of nature rather than in books of scripture. While visiting the Paris Museum of Natural History during his first European tour, Emerson experienced a revelation so intense that he declared, "I will be a naturalist." Once he was back in the United States, his first step in realizing this ambition was to deliver a series of lectures on natural science. These lectures formed the basis for his first publication, Nature (1836), and his writings ever after reflected his intense and continuing interest in science. Walls finds that Emerson matured just as the concept of "the two cultures" emerged, when the disciplines of literature and science were divorcing each other even as he called repeatedly for their marriage. Consequently, Walls writes, half of Emerson's thought has been invisible to us: science was central to Emerson, to his language, to the basic organization of his career. In Emerson's Life in Science, she makes the case that no study of literary history can be complete without embracing science as part of literature. Conversely, she maintains, no history of science is complete unless we consider the role played by writers of literature who helped to install science in the popular imagination.

Author Biography

Laura Dassow Walls is Associate Professor of English at Lafayette College.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	vii
Prologue	1	(3)
The Sphinx at the Crossroads	4	(29)
The Sun of Science	4	(9)
The Culture of Truth	13	(9)
Metaphor: Toward a Poetics of Science	22	(6)
Coda: The Sphinx	28	(5)
Converting the World: Knowledge, Science, Power	33	(35)
The Representative Scholar: Emerson and Bacon	33	(9)
Nature: The Art of God	42	(13)
Books: Reading Science	55	(13)
Gnomic Science: The Body and the Law	68	(59)
The Light of the Eye: Emerson's Early Career	68	(16)
The Future at the Bottom of the Heart: The Early Science Lectures and Nature	84	(21)
The Anatomy of Truth: Emerson's Ecstatic Science	105	(22)
Global Polarity and the Single Life	127	(39)
One plus One Equals One	127	(1)
Polar Coordinates: Kant to Guyot	128	(15)
``The Mind Goes Antagonizing On'': Polarity in Emerson	143	(23)
Truth against the World	166	(33)
From Vesicle to Cosmos: Theories of Evolution	166	(10)
The Dilemma of Race	176	(11)
``Quetelet Fate''	187	(12)
The Solar Eye of Science	199	(28)
Where There Is Light There Will Be Eyes	199	(4)
Emerson and the Culture of Truth	203	(24)
Abbreviations	227	(2)
Notes	229	(30)
Works Cited	259	(14)
Index	273