Transatlantic Transcendentalism: Coleridge, Emerson, and Nature 9780748681372, 074868137X

Table of contents :
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Chapter 1 Transatlantic Transcendentalism
Chapter 2 Coleridge and Boston Transcendentalism
Chapter 3 Nature: Philosophy and the “Riddle of the World”
Chapter 4 The Landing Place: “Distinguishing without Dividing” and Coleridge’s Method
Chapter 5 Humanity: “Art is the Mediatress, the Reconciliator of Man and Nature”
Chapter 6 Spirit: “An Influx of the Divine Mind”
Chapter 7 Emerson’s Nature: Coleridge’s Method and the Romantic Triad
Chapter 8 Coleridge and Vermont Transcendentalism
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

e d i n b u rg H s T u d i e s i n T r a n s aT l a n T i c l i T e r aT u r e s series editors: susan manning and andrew Taylor

TransaTlanTic TranscendenTalism

Coleridge, Emerson, and Nature

samantha c. Harvey

TRANSATLANTIC TRANSCENDENTALISM

EDINBURGH STUDIES IN TRANSATLANTIC LITERATURES Series Editors: Susan Manning and Andrew Taylor Modern global culture makes it clear that literary study can no longer operate on nation-based or exceptionalist models. In practice, American literatures have always been understood and defined in relation to the literatures of Europe and Asia. The books in this series work within a broad comparative framework to question place-based identities and monocular visions, in historical contexts from the earliest European settlements to contemporary affairs, and across all literary genres. They explore the multiple ways in which ideas, texts, objects and bodies travel across spatial and temporal borders, generating powerful forms of contrast and affinity. The Edinburgh Studies in Transatlantic Literatures series fosters new paradigms of exchange, circulation and transformation for transatlantic literary studies, expanding the critical and theoretical work of this rapidly developing field. Titles in the series include: Ethnicity and Cultural Authority: From Arnold to Du Bois, Daniel G. Williams Henry James, Oscar Wilde and Aesthetic Culture, Michèle Mendelssohn American Modernism’s Expatriate Scene: The Labour of Translation, Daniel Katz The Dandy in Irish and American Southern Fiction: Aristocratic Drag, Ellen Crowell Philanthropy in British and American Fiction: Dickens, Hawthorne, Eliot, and Howells, Frank Christianson Transatlantic Women’s Literature, Heidi Slettedahl Macpherson Cultural Authority in the Age of Whitman: A Transatlantic Perspective, Günter Leypoldt Mercenaries in British and American Literature, 1790–1830: Writing, Fighting, and Marrying for Money, Erik Simpson Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777–1826: Rewriting Conquest, Rebecca Cole Heinowitz Transnationalism in Practice: Essays on American Studies, Literature and Religion, Paul Giles South Asian Atlantic Literature, 1970–2010, Ruth Maxey Atlantic Citizens: Nineteenth-Century American Writers at Work in the World, Leslie Elizabeth Eckel Transatlantic Avant-Gardes: Little Magazines and Localist Modernism, Eric White Nineteenth-Century US Literature in Middle Eastern Languages, Jeffrey Einboden Transatlantic Transcendentalism: Coleridge, Emerson, and Nature, Samantha C. Harvey Forthcoming Titles: Emily Dickinson and her British Contemporaries: Victorian Poetry in Nineteenth-Century America, Páraic Finnerty Visit the Edinburgh Studies in Transatlantic Literatures web site at www.​euppublishing.​com/​series/​estl

TRANSATLANTIC TRANSCENDENTALISM COLERIDGE, EMERSON, AND NATURE ◆ ◆ ◆

SAMANTHA C. HARVEY

© Samantha C. Harvey, 2013 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LF www.​euppublishing.​com Typeset in 11/13 Baskerville MT by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 8136 5 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 8137 2 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 0 7486 8138 9 (epub) The right of Samantha C. Harvey to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Susan Manning (1953–2013), one of the founding editors of Edinburgh Studies in Transatlantic Literatures, was committed to the exchange of ideas across languages, cultures and nations. Indeed an expansive intellectual generosity characterised her entire academic career, one that has been cut all too short. The Series is a testament to her work and contributes to her legacy as an outstanding scholar, a supportive colleague and a good friend. Andrew Taylor

Contents

Acknowledgmentsvi Abbreviationsviii 1 2 3 4

Transatlantic Transcendentalism Coleridge and Boston Transcendentalism Nature: Philosophy and the “Riddle of the World” The Landing Place: “Distinguishing without Dividing” and Coleridge’s Method 5 Humanity: “Art is the Mediatress, The Reconciliator of Man and Nature” 6 Spirit: “An Influx of the Divine Mind” 7 Emerson’s Nature: Coleridge’s Method and the Romantic Triad 8 Coleridge and Vermont Transcendentalism

1 24 40 54 76 95 119 141

Notes164 Bibliography197 Index210

Acknowledgments

Transatlantic Transcendentalism took shape over many long years, and I am so very grateful to the mentors, colleagues, friends, and family who made this book possible. Thanks are due to Lawrence Buell, who first suggested pursuing the topic of Coleridge and Emerson for my undergraduate thesis, as well as Alan Hodder and Richard Niebuhr for their encouragement and guidance during those very earliest stages. I am deeply grateful to John Beer: his profound knowledge of Coleridge was formative for me, and his comments on my doctoral dissertation and this manuscript were invaluable. Jim Engell has enriched this book in every way possible, through his inspiring scholarship, his mentorship and friendship, as well as his insightful suggestions at several different stages of this book’s evolution. Thanks to Susan Manning and Andrew Taylor, the editors of the Edinburgh Studies in Transatlantic Literatures series at Edinburgh University Press; I am thrilled to be part of this ground-breaking series. Many conversations have enriched this book, and I am especially grateful to Richard Brantley, Laura Walls, Richard Gravil, David Vallins, Graham Davidson, Anthony Harding, Kevin Hutchings, Martin Bickman, Anya Taylor, and Bob Scholnick for their thoughts and guidance. I greatly appreciate Jim McKusick’s mentorship and sage comments. I am indebted to my colleagues at BSU, especially Steven Olsen-Smith, Tom Hillard, Mac Test, Steve Crowley, Ann Campbell, and Sara Fry, for sharing their enthusiasm and knowledge. I owe so much to Rochelle Johnson, a kindred spirit who has given me so much support and inspiration. Thanks are due to Chris Gair, editor of Symbiosis: A Journal of AngloAmerican Literary Relations, for permission to publish a revised version of “Coleridge’s American Revival: James Marsh, John Dewey, and the

Acknowledgments  [ vii ­

Legacy of Vermont Transcendentalism” as Chapter 8. I would also like to thank Joel Pace for his excellent editorial commentary on that article, and to all those involved in the Symbiosis journal and conferences, which have so immeasurably enriched the field of transatlantic studies. Jeffrey Marshall and Sylvia Bugbee at the University of Vermont Special Collections and the staff at Houghton Library, Harvard University were most helpful with the manuscript materials for this book, and I am grateful for their permission to quote from materials in their holdings. My research assistants, Eric Austin and Jessica Duffy, have been a great help, and special thanks are due to Jessica Nasman, who went far beyond the call of duty in the final stages of preparing the manuscript. The College of Arts and Sciences and the Arts and Humanities Institute Fellowship at Boise State University provided essential leave time and research funds to complete the book. The support of my family has nourished me at every stage of this long process: thanks to Barbara, Dermot, Emily, and Julian. Thank you, Silvino, por estar sempre me apoiando, and Delphi and Leo, for lighting up my days.

Abbreviations

AR BL CC

CL CN

CWE EL

F J

S. T. Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, ed. John Beer, CC 9 (London and Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). S. T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, eds. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, 2 vols., CC 7 (London and Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983). The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, gen. ed. Kathleen Coburn, associate ed. Bart Winer, 16 vols. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969–2002). Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. L. Griggs, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956–71). The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, eds. Kathleen Coburn, Merton Christensen, and Anthony John Harding, 5 vols. in 10 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957–2002). The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 9 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971–2011). The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, eds. Stephen E. Whicher, Robert E. Spiller, and Wallace E. Williams, 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959–72). S. T. Coleridge, The Friend, ed. Barbara Rooke, 2 vols., CC 4 (London and Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969). Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, eds. Edward Waldo

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Abbreviations  [ ix Emerson and Waldo Emerson Forbes, 10 vols. (Boston and New York: Riverside Press, 1909–14). JMN The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, eds. William H. Gilman et al., 16 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960–82). LE The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, eds. Ralph L. Rusk and Eleanor Tilton, 10 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939–95). Lects 1795 S. T. Coleridge, Lectures 1795: On Politics and Religion, eds. Lewis Patton and Peter Mann, CC 1 (London and Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971). Lects 1808–1819 S. T. Coleridge, Lectures 1808–1819: On Literature, ed. R. A. Foakes, 2 vols., CC 5 (London and Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987). LS S. T. Coleridge, Lay Sermons, ed. R. J. White, CC 6 (London and Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972). M S. T. Coleridge, Marginalia, ed. George Whalley, 3 vols., CC 12 (London and Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980). PL S. T. Coleridge, Lectures 1818–1819: On the History of Philosophy, ed. J. R. de J. Jackson, CC 8 (London and Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). PW S. T. Coleridge, Poetical Works, ed. J. C. C. Mays, 6 vols., CC 16 (London and Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). SW S. T. Coleridge, Shorter Works and Fragments, eds. H. J. Jackson and J. R. de J. Jackson, 2 vols., CC 11 (London and Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995).

Emerson’s annotations on Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria. Photo by permission of Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Chapter 1

Transatlantic Transcendentalism

Every man’s progress is through a succession of teachers, each of whom seems at the time to have a superlative influence, but it at last gives place to a new. Frankly let him accept it all. Jesus says, Leave father, mother, house and lands, and follow me. Who leaves all, receives more. This is as true intellectually, as morally. Each new mind we approach, seems to require an abdication of all our past and present possessions. A new doctrine seems, at first, a subversion of all our opinions, tastes, and manner of living. Such has Swedenborg, such has Kant, such has Coleridge, such has Hegel or his interpreter Cousin, seemed to many young men in this country. Take thankfully and heartily all they can give. Exhaust them, wrestle with them, let them not go until their blessing be won, and after a short season, the dismay will be overpast, the excess of influence withdrawn, and they will be no longer an alarming meteor, but one more bright star shining serenely in your heaven, and blending its light with all your day. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)1 [Coleridge] has a tone a little lower than greatness – but what a living soul, what a universal knowledge! I like to encounter these citizens of the universe, that believe the mind was made to be spectator of all, inquisitor of all, and whose philosophy compares with others much as astronomy with the other sciences, taking post at the centre and, as from a specular mount, sending sovereign glances to the circumference of things . . . But there are few or no books of pure literature so self-imprinting . . . so often remembered as Coleridge’s. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)2

The purpose of this book is to illuminate the most important transatlantic source for Emerson and the development of American Transcendentalism:

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the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. At a time when books traveled slowly across the Atlantic, Emerson turned to Coleridge’s prose as a compendium of the best ideas of European Romanticism. But Coleridge was more than a sourcebook: he taught Emerson to think – not what to think, but how to think. Coleridge’s discriminating distinctions and definitions, his call for cultivating the art of reflection, and his dynamic intellectual method galvanized Emerson at a pivotal moment in his intellectual development. Coleridge was a role model for Emerson’s new vocation as a public intellectual and his ideas fundamentally shaped the early lectures and addresses. Coleridge’s thought guided, stimulated, and provoked Emerson to create his most distinctive literary creations, and it also influenced several major American intellectual movements. In addition to examining Coleridge’s specific literary, philosophical, and theological influences on Emerson, Transatlantic Transcendentalism reveals Coleridge’s centrality for Boston Transcendentalism and the related but lesser-known Vermont Transcendentalism, a movement which profoundly affected the development of modern higher education, the national press, and the emergence of Pragmatism. Coleridge himself remarked, “I am a poor poet in England, but I am a great philosopher in America.”3 Despite his importance to American letters, to date no book has devoted itself to elaborating Coleridge’s vital role for Emerson and Transatlantic Transcendentalism, a lacuna which this book endeavors to remedy. This first chapter elaborates the three categories of this book’s title, beginning with the unique case of assimilative influence at work in the relationship between Coleridge and Emerson. This will be followed by an examination of how the burgeoning field of transatlantic studies has opened new circulatory spaces to investigate Transatlantic Transcendentalism, and finally, an account of how Coleridge’s commitment to mediating the categories of nature, spirit, and humanity characterized an overarching Romantic concern that transcended national boundaries. Thus this book is not just an “influence study” of one writer upon another, but rather the relationship between Coleridge and Emerson serves as a lens to magnify the ways in which ideas transferred across thinkers, oceans, and time periods, on one hand forging enduring legacies while also warping, re­interpreting, and renewing those ideas in new climates. A reappraisal of the study of influence is needed to appreciate Coleridge’s seminal role for Emerson and Transatlantic Romanticism. Emerson’s contemporary Monckton Milnes claimed, “there is little in such of [Emerson’s] works as have reached us (and we have read all that we can find), which would be new to the competent student of European

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Transatlantic Transcendentalism  [3

Philosophy . . . much, nay most, of what his country would probably claim exclusively for his own, has been thought of, spoken of, and written of, by Fichte, or Goethe, or Novalis, or Coleridge, or Carlyle.”4 At first glance, this appears to be an indictment of Emerson’s lack of originality, evidence that his own contemporaries recognized his massive and largely unacknowledged debt to transatlantic sources. Yet I agree with Patrick Keane that Emerson could very well be the best example of Thomas McFarland’s “originality paradox” in which a profound indebtedness can enable, and even enhance, the originality of a writer.5 Coleridge, more than any other thinker, provided the ongoing stimulus and challenge that propelled Emerson’s literary career in its early stages. My goal is not simply to tally up the numerous patches of Coleridge in Emerson’s prose, but rather to point toward a far more fundamental and organic integration: Emerson used Coleridge’s definitions, distinctions, and intellectual method to spur on his own distinctive intellectual and creative process. The fact that Emerson so rarely acknowledged his borrowings from Coleridge was not proof of some grand deception – as the quote from Milnes reveals, the connection between the two writers was clearly recognized in his time – but rather that his assimilation of Coleridge was so complete that he felt no attribution was necessary.6 That is, Emerson did not think about Coleridge, he thought with Coleridge, and the result was a quintessential example of a writer at once deeply indebted and highly original. This book focuses upon Emerson’s interest in Coleridge during the pivotal years of his intellectual development from 1826 to 1836. In these years, Coleridge’s volumes were always on his desk: no other author appears so frequently in Emerson’s early journals.7 Emerson read Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria in 1826, and Aids to Reflection and The Friend in 1829. He was also exposed to other works of Coleridge, such as The Statesman’s Manual, through excerpts in the appendix to James Marsh’s 1829 edition of Aids to Reflection. In the 1820s he discussed Coleridge with Mary Moody Emerson, his aunt and vitally important early mentor; the second epigraph for this chapter is from Emerson’s correspondence with her. His personal copies of Coleridge’s volumes are heavily annotated and carefully indexed on the backboards of each volume.8 His intellectual engagement with Coleridge in this period was so intense and encompassing that it almost amounted to a kind of collaboration. This was not in terms of an actual correspondence between the two men; rather Emerson turned to Coleridge for a fundamental armature of Romantic ideas and an intellectual and literary method that informed his entire oeuvre.9 Timing played a role in the intensity of this relationship: the years of

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Transatlantic Transcendentalism

Emerson’s closest study of Coleridge overlapped with a period of intellectual maturation as well as personal and professional upheaval. The early 1830s were full of tribulation for Emerson. His first wife, Ellen, died in 1831 and he was deeply troubled by her death. He wrote to her in his journals as if she were still alive, and opened her coffin over a year after she died.10 He resigned from the Unitarian ministry in 1832, mainly due to concerns about the rite of Communion. On Christmas Day 1832, after a bout of bad health, he began his first trip to Europe. He was at a crossroads both intellectually and personally, searching for a new start, new thoughts, and a new vocation. In many ways this European trip was Emerson’s coming of age, his version of the “Grand Tour,” an educative journey that roughly followed the timeline of European civilization, starting with the wonders of nature, the treasures of antiquity, the modernity of science, and ending with visits to England’s living sages. He witnessed the sublimity of Vesuvius’ smoking volcano, Roman ruins overgrown with foliage, and scientific classification exhibited in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, which so impressed him that it stimulated a life-long interest in natural history.11 The final part of his tour included much-anticipated visits to Landor, Carlyle, Wordsworth, and Coleridge. Emerson came away from these meetings, especially his visit to Coleridge, with the sense that a period of intellectual tutelage was over. He wrote in his journal, “It occurs to me forcibly, yes, somewhat pathetically, that he who visits a man of genius out of admiration for his parts should treat him tenderly. ’Tis odds but he will be disappointed.”12 Although Emerson was warmly received by Wordsworth, the visit was anticlimactic: he described the poet as “a plain, elderly, white-haired man, not prepossessing, and disfigured by green googles.”13 His meeting with Carlyle was more exuberant: Emerson described the meeting as “A white day in my years” and it marked the beginning of a long friendship.14 But the visit to Coleridge was most disappointing, although this did not stop Emerson from carefully recording the minutiae of their encounter: This morn I went to Highgate & called at Dr. Gillman’s & sent up a note to Mr[.] Coleridge requesting leave to see him . . . At one I called & he appeared, a short thick old man with bright blue eyes, black suit and cane, & any thing but what I had imagined[,] a clear clean face with fine complexion – a great snuff taker which presently soiled his cravat & neat black suit . . . Thence he burst into a long & indignant declamation upon the folly & ignorance of Unitarianism[,] its high unreasonableness . . . As soon as he stopped a second to take breath, I remarked to him that it would be cowardly in me, after this,

Transatlantic Transcendentalism  [5 ­

not to inform him that I was an Unitarian, though much interested in his explanations. Yes, he said, I supposed so[,] & continued as before.15

After seven years of reading Coleridge with great interest, this must have been a grave disappointment. Yet Emerson was not really meeting the Coleridge of Aids to Reflection, Biographia Literaria, and The Friend; the sage’s powers were waning, he had only a year to live, and he was mainly preoccupied with Trinitarian metaphysics. While the meeting was unsatisfactory for both parties (Coleridge wrote in a letter, “I feel an especial disappointment with regard to the American Philosopher”) it gave Emerson a liberating sense that the time had come for the emergence of a new generation of writers and thinkers.16 As Pochmann noted, “’Twas himself he had come three thousand miles and more to find.”17 Emerson’s disappointment did not lead to disillusionment. Although he perhaps had hoped to win Coleridge’s blessing, he came away with something else: a sense of empowerment to take on the mantle of the poet-prophet in his native land. The European trip had given him selfconfidence, a sense of purpose, and a newly authoritative voice that began to assert itself in his journals: I thank the Great God who has led me through this European scene, this last schoolroom in which he has pleased to instruct me . . . He has shown me the men I wished to see, – Landor, Coleridge, Carlyle, Wordsworth; he has thereby comforted & confirmed me in my convictions. Many things I owe to the sight of these men. I shall judge more justly, less timidly, of wise men forevermore.18

As he watched England’s shore disappear, he looked forward to returning to American soil, “A land without nobility or wigs or debt / No castles no Cathedrals and no kings / Land of the forest.”19 He was ready to embark upon the intellectual projects that would make him famous. Despite this heroic image of Emerson sailing away from the shores of European influence, in reality his deepest engagement with Coleridge was about to begin. When he arrived back in America in 1834, he took a cue from Coleridge for his next vocation: a public lecturer and a man of letters. Coleridge was a role model for his new career, as revealed by a journal entry dated November 15, 1834: Hail to the quiet fields of my fathers! Not wholly unattended by supernatural friendship & favor let me come hither. Bless my purposes as they are simple and virtuous. Coleridge’s fine letter (in London Lit. Gazette Sept. 13, 1834.)

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Transatlantic Transcendentalism [sic] comes in aid of the very thoughts I was revolving. And be it so. Henceforth I design not to utter any speech, poem, or book that is not entirely & peculiarly my work. I will say at Public Lectures & the like, those things which I have meditated for their own sake & not for the first time with a view to that ­occasion . . . Respect a man! assuredly, but in general only as the potential God & therefore richly deserving of your pity, your tears. Now he is only a scrap, an ort, an end & in his actual being no more worthy of your veneration than the poor lunatic. But the simplest person who in his integrity worships God becomes God: at least no optics of human mind can detect the line where man the effect ceases, & God the Cause begins.20

This passage reveals a great deal about Emerson’s complex relationship to Coleridge: he paraphrased Coleridge’s “fine letter” closely to justify his choice not to “utter any speech, poem, or book that is not entirely & peculiarly my work.”21 In other words, he used Coleridge’s words to express his own commitment to originality. This is one of dozens of instances in which Emerson assimilated Coleridge’s ideas in the name of achieving his own distinctive creative voice. Could the mandate to “Respect a man! assuredly, but in general only as the potential God & therefore richly deserving of your pity” refer to Coleridge? Did Emerson see himself as fulfilling Coleridge’s potential?22 Could the impossibility to “detect the line where man the effect ceases, & God the Cause begins” justify borrowing from Coleridge liberally, since both were inspired by similar ideas and questions? At this very moment in 1834, as Emerson began to incorporate Coleridgean definitions, distinctions, and method to structure his early essays, an interesting case of influence begins to develop, one that resists easy categorization. Emerson read widely and he retained the best of what he read, particularly favoring quotations quoted by other authors, memorable maxims, definitions, and distinctions. In that same journal in 1834, Emerson noted “Coleridge’s four classes of Readers. 1. the Hour glass sort, all in & all out; 2 the Sponge sort, giving it all out a little dirtier than it took in; 3 of the Jelly bag, keeping nothing but the refuse; 4 of the Golconda, sieves picking up the diamonds only.”23 Emerson was particularly adept at finding the diamonds in Coleridge’s voluminous prose. He used it as a sourcebook, considering Coleridge one of only “seven or eight minds” capable of “enumerating the apparently manifold philosophies and forms of thought.”24 Yet I would add another category to Coleridge’s readers: the assimilative reader, one who not only acted as the diamond sieve, but then incorporated and integrated those ideas into distinctive and original productions. Emerson not only admired Coleridge’s wide and aggregative reading,

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Transatlantic Transcendentalism  [7

which encompassed philosophy, metaphysics, literature, and science, but he also preferred his eclectic interpretations of many of these sources, which then became further transformed as they crossed the Atlantic. Emerson was particularly interested in Coleridge’s mediations of Platonism, idealism, and empiricism, a peculiar admixture that was essential for Transatlantic Transcendentalism. His preference for Coleridge’s interpretations of these sources over the originals was due to a profound intellectual affinity: Emerson, like Coleridge, wished to mediate between the opposing visions of the one and the many, and the spiritual and the natural. Emerson preferred working from Coleridge because he could then align himself with “universal” thoughts that belonged to all his ­predecessors, and therefore, to none of them singly. Coleridge was not the only British writer who transmitted European Romantic ideas across the Atlantic: Thomas Carlyle also played a significant role.25 Emerson visited Carlyle on the 1833 trip to Europe, later became his literary agent in America, and the two men corresponded over the course of their lifetimes. However, Coleridge was the more influential thinker for Emerson’s early intellectual development for two reasons: firstly, Emerson had already engaged at length with Coleridge’s thought before he became deeply versed in Carlyle, although there was some overlap. Emerson carefully studied the Biographia Literaria in 1826 and Aids to Reflection and The Friend by 1829; in contrast, Emerson did not know Carlyle’s work by name until two months before his 1833 trip to England, although he did admire the anonymous essays which Carlyle had published in the British quarterlies.26 Emerson’s main interest in Carlyle began in 1830, well after his deep study of Coleridge was under way, and their correspondence did not begin until May of 1834.27 While Carlyle did introduce elements of German thought to America, especially in Sartor Resartus published in 1833–4, Emerson was already familiar with many of these sources from reading Coleridge. This argument for Emerson’s earlier and more formative exposure to Coleridge is supported by the ­following recollection of James Elliot Cabot: Emerson was not among the enthusiasts for “Sartor” when it first appeared here; his preface, some of them thought, was timid and superfluously apologetic; and when I tried, long afterwards, to recall to him the stir that the book made in the minds of some of the younger men, he hesitated, and said he supposed he had got all that earlier, from Coleridge. He was in full sympathy with the ideas, but the “masquerade” under which they were presented was so displeasing to him as to make him doubtful how it would be received if reprinted here.28

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Emerson never warmed to the style and form of Sartor Resartus, and in terms of its principal ideas, “he supposed he had got all that earlier, from Coleridge.” In addition to Coleridge being the prior influence, Emerson found him a more congenial thinker overall. F. T. Thompson claimed that Emerson was more interested in Carlyle’s accounts of the lives of great men, rather than his philosophy: But though he later read and re-read Sartor Resartus, he did not care for Carlyle’s method of presenting the philosophy that formed the background of the German Romantic movement. Rather, he went back to Coleridge’s clearer distinctions between the Understanding and the Reason, between the Productive and non-Productive Imagination, and between Genius and Talent.29

Additionally, while the meeting with Carlyle in 1833 was memorable, from the beginning Emerson sensed his reluctance to grapple with certain compelling intellectual questions. Kenneth Marc Harris commented that Emerson’s disillusionment with Carlyle began at Craigenputtock. Along with the inevitable disenchantment of a young man who meets for the first time someone he admires, he was disturbed by Carlyle’s stubborn reticence on religious and speculative matters and consequently grew skeptical of his capacity for true depth of thought.30

Despite the importance of Emerson’s personal friendship with Carlyle over the arc of his whole career, his early intellectual engagement with Coleridge was foundational and formative: his distinctions, definitions, and intellectual method provided the ongoing intellectual challenge and impetus that galvanized many of Emerson’s early essays and addresses. While the text of Emerson’s lectures does not reveal the scope of Coleridge’s omnipresence, his journal entries record his acute awareness of influence. In 1835, the year he was working on Nature – the essay that bore the greatest debt to Coleridge – he commented upon De Quincey’s charge of Coleridge’s “barefaced plagiarism” of Schelling in Biographia Literaria: Coleridge loses by Dequincey, but more by his own concealing uncandid acknowledgment of debt to Schelling. Why could not he have said generously like Goethe, I owe all? As soon as one gets so far above pride, as to say all truth that might come from me him & that now does come from me him as truth & not as my his truth, as soon as he acknowledges that all is suggestion, then he may be indebted without shame to all.31

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Here Emerson defended indirectly his own liberal use of Coleridge’s thought (ironically by quoting Goethe) in the sweeping statement “I owe all.” The insertions and deletions of “him” and “me” further blurred the lines of predecessor and follower. I do not think Emerson was being disingenuous here, but by creating a new category of influence – namely, “that all is suggestion” – he was giving himself full license to be “indebted without shame to all.” This new category of influence I will call assimilative: Emerson assimilated key aspects of Coleridge’s thought and then applied those ideas in distinctive and original ways. Emerson wrote in his journal, “As soon as I read a wise sentence anywhere, I feel at once the desire of appropriation.”32 Much later in Emerson’s career in 1867, when his reputation was fully established, he revisited his relationship with Coleridge in a journal entry that fittingly appeared in an essay entitled “Quotation and Originality.” Here he openly revealed his assimilative relationship to Coleridge: Original power in men is usually accompanied with assimilating power: and I value in Coleridge his excellent knowledge & quotations, perhaps as much, possibly more, than his original suggestions. If you give me just distinctions, if you give me inspiring lessons, imaginative poetry, – it is not important to me whose they are. If I possess them, & am fired & guided by them, I know you as a benefactor, & shall return to you as long as you serve me so well. I may like well to know what is Plato’s, & what is Goethe’s part, & what thought was always dear to you: but their very worth consists in their radiancy, & equal fitness to all intelligence. They fit all my facts like a charm. I respect myself (the more) that I know them. Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it.33

Here Emerson reviews the categories of Coleridge’s extensive legacy for his own work: “his excellent knowledge & quotations,” “just distinctions,” “inspiring lessons,” and “imaginative poetry,” while immediately clarifying that “it is not important to me whose they are.” This could be read as a justification of plagiarism, or as a denial of influence. Yet the following phrases complicate such reductive models: “If I possess them, & am fired & guided by them, I know you as a benefactor.”34 This is the second stage of the assimilative reader: after sifting out the diamonds, the writer must “possess them” – not by mere imitation – but by being “fired & guided” by those principles by creating original works of art. This process was also defended in “The Divinity School Address,” where Emerson wrote in lapidary style, “Truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul.”35 These passages reveal his own

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s­elf-­assessment of a profound indebtedness to Coleridge that at the same time galvanized great originality. Coleridge’s fragmentary oeuvre begged an imaginative completion, much as a ruin prompted an imagined vision of the whole. Emerson, then, could appropriate fragments of Coleridge and transform those raw materials in his own dynamic creative process. This process emulated Coleridge’s organic theory of art laid out in his literary criticism, which (as will be discussed further in Chapter 5) Emerson studied carefully. The two epigraphs for this chapter demonstrate how Emerson embodied the uneasy tensions of Thomas McFarland’s “originality paradox.” The first passage, with its heroic image of Emerson, like Jacob and the Angel, wrestling his “succession of teachers . . . until their blessing be won,” appears at first glance to reinforce Emerson’s individualism and self-reliance. This familiar story was first popularized by Emerson himself and later by F. O. Matthiessen’s work, in which a series of writers, including Emerson, jettisoned the past to create a new and authentic American literary tradition.36 In this passage, figures of influence were transmuted into stars of a common heaven: “after a short season, the dismay will be overpast, the excess of influence withdrawn, and they will be no longer an alarming meteor, but one more bright star shining serenely in your heaven, and blending its light with all your day.”37 Interestingly, Emerson referred to a line from Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” here – “light of all our day” was changed to “your day” to condone the active appropriation, ­overcoming, and perhaps even the erasure of one’s predecessors.38 However, the second epigraph tells a different story. It is significant that the passage is from a personal letter to his aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, as opposed to the text of a lecture. Here Emerson openly lionized Coleridge, exclaiming “what a living soul, what a universal knowledge,” and then declared that he found “few or no books of pure literature so self-­imprinting . . . so often remembered as Coleridge’s.” These were two different accounts of influence: the former as a violent overcoming and the second as a kind of assimilation or organic incorporation of Coleridge’s thought, revealed by the curious phrase “self-imprinting.” This wording implied that his influence on Emerson was so great that it actually stamped itself permanently – and perhaps imperceptibly – on his mind and work. This use of printing imagery resurfaced in Emerson’s journal in 1836, when he lauded Coleridge’s criticism: “Every opinion he expresses is a canon of criticism that should be writ in steel, & his italics are italics of the mind.”39 This did not portray Emerson as an eraser of influence, but rather as a thinker open to indelible influences that shaped – indeed imprinted – the very fundamentals of his thinking and writing.

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In this light, Harold Bloom’s seminal account of influence must be reevaluated. None of the categories of evasions, erasures, swerves, or misprisions delineated in The Anxiety of Influence quite fit in describing Emerson’s relationship to Coleridge.40 Bloom suggested that Emerson was one of “the great deniers of influence” along with Goethe, Nietzsche, Blake, and others.41 If only the text of the published essays were considered, this proposition might appear to be true; however, as we have seen, Emerson’s journal entries and letters revealed a much more complex picture of influence than simple denial. Interestingly, in his later thoughts on the subject in Anatomy of Influence, Bloom shifted his views somewhat: “In this, my final statement on the subject, I define influence simply as literary love, tempered by defense.”42 This more accommodating view of influence suited Emerson better, especially if we consider his claim – following Goethe – that “I owe all” as a way of balancing literary love and admiration for his predecessors with a strategy of defense. Bloom also acknowledged in the later book that the case of Emerson has always been a complicated one: he wrote, “Myself a disciple of Emerson from 1965 to the present moment, I am properly disconcerted by Emerson influence . . . influence is: you don’t abolish it by denial. Cheerfully, Emerson affirms and negates it, paragraph by paragraph.”43 He did not elaborate further there, but it appeared that Bloom himself realized the necessity of revisiting the issue of influence in the case of Emerson. Recent developments in the rapidly expanding field of transatlantic studies provide fresh perspectives to develop a fuller and more nuanced picture of influence than has heretofore been applied to Coleridge and Emerson. Transatlantic studies has stimulated renewed inquiry into the ambiguities of influence by situating authors within transnational historical, social, and intellectual contexts. In their introduction to Wordsworth in American Literary Culture, Joel Pace and Matthew Scott advocated a ­reconsideration of Bloom’s account of influence as a primarily literary phenomenon: the essays in that volume examined “allusions and references as one indicator of international intertextuality; they also gesture beyond empirical source-study by exploring the larger historical and social-­political significance of Wordsworth’s legacy.”44 Transatlantic Transcendentalism undertakes a similar project; it examines not only Coleridge’s specific ­literary, philosophical, and theological influences on Emerson but also their ramifications for American nineteenth-century culture. This book owes a debt to the pioneers of Transatlantic Romanticism such as Leon Chai, Richard Brantley, and Robert Weisbuch, who began to chart what the latter scholar termed the “huge, rough agreement between American and British writers in the nineteenth century.”45 Recent work in

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transatlantic studies has resoundingly responded to the call that Richard Gravil made some years ago to acknowledge “the existence of a lost continent of literary exchange that our artificially divided academic community has yet to recognize and explore.”46 Robert Weisbuch predicted that Transatlantic Romanticism as a field would take a generation of scholars to define and that process is now well under way, thanks to the first anthology of Transatlantic Romanticism, edited by Lance Newman, Chris KoenigWoodyard, and Joel Pace; the latter has also contributed an invaluable taxonomy of the field.47 Susan Manning and Andrew Taylor’s Transatlantic Literary Studies: A Reader assembled “available angles of approach” in methodology, demonstrating how a wide array of “theoretical paradigms drawn from comparative literature, postcolonial studies, and travel and translation studies are able to contribute interpretive possibilities to the field.”48 Two recent volumes have enriched the field of Transatlantic Romanticism: Transatlantic Literary Studies, 1660–1830, edited by Eve Tavor Bannet and Susan Manning, and Transatlantic Literary Exchanges, 1790–1870: Gender, Race, and Nation, edited by Kevin Hutchings and Julia Wright.49 The Transatlantic Studies series of Edinburgh University Press and Ashgate are further expanding the field with essay collections and monographs. One of the goals of the Edinburgh series is to “question place-based identities and monocular visions” and to “explore the multiple ways in which ideas, texts, objects and bodies travel across spatial and temporal borders, generating powerful forms of contrast and affinity.”50 The Emerson and Coleridge connection has been long neglected precisely because of “placebased identities” and “monocular visions”: the division between British and American literature tracks in modern universities has obscured rich transatlantic conversations. Coleridge’s influence on Emerson reveals a complex blend of the categories of contrast and affinity, particularly the ways in which key ideas endured and yet were substantially modified as they crossed the Atlantic. This flurry of recent scholarship has opened up new ways to chart Transatlantic Romanticism: by crossing common periodizations, disciplinary boundaries, and geographic borders, transatlantic studies provides a new impetus to investigate not only Coleridge’s impact on Emerson, but the larger movement that he inspired in America: Transatlantic Transcendentalism. Susan Manning emphasized the etymology of “Transeo, transire: to go over, cross, pass over” and “Translatio: a transferring, handing over – passing the baton, as in culture.”51 Transatlantic Transcendentalism, then, embodied several modes of crossing boundaries: geographic, temporal, and metaphysical, crossing over from the sensory to the supersensory world. The belief that the mind could know what

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lay beyond the five senses was a central tenet of the movement. Emerson described Coleridge as a “restless human soul bursting the narrow boundaries of antique speculation and mad to know the secrets of that unknown world, on whose brink it is sure it is standing.”52 Emerson considered Coleridge as a rare thinker poised to navigate and overcome numerous geographical, intellectual, and spiritual boundaries, including those between new and old ways of thinking. Coleridge was a principal figure for what Laura Walls termed “global transcendentalism,” an intellectual movement that would “successfully interweave sources from all around the globe, across all historical time scales . . . and circulate back out across the Atlantic and beyond.”53 Transatlantic Transcendentalism crossed over common periodizations. Transatlantic Romanticism can be defined as the period between 1767 and 1867, far beyond the traditional span of European and British Romanticism.54 However, when examining Coleridge’s American legacy, an even longer timeframe could be considered: the late Romanticism of John Dewey endured through the early decades of the twentieth century. From the standpoint of cultural and intellectual context as well as literary allusion, Transatlantic Transcendentalism also spanned disciplinary boundaries. When examining Coleridge and Emerson, it is necessary to address the full interdisciplinary spectrum of their ideas, not only because their literary works were deeply informed by other disciplines, but also because the modern boundaries between literature, philosophy, theology, and science simply did not exist in their time.55 Transcendentalism could be described as a philosophical movement, but it also shaped literature and culture in far-reaching and tangible ways. Transatlantic studies considers Romanticism as a movement without national borders. I agree with Colleen Glenney Boggs that “we need to think of transatlantic Romanticism as a complicated process that stretches across diverse geographies and temporalities.”56 By looking at Romanticism in this way, it is possible to restore the rich transatlantic conversations that were indispensable for early nineteenth-century American letters.57 For Emerson, the term “transcendental” was itself inherently transatlantic: It is well known to most of my audience, that the Idealism of the present day acquired the name of Transcendental, from the use of that term by Immanuel Kant, of Konigsberg . . . The extraordinary profoundness and precision of that man’s thinking have given vogue to his nomenclature, in Europe and America, to that extent, that whatever belongs to the class of intuitive thought, is popularly called at the present day Transcendental . . .58

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This quotation reveals the contiguity between Europe, Britain, and America in Emerson’s own time. If these different strands of Romanticism are divided today, it is a reflection of the preferences of the academy, rather than any inherent division. At the same time, Transatlantic Transcendentalism was not a seamless continuity: for example, as Kant was filtered through Coleridge and then through American readers, warpings and shiftings occurred to the term “transcendental” until it became something quite different from the original, resulting in Emerson’s rather imprecise estimation that the term referred to “whatever belongs to the class of intuitive thought.” An investigation of the Kant–Coleridge– Emerson nexus perfectly illustrates how transatlantic studies illuminates what Susan Manning and Francis Cogliano referred to as “points of connection, disjunction, and mutual enrichment.”59 Similarly, James Vigus and Jane Wright’s essay collection Coleridge’s Afterlives presented “the multiple interpretative avenues” at work in Coleridge’s legacy across the globe, including the complex transformations that occur as ideas cross oceans and time periods.60 Thus the field of transatlantic studies has ushered in a new era of reevaluating literary, intellectual, and cultural influences in more nuanced ways by questioning existing boundaries that have circumscribed periods, disciplines, and movements. I would like to clarify one last term that is important to Transatlantic Transcendentalism: the Romantic triad. Coleridge and Emerson shared a profound intellectual affinity: the desire to comprehend the relationship between the categories of nature, spirit, and humanity, or what I refer to as the “Romantic triad.” To better envision the model, imagine a triangle in which the bottom two feet represent the natural world and the human world, and the top point represents the realm of the spiritual. In the empty space at the middle of the triangle is the figure of the poetprophet. The poet mediates the Romantic triad in a dynamic and ongoing process of intellectual and creative activity that knits together the spiritual and natural, and communicates those visions to the rest of humanity. The mediation of these three categories was an overarching concern of Transatlantic Romanticism. Although Coleridge and Emerson never systematically resolved the categories of the Romantic triad, their desire to do so instigated some of their best writing. Coleridge wrote, “our destiny & instinct is to unriddle the World, & he is the man of Genius who feels this instinct fresh and strong in his nature – who perceives the riddle & the mystery of all things . . .”61 Only “the man of Genius” – the poet-prophet – could perceive the relationship between the one and the many and the spiritual and the natural. Emerson too devoted himself to the “riddle” of the Romantic triad:

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Transatlantic Transcendentalism  [ 15 There sits the Sphinx at the roadside and from age to age as each prophet comes by, he tries his fortune at reading her riddle. It will no doubt be the effect of wiser and better times, if such the earth shall ever see, to open the primitive sense of the permanent objects of nature, that so, all which the eye sees, may be a legible book in which every form, alone, or in composition, shall be significant.62

Solving the riddle of the Sphinx entailed reading the “book of nature” for spiritual meaning. Prophets “from age to age” will try to solve the riddle, but its solution was hypothetical, rather than actual, as indicated by the conditional language in “if such the earth shall ever see” and “may be a legible book.” Coleridge and Emerson profoundly believed in a possible unity of the Romantic triad, but they also acknowledged that glimpses of such transparence were rare and arduously achieved, the domain of poetprophets who were gifted with rare abilities. The inquiry into how the natural, spiritual, and human worlds were interrelated was certainly not a new endeavor. For example, Francis Bacon was an essential figure for both Coleridge and Emerson. In 1830, Emerson copied down in his journal Bacon’s scheme of philosophy as a tree with three branches: divine, natural, and human – which all together would constitute “one universal science” or a “Philosophia Prima.”63 Coleridge brought exciting developments in Romantic thought to bear upon Bacon’s scheme of philosophy. The next chapter describes how many in Emerson’s generation were becoming restless with more static formulations of nature, spirit, and humanity at work in Puritan, Unitarian, and empirical traditions. Coleridge offered new ways of reading the Sphinx’s riddle that resonated with august traditions of Platonism, Christianity, and mysticism, as well as more recent innovations in German idealism and science. Coleridge embraced idealism without abandoning the importance of personal experience of the natural world, an idealism that was “at the same time the truest and most binding realism.”64 Robert Richardson charted Coleridge’s centrality for an expansive tradition of “Liberal Platonism” running from Plato through Neoplatonism, Christian Humanism, Cambridge Platonism, to American Transcendentalism and twentieth-century figures such as William James, Santayana, and Whitehead.65 Coleridge was the pivotal link in this transfer of ideas across the Atlantic: James Engell described Coleridge as “a step-parent to American Transcendentalism. Without Coleridge’s German connection, that movement would be different, less exciting, and certainly go by another name.”66 Emerson and the larger movements of Boston and Vermont Transcendentalism were galvanized by Coleridge’s

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mediations of the Romantic triad using a sophisticated blend of ancient and new ideas. The Romantic triad is a useful model for interpreting Transatlantic Transcendentalism for two reasons: firstly, the Romantic triad is not a closed system, but rather a model of inquiry intended to stimulate an active, dynamic process of mediation – and meditation – in an ongoing intellectual or artistic process. The goal is not to fix the three categories systematically, but rather to provoke inquiry about how the human mind perceives the natural and spiritual worlds, and how those perceptions shape thinking and artistic creation. Coleridge greatly valued this dynamic and ongoing intellectual process, which he outlined in “Essays on the Principles of Method” in The Friend. Emerson carefully studied these essays and noted that Coleridge himself considered them, along with some parts of the Biographia, the best work he had ever written; Emerson agreed with this assessment.67 The American reception of Coleridge’s method is a vital yet underappreciated facet of Transatlantic Transcendentalism.68 Several elements were especially influential for Emerson: 1) method entailed a continual intellectual process; 2) this process entailed an ascent of inquiry from lower to higher topics; 3) a “leading Thought” directed this intellectual investigation upward and outward, while also knitting together its results coherently.69 This dynamic method was used by Coleridge and Emerson as a philosophical, spiritual, and literary process, prompting the thinker (and reader) to ascend to ever-higher vantage points in a search for a transparent vision of the Romantic triad. This method was appealing for Boston and Vermont Transcendentalists, and later for American Pragmatists, precisely because it favored ongoing intellectual inquiry over system-building. My formulation of the Romantic triad is beholden to scholarship by M. H. Abrams, Thomas McFarland, Seamus Perry, and John Beer that has addressed the complex and sometimes contrary impulses of Coleridge’s thought. Abrams developed a triangular formulation with the categories of the universe (nature), audience, and artist and the work of art at the center of the triangle.70 Yet this triangular model did not account for the category of spirit that was so central to Coleridge and Emerson’s view of art. Abrams’ elaboration of the underlying spiritual paradigms of Romanticism in Natural Supernaturalism has deeply influenced this book, particularly Chapter 6 which examines the theological underpinnings of Coleridge’s and Emerson’s oeuvre.71 The Romantic triad is indebted to scholars who have revealed Coleridge and Emerson’s abiding interest in polarity. Thomas McFarland

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described Coleridge as perpetually struggling between opposing c­ ategories, principally the “it is” and the “I am”: We are left finally not with a Coleridgean system, but with repeated testimonies to a mighty split in his allegiance and concern: reason and understanding, imagination and fancy, the head and the heart, “I am” and “it is,” subject and object – these and other characteristic dichotomies testify to the ineradicable presence of diasparactive process in Coleridge’s deepest awareness. The principle of polarity that aligns these sunderings was treasured, by him and by his Romantic contemporaries, as a path to an ultimate wholeness.72

Although this “mighty split” between the “it is” and “I am” precluded the completion of a system, McFarland acknowledged that Coleridge’s “mind played between its two poles with matchless vitality.”73 This is essential for considering his impact on Emerson, since he used the polarity of Coleridge’s distinctions – including every single one mentioned in the passage above – to propel his own vibrant intellectual and creative process. Emerson gravitated to polar concepts: Sherman Paul observed, Emerson retained the cosmological dualism of the Platonic tradition. His universe was a universe of levels and platforms, a progressive staircase leading to unity. Worldliness and other-worldliness, lower and higher, ­ material and ­spiritual – he needed these polarities; they described the tensions he ­experienced and that as facts of consciousness his vision reconciled.74

However, there was no permanent reconciliation of polarity for either Coleridge or Emerson. Rather, as Seamus Perry wrote, “Coleridge’s thought is best understood, not as the solution to a problem, but as the experience and exploration of a muddle.”75 Emerson was particularly interested in a specific Coleridgean muddle, a world-view that could be described as “both monist and diversitarian,” resulting from the fact that Coleridge’s drive to unity was counterbalanced by a drive toward particularity.76 In short, the Romantic triad is indebted to McFarland’s and Perry’s appreciation of Coleridge’s commitment to continual intellectual method as an ongoing mediation of central, profound, and sometimes contradictory allegiances to the natural and spiritual worlds. The Romantic triad is a useful model for Transatlantic Transcendentalism for another reason: despite the fact that polarity was indeed a defining feature of the period, upon closer examination three categories are needed to address Coleridge and Emerson’s most pressing

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intellectual concerns. The Romantic triad is indebted to a most acute assessment of Coleridge by John Beer: [Coleridge] was not content with a poetry based purely on individual experience: he looked, on the contrary, for an all-embracing vision which should encompass all things in heaven and earth, reconciling the truths of science with those of religion. He envisaged this interpretation in three dimensions: the plane of relationship between an individual and his fellow human beings, the plane of relationship between man and nature, and the plane of ­relationship between man and the spiritual order.77

Emerson found Coleridge so compelling precisely because of his “allembracing vision.” He admired his commitment to finding an encompassing, holistic, and integrated vision of the world that informed religion, philosophy, science, and art. Yet at the same time, Emerson recognized that Coleridge’s definitions and distinctions offered a nuanced view of the Romantic triad that resisted the extremes of monism on one hand or a remote God on the other. Beer’s “three planes of relationship” addressed the full spectrum of Coleridge’s and Emerson’s interests. While the categories of “mind and matter” are commonly used in the scholarship of British and American Romanticism, two categories are not sufficient. Despite the persistence of the Romantic myth of the lone individual mind interacting with nature or with the spiritual in nature, Romanticism as a movement also cared profoundly about engaging with the rest of humanity.78 Coleridge was dedicated to the idea of developing a clerisy, or an educated class of citizens dedicated to improving society, Emerson wrote on the reform of education and abolition, and Boston and Vermont Transcendentalism were concerned about improving social institutions such as schools, universities, and the national press. Thus all three categories of nature, spirit, and humanity – mediated by the individual mind – are needed to develop a full picture of Transatlantic Transcendentalism. Finally, the Romantic triad is a useful model for ecocritical discourse. The Romantic triad posits a dynamic interrelation between the categories of the human, divine, and natural – rather than a static hierarchy – illuminating what Kevin Hutchings calls “Romanticism’s understanding of the complex interpenetration of subject and object worlds.”79 It describes an overarching interest in open-ended and subjective conceptions of nature to replace earlier and more rigid models such as the Great Chain of Being.80 Chronicling this shift requires interdisciplinary scholarship: Kate Rigby has built upon the work of M. H. Abrams by examining Romantic ideas of nature across the various disciplines of literature, philosophy, and

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theology, much as Transatlantic Transcendentalism endeavors to do.81 Ashton Nichols worked across the boundaries of disciplines and periodizations by examining nature in the science and poetry of the eighteenth and nineteenth century from Wordsworth to Darwin and Tennyson.82 The Coleridge and Emerson connection stands at an important crossroads in the development of modern environmental thought, where centuries of European intellectual history intersected with questions about the future of an extensive American wilderness. While a good deal of ecocriticism focuses on late nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature, it is vital to recover long eighteenth-century and transatlantic perspectives: as Scott Slovic stated, there is a pressing need for the “vigorous historical and cultural contextualization of our environmental ideas.”83 Recent ecocritics such as James McKusick and Kevin Hutchings have explored transatlantic contexts for changing ideas of nature, and even further work in transatlantic ecocriticism remains to be done.84 Finally, the Romantic triad addresses the role of the divine in interpreting nature and humanity in Transatlantic Romanticism, a dimension which is sometimes neglected by ecocriticism because of its modern secular orientation. My hope is that the model of the Romantic triad can open up new ways of thinking about Coleridge’s and Emerson’s persistent intellectual interests, as well as larger overarching ideas of nature in Transatlantic Transcendentalism. While the importance of the connection between Coleridge and Emerson is well known by scholars of British and American Romanticism, surprisingly there is no single monograph devoted entirely to the subject.85 Patrick Keane has done the most work on the pair in Emerson, Romanticism, and Intuitive Reason. I agree fundamentally with Keane’s approach, which he describes as “an exploration of elective affinities, family resemblances, and analogies binding together in a visionary company.”86 However, by including Milton and Wordsworth, and to a lesser degree Goethe, Carlyle, and Schiller, in that “visionary company” along with Coleridge, he obscured Coleridge’s crucial impact on Emerson in a profuse tangle of inter­ relations. A book by David Greenham, Emerson’s Transatlantic Romanticism, also combined discussions of Coleridge along with Carlyle, Cousin, and other transatlantic influences; unfortunately its publication came too late in 2012 for me to include it fully in my final manuscript p ­ reparation. The profound transatlantic interconnections Greenham traced further underscore the need for a book dedicated solely to Coleridge and Emerson. While it is difficult to extricate Coleridge’s singular role from similar influences, it is worthwhile and necessary to do so, since Emerson interpreted so many Romantic ideas through a specifically Coleridgean lens. I concur with Packer that “the Transcendentalists’ debt to Romantic writers is

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more ­usefully studied as a series of individual harvests than of a crossroads where all travelers’ footprints mingle.”87 On the other hand, Emerson’s many appropriations should not obscure the complex ways in which he departed from, modified, and reinterpreted Coleridgean ideas. A dissertation by Sonja Sostaric examined the “Kant–Coleridge–Emerson link” and claimed that Emerson uses “radical modification” as a way of “using Coleridge’s ideas against Coleridge himself.” While I agree that Emerson significantly modified Coleridgean ideas, Sostaric’s portrayal of Emerson as favoring “monistic indistinction” and “effortless deification” underestimated the manifold complexities of Emerson’s thought, including his profound and genuine respect for the nuances and hierarchies of Coleridge’s definitions and distinctions.88 Numerous shorter articles and chapters offered brief but tantalizing glimpses of the richness of the Coleridge–Emerson connection. The best of these illuminated Coleridge’s role in shaping fundamental paradigms of American Romanticism: Anthony John Harding and Peter Carafiol dedicated numerous pieces to Coleridge’s impact on Boston and Vermont Transcendentalism.89 Barry Wood revealed Coleridge’s role in the pattern of “alternation of ascent and assimilation” in Emerson’s early essays.90 David Vallins analyzed Emerson’s reinterpretation of Romantic ideas in an American context, including individualism, intellectual progress, and transcendence, which was recast as “at once a feeling of elevation or sublimity, and a process of contemplating, explaining, or evoking the unity of phenomena which in other states of consciousness appear to be divided.”91 Kenneth Marc Harris charted Coleridge’s and Emerson’s complex relationship to Kant, which enabled a “dual epistemology of empirical realism and transcendental idealism.”92 Alexander Kern surmised that in the spectrum of American Transcendentalism, “the greatest effect of Coleridge was on Emerson.” Similarly, Laura Walls stated, “Emerson without Coleridge can scarcely be imagined, so central is the Englishman to the American’s development as a writer, philosopher, and public intellectual.”93 Some early criticism on Coleridge and Emerson remains authoritative, including the work of F. T. Thompson and Joseph Warren Beach.94 All of these sources are valuable, yet even a full-length monograph cannot exhaust the full import of the Coleridge and Emerson connection: more work remains to be done. My goal in this book is to illuminate the centrality of Coleridge’s thought for Emerson’s intellectual coming of age and for the development of Transatlantic Transcendentalism. Emerson’s appropriations from Coleridge can be grouped into three foci: 1) an armature of theological, philosophical, and literary paradigms to structure his early essays; 2) a

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sophisticated vocabulary of definitions and distinctions to mediate the Romantic triad; and 3) a method of intellectual inquiry based on everexpanding and elevating vantage points, a “progressive arrangement” driven by a leading idea or theme. Transatlantic Transcendentalism dedicates one chapter to each category of the Romantic triad of nature, humanity, and spirit, bookended by two historical chapters about Coleridge’s American legacy for Boston and Vermont Transcendentalism. Midway through is a “landing place,” a chapter dedicated to Coleridge’s intellectual method and practice of “distinguishing without dividing”: these dynamic strategies were applied by Coleridge and Emerson to mediate the Romantic triad in the various disciplines of philosophy, literature, and theology. Chapter 2 relates Coleridge’s seminal role in the development of Boston Transcendentalism. Two American interpreters were especially influential in the transatlantic transfer of Coleridgean ideas: James Marsh and Frederick Henry Hedge. Their commentaries extracted essential aspects of Coleridge’s thought while also framing it in light of American concerns. James Marsh’s preface to the American edition of Aids to Reflection promoted Coleridge’s relevance for the renewal of American theology and philosophy and popularized the reason and understanding distinction. Hedge’s 1833 article on Coleridge, which Emerson called a “living, leaping, Logos,” both summarized Coleridge’s interpretation of German idealism and issued a call for intellectuals to “raise ourselves at once to a transcendental point of view.” Marsh’s and Hedge’s interpretations of Coleridge boosted his stature in America and indelibly shaped the development of Transatlantic Transcendentalism. Chapter 3, “Nature: Philosophy and the ‘Riddle of the World,’” establishes Coleridge’s centrality for the new kind of philosophical thinking at work in Transatlantic Transcendentalism. Emerson gravitated toward Coleridge’s integration of disparate philosophical and critical traditions, particularly those that harmonized the Romantic triad of nature, spirit, and humanity without rigidly circumscribing their exact relation. Coleridge’s “dynamic philosophy” articulated in the Biographia Literaria inspired Emerson to formulate a “first philosophy” of his own. These philosophical endeavors shared similar underpinnings: both were essentially idealistic, but resisted abandoning experience of the natural world. Both engaged polar terminology and sought to encompass the disciplines of theology, literature, science, and ethics. Most importantly, these systems were fragmentary and incomplete, yet played a vital role in Coleridge’s and Emerson’s literary productions. Chapter 4, “The Landing Place: ‘Distinguishing without Dividing’

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and Coleridge’s Method,” will illuminate two dynamic strategies that fundamentally shaped Emerson’s early essays. Coleridge’s interpretation of the distinctions between reason and understanding and natura naturata and natura naturans suggested possible unions of nature and spirit, without binding their relation in a closed system. Emerson also carefully studied and applied Coleridge’s intellectual method set out in “Essays on the Principles of Method.” Coleridge provided Emerson with a philosophical vocabulary and a method of inquiry that profoundly informed the developing Transcendentalist movement and later American intellectual history. Chapter 5, “Humanity: ‘Art is the Mediatress, the Reconciliator of Man and Nature,’” reveals Emerson’s interest in Coleridge’s literary criticism. Although Coleridge and Emerson were committed to philosophical modes of thinking, ultimately literature was the best medium for expressing their dynamic mediations of the Romantic triad. Through the figure of the poet-prophet – an especially gifted individual who expressed divine messages through literature – unified visions of the natural and spiritual could be transmitted to the rest of humanity. Additionally, Emerson was indebted to Coleridge’s interpretation of the “book of nature,” imagination, and symbol. These concepts of art and literature gave Emerson tremendous freedom and fluidity in interpreting the Romantic triad in a continual process of inquiry and literary production. Chapter 6, “Spirit: ‘An Influx of the Divine Mind,’” relates the importance of a series of intuitive theological presuppositions for Coleridge and Emerson: divine revelation, creation, and evolution. These terms described three conceptions of the divine: God is pure being; God creates the material world and the human mind; and God’s creation eventually ascends and returns to its divine source. Coleridge and Emerson resisted the extremes of pantheism, in which nature and spirit were fused indiscriminately, and theism, in which God was remote from his material creation, essentially forging a panentheist position, which claims that God was in all things. The transparency of the Romantic triad could then be perceived in exalted modes of perception, if only fleetingly and problematically. This emphasis upon the powers of perception – whether imaginative, philosophical, or spiritual – was central for the celebration of individual consciousness in Transatlantic Transcendentalism. Chapter 7, “Emerson’s Nature: Coleridge’s Method and the Romantic Triad,” investigates Emerson’s most famous – and most Coleridgean – essay. Despite the profound debt to Coleridge, it was still a highly original work. Nature posed a central question of the Romantic triad: “To what end is nature?” and applied Coleridge’s method to answer it. His method spurred the development of a dynamic model of the Romantic triad in

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place of a rigid or ossified philosophical or theological system, while his definitions and distinctions provided rungs on a ladder ascending from material to spiritual conceptions of nature. The final chapter reveals that, in addition to Coleridge’s enormous impact on Emerson and Boston Transcendentalism, his influence extended even further into the nineteenth and early twentieth century via a second strand of Transatlantic Transcendentalism: “Vermont Transcendentalism.” James Marsh’s restructuring of the University of Vermont curriculum according to Coleridgean principles revolutionized higher education, and many of Marsh’s students became important public intellectuals, including H. J. Raymond, founder of The New York Times, and John Dewey, a founding figure in the philosophical movement of Pragmatism. Coleridge’s influence on Vermont Transcendentalism transformed American nineteenth- and early twentieth-century letters, constituting a multi-generational link in Transatlantic Transcendentalism and ensuring his relevance for over a hundred years after the first editions of Coleridge arrived on American shores.

chapter 2

Coleridge and Boston Transcendentalism

In September, 1836, on the day of the celebration of the second centennial anniversary of Harvard College, Mr. Emerson, George Ripley, and myself, with one other, chanced to confer together on the state of current opinion in theology and philosophy, which we agreed in thinking very unsatisfactory. Could anything be done in the way of protest and introduction of deeper and broader views? What precisely we wanted it would have been difficult for either of us to state. What we strongly felt was dissatisfaction with the reigning sensuous philosophy, dating from Locke, on which our Unitarian theology was based. The writings of Coleridge, recently edited by Marsh . . . had created a ferment in the minds of some of the young clergy of that day. There was a promise in the air of a new era of intellectual life. (Frederick Henry Hedge)1

Coleridge’s thought arrived on American shores at a pivotal moment for Emerson’s maturation and for the development of Boston Transcendentalism. Why exactly did Coleridge create such a stir in America? Frederick Henry Hedge’s comment above, made during the first meeting of what would later be known as the “Transcendental Club,” revealed several reasons why Coleridge “created a ferment in the minds of some of the young clergy of that day.” Hedge expressed the “dissatisfaction with the reigning sensuous philosophy,” and uncertainty about what could replace it, other than the nebulous desire for the “introduction of deeper and broader views.” Coleridge’s thought addressed all of these concerns: it provided an alternative to stagnant theological and philosophical debates prevailing in both Unitarian and Orthodox circles. His dynamic intellectual method was a new and exciting model for thinking and writing, and his distinctions and definitions furnished a new ­vocabulary

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for the Transcendentalists’ deepest intuitions that nature and spirit were interrelated and accessible to the human mind. As Alexander Kern surmised, “It is only a little too strong to say that [Coleridge] furnished the spark which set off the intellectual reaction” that became American Transcendentalism.2 The views of Hedge, Emerson, and Ripley were representative of a wider discontent with existing theological and philosophical ideas in America, including Unitarian theology, Scottish Common Sense philosophy, and Lockean empiricism. In this propitious moment, Coleridge’s prose offered new interpretations of how the Romantic triad of spirit, nature, and humanity were interrelated. Better yet, Coleridge appeared both venerable and cutting-edge, introducing Romantic ideas without entirely abandoning the familiar. He was conversant in ancient traditions of Christian and Platonic idealism, including Neoplatonism and the seventeenth-century Cambridge Platonists, metaphysics and mysticism, as well as more recent developments such as the German idealism of Kant and Schelling, higher biblical criticism, Naturphilosophie, and contemporary scientific research. Of course the latter ideas were not really new: as Barbara Packer observed, It bothered no one that the Romanticism intoxicating Cambridge was decades old, and the Kantianism even older, or that the ideas being hailed as revolutionary were a jumble of bits and pieces torn from their contexts and served up by a haphazard collection of editors, translators, and book reviewers. If anything, this blurring of historical distinctions contributed to the sense of excitement.3

The fact that Hedge’s comment was prompted by “the second centennial anniversary of Harvard College” revealed a great deal as well. Education in Emerson’s day was dominated by the pedagogy of rote learning and recitation, based in part on a Lockean model of the mind as a tabula rasa passively imprinted with knowledge from the senses. Contemporary theology and philosophy imposed certain limitations on the source and the scope of human knowledge. Many in Emerson’s generation believed that the world of the spirit was in some way accessible to the mind, and they were looking for a new philosophical framework to support that view. The variants of idealism arriving in New England suggested a new model of consciousness, one in which the individual mind could directly intuit truths about the spiritual world.4 Due to a general sense of excitement about Romantic ideas, second- or even third-hand access to sources through compilations, as well as the proclivities of American intellectuals, European texts were

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often appropriated in very different ways from their original contexts. Coleridge was especially popular because he was an idealist who also validated experience based on the senses.5 Coleridge enjoyed an outsized importance in America because of his role as a principal transmitter of European ideas. At the same time, his thought was further adapted in its new climate and taken up by different movements, such as Boston and Vermont Transcendentalism, fostering “multiple interpretative avenues” in Coleridge’s American afterlives.6 In this time of intellectual ferment, two of Coleridge’s most important American interpreters, James Marsh and Frederick Henry Hedge, were particularly influential for Emerson.7 Both were familiar with the original sources of Coleridge’s idealism, which was especially useful since Emerson lacked a background in philosophical German and often relied upon translations and compilations such as Madame de Staël’s Allemagne and Victor Cousin’s Cours de l’histoire de la philosophie.8 But Marsh and Hedge were more than translators: sympathetic and knowledgeable readers of Coleridge, they framed his thought for distinctively American needs, namely an ­alternative concept of the Romantic triad. As Kern stated: Besides changing over their philosophy from what they thought was sensualism to idealism . . . the American Transcendentalists also transformed the previously accepted theory of the universe. They succeeded in transmuting the mechanized universe of Paley into a vitalistic and evolutionary Nature which serves as symbol of the spiritual world . . . They were able to transcendentalize the scientific universe of the Enlightenment by making it the intuitively ­understandable symbol of the realm of the spirit.9

Emerson was able to “transcendentalize the scientific universe of the Enlightenment” by appropriating Coleridge’s peculiar interpretation of Kantian and post-Kantian idealism. Although Emerson professed that the name “Transcendentalism” came directly from Kant, Coleridge’s version of Kant better suited his designs, as will be discussed below.

James Marsh and the American Aids to Reflection James Marsh was by far the most influential American interpreter of Coleridge and a key figure in Transatlantic Transcendentalism. He was born and raised in Vermont in an Orthodox Presbyterian household and educated at Dartmouth College in place of his elder brother, who was too embarrassed to bring a leg of lamb as partial payment for tuition. Later he attended Andover Theological Seminary, where his mentor Moses Stuart

Coleridge and Boston Transcendentalism[ 27 ­

encouraged him to read German literature. Soon after, he discovered Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria. This began a life-long devotion to promulgating Coleridge’s thought, both through editing American editions of his work and through his position as president of the University of Vermont, where he restructured the curriculum according to Coleridgean ideas. In 1829, James Marsh wrote a “Preliminary Essay” for the first American edition of Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection, which subsequently became a pivotal text for Transatlantic Transcendentalism.10 Marsh summarized key elements of Coleridge’s thought in the hope of resolving the quarrels between theological liberalism and orthodoxy: he felt that a proper study of Coleridge’s views would heal unnecessary schisms. He wrote to H. N. Coleridge on July 16, 1840, In all our Theological controversies and they abound in every denomination the want of a higher stand-point is becoming continually more manifest and more distinctly felt. I told the parties to a heated controversy in Connecticut years ago that if they would lay aside the dispute and study Coleridge and Tholuck earnestly for six months they would see the whole controversy to be idle and useless.11

Both liberal and orthodox theologians were hostile to the merging of religion and philosophy that Coleridge advocated in Aids to Reflection, although for different reasons. As Carafiol explained, the “Unitarians objected to the authority of revelation when it infringed on intellectual freedom, and Congregationalists scorned human reason and philosophy as threats to their divinely prescribed faith.”12 Marsh complained that “a strong prejudice exists against the introduction of philosophy, in any form, in the discussion of theological subjects.”13 The “Preliminary Essay” emphasized the relevance of Coleridge’s concept of reason as a power both religious and philosophical, enhancing without curtailing either faith or the intellect, a view which he felt could renew, unify, and uplift American theology. Marsh felt that if “we necessarily attribute to the Supreme Reason, to the Divine Mind, views the same, or coincident, with those of our own reason,”14 then many religious schisms in America would disappear. Although Marsh went to great lengths to render Coleridge palatable to both the theologically liberal and orthodox, few responded favorably. In fact, as Carafiol has documented, by trying to appeal to two very different factions Marsh ended up creating an ambiguous and contradictory account of Coleridge.15 Marsh most certainly did not succeed in his attempt “to inject a new spirit into Orthodoxy without disturbing existing Orthodox doctrine.”16

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The comments of one conservative, Samuel H. Cox, revealed the ­vehement antipathy to Coleridge’s theology in some quarters: Previously and for many years, I had known Dr. Marsh, & esteemed him highly . . . The only ground of my doubt – if such a thing even touched my mind, was his utter absorption in the writings of Coleridge, as his correspondent, disciple and exponent on this side of the Atlantic. That author I consider as a fascinating, scintillating, ambitious philosopher . . . and casting into dim obscurity the better wisdom of all orthodox and faithful theologians. I regard him as insidiously heterodox and vilely erroneous on several cardinal points of Christian doctrine, and yet so specious and sophistical as to delude many a young man or new fledged philosopher. On the grand topic of the atonement of our Lord Jesus Christ on the cross, I am not alone at all in thinking him abominably incorrect and infectious. This is my conviction increasingly as it is also that of many of our wisest and ripest theologians and ministers of Christ.17

Cox wrote this letter after hearing Marsh explain his theological and philosophical positions based on Coleridge’s distinction between the reason and understanding. After several hours of “going through his nomenclature, his definitions & distinctions; with no satisfaction” they met again for a still longer meeting. Cox considered his views “the fitting extorted confession of Coleridgeanism, which I utterly abhor, as I would any vain and glistering system.” This letter ignited a theological controversy of sorts: it was handed around to so many clergymen that it became tattered, and Cox granted a request by a Rev. S. H. Hodges to publish it.18 After Marsh failed to win over theological conservatives, something quite unexpected happened: the Boston Transcendentalists answered his inspiring call instead, somewhat to his chagrin. He infamously declared: The whole of Boston Transcendentalism I take to be rather a superficial affair . . . They have many of the prettinesses of the German writers, but without their manly logic and strong systematizing tendency. They pretend to no system of unity, but each utters, it seems, the inspiration of the moment, assuming that it all comes from the universal heart, while ten to one it comes from the stomach.19

Despite Marsh’s withering attack, in many ways the Boston Transcendentalists did fulfill the kind of revolution in thinking that he envisioned; they were clamoring for new ideas, including those of German idealism, and keen to merge the disciplines of religion and philosophy. He was overly hopeful to think that the leading conservatives of the day,

Coleridge and Boston Transcendentalism[ 29 ­

Orthodox or Unitarian, would be willing to undergo a similar intellectual transformation. Joseph Torrey, Marsh’s biographer and contemporary, described him as up against: the obstinacy of long established opinions, of opinions “unassailable even by the remembrance of a doubt” . . . The tendency of his work was, therefore, to undermine the only foundation which many a favorite theory had to build upon, in recent days, both in metaphysics and theology. There was some hazard in attempting to push into public notice, a work which so boldly attacked the system which, as to its leading principles, was adopted in this country by a sort of tacit consent.20

The only intellectuals prepared to reevaluate “the systems to which their minds are accustomed” were the Transcendentalists and young, discontented theological students at Andover Theological Seminary, where Emerson observed whole “shelvesful” of Marsh’s Aids to Reflection being sold in a short span.21 Students at the University of Vermont, groomed by Marsh’s Coleridgean curriculum, were also greatly influenced by Aids for several generations, as will be discussed in the final chapter on Vermont Transcendentalism. Both Boston and Vermont Transcendentalists were looking for alternatives to what Marsh described as “the prevailing system of metaphysics, I mean the system, of which in modern times Locke is the reputed author, and the leading principles of which . . . have been almost universally received in this country.”22 Marsh’s American edition of Aids to Reflection arrived at precisely the right moment for the emergence of Boston Transcendentalism. Perry Miller commented that Marsh “put into the hands of Emerson, Parker, Alcott, and their group the book that was of the greatest single importance in the formation of their minds.”23 Additionally Marsh further whetted the appetite for Coleridge by attaching an appendix with other works not yet available in America.24 But Marsh did more than just make an American edition of Aids available for the Transcendentalists – the “Preliminary Essay” highlighted specific elements of Coleridge’s thought that were especially relevant for American letters, including a call to merge religion and philosophy, as well as key distinctions and definitions such as reason and understanding, and spirit and nature.25 Coleridge placed great emphasis upon the importance of philosophical distinctions: he wrote in Aids, “let distinctness in expression advance side by side with distinction in thought.”26 Marsh admired Coleridge’s commitment to “the science of words”27 and his preface was responsible for introducing several of Coleridge’s key philosophical distinctions to an

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American audience, providing a sophisticated Romantic vocabulary for the emerging Transcendentalist movements. In particular Marsh emphasized Coleridge’s new perspectives on the Romantic triad; he felt that inadequate attention to defining the terms nature and spirit undermined the “rational grounds” of the prevailing American metaphysics: I should be convinced that so long as we hold the doctrines of Locke and the Scotch metaphysicians respecting power, cause and effect, motives, and the freedom of the will, we not only can make and defend no essential distinction between that which is natural, and that which is spiritual, but we can not even find rational grounds for the feeling of moral obligation, and the distinction between regret and remorse.28

Marsh’s preface helped writers like Emerson immediately locate useful and nuanced arguments in Aids. Coleridge’s definitions of nature and spirit were especially relevant: Coleridge defined nature as, “Whatever is representable in the forms of Time and Space” and spirit as what “cannot be contemplated in any of the forms of Space and Time.”29 According to Marsh, prevailing American theology rendered nature and spirit indistinguishable, since both “are under the control of the universal law of cause and effect.”30 Thus the difference between animals and humans, and between instinct and choice, was obscured, leaving no room for free will.31 Marsh pointed out the fundamental flaw of a metaphysics that “subjected our whole being to the law of nature, and then contended for the existence of something which is not nature.”32 The Transcendentalists were delighted to find a condensed version of Coleridge’s sophisticated arguments, especially since Aids was in many ways a miscellaneous and difficult work. Coleridge stated in his notebook, “Let me by all the labors of my life have answered but one end, if I shall have only succeeded in establishing the diversity of Reason and Understanding.”33 It has been widely established that Coleridge’s interpretation of the Kantian terms was problematic, mainly in regarding reason as constitutive rather than regulative.34 Marsh further complicated the matter by using Coleridge’s version of the distinction instead of Kant’s, even though he knew philosophical German; Emerson in turn adapted Marsh’s Coleridgean version even more broadly. Beach surmised, “Emerson grows particularly reckless when echoing Coleridge’s distinction between understanding and reason, which he handles with a looseness going far beyond anything possible to Coleridge.”35 Emerson admitted that he took the distinction from “our English philosophers” – namely Coleridge – rather than Kant:

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Man is conscious of a twofold nature which manifests itself in perpetual selfcontradiction. Our English philosophers to denote this duality, distinguish the Reason and the Understanding. Reason is the superior principle. Its attributes are Eternity & Intuition. We belong to it, not it to us.36

Emerson greatly simplified the distinction, using a few lapidary lines in place of the dozens of pages Coleridge devoted to the subject. But the kernel of the distinction was what mattered most to Americans – the contradistinction of a lower faculty based on a sense with a higher ­transcendent spiritual power. As Packer observed, Coleridge’s distinction between the Reason and the Understanding seemed to offer Unitarians a way out of their spiritual dilemma – a way for them to satisfy the hunger for contact with the transcendent without abandoning the values of tolerance and rational inquiry . . . people rushed to apply the distinction to every knotty problem that had perplexed them.37

Emerson was so enamored of the distinction that he declared it “a ­philosophy itself”: I think it a philosophy itself & like all truth very practical . . . Reason is the highest faculty of the soul – what we mean often by the soul itself; it never reasons, never proves, it simply perceives; it is vision. The Understanding toils all the time, compares, contrives, adds, argues, near sighted but strongsighted, dwelling in the present the expedient the customary. Beasts have some understanding but no Reason. Reason is potentially perfect in every man – Understanding in very different degrees of strength. The thoughts of youth, & “first thoughts,” are the revelations of Reason. [T]he love of the beautiful & of Goodness as the highest beauty the belief in the absolute & universal superiority of the Right & the True . . .38

The distinction was “a philosophy itself” because it seemingly organized and knit together all aspects of human experience: the understanding gained knowledge from the quotidian world of sense, while the reason accessed the transcendent world beyond sense. The reason was thus expanded beyond its purely rational role established in the Enlightenment, as Engell illuminated: Prompted by Kant’s example, Coleridge wanted to rescue the original sense of reason into something more in line with the Platonic nous or Milton’s ‘intuitive reason’ . . . [Coleridge] deplored the meaning of ‘rational’ as scientific

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or empirical . . . Returning to the Greek conception of reason and guided by Plato, Pascal, Leibniz, and ‘our elder writers’ such as Hooker, Bacon, Milton, Sanderson, and the Cambridge Platonists, Coleridge tries to vanquish the recent sense of reason as a notion of the ‘hollow Puppets of an hollow Age.’39

Coleridge refused to circumscribe the faculty of reason, invoking a wide array of philosophical sources to support his broader conception of reason as intuitive and spiritual as well as rational. In Coleridge’s expanded conception, reason became a kind of faith and transcendent vision, far outstripping Kant’s more restricted claims of a regulative reason that could not know the noumenal world. Since Coleridge respected “our elder writers” such as Bacon and Milton as well as Kant, he appeared ancient and new, venerable and cutting-edge. Steele stated that, “With the Reason–Understanding distinction, the chaotic phenomenal world no longer posed a threat to the spiritual ideas that Emerson wished to preserve . . . he used this distinction, which he maintained in Nature, to validate both empirical observations and transcendental assertions.”40 Coleridge and Emerson shared a deep intellectual affinity: a desire to mediate between empiricism and idealism, or to use McFarland’s terminology, “to connect the ‘I am’ with the ‘it is’ while maintaining the primacy and independence of the ‘I am.’”41 Carafiol explained, Coleridgean reason revealed the contradictions of the understanding (including that between reason and understanding themselves) as polar unities. The barriers that divided man and nature, man and God, form and spirit, responsibility and freedom, finite and infinite all disappeared and these terms appeared as mutually generative, interpenetrating manifestations of the same essential truth.42

Thus Coleridge’s version of the intuitive reason could harmonize the Romantic triad of nature, humanity, and the divine. The great scope attributed to the power of reason was possible in part because of its fluid definition. Despite their shared belief in using language accurately, Marsh and Coleridge were not always consistent in their use of the word “reason.” Nicolson observed: Marsh, like Coleridge, is not consistent in his use of the word reason. Sometimes it is used loosely, meaning evidently the logical faculty; sometimes it is equivalent to intuition; sometimes his distinction between the reason and the understanding is a distinction between truths that are self-evident and those that are derivative; again the word is used to imply that there is a world

Coleridge and Boston Transcendentalism[ 33 ­

of existences and beings which is not the world of sense-perception, but one which is reached by intuitive judgment. Always, however, reason is a faculty which is above understanding and which begins its work where that of the understanding must cease.43

Ultimately this fluidity enabled a much more significant and enduring legacy for Coleridge in America: it permitted a dynamic interplay of ideas, a provisional and working model of the Romantic triad, and a progressive intellectual method that proved more useful to Marsh and Emerson (and later to Dewey) than the closure of a static system. While the Kant–Coleridge–Emerson connection has long been established, the full American legacy of Coleridge’s idealism extended much further. Thanks to Marsh, Coleridge’s interpretation of the intuitive reason became a central tenet not only for Emerson, but for Boston and Vermont Transcendentalism, marking an essential transfer of ideas in the ­intellectual history of Transatlantic Romanticism. While Boston and Vermont Transcendentalism originated from different poles of the theological spectrum in nineteenth-century America, both movements venerated Coleridge as a central figure. When James Marsh remodeled the University of Vermont curriculum in 1829 according to Coleridgean principles, he forged an enduring legacy through generations of students. In 1883, one of these students, William Pierson, dedicated a tablet in the UVM chapel to Marsh’s memory. In the address for the ­occasion, he praised Marsh and Coleridge for the great and memorable work in introducing and teaching the intuitive, or spiritual philosophy so called, to the young men of our country of forty or fifty years ago, in an age notable for the prevalence of the popular mind, in the lyceum, in pulpit, press and halls of learning, of a philosophy sensual and utilitarian, mechanical and necessitarian, eminently irrational and demoralizing.

In its place, Coleridge aided in “restoring the sublime philosophy . . . to its ancient and appropriate place in the University curriculum.” Pierson finished his address with “language familiar to you all, and singularly descriptive of the character of Dr. Marsh”: O framed for calmer times, and nobler hearts! O studious, devout, eloquent for Truth! Philosopher, contemning wealth and death, Yet docile, childlike, full of life and love; Here in this monumental stone thy friends inscribe thy worth.44

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These lines, quoted from Coleridge’s poem “A Tombless Epitaph,” revealed his enduring legacy for Transatlantic Transcendentalism. Coleridge was a vital link in bringing the “sublime philosophy” across the Atlantic; his seminal role in the development of Boston and Vermont Transcendentalism revealed why he was a great philosopher in America.

“Germanicus”: Frederick Henry Hedge Coleridge’s other essential American interpreter, Frederick Henry Hedge, represented the opposite theological pole: while Marsh was an orthodox Congregationalist, Hedge was a radical Unitarian. The fact that these very different figures were simultaneously instrumental to Coleridge’s American reception is intriguing, but not impossible to explain. Despite their differences, Marsh and Hedge shared several things in common: a desire to find a new ground for American theology and philosophy, an interest in Coleridge’s philosophical definitions and distinctions, and familiarity with the original German sources of Coleridge’s idealism. Hedge was one of only a handful of American intellectuals to have been educated in Germany at this time, earning him the nickname of “Germanicus.”45 He was intimately involved with Emerson via the “Transcendental Club” (also named the “Hedge Club”), which would later publish the Transcendentalist journal The Dial in which many of Emerson’s essays first appeared. It is likely that Hedge first introduced Emerson to German philosophy.46 A single article written by Hedge catapulted Coleridge to the center stage of American letters in 1833. “Coleridge’s Literary Character,” a review in the Christian Examiner, summarized his borrowings from German idealism.47 Hedge ardently defended Coleridge’s difficult and miscellaneous prose style, praising his “depth of thought, clearness of judgment, sound reasoning, and forcible expression, [which] have few rivals in the English language.”48 Like Marsh, Hedge proposed that Coleridge’s thought, carefully considered, could potentially instigate a religio-philosophical awakening in his readers, if “we raise ourselves at once to a transcendental point of view.”49 He credited the sudden popularity of German idealism to Coleridge, who was responsible for “throwing into the general circulation” essential religious and philosophical ideas that had “excited into activity”50 the burgeoning Transcendentalist movement. He then provided a synopsis of salient elements of the post-Kantian philosophers Fichte and Schelling, at a time when few American readers possessed knowledge of philosophical German. However, Hedge’s article was not merely a recapitulation of the German originals, but rather a synopsis of Coleridge’s peculiar adaptation of German idealism, including his misinterpretations.51

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Hedge fostered a sense of excitement about Coleridge in America, casting him as a redemptive figure who could rescue “the men of this generation” from an intellectual path made artificially “easy and smooth”: It is to be feared that the men of this generation have been spoiled by the indulgence shown to their natural indolence, and made tender by the excessive pains which have been taken to render every thing easy and smooth . . . There is no taste for hardy application, no capacity for vigorous and manly efforts of the understanding . . . A hard word scares us; a proposition, which does not explain itself at first glance, troubles us; whatever is supersensual and cannot be made plain by images addressed to the senses, is denounced as obscure, or beckoned away as mystical and extravagant. Whatever lies beyond the limits of ordinary and outward experience, is regarded . . . as a land of shadows and chimæras.52

Coleridge was popular in America because his call for “hardy application” inspired a generation of youth looking for fresh ways to think about the “supersensual.” Coleridge championed a method of intellectual inquiry that pushed beyond the limits of “ordinary and outward experience” and he furnished a vocabulary of distinctions to hone the new kind of thinking at work in Transatlantic Transcendentalism. While the Boston and Vermont Transcendentalists were poised to answer Coleridge’s call, many others remained resistant. Hedge’s defense of the obscure and mystical elements of Coleridge’s thought was well warranted: certain influential figures such as Francis Bowen, an ardent Lockean, had denigrated Coleridge’s sudden popularity as part of “a German mania”: [Transcendentalism] is abstruse in its dogmas, fantastic in its dress, and foreign in its origin. It comes from Germany, and is one of the first fruits of a diseased admiration of every thing from that source, which has been rapidly gaining ground of late, till in many individuals it amounts to sheer midsummer madness. In the literary history of the last half century, there is nothing more striking to be recorded, than the various exhibitions of this German mania . . . Poetry, theology, philosophy, all have been infected.53

Recognizing such hostility, Hedge asked his readers “to judge men by what they are, rather than by what they have done . . . few would stand higher than Mr. Coleridge. His talents and acquirements, the original powers, and the exceeding rich cultivation of his mind, place him among the foremost of this generation.”54 He conceded that Coleridge’s oeuvre

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was fragmented: “We have never met with a writer whose works are so patched and ill made up.”55 Yet this honest appraisal set the stage for an American writer to complete what Coleridge had started but never satisfactorily finished.56 Just as observing ruins instigated a process of imagining the whole that might have been, Coleridge’s fragments stimulated American writers to complete their own creations, inspired by his provocative suggestions. Thus fragmentation and obscurity were not obstacles, but opportunities. Hedge recast Coleridge’s difficult prose style in a positive light, claiming that “his style is for the most part as clear as the nature of his thoughts will admit.”57 Hedge called for “vigorous and manly efforts of the understanding,” not just to comprehend Coleridge’s ideas, but to prepare the mind for a higher, idealistic perspective. Such a shift required a complete reversal of the prevailing models of philosophy and theology: Copernicus, when he found that he could not explain the motions of the heavenly bodies on the supposition that the starry host revolves around the observer, changed his theory and made the observer revolve, and the stars stand still. Reversing this process, let us, since the supposition that our intuitions depend on the nature of the world without, will not answer, assume that the world without depends on the nature of our intuitions.58

The idea of turning existing theology on its head was attractive to Emerson. He was both restless and hopeful about the potential of “the present age,”59 a phrase used by Hedge which appears ubiquitously in Emerson’s journals and indexes. Hedge wrote that “the disciples of Kant wrote for minds of quite another stamp” who were ready to see things from an alternative perspective, what he famously dubbed the “transcendental point of view.”60 Yet this shift required an initiation of sorts, an introduction into a radically new mode of thinking: “The effect of such writing upon the uninitiated, is like being in the company of one who has inhaled an exhilarating gas. We witness the inspiration, and are astounded at the effects, but we can form no conception of the feeling until we ourselves have experienced it.”61 Hedge could initiate the uninitiated – including Emerson, his most ardent and ready convert. Hedge’s background in philosophical German enabled him to trans­mit a whole philosophical perspective and vocabulary to Boston Transcen­ dentalism. His article presented a useful synopsis of three essential aspects of idealist philosophy. He began in a fashion welcoming to the novice: In every philosophy there are three things to be considered, the object, the method, and the result. In the transcendental system, the object is to discover in

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every form of finite existence, an infinite and unconditioned as the ground of its existence, or rather as the ground of our knowledge of its existence.62

In short, the object was to harmonize the Romantic triad by finding a divine ground for every natural object, or for the human mind’s ­knowledge of that object. The importance of Coleridge’s method has been underestimated in existing criticism. While the reason and understanding distinction was often considered Coleridge’s most important American legacy and Aids to Reflection his most influential work, Hedge drew extensively from The Friend in his seminal review. He closely paralleled Coleridge’s “Essays on the Principle of Method” from The Friend, where method was defined as a continual and open-ended process of intellectual inquiry, from lower to higher modes of thinking, according to a leading idea that drives the mind upward and outward in its inquiry. Hedge wrote, “The method is synthetical, proceeding from a given point, the lowest that can be found in our consciousness, and deducing from that point, [here quoting Coleridge, who in turn took this from Schelling] ‘the whole world of intelligences, with the whole system of their representations.’”63 This, in short, was a way of yoking natural forms (representations) with mind (intelligences) based on an unconditioned infinite ground (the divine). This inquiry navigated the Romantic triad subjectively, by exploring the mind’s capacity to know itself, the divine, and the natural world. This method was revolutionary for Emerson: it became the blueprint for his early lectures, including Nature, which could be described as a sustained application of Coleridgean method to the question, “To what end is nature?” as will be discussed in Chapter 7. Hedge highlighted another cardinal aspect of Coleridge’s thought articulated in The Friend: its provisional conclusions and its emphasis on process. Although curiously Hedge did not elaborate what he considered the “result” of the transcendental philosophy in the article, he probably had in mind Coleridge’s statement in the Biographia: In order to obtain adequate notions of any truth, we must intellectually separate its distinguishable parts; and this is the technical process of philosophy. But having so done, we must then restore them in our conceptions to the unity, in which they actually co-exist; and this is the result of philosophy.64

However, such unity was elusive and often projected into a hypothetical future. Hedge described a mode of philosophizing in which the ultimate proof of the philosophy was “assumed for a while, until proved by the

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successful completion of the system which it is designed to establish.”65 To illustrate, Hedge used an image from Coleridge’s The Friend: the arch.66 The arch will only stand on its own once the keystone has been fitted, at which point, “the hypothetical frame-work may then fall, and the structure will support itself.”67 Coleridge’s concept of method permitted the building of a philosophical framework, with the assumption that it would eventually be completed. Thus this “system” of philosophy did not require completion in order to be valid: Hedge added, “We give the ideal of the method proposed; we are by no means prepared to say that this idea has been realized, or that it can be realized.”68 This concept of method was revolutionary for Emerson and the Transcendentalists, allowing them to philosophize in a holistic way without fully systematizing their ideas. Marsh continued to value method over system in his Coleridgean curriculum at the University of Vermont, which in turn proved influential for John Dewey’s Pragmatism. In addition to presenting a new model of the Romantic triad of nature, spirit, and humanity, as well as a dynamic intellectual method, Hedge also supplied the Transcendentalists with a host of useful dialectical distinctions used by Coleridge, Schelling, and Fichte. Terms such as subject and object, thesis and antithesis, the “I and the not I” gave Emerson a whole new vocabulary and also broadened the transfer of idealism from Kantian to post-Kantian sources. These dialectical terms distinguished between polar opposites, such as nature and spirit, while presupposing their i­nterconnection. Hedge echoed Coleridgean phrasing: We have called the method synthetical; we should rather say that it is an alternation of synthesis and antithesis . . . In this synthesis we find new antitheses, which, by further qualification must be reconciled as the first was reconciled into new syntheses, and so on till we arrive at absolute unity, or absolute ­contradiction.69

Emerson adopted this method wholeheartedly – what better way to grasp the paradoxes of Nature than to see it as an exercise in Coleridgean method, which could conclude either with “absolute unity, or absolute contradiction”? Hedge’s article extracted essential elements of Coleridge’s thought while simultaneously priming his audience to receive them as the grounds for a new religious philosophy. In his description of the “object, method, and result” of Coleridge’s idealism he gave Transcendentalists a Romantic armature on which to mount their assaults on prevailing metaphysical systems and build a new world-view based on individual consciousness.

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Coleridge and Boston Transcendentalism[ 39

Hedge described Coleridge as “seizing on the spirit of every question, and determining at once the point of view from which each subject should be regarded, – in one word, to the transcendental method.”70 Coleridge’s role in transmitting this “transcendental method” to American shores would prove to be one of his greatest transatlantic legacies. Hedge’s explanation of Coleridge enabled him to become “a great philosopher” in America, while also paving the way for American thinkers to improve upon and complete his thought. At the end of “Coleridge’s Literary Character,” Hedge mingled criticism with resounding praise: “His prejudices are strong, his tastes confined, his pedantry often oppressive, his egotism unbounded. Yet we can never read a chapter in any one of his prose works, without feeling ourselves intellectually exalted and refined.”71 These feelings of exaltation inspired by Coleridge marked “a promise in the air of a new era of intellectual life.”72 Hedge’s article was nothing less than electrifying for Emerson, who called it a “living leaping Logos.”73 Robert Richardson claimed, “If there is a single moment after which American transcendentalism can be said to exist, it is when Emerson read Hedge’s manifesto.”74 It was time for the American Coleridge to step forward.

chapter 3

Nature: Philosophy and the “Riddle of the World”

Coleridge was an essential conduit of philosophical thinking for Emerson and American Transcendentalism. Emerson admired Coleridge’s vast reading which encompassed a wide spectrum of sources, including the empiricism of Bacon, the mysticism of Böhme and Swedenborg, the Naturphilosophie of Steffens and Oken, and the idealism of Plato, Plotinus, and Kant, as well as the post-Kantians such as Schelling and Fichte. None of these sources alone was satisfactory for Coleridge or Emerson to solve the “Riddle of the World,” namely the interrelation of nature and spirit. Coleridge referred to a “dynamic philosophy” and Emerson to a “first philosophy” that could potentially explain how the Romantic triad of humanity, the natural world, and the divine were interrelated. Although neither fully articulated these hypothetical systems, the drive to find such a philosophy was central to their literary productions. At a pivotal moment in his intellectual maturation, Emerson was inspired by Coleridge to envision a “first philosophy” of his own, enabling him to philosophize holistically about the Romantic triad in an ongoing process of intellectual inquiry as opposed to system-building. This new mode of thinking established a vital link in the intellectual history of Transatlantic Transcendentalism. The merit of Coleridge’s philosophical endeavors (and Emerson’s, for that matter) has been contested. There is no question that both made serious errors in interpreting key figures like Kant, and the issue of unacknowledged borrowings haunts their major works.1 Yet to dismiss their philosophizing because of errors and failed system-building is to neglect their profound, indeed insatiable, appetite for ever more comprehensive views of the Romantic triad. Thomas McFarland explained why

Nature: Philosophy and the “Riddle of the World” [ 41 ­

Coleridge could not complete a system, in a statement that applies to Emerson as well: Coleridge’s endeavor was always towards system. But this orientation was first of all the need to connect rather than the need to complete. Under the pressure of this need, his understanding expanded in all directions, both inward into the peculiarly human requirement of an architectonic of symbolic forms, and outward to a confrontation of the jaggedly incommensurable ­particularities of experienced reality.2

Richard Berkeley referred to these opposing perspectives as a kind of “double vision.”3 The same tendencies applied to Emerson as well: both thinkers fervently believed that conflicting visions of nature, humanity, and spirit could be brought into harmony, and that philosophical thinking could facilitate that process by honing the mind’s perceptive powers. The Romantic triad is a better model for interpreting Coleridge’s and Emerson’s philosophical thinking than system-building. The Romantic triad entails an active, dynamic process of mediation – and meditation – in an ongoing intellectual or artistic process. The goal is not to permanently fix the three categories systematically but rather to provoke inquiry about how the human mind perceives the inner and outer worlds. The Romantic triad accurately describes Coleridge’s and Emerson’s persistent desire to integrate the categories of spirit, nature, and humanity, but at the same time their resistance to establishing a rigid final schema that might betray their deep-seated intuitions. These intuitions included a deep reverence for nature, an established belief in a transcendent creator of the material world, and a faith that the human mind, in exalted states, could see nature and spirit transparently. Coleridge’s and Emerson’s refusal to compromise deeply held beliefs about the Romantic triad explains why they were profoundly interested in idealism, but ultimately resisted its more extreme conclusions. Instead, they sought a philosophical framework that was essentially idealistic, without denigrating the validity of experience derived from the natural world. In the Biographia Literaria, Coleridge called for a “Dynamic Philosophy” that is “only so far idealism, as it is at the same time, and on that very account, the truest and most binding realism.”4 As Cameron noted, Emerson’s reading of the Biographia Literaria inspired him to find a prima philosophia or “first philosophy” of his own.5 While the term was from Bacon, Emerson was already reading Bacon through Coleridge’s eyes – as he did with Kant – so the first philosophy ultimately owed more to Coleridge’s dynamic philosophy than to its namesake.

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Coleridge was especially important for Emerson and Transatlantic Transcendentalism because of his interest in engaging different philosophical traditions. Thompson described Coleridge’s thought as a “reconciliation of the Platonic and Transcendental idealism.”6 Eric Wilson chronicled the ways in which “Romantic thinkers merged empirical observation with sublime vision . . . [combining] the sublime and science, intuition and observation, deduction and induction, reason and understanding, Plato and Bacon.”7 Robert Richardson charted Coleridge’s centrality for an even more expansive tradition of “Liberal Platonism,” which he described as “a mediating activity, a balancing act, an illumination of a series of apparent paradoxes rather than a dogma or a system . . . always it has clung to the perception, best grasped and articulated by prophets and poets, that the invisible world is revealed only in the visible world.”8 Emerson gravitated toward Coleridge’s integration of disparate philosophical and critical traditions, particularly those that appeared to harmonize the categories of nature, spirit, and humanity. Thus the Coleridge–Emerson connection stands at a crucial nexus in the ­transatlantic history of ideas. Coleridge’s and Emerson’s “dynamic” and “first” philosophies would ideally encompass theology, literature, science, and ethics in one comprehensive whole. Neither system was completed, but even in their fragmentary state they were important to their literary productions. Both shared similar underpinnings: firstly, they were interdisciplinary.9 Secondly, polar opposites such as subject and object were central to both philosophies. Thirdly, the dynamic and first philosophies were fragmentary and incomplete, hypothetically posited rather than concretely formulated, or as Owen Barfield stated, “coherently conceived, though fragmentarily expounded.”10 Finally, such a philosophy transcended everyday reality; in Emerson’s words, it “gleams of a world in which we do not live.”11 Coleridge stated in the Biographia, “there is a philosophic, no less than a poetic genius”12 that is required to apprehend the wholeness of the dynamic philosophy. The dynamic and first philosophies revealed Emerson’s and Coleridge’s longing for a philosophical resolution of the Romantic triad.

Coleridge’s Dynamic Philosophy In the oft-announced, but never completed, Logosophia or Opus Maximum, Coleridge planned to write a comprehensive survey of his philosophical and religious opinions. In 1815 he sketched out a prospectus in a letter to John May:

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Nature: Philosophy and the “Riddle of the World” [ 43 This work will be entitled LOGOSOPHIA: or on the LOGOS, divine and human, in six Treatises. The first, or preliminary treatise contains a philosophical History of Philosophy . . . The second Treatise is . . . on the science of connected reasoning, containing a system of Logic . . . The III. (Logos Architectonicus) on the Dynamic or Constructive Philosophy – preparatory to the IV. or a detailed Commentary on the Gospel of St. John . . .13

The “Dynamic or Constructive Philosophy” was intended to be the definitive summation of his philosophical positions, an amalgamation of numerous sources knit together in a distinctly Coleridgean way. In order to span the studies of philosophy, theology, and science, the dynamic philosophy would have two poles: the subjective pole was philosophical idealism (based primarily on Schelling with elements of Jacobi, Leibniz, Kant, and Fichte) and the objective pole was natural philosophy, or “the Science of the Construction of Nature,”14 based on the Naturphilosophie of Schelling, Steffens, and Oken,15 as well as recent scientific experiments such as those conducted in electricity by Volta and Laplace.16 To be complete, the dynamic philosophy would unite the “speculative” and “practical”: “For as philosophy is neither a science of the reason or understanding only, nor merely a science of morals, but the science of BEING altogether, its primary ground can be neither merely speculative or merely practical, but both in one.”17 Coleridge ardently believed that future scientific discoveries would definitively bring together a study of the natural world, the spiritual world, and the human mind in one philosophical system. In 1826, Emerson read Coleridge’s partial elaboration of the dynamic philosophy in the Biographia Literaria and it inspired him to create his own “first philosophy.” Fulfilling its title, Coleridge’s “literary biography” traced his intellectual development interconnectedly through his many interests: his reading, personal experiences, philosophical and theological views, and aesthetic concepts. Coleridge, following Leibniz, believed that “the criterion of a true philosophy” was “namely, that it would at once explain and collect the fragments of truth scattered through systems apparently the most incongruous.”18 The Biographia was a hodge-podge of fragments collected together, studded with brilliant gems of insight. Despite its miscellany a principle of unity undergirded the Biographia – what Coleridge described as the key to a “total and undivided philosophy” – namely, “the act and evolution of self-consciousness”: The result of both the sciences, [natural philosophy and idealism] or their equatorial point, would be the principle of a total and undivided philosophy . . . In other words, philosophy would pass into religion, and religion become

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inclusive of philosophy. We begin with the I KNOW MYSELF, in order to end with the absolute I AM. We proceed from the SELF, in order to lose and find all self in GOD.19

Here Coleridge invoked the principle of “I AM,” to be discussed further in Chapter 6, as a unifying principle to knit together the poles of the dynamic philosophy, beginning with self-knowledge and ending with knowledge of nature and the divine. Coleridge’s idealism was grounded on a religio-philosophical notion of self, synonymous with “spirit” and “self-consciousness.”20 The second central tenet of Coleridge’s dynamic philosophy was the “universal Law of Polarity or essential Dualism.”21 Coleridge declared that “EVERY POWER IN NATURE AND IN SPIRIT must evolve an opposite, as the sole means and condition of its manifestation: AND ALL OPPOSITION IS A TENDENCY TO RE-UNION.”22 Coleridge’s use of terms such as subject and object, active and passive, and centrifugal and centripetal adapted the polarities of German idealism as a philosophical and literary tool, continually positioning opposing poles against one another, and searching for higher reconciliations.23 He turned to Schelling because in his system polar forces could potentially harmonize “the world of ­intelligences” and “the whole system of their representations”: In the same sense the transcendental philosopher says; grant me a nature having two contrary forces, the one of which tends to expand infinitely, while the other strives to apprehend or find itself in this infinity, and I will cause the world of intelligences with the whole system of their representations to rise up before you.24

This polar scheme knit together nature and spirit, not substantively, but rather as participants in a single dynamic process, mediated by the human mind. Similarly, Coleridge hoped that his dynamic philosophy could navigate between two unacceptable philosophical extremes: on one hand, the dominance of spirit in pure idealism, in which nature was a mere mirage, and on the other, a natural world in which “every higher Power is the Creature and Product of the lower”: But in fact it is demonstrably impossible, that the Riddle of the World should be solved by a Philosophy, which commences by drawing a circle, that can never open, around it; and which therefore must for ever stagger to and fro between two intolerable Positions – first, an absolute Identity, that monopolizing all very Being leaves only a Universe of mere Relations without

Nature: Philosophy and the “Riddle of the World” [ 45 ­

focuses, to which they refer – i.e. when the Looking-glasses are themselves only Reflections. 2. A real Nature, in which Potential Being is the bona fide Antecedent to all actual Being, and every higher Power is the Creature and Product of the lower – all therefore of the lowest.25

Coleridge believed that the “Riddle of the World” could not be solved by either of these “two intolerable Positions.” Rather he relied upon a concept of bipolar unity, in which each pole was a necessary component of a higher unity, to suggest the possibility of bridging empiricism and ­idealism. This higher synthesis could be achieved by “an act of knowledge”: Intelligence is conceived of as exclusively representative, nature as exclusively represented; the one as conscious, the other as without consciousness. Now in all acts of positive knowledge there is required a reciprocal concurrence of both . . .   During the act of knowledge itself, the objective and subjective are so instantly united, that we cannot determine to which of the two the priority belongs. There is here no first, and no second; both are coinstantaneous and one.26

This marked the most essential quality of the dynamic philosophy: its ­reliance upon an act of knowledge, during which all divisions were suspended. Coleridge attempted to mediate between empiricism and idealism by emphasizing this act of knowing: if directed inwardly, it could discover the laws of the mind; if directed outwardly, it could discover the laws of nature. Coleridge turned to recent scientific inquiry to understand the laws of nature. These musings appear rather alien to modern eyes, mainly because philosophical predilections often seem to take precedence over empirical evidence. Of course the word “scientist” did not even exist yet: in fact Coleridge was present at the meeting where the term was coined, late in his life.27 Naturphilosophie was just what its etymology implied – a “nature philosophy.” Trevor Levere described Coleridge as a “Romantic spectator of science philosophizing in Platonic fashion.”28 Coleridge was particularly interested in natural phenomena, such as electricity, that epitomized polar forces at work throughout nature: “Contemplate in the phaenomena of electricity the operation of a law which reigns through all nature, the law of POLARITY, or the manifestation of one power by opposite forces.”29 Coleridge claimed that he attended the scientific lectures of Humphry Davy in order “to enlarge my stock of metaphors.”30 Polarity was one such powerful metaphor, which he described as the “Male and female of the

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World of Time, in whose wooings, and retirings and nuptial conciliations all other marriages . . . are celebrated inclusively.”31 Such bipolar unity was a universal paradigm for Coleridge: Thus the two great Laws (causae effectivae) of Nature would be Identity – or the Law of the Ground: and Identity in the difference, or Polarity = the Manifestation of unity by opposites. – The two great Ends (& inclusively, the processes) of Nature would be – Individualization, or apparent detachment from Nature = progressive Organization and Spirit, or the re-union with Nature as the apex of Individualization – the birth of the Soul, the Ego or ­conscious Self, into the Spirit.32

Revelation, creation, and evolution will be discussed in Chapter 6 as theological paradigms that mediated the Romantic triad. In the above passage, Coleridge translated these theological ideas into the realm of natural philosophy: identity was the I AM of revelation, polarity was the material manifestation of creation, and individuation was the movement of creation back to the divine. By creating such layered correspondences between his theological, philosophical, and scientific beliefs, Coleridge believed he could construct a dynamic philosophy capable of solving the “Riddle of the World.” The final goal of the dynamic philosophy was to harmonize the Romantic triad of nature, spirit, and humanity. Coleridge claimed that its potential completion had to be intuited in an act of philosophic imagination. This level of seeing was possible for only a few: those gifted with adequate powers of perception. Coleridge often referred to Virgil’s “Non omnia possumus omnes” or “We are not all capable of everything.”33 For Coleridge, “it is the Intuition, the direct Beholding, the immediate Knowledge, which is the substance and true significance of all.”34 This intuitive notion of “direct Beholding” allowed him great freedom to philosophize holistically without creating a static system, and Emerson immediately recognized its usefulness, scope, and power. In order to acknowledge the fragmentary and incomplete state of the dynamic philosophy, Coleridge often used hypothetical and conditional language to describe it. For example, at the end of a long philosophical disquisition in the Biographia, Coleridge stated: When we have formed a scheme or outline of these two different kinds of force . . . it will then remain for us to elevate the Thesis from notional to actual, by contemplating intuitively this one power with its two inherent indestructible yet counteracting forces, and the results or generations to which their inter-

Nature: Philosophy and the “Riddle of the World” [ 47 ­

penetration give existence, in the living principle and in the process of our own self-consciousness.35

An elevated act of thinking – “contemplating intuitively” – was required to see polar forces at work “in the process of our own self-consciousness.” This language emphasized an ongoing process of intellectual inquiry. Additionally, the language was hypothetical, demonstrated by the phrase “it will then remain.” The dynamic philosophy could only be completed by an act of intuition, and judging by the tentative nature of Coleridge’s language, such completion may or may not occur.36 In addition to needing philosophic genius and intuition to imagine the dynamic philosophy in its entirety, it could not be completed without key scientific discoveries. Coleridge hoped that Naturphilosophie would discover further physical evidence that would finally harmonize philosophy and science with religion.37 Ultimately, the dynamic philosophy would be complete only when “all nature was demonstrated to be identical in essence . . . as intelligence”: The highest perfection of natural philosophy would consist in the perfect spiritualization of all the laws of nature into laws of intuition and intellect. The phaenomena (the material) must wholly disappear, and the laws alone (the formal) must remain . . . The theory of natural philosophy would then be completed, when all nature was demonstrated to be identical in essence with that, which in its highest known power exists in man as i­ntelligence and selfconsciousness . . . 38

Nature, spirit, and the mind could be harmonized if “the highest perfection of natural philosophy” were realized. The material dross of nature would vanish, leaving only “laws of intuition and intellect.” Yet again, Coleridge used hypothetical language in the following phrases: “The highest perfection of natural philosophy would consist . . . The phenomenon must wholly disappear . . . The theory of natural philosophy would then be completed . . .” [italics mine]. The completion of the dynamic philosophy would remain an unrealized dream for Coleridge, but it revealed his persistent desire to reconcile the Romantic triad philosophically.

Emerson’s First Philosophy Emerson did not pursue philosophical inquiry to the same degree as Coleridge. However, his persistent references to a “prima” or “first philosophy” indicated his desire to find a philosophical ground for his views,

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and Coleridge was central to this project. He referred to Coleridge as “a man of ideas. Only from a mind conversant with the First Philosophy can definitions be expected. Coleridge has contributed many valuable ones to modern literature.”39 As mentioned above, while the phrase “first phil­ osophy” came from Francis Bacon, Emerson turned to Coleridge as the harmonizer of diverse philosophical influences: Why, O diffuser of Useful K[nowledge]. do you not offer to deliver a course of lectures on Aristotle & Plato or on Plato alone or on him & Bacon & Coleridge? Why not strengthen the hearts of the waiting lovers of the primal philosophy by an account of that fragmentary highest teaching which comes from the half fabulous personages Heraclitus, Hermes Trismegistus, & Giordano Bruno, & Vyasa, & Plotinus, & Swedenborg? Curious now that first I collect their names they should look all so mythological.40

This “primal philosophy,” like Coleridge’s dynamic philosophy, represented an intuitive and fragmentary set of philosophical principles that had yet to be resolved systematically, hence the suggestion that the “lovers of the primary philosophy” were still “waiting.” The first philosophy was a “half poetic” and “fragmentary highest teaching,” a product not just of philosophy but also of mysticism and myth. In Emerson’s vague parlance, the first philosophy evoked an emotional response as much as a rational one: as David Vallins observed, Emerson used the word transcendent loosely to describe “at once a feeling of elevation or sublimity, and a process of contemplating, explaining, or evoking the unity of phenomena which in other states of consciousness appear to be divided.”41 In the following passage, the first philosophy “awakens the feeling of the Moral sublime”: the First Philosophy, the original laws of the mind. It is the Science of what is, in distinction from what appears. It is one mark of them that their enunciation awakens the feeling of the Moral sublime, and great men are they who believe in them. They resemble great circles in astronomy, each of which, in what direction soever it be drawn, contains the whole sphere. So each of these impl all truth.42

The laws were never announced, unless the “Goose Pond Principles” or Nature (to be discussed later) are considered as possible expositions. Rather, Emerson exposited fragments of the first philosophy in a literary form. He appropriated an image from Coleridge, a circle containing all other

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Nature: Philosophy and the “Riddle of the World” [ 49

circles, to evoke a mystical sense of oneness and sublimity for the first philosophy.43 Emerson, like Coleridge, conceived of the first philosophy as interdisciplinary. Bacon defined the prima philosophia as containing “the great principles that are true in all sciences, in morals & in mechanics.” Most essentially, it would describe how nature and spirit were interrelated. In his journals Emerson quoted Coleridge’s articulation of Plato: “The problem which Philosophy has to solve is according to Plato, this; for all that exists conditionally . . . to find a ground that is unconditional and absolute . . .”44 Thus the first philosophy would be a ground for other disciplinary inquiry. Emerson echoed Sampson Reed’s expansive view of a philosophy that was “a receptacle for all such profitable observations & axioms as fall not within the compass of any of the special parts of philosophy or Sciences but are more common & of a higher stage.”45 This “higher stage” encompassed a wide variety of disciplines: Shall I call my subject The Philosophy of modern History, & consider the action of the same general causes upon Religion, Art, Science, Literature; consider the common principles on which they are based; the present condition of these severally; and the intellectual duties of the present generation & the tendencies of the times inferred from the popular science[?]46

While Emerson referred to the “common principles” of these disciplines, he did not elaborate further here: rather, the coherence of the first philosophy was based upon a deep-seated intuition that these disciplines were inherently interconnected. In part due to Coleridge’s vast reading and wide interests, the movement of Transatlantic Transcendentalism was fundamentally interdisciplinary, engaging philosophy, theology, literature, and science.47 The first philosophy also resembled Coleridge’s dynamic philosophy in its use of polarity.48 Polar terms abounded in Emerson’s essays, including centrifugal and centripetal, subject and object, and me and not-me; these terms from German idealism were most likely transmitted through Coleridge; certainly Emerson adopted Coleridge’s eclectic interpretations of them. Polarity became an endlessly productive philosophical and ­literary paradigm for Emerson: Polarity, or action and reaction, we meet in every part of nature; in darkness and light; in heat and cold; in the ebb and flow of waters; in male and female; in the inspiration and expiration of plants and animals; in the equation of quantity and quality in the fluids of the animal body; in the systole and diastole of the heart; in the undulations of fluids, and of sound; in the centrifugal and

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centripetal gravity; in electricity, galvanism, and chemical affinity. . . An inevitable dualism bisects nature, so that each thing is a half, and suggests another thing to make it whole; as spirit, matter; man, woman; odd, even; subjective, objective; in, out; upper, under; motion, rest; yea, nay.49

Emerson shared Coleridge’s belief that polarity was a fundamental dynamic in the natural and spiritual worlds. Each pole “suggests another thing to make it whole,” emphasizing the need for an eventual unification of the poles. Emerson’s use of the word “dualism” is curious here, since the term is usually associated with Descartes’ recalcitrant division of mind and matter. Here, however, “dualism” was merely a temporary stage of illusory separation to be transcended in an act of seeing, necessitating the third category of the human mind mediating the Romantic triad. In some ways Emerson took Coleridge’s notion of polarity a step further. Emerson applied Coleridge’s maxim “Extremes Meet” more radically, by using polarity to illuminate the paradox and contradiction that lay behind a thin veil of custom in our everyday world, behind even language itself: The end and the means, the gamester and the game, – life is made up of the intermixture and reaction of these two amicable powers, whose marriage appears beforehand monstrous, as each denies and tends to abolish the other. We must reconcile the contradictions as we can, but their discord and their concord introduce wild absurdities into our thinking and speech. No sentence will hold the whole truth, and the only way in which we can be just, is by giving ourselves the lie; Speech is better than silence; silence is better than speech; – All things are in contact; every atom has a sphere of repulsion; – Things are, and are not, at the same time; – and the like. All the universe over, there is but one thing, this old Two-Face, creator–creature, mind–matter, right–wrong, of which any proposition may be affirmed or denied.50

In this passage, Emerson juxtaposes polar opposites against one another ruthlessly, claiming that “no sentence will hold the whole truth.” He plays two platitudes against one another as equally true: “[s]peech is better than silence; silence is better than speech.” The last sentence of the passage seems to erase any hope of resolving the universe into unity, since “there is but one thing, this old Two-Face.” Yet as the passage continues, he reveals that this dualism was actually subsumed by unity: Very fitly, therefore, I assert, that every man is a partialist, that nature secures him as an instrument by self-conceit, preventing the tendencies to religion

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Nature: Philosophy and the “Riddle of the World” [ 51 and science; and now further assert, that, each man’s genius being nearly and affectionately explored, he is justified in his individuality, as his nature is found to be immense; and now I add, that every man is a universalist also, and, as our earth, whilst it spins on its own axis, spins all the time around the sun through the celestial spaces, so the least of its rational children, the most dedicated to his private affair, works out, though as it were under a disguise, the universal problem.51

This dense and intriguing passage is a barrage of contradictions, and yet from the muddle emerges the leading idea: however much a person was a partialist, he was also a universalist working out, even without realizing it, “the universal problem.” However overwhelming the multiplicity of the world might be, the universal will prevail. Although Emerson’s excursions into contradiction were disorienting, he usually rescued his position by postulating a higher view requiring elevated powers of perception, such as when he declared, “the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object are one.”52 Polar opposites were never permanently resolved for Coleridge and Emerson. Instead polarity served as a philosophical and a literary method, through which the reader could be ushered to ever higher vantage points. Moving through polar opposites was a way of measuring intellectual progress, hence favorite metaphors such as Coleridge’s water-bug pulsing its way upstream, or Emerson’s statement, “The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks.”53 Yet Emerson and Coleridge believed in the ultimate unity of poles, at least in a hypothetical, perhaps even millenarian future; striving toward this goal of viewing the Romantic triad transparently galvanized many of their intellectual endeavors. The first philosophy, like the dynamic philosophy, was never completed yet it still served an essential function as the underlying framework for Emerson’s thought. Even though it was fragmentary and incomplete, accessible only by fleeting moments of intuition, it still served as the philosophical armature for both individual essays and entire series of lectures. While Coleridge used conditional language to represent the unfinished quality of the dynamic philosophy, Emerson accepted the limitations of language and philosophy more openly. Emerson wrote, “The aim of the author is not to tell truth – that he cannot do, but to suggest it. He has only approximated it himself, & hence his cumbrous embarrassed speech: he uses many words, hoping that one, if not another, will bring you as near to the fact as he is.”54 Emerson more readily admitted the insufficiency of language, preferring first-hand intuition to “cumbrous embarrassed speech.” While Emerson depended upon the idea of the first philosophy, its exact

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philosophical articulation was not essential, since language was limited to approximations in any case. The main ideas of Coleridge’s dynamic philosophy – its emphasis on intellectual process, its interdisciplinary nature, its use of polarity, its ineffable quality, and most importantly its goal of harmonizing the Romantic triad – were all attractive to Emerson and influenced him at a pivotal moment in his intellectual development. He assimilated the general thrust of the dynamic philosophy while passing over some of its philosophical particulars. Moreover, Emerson cultivated this tendency to appropriate the gist of an argument, rather than its well-argued conclusions, into a distinctive literary and philosophical style. He was so engaged with the dynamic process of thinking that often the product itself was compromised, at least if judged from a philosophically rigorous standpoint. The first philosophy was not really a philosophy at all, but a way of looking at the world, or what Sherman Paul termed an “angle of vision.”55 This open-ended mode of philosophizing was instrumental for later admirers of Emerson such as John Dewey and Friedrich Nietzsche.56 Emerson noted in a journal, “M. Degerando – has understood Lord Bacon’s project of a literary history as intended to develope this highest philosophy rather by furnishing the premises than drawing the conclusion.”57 This note reveals a great deal about Emerson’s intellectual character: his essays operated on premises – most especially the potential unity of the Romantic triad – without elaborating a consistent philosophy. Emerson used the reiteration of his central premises to “build” his essays in a series of accumulating layers, rather than constructing a philosophical argument logically.58 A good example of Emerson developing a philosophy by “furnishing the premises” can be found in the “Goose Pond Principles.” These statements fit several characteristics of the first philosophy. The Goose Pond Principles were written to “lay down as the foundations of this Course of Lectures I shall read to my fellow citizens.”59 1. There is a relation between man & nature so that whatever is in matter is in mind. 2. It is a necessity of the human nature that it should express itself outwardly & embody its thought. As all creatures are allured to reproduce themselves, so must the thought be imparted in Speech. The more profound the thought, the more burdensome. What is in will out. Action is as great a pleasure & cannot be forborne[.] 3. It is the constant endeavor of the mind to idealize the actual, to accommodate the shows of things to the desires of the mind. Hence architecture & all art. 4. It is the constant tendency of the mind to Unify all it beholds, or to reduce the remotest facts

Nature: Philosophy and the “Riddle of the World” [ 53 ­

to a single law. Hence all endeavors at classification. 5. There is a /parallel tendency/ corresponding Unity/ in nature which makes this just, as in the composition of the compound shell or leaf or animal from few elements. 6. There is a tendency in the mind to separate particulars & in magnifying them to lose sight of the connexion of the object with the Whole. Hence all false views, Sects; 7. Underneath all Appearances & causing all appearances are certain eternal Laws which we call the Nature of Things. 8. There is one Mind common to all individual men.60

Perhaps the colloquial title “Goose Pond Principles” indicated that Emerson was being playful about systematizing. Certainly they exhibited his intuitive predilections: “matter and mind” are related; inner and spiritual impulses need to be outwardly embodied in form; and “certain eternal Laws” knit together spirit and nature via “one Mind common to all individual men.” These general premises were common to Transatlantic Romanticism, and were not solely the product of Emerson’s readings of Coleridge. However, it was Emerson’s early exposure to Coleridge that propelled him to create his own first philosophy. Moreover, Emerson adopted specific Coleridgean concepts to elaborate these intuitive tendencies into more sophisticated philosophical conceptions. Several of these concepts, such as the distinctions between reason and understanding, natura naturata and naturans, and the principles of method, will be discussed in the next chapter.

chapter 4

The Landing Place: “Distinguishing without Dividing” and Coleridge’s Method

Among my earliest impressions I still distinctly remember that of my first entrance into the mansion of a neighboring Baronet . . . Beyond all other objects, I was most struck with the magnificent stair-case, relieved at well proportioned intervals by spacious landing-places, this adorned with grand or shewy plants, the next looking out on an extensive prospect through the stately window with its side panes of rich blues and saturated amber or orange tints: while from the last and highest the eye commanded the whole spiral ascent with the marbled pavement of the great hall from which it seemed to spring up as if it merely used the ground on which it rested. My readers will find no difficulty in translating these forms of the outward senses into their intellectual analogies, so as to understand the purport of the Friend’s LANDING-PLACES, and the objects, he proposed to himself, in the small groups of Essays interposed under this title between the main divisions of the work. (S. T. Coleridge)1

The image of a grand spiral staircase, interspersed with “landing-places” between floors, fascinated Coleridge as a child. The landing place was a place to pause, reflect, and gaze around, simultaneously engaging different perspectives of high and low, near and far, subsequently exercising various powers of vision. Coleridge’s The Friend included “essays interposed for amusement, retrospect and preparation” in between sections. He asked his readers to consider the spiral staircase and interspersed landing places as “intellectual analogies,” indicating a complex and dynamic mode of thinking that engaged multiple perspectives at once. The image of a spiral moving at once upward and outward, with platforms to pause and reflect along the way, could be a cipher for much of Coleridge’s and Emerson’s

­The Landing Place: “Distinguishing without Dividing” and Coleridge’s Method[ 55 prose. The upward spiral embodied a mode of inquiry that Coleridge described as “commencing with the most familiar truths, with facts of hourly experience, and gradually winning its way to positions the most comprehensive and sublime.”2 The purpose of this chapter is to pause and consider two dynamic strategies that Emerson appropriated from Coleridge to hone and expand the mind’s perceptive powers: “distinguishing without dividing” and “principles of method.” These strategies deeply informed all of Coleridge’s and Emerson’s endeavors, including their philosophical and theological views as well as their literary theory and practice. The cultivation of individual consciousness constituted an overarching motif of Transatlantic Transcendentalism. Coleridge was profoundly committed to expanding and refining the mind’s perceptive and reflective powers, and his philosophical strategies of “distinguishing without dividing” and dynamic method were intended to provoke and guide inquiry about how the human mind perceives the natural and spiritual worlds. In his early lectures, Emerson used these Coleridgean concepts to mediate complex and even conflicting visions of the Romantic triad of nature, spirit, and humanity.3 The image of the spiral staircase was apt because it moved upward and outward around a common center: spirit at the core, nature as its expression, and the human mind ascending upward through different levels of perception. Throughout his intellectual life, Coleridge attempted to reconcile two opposing positions that were equally attractive to his mind: the validity of experience gained from the natural world and a deep-seated belief in transcendent spirit. Coleridge believed that seeing only one side of a situation without considering its opposite led to schism, sectarianism, and fanaticism.4 Thus “distinguishing without dividing” was one way that he could sustain two positions at once: philosophical distinctions, such as reason and understanding and natura naturans and natura naturata, described the world as both unified and plural, variegated and yet emblematic of higher laws. Coleridge espoused the “value of the Science of Words,”5 and believed that precision in language reflected precision in thinking. Thus accurate distinctions could resolve apparent contradictions between nature (individuality) and spirit (final Co-adunation): “The understanding [of] the difference between Division & Distinction is the first step in the Solution of the seeming Contradictions concerning Individuality & final Co-adunation . . .”6 Through subtle nuances in language, Coleridge maintained a vision of unity in diversity without obscuring the finer points of difference ­necessary for philosophical discourse:

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The office of philosophical disquisition consists in just distinction; while it is the privilege of the philosopher to preserve himself constantly aware, that distinction is not division. In order to obtain adequate notions of any truth, we must intellectually separate its distinguishable parts; and this is the technical process of philosophy. But having so done, we must then restore them in our conceptions to the unity, in which they actually co-exist; and this is the result of philosophy.7

Coleridge emphasized that distinguishing does not indicate a permanent division, but was rather a temporary and necessary stage in the process of “knowing.” Once something was separated into “its distinguishable parts” in order to be better understood, then “we must restore them in our conceptions to the unity, in which they actually co-exist.” While honing philosophical thinking by distinguishing the similar from the same, distinctions did not irreparably divide or sunder the categories of the Romantic triad. Coleridge’s distinctions – succinct, thought-provoking, and ­expansive – were one of his most important contributions to Emerson and the development of Transatlantic Transcendentalism. While Swedenborg’s idea of correspondence and Plotinus’ notion of the soul were also attractive to Emerson, he was profoundly attracted to Coleridge’s distinctions because they were open-ended and they fostered a dynamic intellectual process of thinking. For Emerson, the technique of “distinguishing without dividing” allowed him to introduce a host of sophisticated philosophical terms into his vocabulary without tying himself down to static conclusions. Moreover, they provoked him to refine his own individual thinking process, as opposed to delivering an established system of philosophy. Emerson wrote in his journal, “by knowing the systems of philosophy that have flourished under the names of Heraclitus, Zoroaster, Plato, Kant . . . I get thereby a vocabulary for my ideas. I get no ideas. There is however one other service of good books. They provoke thoughts[.]”8 Since Emerson ­interpreted many of these sources through Coleridge – remember that he considered him one of only “seven or eight minds” capable of “enumerating the apparently manifold philosophies and forms of thought”9 – this statement reveals how fundamentally Coleridge shaped Emerson’s thinking. The Coleridgean distinctions favored by Emerson, including reason and understanding, natura naturans and natura naturata, imagination and fancy, symbol and allegory, and genius and talent, all pivoted around the poles of spirit and nature. That is, the first term of the pair was informed by a dynamic and spiritual power, while the second represented a mechanical

­The Landing Place: “Distinguishing without Dividing” and Coleridge’s Method[ 57 or fixed stasis.10 For example, in the genius and talent distinction, talent was a merely mechanical skill, defined as “the faculty of appropriating and applying the knowledge of others.” In contrast, genius was a “creative, and self-sufficing power”11 that echoed divine creative power. While talent entailed the mechanical reproduction of existing ideas, genius was an organic and dynamic process partaking of life itself; Coleridge wrote, “To be a musician, an orator, a painter . . . presupposes genius” while “an excellent artizan or mechanic requires more than an average degree of talent.”12 The mechanical and the spiritual dimensions of artistic activity existed along a continuum, and distinguishing between the two categories was a powerful technique to hone philosophical thinking. Coleridge’s distinctions fostered a kind of dual vision in which things could be both material and spiritual at the same time. Emerson was deeply influenced by these distinctions, claiming “the biography of Coleridge is written in that sentence of Plato, ‘He shall be as a god to me who shall rightly define and divide.’”13 This reflected one of many instances in which Emerson read Platonism through a Coleridgean lens. By seeing Plato, Plotinus, German idealists, and Coleridge as successors in a philosophical lineage (of which Emerson considered himself a part), he could refer to this “universal” tradition without acknowledging his reliance on Coleridge’s eclectic interpretation of these figures. Emerson was immediately impressed by the pragmatic utility of Coleridge’s ­distinctions as tools for reflection across the disciplines: He has made admirable definitions, and drawn indelible lines of distinction between things heretofore confounded. He thought and thought truly that all confusion of thought tended to confusion in action; and said that he had never observed an abuse of terms obtain currency without being followed by some practical error. He has enriched the English language and the English mind with an explanation of the object of Philosophy; of the all-important distinction between Reason and Understanding; the distinction of an Idea and a Conception; between Genius and Talent; between Fancy and Imagination; of the nature and end of Poetry; of the Idea of a State.14

This praise indicates how deeply Emerson admired Coleridge’s philosophical thinking. He recognized the potential of not only thinking about these distinctions, but thinking with these distinctions. By applying the distinctions to his own thought process, Emerson could be indebted yet still original: he made them his own. Coleridge’s distinctions were compact yet expansive, venerable yet cutting edge, and crucially, they assisted in ­directing the mind inward in a process of reflection:

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But what definitions and distinctions are these to the reader of his fervent page? How unlike the defining of school logic and formal metaphysicians! Out of every one of [Coleridge’s] distinctions comes life and heat. They light the road of common duty: they arm the working hand with skill. They fill the mind with emotions of awe and delight at the perception of its own depth. Take the single example of the distinction so scientifically drawn by him between Reason and Understanding. We do not read the popular writers of our own day . . . without seeing what confusion of thought the study of this one subject would have saved them, and that with his theory of Reason he could not fail to impart to them his own sublime confidence in Man.15

This quotation reveals several of Coleridge’s legacies for Transatlantic Transcendentalism. Firstly, his distinctions were dynamic and provocative precisely because they were open-ended: “Out of every one of [Coleridge’s] distinctions comes life and heat,” as opposed to closed systems of “school logic and formal metaphysicians.” They were practical: “They light the road of common duty: they arm the working hand with skill.” The distinctions were useful tools for living, a crucial legacy for the emergence of Pragmatism later in the century. Finally, Coleridge’s distinctions appealed to the heart and the head, the emotional as well as the rational: “They fill the mind with emotions of awe and delight at the perception of its own depth.” In short, Coleridge’s distinctions not only gave Emerson a more sophisticated philosophical vocabulary, but they provided an intellectual and literary method so compelling and provocative that they galvanized several American intellectual movements as well.

Reason and Understanding Coleridge’s distinction between reason and understanding was ­fundamental for Emerson: he called it “a philosophy itself.”16 As discussed in the first chapter, Transcendentalism was in search of a way to embrace idealism without abandoning the validity of experience of the natural world. It is widely accepted that although the distinction originated from Kant, Coleridge adapted the distinction extensively, and most Transcendentalists followed Coleridge’s rather than Kant’s usage of the terms.17 Coleridge’s reading of Kant was complex, and for my purposes here I will summarize his most salient adaptation for American Transcendentalism: for Kant the power of reason was regulative, while for Coleridge it was constitutive. As Paul succinctly expressed it,

­The Landing Place: “Distinguishing without Dividing” and Coleridge’s Method[ 59 By showing the limits of the understanding, Kant, too, had dichotomized the universe into the realms of noumena and phenomena, and the impossibility of knowing the things-in-themselves had disturbed Emerson. He followed in the writings of Coleridge the line of Kant in the thought of Fichte and Schelling that developed from Kant’s own discontent with the empirical analysis of knowledge.18

Van Leer observed that Emerson treated the reason and understanding distinction “more enthusiastically than accurately. His failure to restrict himself, as Kant had insisted, to the purely negative use of Reason as a limit accounts for his conflation of ‘transcendent’ and ‘transcendental.’”19 Vallins observed the broadening of the term “transcendence” by both Coleridge and Emerson: “Transcendence is at once a feeling of elevation or sublimity, and a process of contemplating, explaining, or evoking the unity of phenomena which in other states of consciousness appear to be divided.”20 In short, both Coleridge and Emerson radically altered the Kantian distinction by widening the scope of the human mind’s capacity to know. Coleridge’s eclectic transfer of German idealism to American shores proved influential not only to Emerson and the Boston Transcendentalists, but to other movements such as Vermont Transcendentalism and the emergence of American Pragmatism later in the century. Rather than accepting Kant’s limitations on the power of reason, Coleridge and Emerson modified the distinction in order to heal the schism between nature and spirit. They achieved this by relocating the dualism to different powers of the human mind.21 In short, the understanding formed common-sense precepts and generalizations from its observations of the material world. In contrast, the reason perceived “Truths above Sense . . . having their evidence in themselves.”22 Reason was a priori, unconditional, grounded only in itself, and capable of perceiving divine law, whereas the understanding was limited to knowledge gained from the world of sense. Thus the distinction provided a framework for a harmonized view of the Romantic triad, in which both nature and spirit played equally valid, but distinct, roles in human knowledge. Coleridge believed that comprehending the reason and understanding distinction was critical for philosophical clarity, as noted in this passage from Table Talk which Emerson annotated in his personal copy: “Until you have mastered the fundamental difference, in kind, between the reason and the understanding as faculties of the human mind, you cannot escape a thousand difficulties in philosophy.”23 For Emerson, the distinction did overcome a central difficulty: how to mediate between idealism and empiricism. Coleridge’s distinction constructed a ladder of

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hierarchical mental faculties at work in human knowledge: sense perceptions and common-sense precepts drawn from the understanding, and an intuitive faculty that bordered on faith – the power of reason. Reason and understanding, then, explained how oneness and difference, phenomenon and noumenon, and nature and spirit could be brought together in a ­provisional theory of knowledge. As Coleridge explained: Reason is the knowlege of the laws of the WHOLE considered as ONE: and as such it is contradistinguished from the Understanding, which concerns itself exclusively with the quantities, qualities, and relations of particulars in time and space. The UNDERSTANDING, therefore, is the science of phænomena, and their subsumption under distinct kinds and sorts, (genus and species). Its functions supply the rules and constitute the possibility of EXPERIENCE; but remain mere logical forms, except as far as materials are given by the senses or sensations. The REASON, on the other hand, is the science of the universal, having the ideas of ONENESS and ALLNESS as its two elements or primary factors.24

In this view, which has now strayed well beyond Kant’s use of the distinction, reason and understanding both participated in an act of knowing: the understanding gathered basic sensory material and organized it into common-sense precepts, while the reason perceived the universal laws that informed the world. Reason and understanding were united during an act of true knowledge. In fact, reason needed understanding: “the Understanding and Experience may exist without Reason. But Reason cannot exist without Understanding; nor does it or can it manifest itself but in and through the understanding . . .”25 The distinction, true to Coleridge’s idea of “distinguishing without dividing,” was a philosophically subtle way of harmonizing the Romantic triad without losing sight of the essential differences between the categories. Coleridge expanded the role of reason by claiming that it was not merely an “organ” of perception, but it also shared identity with that which it perceived.26 This marked the gravity of the reason and understanding distinction, since reason could apprehend the divine: “[Reason] is an organ identical with its appropriate objects. Thus, God, the Soul, eternal Truth, &c. are the objects of Reason; but they are themselves reason. We name God the Supreme Reason . . .”27 Through reason, the perceiver and the perceived were commingled in the divine spirit. Yet for these super-sensual truths to be “fixed as an object of reflection, and to be rendered expressible” they must be embodied through the understanding:

­The Landing Place: “Distinguishing without Dividing” and Coleridge’s Method[ 61 And yet to the forms of the Understanding all truth must be reduced, that is to be fixed as an object of reflection, and to be rendered expressible. And here we have a second test and sign of a truth so affirmed, that it can come forth out of the moulds of the Understanding only in the disguise of two contradictory conceptions, each of which is partially true, and the conjunction of both conceptions becomes the representative or expression (= the exponent ) of a truth beyond conception and inexpressible.28

For Coleridge, truth must be embodied to be known. However, at the moment of its embodiment, it changed from its pure and unified state to appear “in the disguise of two contradictory conceptions” such as the dialectical poles of subject and object, the me and the not-me, or spirit and nature. Only through a yet higher elevated act of seeing could these contradictions be resolved once again. This mystical hope of union was at the heart of so much of Emerson’s and Coleridge’s writing, a momentary glimpse in which nature and spirit were no longer diametrically opposed, but parts of a higher union. The reason and understanding distinction was essential for Emerson’s early essays. He regarded it as “a philosophy itself” for several reasons: 1) the distinction honored both empiricism and idealism as valid modes of knowing; 2) it presented a model of the human mind as possessing lower and higher abilities, and the world as both material and spiritual; and 3) through a process of cleansing and elevating the perceptive powers, the mind could catch momentary glimpses of unity of the Romantic triad of humanity, nature, and the divine. Using this distinction, Emerson could invoke intuitive modes of knowing without denying the experience of nature as a valid source of truth. The distinction between reason and understanding not only established a philosophical armature for Emerson’s essays, but a drive and momentum as well: he followed Coleridge’s interpretation of St. Paul, that there exists a “natural man and spiritual man” and that “The Carnal mind is enmity against God.”29 It is necessary, therefore, to rouse the mind from a dormant state, what Coleridge called the “debasing Slavery to the outward Senses.”30 This drive to awaken the mind accounted for a good deal of the intellectual energy and literary strategy of Emerson’s essays: The mind is very wise, could it be roused into action. But the life of most men is aptly signified by the poet’s personification, “Death in Life.” We walk about in a sleep. A few moments in the year, or in our lifetime, we truly live; we are at the top of our being; we are pervaded, yea, dissolved by the Mind; but we

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fall back again presently. Those who are styled Practical Men are not awake, for they do not exercise the Reason; yet their sleep is restless.31

Here Emerson invoked the figure of “Death in Life” from Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” In that poem, the powers of reason were suspended in a nightmarish, supernatural reverie. After violating the principles of unity by killing an albatross in a thoughtless act of violence, the Mariner was subjected to luck and whim, as opposed to any intentional rationality determining his fate. Emerson adapted this idea by stating that “Practical Men” were dominated by the understanding, and thus “walk about in a sleep.” In contrast, in an elevated and ecstatic state of pure reason, “we are at the top of our being” and hence “dissolved by the Mind” in a state of unific divine communion. Reason became for Emerson the highest form of perception, a kind of spiritual vision: Reason is the highest faculty of the soul – what we mean often by the soul itself; it never reasons, never proves, it simply perceives; it is vision. The Understanding toils all the time, compares, contrives, adds, argues, near sighted but strong-sighted, dwelling in the present the expedient the customary. Beasts have some understanding but no Reason . . . The thoughts of youth, & ‘first thoughts,’ are the revelations of Reason. [T]he love of the beautiful & of Goodness as the highest beauty the belief in the absolute & universal superiority of the Right and the True[.] But understanding that wrinkled calculator the steward of our house to whom is committed the support of our animal life contradicts evermore these affirmations of Reason . . .32

The heart of the distinction was still Coleridgean: reason was the highest faculty, while the understanding dealt with fixed particulars. However, Emerson adapted the distinction to fit his own needs: the language was softened and colloquialized, with references to “the wrinkled calculator the steward of our house” and the “near sighted but strong-sighted” understanding. Emerson personified understanding, while elevating reason as “vision” or a pure kind of perception. The language was not specifically Christian, referring to “soul” rather than spirit, “beauty and Goodness” and “the Right and the True.” Characteristically, Emerson’s use of the distinction was far less rigorous than Coleridge’s laborious definitions in Aids to Reflection. Ultimately, as Kenneth Harris noted, Kant’s ideas “are less important than the literary uses to which [the Transcendentalists] put those ideas.”33 Emerson used the reason and understanding distinction as a powerful philosophical strategy to mediate the Romantic triad, and

­The Landing Place: “Distinguishing without Dividing” and Coleridge’s Method[ 63 it was also a literary technique to drive the minds of his readers to ever higher levels of perception.34

Natura Naturans and Natura Naturata Emerson appropriated another Coleridgean distinction to harmonize the Romantic triad of spirit, nature, and humanity: natura naturans and natura naturata. Like the reason and understanding distinction, Coleridge did not invent the terms, which have a long history of usage.35 Natura naturans, literally “naturing nature, active or creative nature,” referred to the dynamic and spiritual creative power in nature. Natura naturata or material nature, on the other hand, referred to the passive fixities of the natural world of phenomena. In the Latin, the latter term is in the past tense whereas the former is in active present, again emphasizing a static versus dynamic state. Like many Coleridgean distinctions, one pole referred to an immaterial and spiritual power, while the other referred to the material product manifested by that power, or as Barfield elegantly observed, “a process versus the result of that process.”36 Natura naturans and natura naturata were closely related to other Coleridgean distinctions: copy versus imitation, as well as allegory versus symbol, to be discussed in the next chapter. A copy referred to a waxen, lifeless duplication of an object in nature, whereas an imitation partook in the creative process of nature itself, producing a living embodiment of what it represented:37 This is the true Exposition of the Rule, that the Artist must first eloign himself from Nature in order to return to her with full effect. —Why this?— Because—if he began by mere painful copying, he would produce Masks only, not forms breathing Life—he must out of his own mind create forms according to the several Laws of the Intellect, in order to produce in himself that coordination of Freedom & Law . . . which assimilates him to Nature—enables him to understand her—. He absents himself from her only in his own Spirit, which has the same ground with Nature, to learn her unspoken language . . . Not to acquire cold notions, lifeless technical Rules, but living and lifeproducing Ideas, which contain their own evidence/ and in that evidence the certainty that they are essentially one with the germinal causes in Nature, his Consciousness being the focus and mirror of both—for this does he for a time abandon the external real, in order to return to it with a full sympathy with its internal & actual—.38

Imitation employed natura naturans, or the “living and life-producing ideas” that were capable of producing “forms breathing Life.” In contrast, natura

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naturata produced copies or masks, by using “cold notions, lifeless technical rules.” The artist must engage with the world of spirit “which has the same ground with Nature,” and then use the material world to embody the creative work. Thus true art was inspired by the creative spiritual power of naturans, but embodied through the materials of naturata. By distinguishing these two powers inherent in nature without dividing them, Coleridge could knit together the Romantic triad philosophically and aesthetically: “The essence must be mastered—the natura naturans, & this presupposes a bond between Nature in this higher sense and the soul of Man—.”39 While reason and understanding posited a unified mind with two powers of perception, natura naturans and natura naturata similarly revealed nature as composed of power and product, the immaterial and material. The distinction was an essential paradigm in Coleridge’s thought, as seen in this set of definitions in the Philosophical Lectures: I proceed then to the definitions. First, that which appears by weight, or what in chemistry is called ponderable substance, is in philosophic language body. Second, that which appears, but not by weight, or the imponderable substance, is matter . . . Thirdly, that [which] does not appear, which has no outwardness, but must be either known or inferred but cannot be directly perceived, we call spirit, or power. Fourthly, in speaking of the world without us as distinguished from ourselves, the aggregate of [phenomena] ponderable and imponderable, is called nature in the passive sense, in the language of the old schools natura [naturata, while the sum or aggregate of the powers inferred as the sufficient] causes of the former, which by Aristotle and his followers were called the [substantial forms], was nature in the active sense or natura natur[ans]. Fifthly, on the other hand, when reflecting on ourselves as intelligences, and therefore individualising spiritual powers, that which affirms its own existence and, whether mediately or immediately, that of [other] beings, we call mind . . . Lastly, we contradistinguish the mind or the percipient power from that which it perceives; the former has been, very conveniently I think, entitled the subject and the latter the object. Hence the mind may be defined [as] a subject which has its own object.40

In this passage, Coleridge laid down a series of definitions that delineated his world-view as of 1819. He began with the primary poles of nature and spirit, expressed as matter or body and its antithesis, spirit, which “cannot be directly perceived.” Then natura naturata and natura naturans acted as bridging concepts between nature, spirit, and mind. Finally Coleridge contra-distinguished the mind from that which it perceived, in the terms subject and object, only to collapse that duality by claiming that the mind

­The Landing Place: “Distinguishing without Dividing” and Coleridge’s Method[ 65 was “a subject which has its own object.” The mind, in an act of knowledge, could thus transcend the duality of nature and spirit: “But when not only the mind’s self-consciousness, but all other things perceived by it are regarded as modifications of itself, as disguised but actual modes of selfperception, then the whole ground of the difference between subject and object appears [gone]; all is subject . . .”41 Natura naturans was the mediating power that made this unity of spirit and nature possible. Since nature was not limited to being solely matter, it could indeed share the same ground as the human mind and the divine. Thus through a careful modification of language, Coleridge redefined nature in such a way that the Romantic triad could be brought into harmony. Emerson did not engage too deeply with these philosophical nuances; however, as with reason and understanding, he appropriated the heart of the distinction between natura naturans and natura naturata. In his seminal work Nature, Emerson contrasted the materiality of natura naturata, or “nature passive” with “the Efficient Nature, natura naturans, the quick cause.”42 Emerson simplified and poeticized Coleridge’s distinction, salvaging its essential features only – the dynamic and immaterial quality of naturans, and its function as cause rather than effect, as seen below: let us not longer omit our homage to the Efficient Nature, natura naturans, the quick cause, before which all forms flee as the driven snows, itself secret, its works driven before it in flocks and multitudes, (as the ancients represented nature by Proteus, a shepherd,) and in indescribable variety. It publishes itself in creatures, reaching from particles and spicula, through transformation on transformation to the highest symmetries, arriving at consummate results without a shock or a leap . . . Now we learn what patient periods must round themselves before the rock is formed, then before the rock is broken, and then the first lichen race has disintegrated . . . opened the door for the remote Flora, Fauna, Ceres, and Pomona to come in. How far off yet is the trilobite! how far the quadruped! How inconceivably remote is man!43

Coleridge would never have agreed that primitive life evolved directly into humans; this idea of evolution was too antagonistic to his divine notion of creation, as will be discussed in Chapter 6. Yet it is understandable how Emerson, with his passion for science a generation later than Coleridge, could translate the dynamic power of natura naturans into a force at work in evolution. The heart of the distinction, natura naturans as the power which “publishes itself in creatures,” enabled Emerson to envision a material nature formed and driven by dynamic spiritual powers. Coleridge’s distinctions gave Emerson a vocabulary and a p ­ hilosophical method of

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reconciling the Romantic triad. Ultimately, however, Emerson expressed these views through literature rather than systematic philos­ophy: “Still am I a poet in the sense of a perceiver & dear lover of the harmonies that are in the soul & in matter, & specially of the correspondences between these & those.”44 Literature would prove the best medium for reconciling the Romantic triad poetically, rather than systematically.

Method – The “Self-Unraveling Clue” Coleridge and Emerson shared a great affinity: a passion for intellectual, spiritual, and literary process and progress. Often they were so engaged in this process that their literary products were compromised. Coleridge’s Opus Maximum was never finished, although he probably needed the hope that it could be finished in order to keep working. Emerson’s essays have been criticized as circuitous and contradictory, in part because the continual push and pull of his views – sometimes even within a single ­paragraph – can make them appear to be a tissue of paradoxes.45 Yet some of the apparent inconsistencies of Coleridge’s and Emerson’s writing are reconcilable if their texts are examined through a different lens, a lens which focuses on the method and premises of their work rather than its systematic conclusions. Although both Coleridge and Emerson entertained systematic ambitions, as evidenced by the dynamic and first philosophies, ultimately their commitment to continual intellectual inquiry outweighed their desire for a system, particularly when system-building impinged upon that intellectual process. Coleridge defined his commitment to continual intellectual process as “method,” an idea so vital that he devoted an entire section of The Friend to its definition: the “Essays on the Principles of Method.”46 A similar version appeared as the “Treatise on Method” in the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana. As mentioned in the first chapter, Emerson’s personal copy of The Friend was very heavily annotated and he agreed with Coleridge’s assessment that the “Essays on the Principle of Method” comprised some of his best writing.47 Coleridge’s principles of method were a vital and underappreciated intellectual legacy for Transatlantic Transcendentalism. While the distinction between reason and understanding has been considered Coleridge’s most important contribution to American letters, those terms gradually dropped out of usage, while his concept of method endured into the twentieth century through Pragmatism. It has been erroneously assumed that Aids to Reflection was the most important of Coleridge’s books for Emerson, probably because it was the more widely circulated text and the primary conduit for the reason

­The Landing Place: “Distinguishing without Dividing” and Coleridge’s Method[ 67 and understanding distinction for many American intellectuals, thanks to Marsh’s “Preliminary Essay.” However, Emerson read The Friend in 1829, in the same year as Aids, and it too featured a significant exposition of the reason and understanding distinction. Overall, The Friend and the Biographia were far more congenial texts for Emerson than Aids as revealed by the following comment: [Coleridge’s] works are of very unequal interest; the Aids to Reflexion, though a useful book I suppose, is the least valuable. In his own judgment, half the Biography and the third volume of the Friend from the beginning of the Essay on Method to the end with a few of his poems were all that he would preserve of his works. In this judgment, if you add the invaluable little book called Church and State which was written afterwards, I suppose all good judges would concur.48

While Aids was preoccupied with theological questions, The Friend was a motley and interdisciplinary book, peppered with entertaining anecdotes and glosses on other thinkers. For Emerson it was an excellent sampler, full of interesting language and ideas that he incorporated directly into his own essays. In an 1829 letter to his Aunt Mary, Emerson wrote that he was reading Coleridge’s The Friend with “great interest.”49 The 1818 edition of The Friend was probably the first of Coleridge’s books purchased for Emerson’s personal library, and there is ample evidence of his close reading of the work throughout the 1830s.50 Emerson was giving public lectures at this time, and adaptations of Coleridgean ideas were ubiquitous throughout the early lectures, especially in “English Literature,” “The Philosophy of History,” and Nature. Emerson was especially attracted to Coleridge’s fusion of ancient philosophical traditions with the latest innovations in Romantic idealism. Coleridge’s definition of method in The Friend was a good example: he honored the ancient Greek derivation of the term as a “pursuit of knowledge, mode of investigation” or “a way, or path of Transit.”51 But Coleridge made it clear that this method could also be applied to experimental science and literature as well as philosophy, ideally embracing all areas of intellectual inquiry. Thus method was a “science of education” fitting for everyday truths as well as those “most comprehensive and sublime”: Yet that I may fulfil the original scope of the Friend, I shall attempt to provide the preparatory steps for such an investigation in the following Essays on the Principles of Method common to all investigations: which I here present, as the basis of my future philosophical and theological writings, and as the

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­ ecessary introduction to the same. And in addition to this, I can conceive no n object of inquiry more appropriate, none which, commencing with the most familiar truths, with facts of hourly experience, and gradually winning its way to positions the most comprehensive and sublime, will more aptly prepare the mind for the reception of specific knowledge, than the full exposition of a principle which is the condition of all intellectual progress, and which may be said to even constitute the science of education, alike in the narrowest and in the most extensive sense of the word.52

Coleridge’s method was an intellectual, spiritual, and literary mode of inquiry. Several elements were especially influential for Emerson: 1) method indicated a continual intellectual process; 2) this process entailed an ascent of inquiry from lower to higher topics; and 3) a “leading Thought” directed this intellectual investigation upward and outward, while also knitting together its results coherently.53 Thus method operated centrifugally, constantly expanding into new areas, and centripetally, as discoveries were interconnected by the “leading idea.” Method was used by Coleridge and Emerson as a strategy to prompt the reader to ascend to ever higher vantage points, in a search of a transparent vision of the Romantic triad. Emerson was profoundly attracted to the dynamism of Coleridge’s method: he recorded in his journal aphorism 36 from Aids to Reflection: “All things strive to ascend and ascend in their striving.”54 Coleridge’s method mandated a continual and dynamic intellectual investigation. Coleridge wrote, “all Method supposes A PRINCIPLE OF UNITY WITH PROGRESSION; in other words, progressive transition without breach of continuity.”55 Method required two types of intellectual discipline: first, establishing a leading idea or premise, and secondly and most importantly, adhering to a progressive investigation and resisting any incomplete or hasty conclusion. There were spiritual overtones to this process, in which “the human mind is purified from its idols”: the discipline, by which the human mind is purified from its idols . . . and raised to the contemplation of Ideas, and thence to the secure and ever-progressive, though never-ending, investigation of truth and reality by scientific method, comprehends what [Plato] so highly extols under the title of Dialectic.56

Coleridge’s devotion to the “ever-progressive, though never-ending, investigation of truth and reality” explains both the impressive range – and frustrating fragmentation – of his oeuvre. Method was a dynamic and interdisciplinary mode of thinking that, if done properly, might never reach a permanent conclusion. Trevor Levere stated eloquently:

­The Landing Place: “Distinguishing without Dividing” and Coleridge’s Method[ 69 Coleridge, seeking a system, had a method. The distinction is fundamental. The more complete a system is, the more it describes and classifies knowledge, and the less it encourages new kinds of inquiry. Coleridge’s life work was one long inquiry. His refusal to limit himself initially to clear and distinct ideas often led him astray, but it kept his thought from ossification. He sought to refine concepts that gained definition through use and experience. His inquiry, like that of science itself, was living, generative, and far from abstract. His method, transcending the abstraction of his philosophy, was a major constituent of his intellectual vitality and of his continuing and major importance in our own imaginative life of the mind.57

This tendency toward process rather than product, and method rather than system, was an overarching theme in Coleridge’s work. Although the dynamic philosophy was never completed, the treatise on imagination never written, the Opus Maximum never finally finished, this fragmentation was not just a matter of personal tribulation (although surely this played a large part), but also a testament to the depth and breadth of his passion for knowledge and his commitment to this “ever-progressive” method. Emerson was attracted to the relentless intellectual and spiritual expansion of Coleridge’s method. On practically every page of his essays there are exhortations to process and progress. In “The Method of Nature” Emerson wrote, “A man’s wisdom is to know that all ends are momentary, that the best end must instantly be superseded by a better.”58 His literary prose itself embodied Coleridge’s method, as it applied a leading idea upward and outward, driving for ever higher vantage points. Method had spiritual and ethical overtones for Coleridge and Emerson – it implied a process of self-betterment. Emerson described the proper application of method as an arduous “intellectual duty” requiring ­“intellectual courage”: There is an intellectual duty as imperative and as burdensome as that moral one. I come, e.g., to the present subject of classification. At the centre it is a black spot—no line, no handle, no character; I am tempted to stray to the accessible lanes on the left hand and right, which lead round it—all outside of it. Intellectual courage, intellectual duty says we must not blink the question, we must march up to it and sit down before it and watch there, incessantly getting as close as we can to the black wall, and watch and watch, until slowly lines and handles and characters shall appear on its surface and we shall learn to open the gate and enter the fortress, unroof it and lay bare its ground-plan to the day.59

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Here this intellectual process was described in visual terms, as a temporary blindness gradually abating after persistent inquiry.60 Emerson’s method here, like Coleridge’s, required a commitment to progress – refusing to flinch before a difficult question and resolving to “march right up to it” and resisting the temptation to “stray to the accessible lanes on the left hand and right, which lead round it.” This resonated with Coleridge’s exhortations to avoid succumbing to easier but lesser answers. True method involved a prolonged intellectual inquiry, wherever it led, which brings us to a second aspect of Coleridge’s method admired by Emerson: the use of ascending topics to drive the reader to ever higher vantage points. Coleridge characterized method as “commencing with the most familiar truths, with facts of hourly experience, and gradually winning its way to positions the most comprehensive and sublime.”61 In an echo of the spiral staircase imagery, Coleridge employed an ascending hierarchy of topics as a philosophical and literary strategy in his prose. For example, in The Friend, Coleridge wrote about politics, morals, and religion, in that order. In Aids to Reflection, he began with “Introductory and Prudential Aphorisms,” continued with “Moral and Religious Aphorisms,” followed by “Aphorisms on Spiritual Religion,” and concluded with “Aphorisms on that which is indeed Spiritual Religion.” Coleridge’s method investigated a topic in tiers, beginning with the worldly and mundane and elevating to spiritual perspectives, with the goal of instigating that same process of intellectual ascent in the reader. Emerson adopted Coleridge’s use of ascending tiers of topics. By doing so, he could acknowledge New England practicality, since conclusions based on observations of nature and common-sense pragmatism were valid as products of the understanding. However, at the same time ascending topics provoked ever higher and more comprehensive meanings for nature, which appealed to Emerson’s idealist leanings. Secondly, hierarchical topics gave Emerson’s essays a structure he found appealing, one that promoted intellectual growth as continually more difficult ideas were grasped in succession. This commitment to progress also ensured that his thought would not harden into dogmatism. Emerson used hierarchical topics to structure individual lectures such as Nature, which will be examined in Chapter 7. Additionally entire lecture series were organized this way: the series “Human Culture” began with “Doctrine of the Hands,” “The Head,” and “The Eye and Ear,” which elaborated basic sensory modes of perceiving the world. Then he continued with “Being and Seeming” and “Prudence,” as higher stages of perceiving through the understanding. Finally, “Heroism,” “Holiness,” and “General Views” moved to the highest vantage points of reason and faith. Emerson’s and

­The Landing Place: “Distinguishing without Dividing” and Coleridge’s Method[ 71 Coleridge’s persistent use of hierarchies demonstrated that they were not pantheists nor monists: if nature and spirit were simply one, there was no further progress to be made, no further elevation of perception was necessary. The drive toward continual improvement was the engine of Emerson’s essays. Although there are vatic moments of unity interspersed throughout his essays, they do not last: Emerson always returned to ­multiplicity again, restoring the need for upward progress. For Coleridge and Emerson, the proper application of method created a dynamic working model of the Romantic triad in place of a rigid system. Coleridge stated that method was natural to a mind “accustomed to contemplate not things only, or for their own sake alone, but likewise and chiefly the relations of things, either their relations to each other, or to the observer, or to the state and apprehension of the hearers.”62 He continued, “To enumerate and analyze these relations, with the conditions under which alone they are discoverable, is to teach the science of Method.”63 However, method was not simply a question of cataloging material relationships – this would be mere classification. Coleridge states that method cannot “be applied to a mere dead arrangement, containing in itself no principle of progression.”64 Rather, method was a dynamic and active process through which the mind was taught to perceive relations in “mental contiguity and succession,” by connecting seemingly random ideas and facts into a cohesive whole: “On the contrary, where the habit of Method is present and effective, things the most remote and diverse in time, place, and outward circumstance, are brought into mental contiguity and succession, the more striking as the less expected.”65 Coleridge compared the “leading Thought”66 in his method to the organic presence of “vegetable sap in the branches, sprays, leaves, buds, blossoms, and fruits.”67 That is, method was what made the products of thinking vital and alive, part of a process of intellectual growth. Coleridge’s method gave meaning and life to classification, without which it would become an empty “enumeration of facts”: Mr. Coleridge has written well on this matter of Theory in his Friend. A lecture may be given upon insects or plants, that, when it is closed, irresistibly suggests the question, “Well, what of that?” An enumeration of facts without method. A true method has no more need of firstly, secondly, etc., than a perfect sentence has of punctuation. It tells its own story, makes its own feet, creates its own form. It is its own apology. The best argument of the lawyer is a skillful telling of the story. The true classification will not present itself to us in a catalogue of a hundred classes, but as an idea of which the flying wasp and the grazing ox are developments. Natural History is to be studied, not with any

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pretension that its theory is attained, that its classification is permanent, but merely as full of tendency.68

After marveling at the cataloging of plants and animals at the Jardin de Plantes in 1833, Emerson claimed exultantly,“I will be a naturalist.”69 And yet his project was far more comprehensive than this statement might suggest. Emerson saw the potential for Coleridge’s method to wed recent scientific efforts to know nature with a study of the inner self. Method, then, offered the hope of reconciling science and philosophy, empiricism and idealism. In the passage above, Emerson invoked both “Natural History” and Neoplatonic philosophy in one sweep: method “tells its own story, makes its own feet, creates its own form,” an echo of Plotinus’ Enneads 3.8 in which Nature is described as “having no hands nor feet.” Coleridge’s method enabled Emerson to re-imagine the practice of scientific classification as an open-ended, dynamic mode of inquiry, not as a fixed or dead cataloging. According to this view, classification itself was never a final, closed system, but “merely as full of tendency” – a way station along a continual path of knowledge: It is the perpetual effort of the mind to seek relations between the multitude of facts under its eye, by means of which it can reduce them to some order. The mind busies itself in a perpetual comparison of objects to find resemblances by which those resembling may be set apart as a class. Of those resembling it seeks to abstract the common property; which it compares again with another common property of another resembling class, to derive from these two, a still higher common property. This is method, classification.70

Through method, the mind continually sought a “higher common property” in diverse things, with the ultimate goal of seeing harmony between the categories of the Romantic triad. Emerson’s claim “I will be a ­naturalist” also included becoming a philosopher and a poet-prophet.

Method and the Romantic Triad Emerson studied Coleridge’s “Essays on the Principles of Method” very carefully at a propitious moment in his intellectual development. He needed an alternative to dogmatic theology, systematic philosophy that widened the chasm between empiricism and idealism, and scientific principles that could potentially suffocate the living nature they attempted to describe. Coleridge’s method – fluid, dynamic, progressive, and inter­ disciplinary – offered a compelling alternative. Method liberated Emerson

­The Landing Place: “Distinguishing without Dividing” and Coleridge’s Method[ 73 to use ideas as tools, refashioning them as needed, and driving continually onward to higher vantage points. It empowered Emerson to philosophize holistically without systematizing, an important legacy of Transatlantic Transcendentalism. Coleridge’s dynamic method envisioned a flexible model of the Romantic triad, supporting a continual search for a “unity of principle through all the diversity of forms” and “that just proportion, that union and interpenetration of the universal and the particular, which must ever pervade all works of decided genius and true science.”71 Yet while method presupposed a unity between the Romantic triad, the exact interrelation was shrouded in mystery. Coleridge wrote, “All method supposes a union of several things to a common end, either by disposition, as in the works of man; or by convergence, as in the operations and products of nature.”72 The word “supposes” was key here: it was an intuition, or as Coleridge called it, “an Enigma. It is the sense of a principle of connection given by the mind, and sanctioned by the correspondency of nature.”73 In a difficult passage, Coleridge set out the underlying premise of the nature/ spirit connection: In a self-conscious and thence reflecting being, no instinct can exist, without engendering the belief of an object corresponding to it, either present or future, real or capable of being realized: much less the instinct, in which humanity itself is grounded: that by which, in every act of conscious perception, we at once identify our being with that of the world without us, and yet place ourselves in contra-distinction to that world. Least of all can this mysterious pre-disposition exist without evolving a belief that the productive power, which is in nature as nature, is essentially one (i.e. of one kind) with the ­intelligence, which is in the human mind above nature . . .74

On one hand, Coleridge claimed that “All Method supposes a union of several things to a common end” – namely a unification of the Romantic triad. Yet on the other, he noted the “mysterious pre-disposition” of humanity to both identify with – and distance itself from – the natural and spiritual worlds. Every conscious act of perception sundered nature and spirit, by placing nature in contradistinction to the mind. Through a conscious application of intellectual method, the mind could possibly reunify spirit and nature once again. Coleridge’s method gave Emerson a model for exploring the Romantic triad in a dynamic and open-ended way, a process of looking both outward to nature and inward to the self. This was possible because both thinkers shared a deep intellectual affinity, a deep-seated intuition of the essential

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correspondence between nature, spirit, and the human mind. Coleridge wrote: In order therefore to the recognition of himself in nature man must first learn to comprehend nature in himself, and its laws in the ground of his own existence. Then only can he reduce Phænomena to Principles—then only will he have achieved the METHOD, the self-unravelling clue, which alone can securely guide him to the conquest of the former—when he has discovered in the basis of their union the necessity of their differences; in the principle of their continuance the solution of their changes.75

Here Coleridge appeared on the brink of unifying nature and humanity, yet the passage is full of paradoxical and hypothetical language: “phaenomenon” can be reduced to “principles” only when “the basis of their union” was understood to be “the necessity of their difference; in the principle of their continuance the solution of their changes.” True method, here described as “the self-unravelling clue,” required apprehending a paradox. Once again Coleridge came close to unifying spirit and nature, yet the union was problematic and hypothetical, and demanded an ­intuitive and spiritual leap of faith to complete. Despite their aspirations toward system-building, Coleridge and Emerson chose a dynamic method over a final fixed model of the Romantic triad. In his essays, Emerson applied Coleridge’s intellectual method to a set of intuitive presuppositions, pursuing the inquiry to ever higher and more encompassing views. Emerson extended these intuitions past limits Coleridge would have established, as evidenced by his declaration that “a man is a method”: “As a man thinketh, so is he; and as a man chooseth, so is he, and so is Nature. A man is a method; a progressive arrangement; a selecting principle, gathering his like to him wherever he goes.”76 Coleridge would not have ascribed the powers of thinking and choice to nature. But Emerson clearly engaged Coleridge’s method as a “progressive arrangement” and “a selecting principle” to inform his thinking about the Romantic triad. This passage demonstrates a remarkable blending of identities between nature and mind, and perceiver and perceived. Coleridge’s concept of method was clearly of fundamental importance for Emerson’s deepest views about the temporal, t­ranscendental, and human worlds. For Coleridge and Emerson, method was a literary as well as a philosophical strategy. If some of the statements above failed to stand on philosophical grounds, they were still capable of evoking a profound reader response. Often Coleridge and Emerson deliberately bombarded

­The Landing Place: “Distinguishing without Dividing” and Coleridge’s Method[ 75 their readers with paradoxes that juxtaposed polar opposites, making the reader feel as if he or she were “standing on his head,” a strategy intended to prompt the reader to ascend to a higher view.77 This tactic was justified by Coleridge and Emerson because of their shared belief that “all power manifests itself in opposite yet interdependent forces”: It is the idea of the common centre, of the universal law, by which all power manifests itself in opposite yet interdependent forces . . . that enlightening inquiry, multiplying experiment, and at once inspiring humility and perseverance will lead him to comprehend gradually and progressively the relation of each to the other, of each to all, and of all to each.78

At the heart of Coleridge’s method was a process of identifying and relating “opposite yet interdependent forces” that revealed “universal law.” Method, through “enlightening inquiry, multiplying experiment,” could potentially knit together these oppositions, including that of nature, spirit, and humanity, in a unified whole once again. The next chapter investigates the translation of this dynamic strategy into the realm of art and literature.

chapter 5

Humanity: “Art is the Mediatress, the Reconciliator of Man and Nature”

Emerson’s deep engagement with Coleridge’s thought taught him to think – not what to think, but how to think. The previous chapters have investigated how Coleridge inspired Emerson to find his own “first philosophy,” and the essential role that his philosophical definitions, distinctions, and method played in structuring the early lectures. Although Coleridge and Emerson were deeply interested in philosophical modes of thinking, ultimately the medium of literature best expressed their dynamic mediations of the Romantic triad. Coleridge was a role model for Emerson, not only for his new vocation as a public lecturer and a man of letters, but for an even more elevated role: the poet-prophet. The poet-prophet was at the center of the Romantic triad, an especially gifted individual who could mediate the relationship of nature, spirit, and humanity in imaginative literary works. Both Coleridge and Emerson referred constantly to the figure of the poet throughout their careers, even though Coleridge had finished writing his most notable poems by 1802, and Emerson’s poetry ultimately proved far less influential than his essays. Emerson’s early exposure to Coleridge’s literary criticism was pivotal, especially his organic view of art as reconciling the natural and spiritual. In his 1818 lectures on literature, Coleridge made the following three statements: “Art is the Mediatress, the reconciliator of Man and Nature,” “Art is the Imitatress of Nature,” and finally “Art would or should be the Abridgment of Nature.”1 These statements expressed provocative and open-ended relationships between nature, spirit, and the human worlds embodied through the medium of art. Coleridge wrote that “to make the external internal, the internal external, to make nature thought, and thought nature, – this is the mystery of genius in the Fine Arts . . .”2 For

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Coleridge, the dynamic power of the creative imagination echoed the divine creative spirit. Thus the literary activities of the poet-prophet harnessed a central creative impulse at work throughout the natural, spiritual, and human worlds. Emerson appropriated many of Coleridge’s fundamental positions about the role of art, including a vocabulary of definitions and distinctions: Because the soul is progressive, it never quite repeats itself, but in every act attempts the production of a new and fairer whole . . . Thus in our fine arts, not imitation, but creation is the aim . . .   What is that abridgment and selection we observe in all spiritual activity, but itself the creative impulse? for it is the inlet of that higher illumination which teaches to convey a larger sense by simpler symbols.3

Emerson took several ideas and terms from Coleridge here: the distinction between imitation and creation, the creative impulse as an “abridgement,” and the yoking of the spiritual and the literary in the concept of the symbol. However, terms like “all spiritual activity” and “a larger sense” expanded and broadened Coleridge’s language, something that Emerson did often. He put Coleridge’s distinctions to work for him, while also infusing his own idea of the soul as “progressive, it never quite repeats itself.” He posited artistic creation as provisory and impermanent, an act that merely “attempts the production of a new and fairer whole,” suggesting a fragmented and incomplete process, one requiring constant renewal and inquiry.4 Although Emerson was indebted to Coleridge for core ideas about literary theory and practice, his individual application of those ideas propelled him to create some of his most distinctive and original literary works. Emerson’s early reading of Biographia Literaria in 1826, and The Friend and The Statesman’s Manual a few years later, fundamentally shaped his emerging literary identity. In those works he found a model of literary criticism that informed all of his later writing, including valuable definitions and distinctions such as the ideal poet, genius and talent, the primary and secondary imagination, and symbol versus allegory. Coleridge’s organic literary criticism galvanized Emerson at a critical moment in his intellectual maturation. It taught him to read figures like Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth in an entirely new light.5 It helped inspire and organize whole lectures and series of lectures. It propelled him to take on the mantle of the poet-prophet in his own land, marking another essential Coleridgean link in the development of Transatlantic Transcendentalism.

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The Romantic Triad and the “Book of Nature” Coleridge played such a vital role in America because he envisioned new ways of mediating the Romantic triad. He elevated the role of individual consciousness and encouraged readers to reconsider the interconnections between nature, spirit, and humanity freshly in a dynamic and ongoing process of reflection. Coleridge was an especially congenial figure for Transatlantic Transcendentalism because he reconciled new perspectives with venerable and ancient ideas. One example was the way that Coleridge interpreted the motif of the “Book of Nature,” or the concept that the physical landscape could be read as a book of spiritual meaning or alternative scripture in revealing God. Seeing nature as a “text” of varying legibility, depending upon the perceptive abilities of a particular “reader,” dated back to Antiquity; however, the metaphor enjoyed a renaissance during the Romantic period with its renewed interest in spiritual experiences of nature.6 For Emerson, Coleridge’s interpretation of the book of nature as the basis for natural language was of seminal importance for early works like Nature.7 Coleridge’s interpretation of the book of nature was grounded in the concept of the logos or the word of God, in which divine spirit manifested itself in material form.8 In Aids to Reflection, Coleridge referred to Christ’s words in the Bible, “My words are Spirit: and they (i.e. the spiritual powers expressed by them) are Truth.”9 In The Friend he referred to “the blessed machine of language.”10 In his view, nature embodied a divinely ordained language that “ministered” or served the human mind by teaching it divine lessons.11 Coleridge called nature “a revelation of God” and the diversity of the material world “the great book of [God’s] servant Nature.”12 He also used other literary metaphors to describe nature as a “transcript,” “symbol,” or “alphabet,”13 and even as an alternative scripture: the other great Bible of God, the book of nature [will] become transparent to us when we regard the forms of matter as words, as symbols valuable only for the meaning which they convey to us, only for the life which they speak of, and venerable only as being the expression, an unrolled but yet a glorious fragment, of the wisdom of the supreme Being.14

The metaphor of the book of nature interconnected nature and spirit in a flexible way. Its meanings were not obvious: although it was “unrolled” and therefore readable, it was still a “glorious fragment.” Only through the elevated perception of the poet-prophet could nature “become ­transparent” through an act of imagination.15

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Emerson recognized the exciting potential of Coleridge’s interpretation of the book of nature. The metaphor had an authoritative and august lineage, yet it was also fluid and open-ended, since its fragmented revelation required a dynamic process of reading nature. It posited a fundamental interconnection between spirit and nature without circumscribing their exact relation. It championed the powers of the poet-prophet, who could gain momentary glimpses of transparence between the Romantic triad. In his essay “The Uses of Natural History,” Emerson quoted lines from Coleridge’s poem “The Destiny of Nations: a Vision”: “For all that meets the bodily sense I deem / Symbolical, one mighty alphabet / For infant minds.”16 Here the phrase “infant minds” did not refer to children, but to undeveloped minds still learning to “read” the book of nature. Emerson was interested in Platonism, Neoplatonism, Swedenborgian mysticism, and biblical typology, all of which posited a correspondence between nature and spirit. Coleridge enabled Emerson to interfuse these sources with Christian and German idealism. By emphasizing the metaphorical element of the book of nature, Emerson avoided narrow or rigid formulations of the Romantic triad: And this, because the whole of Nature is a metaphor or image of the human Mind. The laws of moral nature answer to those of matter as face to face in a glass. “The visible world,” it has been well said, “and the relations of its parts is the dial plate of the invisible one.”17

Here Emerson quoted Swedenborg, who claimed that the visible world was a “dial plate of the invisible one.” This appeared to be a straightforward equation of spirit and nature standing “as face to face in a glass.” Yet by using the phrase “metaphor or image of” Emerson resisted a formulaic relationship between spirit and nature: metaphors and images must be negotiated by the human mind, ideally by poets or artists, and thus were open to interpretation. Although both Emerson and Coleridge were influenced by Swedenborg and Böhme, ultimately they rejected their mystical systems because they were based on a rigid system of correspondence between spirit and nature, in which natural forms represented an exact spiritual correlate. Emerson related what he considered a primary fault in Swedenborg’s system: [Swedenborg’s] perception of nature is not human and universal, but is mystical and Hebraic. He fastens each natural object to a theologic notion; a horse signifies carnal understanding; a tree, perception; the moon, faith; a cat means this; an ostrich, that; an artichoke, this other; and poorly tethers every

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symbol to a several ecclesiastic sense. The slippery Proteus is not so easily caught. In nature, each individual symbol plays innumerable parts, as each particle of matter circulates in turn through every system. The central identity enables any one symbol to express successively all the qualities and shades of real being. In the transmission of the heavenly waters, every hose fits every hydrant. Nature avenges herself speedily on the hard pedantry that would chain her waves. She is no literalist. Everything must be taken genially, and we must be at the top of our condition, to understand anything rightly.18

Emerson used two dynamic images to describe nature in this passage: Proteus, the shape-shifter, and the ocean, who “avenges herself speedily on the hard pedantry that would chain her waves. She is no literalist.” Emerson saw the relation of spirit and nature as subject to change and continual reinterpretation. Only the poet-prophet, one who was “at the top of our condition,” could understand nature’s ever-changing symbolism. The metaphor of the book of nature preserved this fluidity and process. Like human language, the language of nature was constantly changing. Reading the book of nature was not as simple as learning a picture-language or allegory, in which each image corresponded to an exact correlate, but rather it resembled learning an entirely new language, replete with shades of meaning and various interpretations. For Emerson, the mastery of this natural language, which was always supposed but never completed, could harmonize the categories of the Romantic triad of nature, spirit, and humanity: Nature is a language and every new fact we learn is a new word; but it is not a language taken to pieces and dead in the dictionary, but the language put together into a most significant and universal sense. I wish to learn this ­language—not that I may know a new grammar but that I may read the great book which is written in that tongue . . . If the opportunity is afforded him he may study the leaves of the lightest flower that opens upon the breast of summer, in the faith that there is a meaning therein before whose truth and beauty all external grace must vanish, as it may be, all this outward universe shall one day disappear, when its whole sense hath been comprehended and engraved forever in the eternal thoughts of the human mind.19

Emerson constantly referred to a final end-point of total comprehension and transparence between the elements of the Romantic triad, but it was always projected in the distant and hypothetical future, perhaps even a millennial “new heaven and new earth.”20 Following Coleridge, Emerson relied upon conditional language in passages that described such

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t­ ransparence, as emphasized by my italics: “he may study the leaves of the lightest flower”; “all external grace must vanish”; “all the outward universe shall one day disappear.” Yet despite this transparence being conditional, Coleridge and Emerson both cherished an unwavering “faith that there is a meaning therein.” Reading the book of nature was arduous and required elevated spiritual and perceptive powers. Coleridge regarded this as a sign of human fallenness that could be redressed by making “thy Self all permeable to a holier power”: It seems as if the soul said to herself: from this state hast thou fallen! Such shouldst thou still become, thy Self all permeable to a holier power! thy Self at once hidden and glorified by its own transparency, as the accidental and dividuous in this quiet and harmonious object is subjected to the life and light of nature which shines in it, even as the transmitted power, love and wisdom, of God over all fills, and shines through, nature!21

Here Coleridge used a favorite metaphor of divine light shining throughout creation.22 If the “life and light of nature” were properly apprehended, the book of nature could be read transparently. However, such a mystical perception was both difficult to attain and often ignored, as Emerson attested: The whole world is an omen and a sign. Why look so wistfully in a corner? Man is the Image of God. Why run after a ghost or a dream? The voice of divination resounds everywhere and runs to waste unheard, unregarded as the mountains echo with the bleatings of cattle.23

Recognizing divinity in the world required special powers of perception. Coleridge and Emerson championed the idea of a literary figure who could not only read the book of nature for spiritual meaning, but also awaken others to do the same: the poet-prophet.

The Poet-Prophet The idea of the poet-prophet was another ancient idea taken up by many Romantic writers; in the aftermath of the French Revolution, many felt that art rather than political or social reform could change the world.24 The poet-prophet communicated spiritual perceptions to the rest of the world through the medium of literature. Coleridge, with his vast reading and his interest in marrying concepts from ancient and contemporary

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literature, metaphysics, and philosophy, was the perfect conduit for this august lineage of poet-prophets stretching back to classical literature. Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria was not only a model for Emerson’s “first philosophy,” but also for his emerging literary identity. As Gregory Haynes explained, Emerson saw Coleridge as “a model of a prophetic voice.”25 Coleridge offered provocative and dynamic conceptions about the role of poetry and the poet. If philosophical or metaphysical resolutions of the Romantic triad were hard to resolve systematically, then the poet’s imaginative powers could diffuse “a tone, and spirit of unity” through literature instead.26 Emerson gravitated to several specific elements from Coleridge’s Biographia and The Statesman’s Manual: the ideal poet could mediate the Romantic triad by reading the book of nature, engaging the power of the imagination, creating living symbols, and communicating to the rest of humanity through the medium of literature. Coleridge envisioned a group of pious intellectuals who would form a “clerisy” dedicated to the improvement of society. Coleridge wrote in The Friend, To whom then do we owe our ameliorated condition? To the successive Few in every age (more indeed in one generation than in another, but relatively to the mass of mankind always few) who by the intensity and permanence of their action have compensated for the limited sphere, within which it is at any one time intelligible; and whose good deeds posterity reverence in their results . . .27

Emerson also envisioned a “class of scholars or writers, namely, who see connexion, where the multitude see fragments, and who are impelled to exhibit the facts in ideal order, and so to supply the axis on which the frame of things turns.”28 For Emerson, the poet “must work in the spirit in which we conceive a prophet to speak, or an angel of the Lord to act, that is, he is not to speak his own words, or do his own works, or think his own thoughts, but he is to be an organ through which the universal mind acts.”29 After his crucial decision to resign from the ministry, Coleridge inspired Emerson to imagine himself as part of an august lineage of poet-prophets, using literature rather than the pulpit to transmit spiritual messages. In addition to providing an essential role model for Emerson’s interactions with the rest of society, Coleridge was instrumental for the larger movement of Transatlantic Transcendentalism. Aids to Reflection was such a central text for American letters because it spoke to a whole generation of men and women eager to “awaken the mind” and thereby improve

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society. Coleridge’s primary goal in Aids was “to rouse and emancipate the Soul from this debasing Slavery to the outward Senses, to awaken the mind to the true Criteria of Reality, viz. Permanence, Power, Will manifested in Act, and Truth operating as Life.”30 This required a cleansing of the mind’s perceptive powers. In his lecture series on English literature, Emerson invoked Coleridge, both directly and indirectly, for a similar goal: To break the chains of custom, to see everything as it absolutely exists, and so to clothe every thing ordinary and even sordid with beauty is the aim of the Thinker. All men are capable of this act . . . But whilst the poetic vision seems to be not a partial gift to one man but a state of mind into which all occasionally pass, there yet subsist actually very great differences between men . . . “those who invent; those who understand; and those who neither invent nor understand.” The distribution, without satire, would be, the class which receives, the class which perceives, and the class which embodies truth.31

At the beginning of this passage, Emerson referred to Coleridge’s call for renewed perception in Aids; at the end of the passage he directly quoted The Friend which distinguished between “those who invent; those who understand; and those who neither invent nor understand.” Emerson used Coleridge’s distinctions to parse different modes of perception, although he adapted them in his own way as three “classes of men”: “the class which receives, the class which perceives, and the class which embodies truth.” Once again he used Coleridge’s distinctions to stimulate his own original thought process. For both Coleridge and Emerson, the ideal poet would master a whole hierarchy of faculties – passive, active, and expressive – encompassing the prophet’s religious and communicative role, the artist’s creative abilities, and the philosopher’s intellectual capacity. Coleridge declared that “in all ages and countries of civilization Religion has been the parent and fosterer of the Fine Arts, as of Poetry, Music, Painting, &c.” because of their “common essence of which consists in a similar union of the Universal and the Individual.”32 Philosophy was yoked to religion and art as well: Coleridge wrote, “No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher. For poetry is the blossom and the fragrancy of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, language.”33 Coleridge and Emerson lionized Shakespeare as a model – Emerson praised Shakespeare for possessing “three great intellectual faculties of man, the Imaginative, the Reflective, and the Practical” and lauded him as “a poet, a philosopher and a man.”34

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The poet-prophet was not defined by disciplinary specialty but by the ability to discern spiritual unity in the multiplicity of natural forms, fulfilling Coleridge’s call in the Biographia that the poet “described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man into activity.”35 The poet, endowed with heightened perceptive powers, was the ideal mediator of the Romantic triad, as Emerson described: Now the Poet is the person in whom these demands are answered, the person without impediment, who by the favor of God is sent into the world to see clearly what others have glimpses of, to feel richly what they suspect, to gaze with sound senses and responding heart at full leisure, and in a trance of delight, at the heavens and the earth; a soul through which the universe is poured . . .36

This call to see the Romantic triad “without impediment” was a central theme undergirding Emerson’s essays. The poet-prophet “by the favor of God is sent into the world” in order to “see clearly” the interrelations of “heavens and the earth,” and then brings back those exalted visions to the rest of the humanity through literature. This commitment to refreshing, renewing, and engaging elevated modes of vision required continual intellectual and spiritual effort. As Emerson wrote, “A man should apply himself as with a total abandonment to all the highest influences. He should be all Eye, all Ear to whatever intimations of the Soul are reflected to him from the forms of things.”37 The words “abandonment” and “intimations” suggested the need for passive reception of these “highest ­influences,” while “apply” evoked the necessity for conscious effort. In Antiquity the poet-prophet was imagined as a passive vessel for the divine: epic poems traditionally began with a call to the muses for inspiration. The selections above, as well as other famous examples such as Emerson’s transparent eyeball passage, mandated total passivity as the divine spirit flowed through the subject.38 Elsewhere Emerson wrote that a man’s “health and greatness consist in his being the channel through which heaven flows to earth.”39 However, the poet-prophet must be active as well as passive: the poet “listens to all conversations, and receives all objects of nature, to give back, not them, but a new and radiant whole.”40 Emerson turned to Coleridge’s terminology to describe the necessary balance between active and passive: 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. Once inhale the upper air, being admitted to behold the absolute natures of

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justice and truth, and we learn that man has access to the entire mind of the Creator, is himself the creator in the finite.41

Here humanity “rests” and “is nourished” by God and nature in a passive sense, but at the same time, Emerson posited that “man has access to the entire mind of the Creator” and even more dramatically “is himself the creator in the finite.” Note the Creator/creator pairing: the poet-prophet can create actively in a God-like way, although in the more limited realm of language rather than in nature. Emerson forged this notion of the poet-prophet by carefully studying and appropriating Coleridge’s definition of the creative imagination in the Biographia Literaria, to be discussed below.

Imagination: The “synthetic and magical power” As Emerson perused the Biographia for a model of literary identity, useful distinctions and definitions, and aesthetic concepts, he discovered a seminal idea that continues to generate critical interest today: Coleridge’s definitions of the primary and secondary imagination.42 Like reason and understanding, the distinction between primary and secondary imagination envisioned a dynamic model of the Romantic triad. According to Coleridge, the poet “diffuses a tone, and spirit of unity, that blends, and (as it were) fuses, each into each, by that synthetic and magical power, to which we have exclusively appropriated the name of imagination.”43 Coleridge described the imagination as “the esemplastic power” – a translation of the German Einbildungskraft or “the faculty that forms the many into one.”44 As Seamus Perry observed, the imagination “has the hallmark Coleridgean quality of trying to have things both ways: it is a faculty devoted at once to unifying and yet to particularising . . .”45 The imagination could knit together polar opposites: [The imagination] reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities: of sameness, with difference; of the general, with the concrete; the idea, with the image; the individual, with the representative; the sense of novelty and freshness, with old and familiar objects; a more than usual state of emotion, with more than usual order; judgment ever awake and steady self-possession, with enthusiasm and feeling profound or vehement; and while it blends and harmonizes the natural and the artificial, still subordinates art to nature; the manner to the matter; and our admiration of the poet to our sympathy with the poetry . . . Finally, GOOD SENSE is the BODY of poetic genius, FANCY its DRAPERY, MOTION its LIFE, and IMAGINATION

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the SOUL that is every where, and in each; and forms all into one graceful and intelligent whole.46

The power of the imagination mediated between opposing tendencies: sameness and difference, general and concrete, the novel and the familiar, emotion and order, self-possession and enthusiasm. This power “forms all into one graceful and intelligent whole.” Emerson, who shared a similar proclivity for reconciling the one and the many, was galvanized by Coleridge’s expansive notion of the imagination as a quasi-divine creative power. For Emerson, too, it was “the poet, the inventor” who ultimately “unlocks our chains, and admits us to a new scene” through the medium of literature. Readers could be spiritually awakened by truths manifested in literary form: Therefore we love the poet, the inventor, who in any form, whether in an ode or in an action, or in looks and behavior, has yielded us a new thought. He unlocks our chains, and admits us to a new scene.   This emancipation is dear to all men, and the power to impart it, as it must come from greater depth and scope of thought, is a measure of intellect. Therefore all books of the imagination endure, all which ascend to that truth, that the writer sees nature beneath him, and uses it as his exponent.47

When Emerson wrote “therefore all books of the imagination endure, all which ascend to that truth, that the writer sees nature beneath him, and uses it as his exponent,” he used Coleridge’s two-fold idea of imagination as both passive and active, based on the definitions of the primary and secondary imagination in the Biographia.48 Coleridge’s concept of the imagination enriched Emerson’s vocabulary of distinctions that distinguished between manifold modes of perceiving the natural, spiritual, and human worlds. References to the imagination appeared in numerous essays, including Nature. He adapted several aspects of the definition from Coleridge: 1) imagination was an echo of divine creativity; 2) it was both a mode of seeing, and a creative act controlled by the poet; and 3) imagination was a mediating and unifying power that could harmonize the Romantic triad. These were all based on Coleridge’s main definition of the imagination in the Biographia: The IMAGINATION then I consider either as primary, or secondary. The primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act

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of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.49

The poet could mediate the Romantic triad in two ways: the primary imagination made human perception of nature and spirit possible, as “the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception.” The secondary imagination was another echo of divine creativity, but a power under human control, that “dissolves, diffuses, dissipates in order to re-create,” or at the very least, “it struggles to idealize and unify.” Thus it could link nature and spirit through the medium of art. As in so many instances, Emerson did not acknowledge his debt to Coleridge nor did he use the terms “primary” and “secondary.” However, when he used the term “imagination,” he had clearly assimilated Coleridge’s two-fold conception. For example, he described the imagination as “both act and vision,” following closely Coleridge’s division of the primary imagination (perception or vision) and secondary imagination (artistic act). Emerson wrote that “the Poet should not only be able to use nature as his hieroglyphic, but he should have a still higher power, namely, an adequate message to communicate; a vision fit for such a faculty.”50 This again engaged the primary imagination as a mode of seeing and the secondary as the active ability “to use nature as his hieroglyphic.” He further elaborated the two-fold nature of imagination below, asserting that “it is the office of the poet” to both “perceive and use” the analogies between spirit and nature: All reflexion goes to teach us the strictly emblematic character of the material world. Especially is it the office of the poet to perceive and use these analogies. He converts the solid globe, the land, the sea, the sun, the animals into symbols of thought: he makes the outward creation subordinate and merely a convenient alphabet to express thoughts and emotions. This act or vision of the mind is called Imagination. It is that active state of the mind in which it forces things to obey the laws of thought; takes up all present objects in a despotic manner into its own image and likeness and makes the thought which occupies it the center of the world.51

Coleridge’s thought helped Emerson assimilate more familiar (though rigid) ideas regarding the “emblematic character of the material world”

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from Plato, biblical typology, or Swedenborgian mysticism, with more fluid and dynamic Romantic conceptions. Coleridge’s definition of imagination as “an intermediate faculty, which is at once both active and passive” was dynamic and progressive as opposed to static.52 While Emerson paid homage to the primary imagination’s power of vision, he emphasized the active, creative power of the secondary imagination through active verbs such as “delineates,” “unfixes,” “makes,” “disposes them anew,” “uses,” “conforms,” and “invests.” The poet “converts the solid globe, the land, the sea, the sun, the animals, into symbols of thought” through a process of making “the outward creation subordinate and merely a convenient alphabet to express thoughts and emotions.” The poet simultaneously controlled nature and yet was receptive to the spiritual laws informing it. Coleridge’s definition of imagination, like the reason and understanding distinction, was “a philosophy itself” for Emerson. By engaging the imagination, the poet could create an open-ended model of the Romantic triad: By a few strokes [the poet] delineates, as on air, the sun, the mountain, the camp, the city, the hero, the maiden, not different from what we know them, but only lifted from the ground and afloat before the eye. He unfixes the land and the sea, makes them revolve around the axis of his primary thought, and disposes them anew. Possessed himself by a heroic passion, he uses matter as symbols of it. The sensual man conforms thoughts to things; the poet conforms things to his thoughts. The one esteems nature as rooted and fast; the other, as fluid, and impresses his being thereon. To him, the refractory world is ductile and flexible; he invests dust and stones with humanity, and makes them the words of the Reason. The imagination may be defined to be, the use which the Reason makes of the material world.53

For Coleridge, the imagination was “the repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation” – and the poet was thus granted god-like powers. Emerson’s passage above also describes the poet as a god in miniature: he “unfixes the land and the sea, makes them revolve around the axis of his primary thought, and disposes them anew,” language that echoes biblical creation. The poet “invests dust and stones with humanity” in a similar gesture to God breathing life into Adam. By linking the imagination and reason at the end of the passage, Emerson again revealed his debt to Coleridge’s definitions and distinctions, which fundamentally shaped his thinking about literature. Coleridge’s imagination placed the poet-prophet at the center of the

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Romantic triad, gazing out at the natural world, reading it for spiritual meaning, embodying those perceptions in literary form, thus transmitting them to the rest of humanity. Emerson drew attention to how the imagination acted as a lens through which nature was viewed, dependent upon the special abilities of the poet-prophet: 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.54

With its imagery of sunsets, poems, and varying moods that radically alter perception, this passage echoes Coleridge’s most famous poem about the vagaries of the imagination: “Dejection: An Ode.” In that poem, Coleridge wrote, “we receive but what we give, / And in our life alone does Nature live.” Similarly, Emerson discerned the “many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue” depending on the imaginative state of the perceiver. Coleridge’s definition of the imagination explains other cryptic passages in Emerson – and even whole essays – that suddenly come into focus when they are read through a Coleridgean lens. For example, Emerson wrote, “This insight, which expresses itself by what is called Imagination, is a very high sort of seeing, which does not come by study, but by the intellect being where and what it sees, by sharing the path, or circuit of things through forms, and so making them translucid to others.”55 Without going back to Coleridge, such an idea of imagination was almost nonsensical; phrases like “sharing the path, or circuit of things through forms” are maddening in their vague parlance. Yet after considering Emerson’s close reading and appropriation of Coleridge’s thought, especially his definitions of imagination and symbol as knitting together nature and spirit, such passages become legible. The final phrase, “so making them translucid to others,” reveals a yearning for transparence between nature, spirit, and humanity also at work in Coleridge’s definition of symbol.

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Symbol Coleridge provided Emerson with a powerful and flexible set of literary distinctions, definitions, and dynamic method. These literary concepts enabled Emerson to envision a model of the Romantic triad that was integrated, but open-ended, as opposed to systematically resolved. Coleridge’s definition of a symbol, as sharing spiritual substance with that which it symbolizes, was yet another connective idea that bridged divine, natural, and human language. Barth observed that, for Coleridge, “The act of perceiving symbols (the primary imagination) or of making symbols (the secondary imagination) is essentially a religious act.”56 Coleridge defined symbols as “educts” or products of the imagination: In the Scriptures they are the living educts of the Imagination; of that reconciling and mediatory power, which incorporating the Reason in Images of the Sense, and organizing (as it were) the flux of the Senses by the permanence and self-circling energies of the Reason, gives birth to a system of symbols, harmonious in themselves, and consubstantial with the truths, of which they are the conductors. These are the Wheels which Ezekiel beheld, when the hand of the Lord was upon him, and he saw visions of God as he sate among the captives by the river of Chebar. Whithersoever the Spirit was to go, the wheels went, and thither was their spirit to go: for the spirit of the living creature was in the wheels also. The truths and the symbols that represent them move in conjunction and form the living chariot that bears up (for us) the throne of the Divine Humanity.57

Coleridge defined symbol with a symbol: Ezekiel’s chariot was a vessel or vehicle that moved wherever divine spirit directed it. This was an attractively dynamic formulation for Emerson who echoed Coleridge’s phrasing in his statement, “For all symbols are fluxional; all language is vehicular and transitive.”58 Emerson yoked Coleridge’s imagination, reason, and symbol together: “The imagination may be defined to be, the use which the Reason makes of the material world.”59 Nuances were lost in the transmission: the word “use” – one of Emerson’s favorite words – was far less subtle than Coleridge’s depiction of the imagination that “gives birth to a system of symbols, harmonious in themselves, and consubstantial with the truths, of which they are the conductors.” Emerson characteristically extracted the kernel of Coleridge’s definition and adapted it as he saw fit: in short, symbol embodied the powers of imagination and reason in ­material form. Coleridge’s symbol was intrinsically and organically connected with what it represented, in contrast to the arbitrary and mechanical

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r­epresentation of an “Allegory” or “a picture-language.” Symbol was nothing less than a “translucence of the Eternal through and in the Temporal”: Now an Allegory is but a translation of abstract notions into a picture-­ language which is itself nothing but an abstraction from objects of the senses; the principal being more worthless even than its phantom proxy, both alike unsubstantial, and the former shapeless to boot. On the other hand a Symbol . . . is characterized by a translucence of the Special in the Individual or of the General in the Especial or of the Universal in the General. Above all by the translucence of the Eternal through and in the Temporal. It always partakes of the Reality which it renders intelligible; and while it enunciates the whole, abides itself as a living part in that Unity, of which it is the representative.60

Following the pattern of many of his other distinctions, Coleridge contrasted a material term with a spiritually informed term. This was compelling for Emerson: flexible concepts like Coleridge’s symbol enabled him to hierarchically order lower and higher “uses” of nature in an ascending series without losing a thread of common spiritual identity. The best example of this layering technique is to be found in Emerson’s essay Nature, where Coleridge’s concept of symbol played a pivotal role in the “Language” section, which will be discussed at length in chapter 7. Coleridge’s definition of symbol mediated the Romantic triad by connecting the spiritual, natural, and human worlds in a sacramental view of language. Coleridge wrote that “All minds must think by some symbols”61 and “Language & all symbols give outness to Thoughts / & this the philosophical essence & purpose of Language.”62 Emerson pushed this even further by saying “All things are symbols.”63 This idea of symbol presumed that a unified divine spirit manifested itself in form in order to minister to the human mind. Although Emerson would not have known the following passage since it was in an unpublished notebook, it reveals the essentially intuitive basis for Coleridge’s notion of symbol and natural language: In looking at objects of Nature while I’m thinking, as at yonder moon dimglimmering thro’ the dewy window-pane, I seem rather to be seeking, as it were asking, a symbolical language for something within me that already and forever exists, than observing any thing new. Even when that latter is the case, yet still I have always an obscure feeling as if that new phænomena were the dim Awaking of a forgotten or hidden Truth of my inner Nature. / It is still interesting as a Word, a Symbol! It is Aoyos, the Creator! 64

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The language in this passage is tentative, especially in the phrases “I seem rather to be seeking, as it were asking,” “I have always an obscure feeling,” and “the dim Awaking of a forgotten or hidden Truth.” These were obscure, dim, and amorphous intuitions, and yet at the same time they represented the very foundation of Coleridge’s theory of language and symbol, one expressed (albeit fragmentarily) in countless works, from poems like “Frost at Midnight” and “The Nightingale” to prose formulations in Lay Sermons and Aids to Reflection. Emerson adopted Coleridge’s fluid definition of symbol. He stated that “All the facts of the animal and organic economy,—Sex, Nutriment, Gestation, Birth, Growth, are emphatic symbols of this eternal fact of the passage of the world into the soul of man to suffer there a change, and reappear a new and higher fact, another yet the same.”65 Emerson avoided tentative language here, but he also did not allow the reader to linger long enough on a single statement to ponder its philosophical implications. By calling “all the facts of the animal and organic economy” – the basic material processes at work in nature – “emphatic symbols” of nothing less than “the passage of the world into the soul of man,” Emerson sketched out an entire plan of the Romantic triad. But by using the literary term “symbol,” he gave himself a good deal of leeway. Symbols must be perceived, created, and interpreted in a dynamic process, so they were not tethered to a single meaning. Coleridge’s definition of symbol provided an attractive, if numinous, unity: Poetry finds its origin in that need of expression which is a primary impulse of nature. Every thought in man requires to be uttered, and his whole life is an endeavor to embody in facts the states of the mind. When he lays out a garden, or builds a house or a ship, when he frames a law, or plans a colony, or a war, or when he seeks to inform an individual or an assembly of his views, you see the need he stands in and the joy he finds in unbosoming himself, and contemplating his thought in a new form, on the face of the world, or in the minds of other men. When my thought has passed into a thing, I am one step farther on my way. To be unfolded, explained, expressed, that is the boon we crave of the Universe. The man is only half himself; the other half is his Expression, or the aggregate of his saying and doing.66

In this passage, Emerson began with the principle that poetry shared the “primary impulse of nature” – namely “that need of expression.” From this starting point, he commenced a litany of repeated statements: poetry, like nature – as well as gardening, ship- and house-building, law making, colonizing, and public speaking – were reducible to one single process,

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the “endeavor to embody in facts the states of the mind.” This position could be attributed to Emerson’s interest in Neoplatonism. However, by continuing with the statement “The man is only half himself; the other half is his Expression,” Emerson revealed his interest in the human experience and literary expressions of the Romantic triad rather than in completing a philosophical or theological system. The passage above reveals how Emerson’s essays were often composed of multi-layered accretions formed around his deepest intuitions that nature and spirit were reconcilable. The passage works much better as literature than it does as philosophy: it is composed of a series of lapidary, oracular pronouncements essentially reiterating the same idea in several ways, as if accumulation would eventually instigate a moment of insight for the reader. In order to structure these disorienting statements, Emerson appropriated a literary and philosophical technique from Coleridge: the use of an ascending hierarchy of terms based on different powers of perception. Moving from lower to higher views of nature, for example, provided coherence for many of Emerson’s essays, but it is also evident in individual passages like the one below: There are all degrees of proficiency in knowledge of the world. It is sufficient, to our present purpose, to indicate three. One class live to the utility of the symbol; esteeming health and wealth a final good. Another class live above this mark to the beauty of the symbol; as the poet, and artist, and the naturalist, and man of science. A third class live above the beauty of the symbol to the beauty of the thing signified; these are wise men. The first class have common sense; the second, taste; and the third, spiritual perception. Once in a long time, a man traverses the whole scale, and sees and enjoys the symbol solidly; then also has a clear eye for its beauty, and, lastly, whilst he pitches his tent on this sacred volcanic isle of nature, does not offer to build houses and barns thereon, reverencing the splendor of the God which he sees bursting through each chink and cranny.67

Here Emerson traversed the whole scale of Coleridgean powers – from the basic, practical use of the symbol (through the understanding), to the aesthetic (through the secondary imagination), to the very highest levels (through the imagination and reason raised to a spiritual power). Occasionally someone “traverses the whole scale” of a symbol’s meaning, from its origins in nature to its ultimate transparence in spirit. However, this occurred only “once in a long time,” and it required the highest powers of the poet-prophet, who could then bring these visions of unity back to the rest of humanity through literature.

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Emerson was deeply indebted to Coleridge’s dynamic literary concepts such as the book of nature, the poet-prophet, imagination, and symbol. These ideas were based on a deep-seated intuition about the interconnectedness of the Romantic triad, namely that divine creative powers at work in nature echoed through the human mind’s perceptive and artistic powers. Coleridge’s and Emerson’s theory of art also reveals underlying theological presuppositions that will be explored in the next chapter.

chapter 6

Spirit: “An Influx of the Divine Mind”

Emerson admired Coleridge’s ability to integrate disparate philosophical and literary traditions, particularly those that harmonized the Romantic triad of nature, spirit, and humanity without rigidly circumscribing their exact relation. While previous chapters have investigated Coleridge’s and Emerson’s philosophical and literary mediations of nature and humanity, this chapter is devoted to the third element of the Romantic triad: spirit. Although Emerson was not concerned with doctrine and often used secular rather than Christian language, he believed profoundly in a divine presence that was transcendent and yet present in the material world. His early contact with Coleridge’s thought helped him navigate these opposing positions. Coleridge and Emerson rejected narrow or fixed views of the Romantic triad, relying instead on a series of intuitive theological presuppositions: divine revelation, creation, and evolution. These terms described three conceptions of the divine: 1) God is pure being; 2) he creates the material world and the human mind; and 3) God’s creation eventually ascends and returns to its divine source. Coleridge and Emerson resisted the more extreme conclusions of pantheism, in which nature and spirit were fused indiscriminately, and theism, in which God was remote from his material creation. Essentially, Coleridge and Emerson forged a panentheist position, which claimed that God was in all things, as a way of holding two positions at once: God was transcendent, yet also immanent in the workings of the human mind and nature. In exalted modes of intuition and faith, the transparency of the Romantic triad could be fleetingly perceived. Although Emerson used secularized language such as “the Eternal One,” “the Supreme Good” or the “eternal generator” instead of “God,” he

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adapted a Romantic armature, vocabulary, and method from Coleridge to envision a dynamic relationship between the natural, spiritual, and human worlds. Coleridge’s eclectic amalgamation of Christian, Platonic, and German idealist concepts fundamentally shaped Emerson and the development of Transatlantic Transcendentalism. However, as elements of Coleridge’s thought crossed the Atlantic they warped and shifted. As Packer noted, Hedge’s 1833 article on Coleridge revealed the selective assimilation and transmission of his ideas for an American audience: “Hedge welcomes Coleridge’s unconscious heterodoxy. He sees Coleridge as a valuable importer and disseminator of ideas that are quite easily separable from the husk of Anglican piety in which they are contained.”1 Emerson and other liberal thinkers appropriated key ideas from Coleridge while discarding many metaphysical subtleties and secularizing his theological language. At the other end of the theological spectrum, James Marsh attempted to establish the relevance of Coleridge’s thought in yet another context, one that was doctrinally conservative. In both cases, the underpinning paradigms of Coleridge’s theology were central for the transatlantic history of ideas.

Revelation It is absolutely one, and that it IS, and affirms itself TO BE, is its only predicate. And yet this power, nevertheless, is! In eminence of Being it IS! . . . He bears witness of it to his own mind, even as he describes life and light: and, with the silence of light, it describes itself and dwells in us only as far as we dwell in it . . . By what name then canst thou call a truth so manifested? Is it not REVELATION? (S. T. Coleridge)2

Coleridge desired a foundation for his thought that had both religious authority and philosophical weight, that could satisfy both his heart and head, and act as a point of departure for other disciplines. Revelation served as this grounding point.3 In Christian theology, the word revelation had two senses: the first referred to the corpus of truth which God revealed to humanity, and the second indicated the process by which this divine communication took place.4 This second usage was especially relevant for Coleridge, since it established revelation as a dynamic and ongoing process. God revealed himself in two scriptures – the Bible and the “book of nature.” Coleridge combined these traditional conceptions of revelation with recent innovations in European Romantic thought: he envisioned God as pure consciousness, which enabled his creation, the human mind,

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to know itself, know nature, and to know God, thus harmonizing the ­categories of the Romantic triad. Coleridge placed great importance on the first biblical account of revelation in Exodus 3: 13. God revealed himself to Moses by saying “I am who I am,” a translation of the divine name YHWH or Yahweh which additionally sounds like the Hebrew verb hayah or “to be.” “I am who I am” was a self-reflexive statement of pure identity. Coleridge felt that this biblical revelation was a suitable founding point, since it was a “truth self-grounded, unconditional and known by its own light . . . somewhat which is, simply because it is.”5 Yet at the same time, “I am who I am” was also the causeless cause of all things: “God, not only as the ground of the universe by his essence” was also “its maker and judge by his wisdom and holy will.”6 God was both pure being and pure act. By combining the biblical account of God’s revelation to Moses with the German idealist concept of consciousness, the “I AM” seemed capable of spanning religion and philosophy, creator and created, and the subjective and objective all at once, while accounting for the greatest power of the human mind: the ability to reason and know.7 Coleridge believed that the “Great I AM” could be known in a quasimystical act of knowledge. Thus he connected a biblical view of revelation with the philosophical ideas of Kant, Fichte, and Schelling, as revealed in this passage from the Biographia: This principle, and so characterised manifests itself in the SUM or I AM; which I shall hereafter indiscriminately express by the words spirit, self, and self-consciousness. In this, and in this alone, object and subject, being and knowing, are identical, each involving and supposing the other. In other words, it is a subject which becomes a subject by the act of constructing itself objectively to itself; but which never is an object except for itself, and only so far as by the very same act it becomes a subject. It may be described therefore as a perpetual self-duplication of one and the same power into object and subject, which presuppose each other, and can exist only as antitheses.8

The “I AM” engaged in a “perpetual self-duplication of one and the same power into object and subject,” suggesting a movement from unity to duality, from spirit into matter. Coleridge’s concept of revelation was the theological grounding point for the “spirit” portion of the Romantic triad, and yet it also required an essentially vital and dynamic process of knowing, the domain of the poet-prophet, or the poet-philosopher. Emerson similarly grounded his views in a concept of a divine essence that

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was simultaneously “spirit, self, and self-consciousness,” and ­revelation was the ongoing process of divine manifestation to the human mind. Emerson was impressed by Coleridge’s interpretation of idealism, which fused the “I AM” of biblical revelation, the concept of self-­ consciousness in German idealism, and the Platonic causeless Cause as the ground of philosophy and religion. In the following passage, Emerson specifically refers to Coleridge’s definition of the “I am”: As he becomes man he enters from below upward into the great and absolute nature of which souls drink, of that nature whose property it is to be Cause – to be self-existing Cause, and through all his being, yet obstructed and impure, bursts the first surge of that ocean and he affirms I am, he speaks I. Only Cause can say I. Effect pointeth always at Him, the cause.9

For Emerson, humanity must enter “from below upward into the great and absolute nature of which souls drink” through an act of self-affirmation or self-consciousness, echoing Yahweh’s “I am that I am” on a human scale. Revelation was for Emerson, as for Coleridge, both identity and act – a corpus of revealed truth, as well as an ongoing process of communication: 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. It is an ebb of the individual rivulet before the flowing surges of the sea of life.10

Revelation disclosed a shared identity between humanity and God; just as the “individual rivulet” shared the substance of water with the “flowing surges of the seas,” the human mind was informed by the divine. Revelation was also an act of communication, including both “announcements” and “manifestations” of the divine “into our mind.” Thus the human mind shared an inherent link of identity with God, yet needed to “know” or discover this fact through an ongoing process.

“The great I AM . . . whose choral Echo is the Universe”: Creation Coleridge and Emerson both believed that God revealed himself in the “book of nature.” In the biblical revelation, God revealed himself to Moses as the self-reflexive “I am who I am.” In a second mode of revelation, God revealed himself through the multiplicity of the natural creation. Thus God appeared to the human mind as both one and many – what Coleridge

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referred to as the “Riddle of the World.” Revelation, in its pure form of “I am,” passed into the “it is” of the material world, as the divine sought to communicate itself. As Barbara Packer observed, One way of explaining the reason for God’s decision to create nature in the first place is to say that Spirit needs to evolve an opposite, as the sole means and condition of its manifestation (a notion Emerson took over from Coleridge, who had it from Schelling), then nature returns the dialectical favor by conspiring with Spirit to “emancipate us” – not just from attachment to the material world, but even from belief in its substantial existence, until we can finally see the whole outward creation as a mere spectacle designed for our edification . . .11

For Coleridge, revelation and creation were intimately conjoined divine activities, since nature was “made for the sake of man” to know spirit: Meditate on the nature of a Being whose ideas are creative, and consequently more real, more substantial than the things that, at the height of their creaturely state, are but their dim reflexes: and the intuitive conviction will arise that in such a Being there could exist no motive to the creation of a machine for its own sake; that, therefore, the material world must have been made for the sake of man, at once the high-priest and representative of the Creator, as far as he partakes of that reason in which the essences of all things co-exist in all their distinctions yet as one and indivisible.12

God’s ideas were more substantial than objects in nature, which “are but their dim reflexes.” Humanity became the intermediator between nature and spirit, designated “the high-priest and representative of the Creator” through the power of reason, which perceived that “the essences of all things co-exist in all their distinctions yet as one and indivisible.” Hence an act of knowing was required for humanity to see natural forms as a reflection of God, an act of reading the book of nature. Coleridge wrote, “The other great Bible of God, the book of nature [will] become transparent to us when we regard the forms of matter as words . . . an unrolled but yet a glorious fragment, of the wisdom of the supreme Being.”13 God’s creation, then, helped the human mind know the divine. In the culminating passage of the Biographia, Coleridge illustrated the way in which observing the stars facilitated such an act of knowing: It is Night, sacred Night! the upraised Eye views only the starry Heaven which manifests itself alone: and the outward Beholding is fixed on the sparks

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twinkling in the aweful depth, though Suns of other Worlds, only to preserve the Soul steady and collected in its pure Act of inward Adoration to the great I AM, and to the filial WORD that re-affirmeth it from Eternity to Eternity, whose choral Echo is the Universe.14

The “upraised Eye” beheld the stars outwardly, while the Soul inwardly adored the great I AM. The “filial WORD,” or logos, was God’s embodiment in the form of Christ and the universe was its “choral Echo.”15 Coleridge invoked a harmonic model of the Romantic triad that depended upon acts of perception that were at once aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritual. Coleridge continually sought mediating concepts between God, the human mind, and nature. He relied upon a nesting series of theological concepts to explain the mystery of the one and the many, always beginning from top down, that is, working from the divine and progressing down toward nature. Modiano observed that “from his earliest attempts to put together his system of natural philosophy, Coleridge had consistently begun with the biblical account of the creation of the world out of chaos, and not with an analysis of the powers of nature.”16 At the very top of the pyramid was “the Eternal I AM,” the source of all being and knowing. Then there was logos, an embodiment of divine spirit intended to reveal God’s wisdom to the world. Next there was the human mind, created in God’s image, endowed with the manifold powers of reason, understanding, and imagination. These powers in turn created language, symbols and ideas, art and philosophy. Finally, there was the natural world. Coleridge hoped that future discoveries in science would establish a definitive link between the natural, human, and divine. For Coleridge, God’s revelation involved creation, as divine spirit was embodied in material form through logos, symbol, scripture, or nature. Emerson similarly yoked the theological concepts of revelation and creation, maintaining that truth must be embodied or manifested in order to be known. However, he adapted Coleridge’s thought for an American audience, veering away from some of his metaphysical subtleties, secularizing much of his theological language, and embracing a more practical outlook. Outward forms, such as objects in nature, pictures, or language, were needed as vehicles for communication, a tradition he would have been familiar with from his days as a Unitarian minister.17 But Coleridge’s two-fold notion of revelation and creation, expressed as “the thought and the publication,” gave Emerson even more nuanced ideas to work with, as revealed in the passage below:

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To genius must always go two gifts, the thought and the publication. The first is revelation, always a miracle . . . It is the advent of truth into the world, a form of thought now, for the first time, bursting into the universe, a child of the old eternal soul, a piece of genuine and immeasurable greatness . . . but to make it available, it needs a vehicle or art by which it is conveyed to men. To be communicable, it must become picture or sensible object. We must learn the language of facts. The most wonderful inspirations die with their subject, if he has no hand to paint them to the senses.18

Revelation was a divine inspiration that needed “publication” in order to be known, requiring “genius” and “a vehicle or art by which it is conveyed to man” – the latter two terms were both Coleridgean.19 As Chai noted, nature was more than an analogy to the realm of spirit: rather, “spiritual energy is by definition creative, hence must manifest itself in a neverending succession of new forms, just as energy seeks always to discharge itself.”20 This “never-ending succession of new forms” described both the structure and function of Emerson’s essays, in which a central idea often proliferated in a series of choral echoes. While Coleridge emphasized the role of logos, the scriptures, and nature as manifestations of the divine, Emerson was most interested in natural forms or human acts serving this function. Although he referred to Jesus as a “minister of the pure Reason,”21 he did not privilege Christianity alone; rather he wrote that “every nation has some more or less perfect transcript” of revelation.22 Emerson also shifted emphasis from public and institutionalized modes of divine revelation, such as the Bible or church rites, to experiential and private modes of revelation experienced by the individual mind. Shorn of its theological trappings, revelation became a personal epiphany: Let the aspirant learn the revelation of all nature, of all thought, to his heart; this, namely; that the Highest dwells with him; that the sources of nature are in his own soul, if the sentiment of Duty is there . . . By driving from me all false and inferior thoughts, I come at last to see the face of an absolute Justice and Truth and Love. It is at once Wisdom, Goodness, Power, and Peace. Calm, immutable, one, it overhangs me like a sky. It is the causing, causing Reason. I see that in its nature it is impersonal; and that its authority pervades all my real, all my possible actions.23

In this passage, Emerson harmonized the Romantic triad by linking “the revelation of all nature, of all thought” with the realization that “the Highest dwells with him.” He used a secularized term for God, calling him

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“an absolute Justice and Truth and Love” who was the source, in turn, of both nature and his own soul. The language was deliberately vague, facilitating the echoing of identities between nature and spirit. However, this union was characteristically fleeting and hard-won. It required an elevated seeing, necessitating “driving from me all false and inferior thoughts.” He used Coleridge’s concept of “Reason” here as a grounding point, repeating “causing, causing” to indicate its self-reflexivity as a causeless cause. His use of Coleridge here was substantial, but as in many other instances, unacknowledged. While Emerson was fundamentally indebted to Coleridge, he also liberally adapted his ideas. For example, he was much more strident than Coleridge in distinguishing between this kind of private revelation and the institutional notion of “Revelation and the Church.” Both terms are capitalized in the passage below, underscoring their societal status and importance: But the Revelation and the Church both labor under one perpetual disadvantage. They need always the presence of the same spirit that created them to make them thoroughly valid . . . Thought is like manna, that fell out of heaven, which cannot be stored. It will be sour if kept; and tomorrow must be gathered anew. Perpetually must we east ourselves or we get into irrecoverable error starting from the plainest truths, and keeping, as we think, the straightest road of logic.24

For Emerson, revelation was only valid as an ongoing and dynamic process, in which “perpetually must we east ourselves.” Here Emerson departed from Coleridge’s reverential treatment of biblical and ecclesiastical revelation, revealing his anti-authoritarian impulses by choosing newness over tradition, individualism over authority, direct experience over second-hand accounts. At the same time he defended, far more boldly than Coleridge ever did, the circling and often contradictory pathways of his thought, claiming that truth can only be found in a continual intellectual process. Another dynamic process was essential for Coleridge’s and Emerson’s theological intuitions: evolution.

“And, striving to be man, the worm / Mounts through all the spires of form”: Evolution We begin with the I KNOW MYSELF, in order to end with the absolute I AM. We proceed from the SELF, in order to lose and find all self in GOD. (S. T. Coleridge)25

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Spirit: “An Influx of the Divine Mind[ 103 Nature is a Line in constant and continuous evolution. (S. T. Coleridge)26

Revelation and creation embodied dynamic processes through which God communicated to humankind in myriad ways. A pair of polar forces was at work: on one hand God manifested himself through revelation, multiplying unity into diversity, and yet in an equal and opposite force, multiplicity returned to the wholeness of its divine source once again.27 Coleridge used the term “evolution” to describe the ascent and return of God’s creation to its divine source, a much different idea than the more familiar concept of Darwinian evolution.28 Emerson was influenced by Coleridge’s idea of evolution, yet another instance of the spiral motif that informed so many of his early essays. In the etymology of the word evolution, the prefix “e” can mean upward, outward, or forth, and “volve,” from the Old French “volver” means to roll.29 Evolution, then, was a progressive movement rolling upward, outward, and forward all at once. Coleridge envisioned humanity moving toward an exalted state of union with God, and in a parallel movement, forms in the natural world continually ascended toward higher states of being, at once more individually distinct and closer to the divine. Coleridge’s concept of evolution drew upon many sources, including Neoplatonism, natural philosophy, and idealism.30 It was also influenced by the following section of Milton’s Paradise Lost, as quoted in the Biographia: O Adam! one Almighty is, from whom All things proceed, and up to him return If not depraved from good: created all Such to perfection, one first nature all Indued with various forms, various degrees Of substance, and in things that live, of life; But more refin’d, more spiritous and pure, As nearer to him plac’d or nearer tending, Each in their several active spheres assign’d, Till body up to spirit work, in bounds Proportion’d to each kind. So from the root Springs lighter the green stalk: from thence the leaves More airy: last, the bright consummate flower Spirits odorous breathes. Flowers and their fruit, Man’s nourishment, by gradual scale sublim’d, To vital spirits aspire: to animal: To intellectual! – give both life and sense,

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Fancy and understanding: whence the soul REASON receives. And reason is her being, Discursive or intuitive.31

In Milton’s lines, the concept of the “Great Chain of Being” was modified in several important ways. The Great Chain of Being, according to Lovejoy, referred to the idea that nature consisted “of an infinite number of links ranging in hierarchical order from the meagerest kind of existents, which barely escape non-existence, through ‘every possible’ grade up to the ens perfectissimum – or, in a somewhat more orthodox version, to the highest possible kind of creature . . .”32 However, Milton, and Coleridge after him, saw an active principle at work: a dynamic process of ascent rather than a fixed order. “Till body up to spirit work” indicated a hierarchy of natural forms aspiring to become spiritual. From the root came the stalk, the flowers, and the fruit in organic progression. Even more dramatically, the forms in the vegetable creation “To vital spirits aspire: to animal: To intellectual! ” In addition to this dynamic ascent, Coleridge turned the linear image of the Great Chain into an upwardly and outwardly expanding spiral: he wrote that nature “does not ascend as links in a suspended chain, but as the steps in a ladder; or rather she at one and the same time ascends as by a climax, and expands as the concentric circles on the lake from the point to which the stone in its fall had given the first impulse.”33 The static scheme of the Great Chain of Being was transformed in the Romantic period into a process of active ascent and becoming.34 However, there were certain limits in place, limits which were exceedingly important to Coleridge. Although at first glance Milton’s lines might seem to foreshadow Darwin’s evolution, there were several barriers to prevent an indiscriminate movement from lower to higher: the different classes of forms are “Each in their several active spheres assign’d,” indicating an essential difference between the human and vegetable worlds. Although “body up to spirit work,” it does so “in bounds / Proportion’d to each kind.” Coleridge emphasized the difference between degree and kind as essential to correct thinking.35 Although there were “various degrees / Of substance” in nature, forms evolved within a subset of their kind. Although all things ascended into higher forms, this process followed the pre-established order of divine law, rather than the happenstance of Darwinian evolution. Most importantly, there was a chasm between human and natural evolution, which were not continuous processes; in other words, algae could evolve into a lily, or a worm into a bird, but not an ape into a human, according to Coleridge’s interpretation of evolution. For theological reasons, he could not accept the idea of humans

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evolving from animals, although he believed that animals shared lower human capacities such as instinct and understanding.36 Material nature and human nature were not linked by their innate similarity, but rather because they were creations of God guided and formed by divine law. Coleridge created two categories of evolution: human and natural, which corresponded to the subjective and objective poles of the dynamic philosophy.37 The subjective or human pole of evolution centered upon consciousness and knowledge. The objective or natural pole focused upon scientific laws that reflected greater divine laws. In the passage below, Coleridge referred to both: that living Principle, at once the Giver and the Gift! of that anointing Faith, which in endless evolution “teaches us of all things, and is truth!” For all things are but parts and forms of its progressive manifestation, and every new knowledge but a new organ of sense and insight into this one all-inclusive Verity, which, still filling the vessel of the understanding, still dilates it to a capacity of yet other and yet greater Truths, and thus makes the soul feel its poverty by the very amplitude of its present, and the immensity of its reversionary, wealth.38

Here Coleridge discussed both human and natural categories of “endless evolution.” In nature, “all things are but parts and forms of [evolution’s] progressive manifestation.” In the human mind, “every new knowledge [is] but a new organ of sense and insight into this one all-inclusive Verity.” The principle of evolution drove the mind as it “dilates it to a capacity of yet other and yet greater Truths.” While the human mind evolved through higher apprehensions of truth, the material world, without a similar endowment of consciousness, evolved organically from simpler to more complex forms, while retaining a principle of unity. Coleridge explored this idea at length in “Theory of Life,” where he asserted that, “Life itself is not a Thing . . . but an Act and Process” involving two forces in balance: a “tendency to individuate” and “the opposite tendency to connect, even as the centrifugal power supposes the centripetal.”39 Coleridge denoted the evolutionary tendency toward “the highest and most comprehensive individuality” with the term “Individuation,” a paradoxical balancing of unity and “Distinctity” in a single process: Take an Acorn—and consider it in its successive growth as the Object of Watchful Attention.—It is one—but lo! it is becoming many—Nay, it still remains One—&c &c till at length the full Idea of the Oak is mastered—the original Unity becoming more & more intense, as the Distinctity becomes apparent.40

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Coleridge mediated between the multiplicity of nature and the unity of spirit through the concept of evolution, a principle that simultaneously entailed both ascent and return to the divine.41 The exact way in which a natural form was both intensely individual and yet unified with God was paradoxical, requiring a leap of intuitive thinking to comprehend. Clearly, individuation was another instance of Coleridge’s profound desire to find possible hypotheses to explain the mystery of the many and the one. As Vallins observed, “Coleridge’s metaphysical explanation of organic life is only implicit. He will not commit himself to any definite metaphysical structure and only suggests such a structure by using the term ‘life’ to mean ‘consciousness,’ even though he is seeking an explanation of organisms.”42 In the revealing passage below, Coleridge confessed that his goal was not to explain life, but rather to account for it – in other words, he wished to posit the unity of nature and spirit without describing their exact relation: To account for Life is one thing; to explain Life another. In the first we are supposed to state something prior (if not in time, yet in the order of Nature) to the thing accounted for, as the ground or cause of that thing . . . And to this, in the question of Life, I know no possible answer but GOD. To account for a thing is to see into the principle of its possibility, and from that principle to evolve its being.43

This passage perfectly reveals Coleridge’s intellectual character: rather than attempting to establish a systematic explanation of spirit and nature, he contented himself with a far different and more ambiguous project. He decided to “account” for life, which did not entail founding a system, but instead seeing “into the principle of its possibility,” with confidence that from that principle it was possible to “evolve its being.” In this passage we do not see the locutions of a systematic philosopher, but rather the musings of a religious man with an intense faith that nature and spirit could potentially be unified. Although Emerson did not know Coleridge’s “Theory of Life,” he espoused a similar concept of evolution as the spiritual ascent of humanity and nature toward the divine, a central paradigm in his early essays and lectures.44 If Coleridge’s unfinished fragments were the unintended but inevitable result of his conflicting views of multiplicity and unity, Emerson raised this condition to a deliberate art, claiming that “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”45 While Coleridge stated “All things strive to ascend, and ascend in their striving,” Emerson turned this ­statement into a literary technique of relentless intellectual process.46 Emerson paraphrased Plato’s remark that “All things are in a scale,

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and, begin where we will, ascend and ascend.”47 Like Coleridge, Emerson saw a principle of evolution working in both the material and human realms, an idea he found in Platonism and Neoplatonism that was articulated by Coleridge in ways that also harmonized with Christianity, scientific theories, and German idealism. However, Emerson preferred to quote Plato rather than Coleridge; he saw these sources as part of a universal lineage, and therefore thought no specific attribution to a single source was necessary. Unlike Coleridge, however, Emerson was not preoccupied with qualifying that the animals could not evolve into humans. Rather, lower forms “betray the approaches of cause” in human life: let us endeavor to mark as we can the few steps we can distinguish in the ascending scale of Nature. First we behold the inorganic creation, the earth, the water, and the rock . . . The chrystal, the chemical affinities, the plant, are a higher form of being and betray the approaches of cause. Then we come to the animal. Over the brute creation seems to brood a common soul, the same in all, which by its own virtue determines the various forms in which it embodies itself and is never individualized . . . This life of which as an element they all partake without an intimation of individual right is the feeblest or I might say the outmost breath of God; according to the ancient sentence, God is the soul of brutes. Thus living from God, the soul of Nature, they are in harmony with it; they are innocent.   In a higher sphere of rational life dwells the infant man . . . The child lives with God and as pervaded by this high mind is animated by a certain pure and sublime spirit which attracts the perpetual reverence of men.48

While the fact that infant man existed “in a higher sphere” indicated a separation of kind between animals and humans, Emerson did not make that division as explicitly clear as Coleridge. He did not feel the pressure to conform to a traditionally theological account of creation, but rather attempted to harmonize the hierarchical levels of the Great Chain of Being, scientific classification, and the Neoplatonic principle of “a common soul” with Romantic principles of consciousness.49 Although Emerson did discuss evolution in animals and plants, he was most enamored with the idea of the human mind evolving to higher modes of perception. Emerson declared that humans should always be engaged in an ongoing state of intellectual evolution: The life of man is a self-evolving circle, which, from a ring imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides outwards to new and larger circles, and that without end. The extent to which this generation of circles, wheel without wheel will

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go, depends on the force or truth of the individual soul. For, it is the inert effort of each thought having formed itself into a circular wave of circumstance, – as, for instance, an empire, rules of an art, a local usage, a religious rite, – to heap itself on that ridge, and to solidify, and hem in the life. But if the soul is quick and strong, it bursts over that boundary on all sides, and expands another orbit on the great deep, which also runs up into a high wave, with attempt again to stop and to bind. But the heart refuses to be imprisoned; in its first and narrowest pulses, it already tends outward with a vast force, and to immense and innumerable expansions.50

“Circles” is one of Emerson’s most cryptic and intriguing essays, but applying Coleridge’s idea of evolution to his statement that “The life of man is a self-evolving circle” renders the essay suddenly legible. Human evolution was an active and purposeful ascension to higher levels of perception, reminiscent of the image of the spiral staircase: “Step by step we scale this mysterious ladder: the steps are actions; the new prospect is power.”51 The ultimate goal of Emerson’s evolution was return to a “home” in nature and in the divine: “If it be seen a little deeper all growth, all progress is a constant endeavor of the Soul to find that which is within without there in nature; to answer its question; Itself is a Question, and Nature is the Answer; to produce a unity within and without; to find a Home.”52 Growth or progress was an “endeavor of the Soul” to “produce a unity within and without.”53 Thus progress involved a movement from diversity to unity, from outer to inner, and from nature to spirit. If a high enough level of seeing were attained, evolution in nature and mind could be seen as mirror images: Nature recites her lesson once more in a higher mood. The mind is a finer body, and resumes its functions of feeding, digesting, absorbing, excluding, and generating, in a new and ethereal element. Here in the brain is all the process of alimentation repeated, in the acquiring, comparing, digesting, and assimilating of experience. Here again is the mystery of generation repeated. In the brain, are male and female faculties: here is marriage, here is fruit. And there is no limit to this ascending scale, but series on series. Everything at the end of one use is taken up into the next, each series punctually repeating every organ and process of the last. We are adapted to infinity. We are hard to please, and love nothing which ends: and in nature is no end, but everything, at the end of one use, is lifted into a superior, and the ascent of these things climbs into dæmonic and celestial natures. Creative force, like a musical composer, goes on unweariedly repeating a simple air or theme, now high, now low, in solo, in chorus, ten thousand times reverberated, till it fills earth and heaven with the chant.54

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While Coleridge might have taken exception to such an easy translation of material and spiritual processes, Emerson saw such correspondence everywhere. Evolution was the “creative force” that went on “unweariedly repeating a simple air or theme . . . till it fills heaven and earth with the chant,” an apt description of the literary form of many of Emerson’s essays. While evolution did serve a “higher end . . . the passage of the soul into higher forms,”55 this process was never-ending. This is another indication that Emerson was not a pantheist or a monist: he stated “We are adapted to infinity” and yet could not accept a final resolution, since “We are hard to please, and love nothing which ends.” Thus he resisted a fixed system of the Romantic triad, choosing a dynamic model instead. Coleridge and Emerson resisted simply equating spirit and nature as substantially one. Although Emerson believed ardently in the correspondence of spirit and nature, spirit was always prior and transcendent, at once higher and in some sense separate from creation. Thus Emerson drew back from an inherently pantheistic position, in which spirit and nature were automatically equated, into a world in which the human mind, through an act of elevated consciousness, could catch a fleeting glimpse of the possibility of such a unity: [Plato] represents the privilege of the intellect, the power, namely, of carrying up every fact to successive platforms, and so disclosing in every fact a germ of expansion. These expansions are in the essence of thought . . . The expansions are organic. The mind does not create what it perceives, any more than the eye creates the rose. In ascribing to Plato the merit of announcing them, we only say, here was a more complete man who could apply to nature the whole scale of the senses, the understanding, and the reason.   These expansions or extensions consist in continuing the spiritual sight where the horizon falls on our natural vision, and by this second sight ­discovering the long lines of law which shoot in every direction.56

In “Theory of Life,” Coleridge made the qualifying statement that “To account for life is one thing; to explain Life another.” Similarly, Emerson focused on the human ability to potentially see spirit and nature transparently, without describing the exact nature of that relation. Evolution permitted the “expansions” of every idea, from lower to higher levels, until it passed from “the horizon . . . of our natural vision” into a spiritual seeing, a movement from the understanding to reason and faith. In an exalted state of perception, one could see “the long lines of law that shoot in every direction,” potentially linking the Romantic triad of the material, spiritual,

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and human worlds. The exact way this happened was not as important to Emerson as the faith that it was possible. Emerson saw the process of evolution everywhere, both in the material world (“striving to be man, the worm / Mounts through all the spires of form”)57 and in the human mind (“the unfolding of his nature, is the chief end of man”).58 In this process, the natural world and the human mind evolved toward a divine state of union. However, seeing the Romantic triad required an elevated act of perception, an act at once fleeting and ­problematic. It required seeing God in the world, panentheistically.

Panentheism: Mediating between Pantheism and Theism Coleridge’s and Emerson’s theological positions cannot be easily pigeonholed, in particular because of their conflicting views on immanence and transcendence. Both felt intuitively that God was immanent in the world and yet distinct from it, transcendent yet intimately involved in nature. They resisted two unsatisfactory positions: accepting the remote God of Christian theism, or risking the indiscriminate merging of spirit and nature in pantheism. In attempting to mediate between these extremes, Coleridge’s and Emerson’s theological views approximate panentheism, in which all things are found in God, rather than the natural world being either wholly one with or wholly separate from the divine. Pantheism is defined as “a belief or philosophical theory that God is everything and everything is God.”59 Thus God is the sum of all things, including the natural world. On the other hand, theism asserts a transcendent God who creates, governs, and preserves the world, but is essentially separate from his natural creation.60 Panentheism, rather than declaring that God is the sum of all things, emphasizes instead that God is in all things: the Oxford English Dictionary defines the term as “The theory or belief that God encompasses and interpenetrates the universe but at the same time is greater than and independent of it.”61 The difference was narrow, yet of essential importance to Coleridge and Emerson. The term panentheism was coined by K. C. F. Krause (1781–1832), a post-Kantian idealist who studied with Fichte and Schelling. Krause believed that although all things were God, God was not equal to all things.62 The ideas of the seventeenth-century theologian Nicholas Malebranche also approximated panentheism. Malebranche, who was admired by Coleridge, believed that the human mind had access to divine archetypes or ideas through a process of divine illumination.63 In this way, through an act of perception, it was possible to see God in the world, something very different from claiming reductively that God was either

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one with – or separate from – the world. Although neither Coleridge nor Emerson actively declared themselves to be panentheists, panentheism best describes their theological positions. In Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition, Thomas McFarland described Coleridge’s complex relationship to pantheism.64 McFarland noted that panentheism, as an alternative to pantheism, is “an attractive ­formulation – as are most formulations that allow us to have it both ways. Indeed, both Leibniz and Coleridge at times enunciate similar conceptions.”65 However, McFarland asserted that panentheism cannot be distinguished from pantheism, because it suggested a part–whole relationship that compromised the unity of God. McFarland stated that both the pantheist and the panentheist believed that “God must be somehow in all things – be these things themselves.”66 More recent scholarship has revisited the question, acknowledging that panentheism is indeed a distinct third alternative to theism and pantheism. David Vallins suggested that Coleridge avoided pantheism by using the ideas of evolution and individuation to link all things not by essence, but through process: It is, indeed, the very absence of an independent “substance” in Coleridge’s system which leads to its central paradox. All things are one, he suggests, not because they are different forms of a single essence, but because they are all stages in a single progression. This progression, however, is a process of individuation – that is, a progressive detachment of the individual from the intrinsic unity of phenomena.67

James Engell noted that many Romantics, including Coleridge, believed during at least one important stage of their lives in the en kai pan, the “one and the all,” whose two elements form the word panentheism. This view recognizes the inviolable unity of God as one separate being yet sees him simultaneously as a presence dwelling in each part of his creation. The idea of the creative imagination rekindled a full-blown panentheistic religion and cosmology in many Romantics.68

For a thinker like Coleridge who emphasized attention to the “value of the Science of Words,”69 including minute but significant shadings of linguistic usage, I think panentheism was a valid third option to pantheism or theism. Pantheism was a statement of identity, declaring ontologically the exact relation of nature and spirit as indiscriminately equivalent. On the other hand, the preposition “in” of panentheism’s “God is in all

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things” changed the emphasis dramatically: it did not answer how God is in all things, or whether spirit or nature was prior, or to what degree God was in the world. In this way it did not circumscribe the relation of spirit and nature, since it did not state its relation exactly. Such ambiguity allowed for a mystical apprehension of the divine in the world without openly subscribing to a pantheistic unity, something that would have satisfied both the intuitions of Coleridge and his wariness about the dangers of pantheism. Panentheism dovetailed with Romanticism’s emphasis on the nature of consciousness: to see God in the world required an act of elevated perception, a moment of fleeting insight rather than a static statement of identity. Panentheism would thus explain Coleridge’s attachment to the biblical text from Acts, “For in Him we live, and move, and have our being.”70 The use of the preposition “in” cannot be ignored here. Coleridge was aware of the theological ramifications of using the preposition “in” rather than “from” or “with” in the following passage: Here then we have, by anticipation the distinction between the conditional finite I . . . and the absolute I AM, and likewise the dependence or rather the inherence of the former in the latter: in whom “we live, and move, and have our being,” as St. Paul divinely asserts, differing widely from the Theists of the mechanic school (as Sir I. Newton, Locke, &c.) who must say from whom we had our being, and with it life and the powers of life.71

Coleridge here established the relation between the personal self and the absolute I AM, asserting the “inherence” of the former in the latter; humans live, move, and have their being in God, as opposed to a God “from whom we had our being.” The phrase “from whom” implied a remote relation between humanity and God in both time and space, evoking a more distant and historically limited relation between Creator and created. In contrast, “in whom” upheld an intimate inherence of ­creation within God, while still preserving a sense of separate identities. Coleridge gravitated to a panentheist position by using the image of a “vehicle” through which divine spirit travels, such as the chariot of Ezekiel in his definition of symbol: “Whithersoever the Spirit was to go, the wheels went, and thither was their spirit to go: for the spirit of the living creature was in the wheels also.”72 God was found “in” the wheels of the chariot, in the same way that God was found in humanity or in nature in panentheism. To say that God was the same as the chariot wheel would be preposterous; however, to say that God directed and moved the wheel, in some way inhabiting the wheel, was a different proposition.

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Coleridge insisted that “a Scheme of Christian Faith which does not arise out of and shoot its beams downward into, the Scheme of Nature, but stands aloof, as an insulated After-thought, must be false or distorted in all its particulars.”73 McFarland observed that Coleridge was “dedicated to having both a personal God and a living nature.”74 Only an integrated vision of the Romantic triad would satisfy him as a thinker. However, I am not arguing that Coleridge openly declared himself a panentheist, but rather that panentheism was an inadvertent end-product of his intellectual struggles. Panentheism explains the curiously lopsided handling of spirit and nature in Coleridge’s work: spirit and nature can be joined, but spirit was always prior and above nature hierarchically. God was transcendent, yet intimately informed his creation. Through an act of perception, it was possible to see God in the world, but not necessarily know how exactly that relation worked. In this way, Coleridge could amalgamate elements of empiricism, idealism, and even mysticism. Most importantly, Coleridge’s pan­en­theism emphasized process, rather than identity: visions of God in the world must be continually renewed and pursued in elevated modes of seeing. At the heart of panentheism was an act of perception, in order to see God in the world. This act was essentially spiritual, transcending the bounds of normal logic or everyday perception. Certain divinely inspired powers, such as a high use of the intellect (reason), a creative act (imagination), or religious intuition (faith), could access these high levels of seeing. The language of perception saturates the following passage: “Religion is the sun whose warmth indeed swells, and stirs, and actuates the life of nature, but who at the same time beholds all the growth of life with a master-eye, makes all objects glorious on which he looks, and by that glory visible to others.”75 Religion “swells, and stirs, and actuates the life of nature” in the same way that spirit inhabited the wheels of Ezekiel. Several modes of perception are at work here: spirit “beholds” life with a “master-eye,” and transforms all objects “glorious on which he looks” and finally makes that glory “visible to others.” Spirit “actuates” nature, from a distance observes its growth, and informs human perception. The image of light embodied this spiritual force, as “God over all fills, and shines through, nature!”76 Coleridge often used the metaphor of light to represent a panentheistic spiritual force working through nature: The error here – and it is a grievous error – consists in the word “Nature.” There is, there can be no Light of Nature. There may be a light in or upon it; but this is the Light, that shineth down into the Darkness – i.e. in Nature;

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and the Darkness comprehendeth it not. All ideas, i.e. spiritual truths, are ­supernatural.77

If Coleridge were a pantheist, he would equate the light of spirit and the light of nature. However, he took great pains here to distinguish that there cannot be a light “of” nature, which would imply an equal identity between nature and spirit, but only “a light in or upon it.” Thus nature did not comprehend itself, nor its divine light – only the human or divine mind could perceive this. Through a careful orchestration of terms, Coleridge attempted to reconcile nature and spirit using a strategy consistent with panentheism. Although Emerson did not fear pantheism, he consistently upheld the transcendence of God and the hierarchical relation between spirit and nature.78 Emerson also attempted to mediate between pantheism and theism, and Coleridge’s conceptions were useful for this endeavor.79 Both thinkers emphasized that in elevated moments of perception, nature and spirit could be seen transparently: Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE. 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.80

Although Emerson used the non-Christian terms “soul of the whole” and “over-soul,” his vision was panentheistic. The divine was “self-sufficing and perfect in every hour” and perfectly unified as “the eternal ONE.” However, this “eternal ONE” was also paradoxically many, composed of “the shining parts” of the natural world. Like Coleridge, Emerson turned to a mystical act of perception, in which “the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one.” While at first glance this collapsing of identities might appear pantheistic, note the mediating language in the above passage: “within man is the soul of the whole” suggested that spirit existed within man, but was not equal to him, while the phrases “this deep power in which we exist” and “innate in every man” also used the preposition “in” to indicate divine power flowing

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through humanity while distinguishing their separate identities. Only through an elevated and fleeting act of perception could God be seen in the world, by “the vision of that Wisdom” through which “the horoscope of the ages [can] be read.” Emerson resisted pantheism by designating divine spirit as above the material world. His world-view was hierarchical, beginning with the lower spheres of material nature and ascending to the divine, as illustrated in Nature and many of the early lectures. Yet this hierarchy could sometimes dissolve into transparency: “From within or from behind, a light shines through us upon things, and makes us aware that we are nothing, but the light is all.”81 Emerson, like Coleridge, used the symbol of light shining “from within or from behind,” “through us” and “upon things,” all phrases that indicate separation while paradoxically at the same time suggesting unity. This phrasing indicated a panentheistic light shining on or in nature, not a pantheistic light of nature. Coleridge’s reason, loosely adapted by Emerson below to mean both spiritual intuition and the soul itself, represented this faculty of seeing God in the world: To this Soul, this Reason, every human being has access. And every moment when the individual feels himself interpenetrated by it, is memorable. Always, I believe, 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, – which is its rarer appearance, – to the faintest glow of virtuous emotion, in which form it warms, like our household fires, all the families and associations of men, and makes society possible.82

Perception of the divine depended upon the abilities or “state” of the perceiver, ranging from “extasy and trance and prophetic inspiration” to “the faintest glow of virtuous emotion.” In the higher and rarer case, the individual could experience an “interpenetration” of the divine, the human, and the natural world. In such epiphanic moments, all notions of separate identity dissolved, and yet Emerson still used the preposition “in” to maintain a hierarchy between spirit and nature. The most dramatic instance of this occurs in the phrase, “I am God in nature; I am a weed by the wall.”83 Here Emerson declared himself to be God in nature, a substantially different statement than simply “I am God” or “God is nature.” By declaring himself “a weed by the wall” he identified himself with nature as a fellow creature in the divine creation. Through these subtle linguistic differences, learned in part from Coleridge, Emerson upheld a ­panentheistic ­relation

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between the Romantic triad of nature, spirit, and humanity through complex word-play that resisted simple categorization.

“The Completing KEY-STONE”: Faith Coleridge called faith “the completing KEY-STONE”84 of his world-view. The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church defines two elements of faith, objective and subjective: the former refers to the body of truth found in the doctrine of the Church and the Bible. The latter, which was more important for Emerson, refers to the human response to divine truth, requiring an act of the will and faculties beyond the merely intellectual.85 Faith was a form of “active knowledge” rather than a passive acceptance of the limits of knowledge.86 McNiece perceptively stated, “Romanticism defined faith as an activity expressive of our whole nature, which draws from and unites imagination, reason and will, ultimately leading to notions of the inseparability of knowledge and being, subject and object, obscurely revealed in symbol.”87 Once the limits of reason were reached, faith was its continuation, as Coleridge wrote: “Religion passes out of the ken of Reason only where the eye of Reason has reached its own Horizon; and that Faith is then but its continuation: even as the Day softens away into the sweet Twilight, and Twilight, hushed and breathless, steals into the Darkness.”88 Coleridge’s faith that God could be known to the human mind, and that nature and spirit are in some way interrelated, completed his world-view intuitively rather than philosophically. Although faith informed experience, it was not derived from experience, thus supporting a panentheistic hierarchy of spirit over nature: This primal act of faith is enunciated in the word, GOD: a faith not derived from experience, but its ground and source, and without which the fleeting chaos of facts would no more form experience, that the dust of the grave can of itself make a living man.89

Faith, like the shaping spirit of imagination, gave form to chaos through an intimation of divine spirit working through all things. After rejecting systematic resolutions of the Romantic triad, Coleridge and Emerson sought refuge in an ineffable conclusion: only through faith could such mysteries be finally apprehended. The idea of faith was also central for Emerson. He wrote, “The Transcendentalist adopts the whole connexion of spiritual doctrine. 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.”90

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Despite his reservations about doctrinal religion, Emerson embraced the “faith that there is a meaning therein” for each and every object in nature: If the opportunity is afforded him he may study the leaves of the lightest flower that opens upon the breast of summer, in the faith that there is a meaning therein before whose truth and beauty all external grace must vanish, as it may be, all this outward universe shall one day disappear, when its whole sense hath been comprehended and engraved forever in the eternal thoughts of the human mind.91

Emerson’s faith in the interrelationship of the Romantic triad of nature, spirit, and humanity was at the center of all his essays, one of a handful of central ideas consistently applied and reiterated throughout all of his work. Yet this elevated state of seeing was difficult to attain, as evidenced by his use of conditional language: “all this outward universe shall one day disappear” once its “whole sense hath been comprehended” by the human mind. Faith presumed that God’s book of nature was readable in its entirety, even if total transparence lay in the distant and hypothetical future. Faith was the precondition for Emerson’s search for truth, as revealed by his statement that “an excess of Faith” was necessary to be a true Transcendentalist: Shall we say, then, that Transcendentalism is the Saturnalia or excess of Faith; the presentiment of a faith proper to man in his integrity, excessive only when his imperfect obedience hinders the satisfaction of his wish. Nature is transcendental, exists primarily, necessarily, ever works and advances, yet takes no thought for the morrow.92

At the heart of Coleridge’s and Emerson’s view of nature and spirit was an intuitive conclusion, accessible by faith: God existed in the world and could be perceived there. If Emerson confusingly stated “Nature is transcendental” rather than God, it illustrated the union of nature and spirit possible in these high levels of seeing. However, this brief glimpse of unity was problematically limited, since “Our faith comes in moments; our vice is habitual.”93 Emerson revealed his frustration with the transience of faith: [My faith] is a certain brief experience, which surprised me in the highway or in the market, in some place, at some time,—whether in the body or out of the body, God knoweth . . . Well, in the space of an hour, probably, I was let down from this height; I was at my old tricks, the selfish member of a selfish society. My life is superficial, takes no root in the deep world; I ask, When shall I die,

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and be relieved of the responsibility of seeing an Universe which I do not use? I wish to exchange this flash-of-lightning faith for continuous daylight, this fever-glow for a benign climate.94

Although perception could be extended to its horizons, the resulting “flash-of-lightning faith” was gone “in the space of the hour.” Emerson’s “reliance on the vast, the unknown; any presentiment; any extravagance of faith” informed both the foundations and the endpoint of his world-view.95 Emerson complained in the above passage that “My life is superficial, takes no root in the deep world” and yet his repeated efforts to take root, to find a more complete union of the inner and outer worlds, fuelled much of his best writing. Coleridge’s and Emerson’s oeuvre was fundamentally informed by deeply held theological presuppositions that mediated the Romantic triad of nature, spirit, and humanity. Emerson appropriated these theological paradigms but also further broadened and secularized them, marking an important link in the legacy of Transatlantic Transcendentalism. Coleridge’s religious ideas endured in American letters because of his focus on cultivating and fostering spiritual perception, blending the rational capacities of reason with the intuitive power of faith. Coleridge’s early influence on Emerson gave him a blueprint for an intellectual, spiritual, and artistic process, culminating in his most famous and most Coleridgean work, Nature, which will be the subject of the next chapter.

chapter 7

Emerson’s Nature: Coleridge’s Method and the Romantic Triad

Insist upon seeing Nature as a problem to be solved. It is a question addressed to you. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)1

The preceding chapters have investigated the complexity of Emerson’s relationship to Coleridge’s thought in the realms of philosophy, literature, and theology. The essay Nature marked the zenith of Emerson’s assimilative relationship to Coleridge. A close reading of the essay yields dozens of direct and indirect references to Coleridge, but his true role was far greater than a patchwork of allusions.2 Rather, Nature epitomized the way in which Emerson was both deeply indebted to Coleridge and yet applied his ideas to create a highly original and ground-breaking work. In short, Nature posed a question, “To what end is nature?” and used Coleridge’s definitions, distinctions, and intellectual method to answer it. Nature was a seminal work for Emerson and Transatlantic Transcendentalism. Carlyle immediately recognized its importance, praising it in a letter to Emerson as “the Foundation and Ground-plan on which you may build whatsoever of great and true has been given you to build.”3 The essay’s full relevance can only be appreciated in a transatlantic context: Emerson not only created a foundational text for American Romanticism, but in many ways he completed a project that other Romantics had only fragmentarily expounded: as Gravil commented, “Emerson articulated in prose as no English Romantic successfully did, the high Romantic argument concerning nature. Not even Coleridge came close to crafting a satisfactory, portable and unitary exposition of what he and his contemporaries meant by nature – or even recognizing that such an exposition was needed.”4 Nature articulated an American response

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to a central question of Romanticism – how are nature, spirit, and the human mind interconnected? Much of the essay’s structure can be attributed to Coleridge’s distinctions and definitions, while its open-endedness resulted from applying his dynamic intellectual method in an upward and ­outwardly expanding inquiry. Nature forged a distinctive model of the Romantic triad for Transatlantic Transcendentalism. Emerson’s own remarks on the essay suggest that his true subject was not just nature, but rather nature’s relationship to spirit and humanity. In June 1836, he wrote, “My little book is nearly done. Its title is ‘Nature’ . . . My design is to follow it by & by with another essay, ‘Spirit’; and the two shall make a decent volume.”5 However, rather than writing two separate pieces, Emerson merged the two essays into one long essay, which meditated throughout on the ways in which humanity engaged with nature and spirit. In the first sections (the introduction and chapter one) all three elements of the triad were harmonized, culminating with the famous “transparent eyeball” passage. Similarly, the last section (“Prospects”) envisioned a possible unity of the Romantic triad in a prophetic vision. The middle sections of Nature consisted of ascending tiers in which the mind worked upward from nature to spirit. Thus the overall structure of Nature – what Robert Lee Francis described as its ­“architectonic” – pivoted around the categories of the Romantic triad.6 Coleridge’s thought was pivotal to the essay’s organization in ascending and hierarchical tiers, creating a sense of “definitional escalation” that propelled the essay to ever higher vantage points.7 The essay’s overall structure was most likely inspired by Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection, where the chapters were arranged in ascending levels from prudential aphorisms, to those moral and religious, to spiritual religion and “that which is indeed spiritual religion.”8 Emerson adopted this progressive method in Nature as well, beginning with the everyday uses of nature, and moving through increasingly more rarified uses of nature in aesthetics, morality, and philosophy, culminating in a potentially harmonized view of the Romantic triad. Coleridge’s definitions and distinctions, including reason and understanding, natura naturans and natura naturata, symbol, imagination, and the poet-prophet, were instrumental in organizing the eight chapters and numerous sub-sections of Nature. Emerson praised Plato as “a more complete man who could apply to nature the whole scale of the senses, the understanding, and the reason.”9 Yet as discussed in Chapter 4, Emerson was working with Coleridge’s interpretation of reason and understanding, not that of Kant or Plato. This endeavor to “apply to nature the whole scale of the senses” described Emerson’s underlying aim in Nature: the

­     Emerson’s Nature: Coleridge’s Method and the Romantic Triad[ 121 reason and understanding distinction structured the whole essay. Chapters one to three (“Nature,” “Commodity,” and “Beauty”) were more or less directed by the understanding.10 Chapters four and five (“Language” and “Discipline”) discussed the reason and understanding distinction directly, and thus acted as a bridge between the two “halves” of the work, nature and spiritualized nature respectively. Lastly, chapters six to eight (“Idealism,” “Spirit,” and “Prospects”) were guided by the faculty of reason, bordering on intuition and mysticism. Thus the essay was a Coleridgean exercise in “distinguishing without dividing” the ways in which the mind perceived nature with higher and lower faculties. Coleridge’s distinctions valued sense experience as part of nature’s ministry or service to humanity, while also subordinating it to higher transcendental perspectives. Thus Emerson could simultaneously mediate empiricist and idealist views of nature as part of a larger dynamic intellectual inquiry, one that leaped to the next ascending tier before hardening into system or dogma. Since Emerson considered the reason and understanding distinction “a philosophy itself,” then it was fitting that he would dedicate an entire essay to its elaboration. Coleridge’s second important contribution to Nature – his dynamic intellectual method – drove the essay onward in its intellectual inquiry, pursuing transparent visions of the Romantic triad. If Coleridge’s distinctions gave a structure to Nature, method was its engine: namely a method “commencing with the most familiar truths, with facts of hourly experience, and gradually winning its way to positions the most comprehensive and sublime.”11 This statement described both the architecture and the process of Nature, an upwardly and outwardly spiraling inquiry guided by the question, “To what end is nature?” Yet the inquiry was neither systematic nor progressive in a straightforward way: Emerson claimed that truth was discovered “by untaught sallies of the spirit, by a continual selfrecovery, and by entire humility.”12 Nature unfolded in a series of stops and starts, double-tracking and contradiction, self-recovery and leaps forward, and humility – if not a humble aversion to grand claims, then the humility to follow an intellectual path wherever it went, following Coleridge’s method. This experiment in thinking with Coleridge forged a dynamic model of the Romantic triad in place of a rigid or ossified philosophical or theological system, marking an important link in the intellectual history of Transatlantic Transcendentalism.13 Nature could be described as both a manifesto and an anti-manifesto: on the surface it seemed to construct a logical, ordered treatise, only to dissolve into a tissue of paradoxes upon closer examination. While Coleridgean distinctions contributed rigor and structure to the essay, his

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method shaped Nature in an opposing way, undermining its systematic conclusions in favor of a continual process of intellectual reflection. Many critics have remarked upon the paradoxical tendencies in Emerson’s essays. In part these tendencies can be explained by an affinity he shared with Coleridge: a desire to mediate the one and the many, the natural and the spiritual, and the centrifugal and centripetal. Julie Ellison drew attention to Emerson’s “repeated, rapid oscillations between viewpoints,” especially in Nature, which progressed not by the demonstration of logical relationships but by the repetition of key gestures and metaphoric associations . . . Emerson evades his own logical framework in Nature by leaping from commodity to spirit on every page. These transitions build to a kind of hyperbole or crescendo; their power is produced by accumulation, not progress.14

Hodder noted the “interplay of centripetal and centrifugal forces” in Nature: Orbital expansion depends upon a constant reference to the center of the system. The redeeming value of Emerson’s progressive method in Nature results from a similar dynamic. From Coleridge’s usage he may have gotten the prospective push of his design, but to this he added a self-referential pull, so that each apparent development entails a looking back, as it were, to its source.15

While Hodder saw this as an impediment to the progress of Nature, Coleridge and Emerson both embraced active and passive modes of thinking, surging forward and then pausing to gain perspective. Francis observed that “Motion defines the nature of things as we encounter them in the world around us; rest characterizes our ability to organize the motion by identifying the analogies that exist between things.”16 Coleridge envisioned the water-insect as a metaphor for thinking in the Biographia: this creature progressed up the stream by a series of active pulses and passive pauses, a movement that also illuminated some of the ­contradictory qualities of Nature.17 Many of the apparent paradoxes in Emerson’s essays could be resolved by using a different vantage point: if the goal of Nature was to create a dynamic and open-ended model of the Romantic triad – rather than a systematic exposition – then the paradoxes would be resolved as stages in a process of intellectual inquiry prompted by Coleridgean method. In this case, the goal would be to mediate continually between the poles of

­     Emerson’s Nature: Coleridge’s Method and the Romantic Triad[ 123 nature, spirit, and humanity, through the heightened abilities of the poetprophet and via the medium of literature instead of systematic philosophy. By manifesting a model of inquiry in place of a static system, Nature was an early example of pragmatic thinking, yet another legacy for Transatlantic Transcendentalism which will be examined in the final chapter.

Nature Encapsulated: The Introduction and First Chapter In the note “To the Reader” at the beginning of Aids to Reflection, Coleridge asked his readers to judge the usefulness of his book: “Has it led you to reflect? Has it supplied or suggested fresh subjects for reflection? Has it given you any new information? . . . Lastly, has it increased your power of thinking connectedly?”18 Emerson also began Nature with a didactic call to reflection: “The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we enjoy an original relation to the universe?”19 Emerson asked his readers to join in a Coleridgean renewal of perceptions of nature, the mind, and the divine – namely, to create their own dynamic model of the Romantic triad. This exercise was instigated by a deceptively simple question: “Let us inquire, to what end is nature?”20 It is important to note here that Emerson did not ask “what is nature”: by adding those simple few words, an ontological inquiry was exchanged for a pragmatic one. Just as Coleridge wished to develop his readers’ reflective capacities in Aids to Reflection, Nature fostered a process of intellectual inquiry, with the goal of creating an “original relation to the universe.” In short, cultivating the mind’s ability to see nature and spirit in manifold ways was the true purpose of Nature. References to seeing and perception saturate this section below, as highlighted by my italics: To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other . . .21

This passage refers to seeing, eyes, and the senses no less than six times. The act of seeing referred not only to the material, outer eye, but also to the inner eye of intuition or reason. If the “inward and outward senses” were harmonized, nature could become transparent to its spiritual meaning.22 The first chapter of Nature (suitably titled “Nature”) was crafted as a

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microcosm of the work as a whole. It introduced the three main drives of the essay: firstly, a call for the reader to hone the powers of perception; secondly, a demonstration of Coleridge’s ascending and dynamic method of inquiry; and lastly, a goal to harmonize the Romantic triad. The very first line of the chapter issued a didactic exhortation to perceive nature directly: “To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society.”23 Then he encouraged his reader to distinguish (without dividing) between lower and higher meanings of nature: When we speak of nature in this manner, we have a distinct but most poetical sense in the mind. We mean the integrity of impression made by manifold natural objects. It is this which distinguishes the stick of timber of the woodcutter, from the tree of the poet. The charming landscape which I saw this morning, is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet.24

Here Emerson differentiated “the stick of timber of the wood-cutter, from the tree of the poet.” One looked upon nature materially, the other artistically or spiritually. He thus created a kind of dual vision, in which the farms were at once a hodge-podge of properties owned by various people, and an integrated landscape appreciated by the poet. The landscape, as opposed to merely the land, “cannot be owned,” thus introducing the subtle gradations of meaning within the single noun “nature.” Indeed much of Nature consists of making such distinctions, the winnowing away of the similar from the same, following Coleridge’s principles of distinguishing without dividing. Between the poles of material and spiritual, Emerson charted many intermediary stages, such as beauty and art, language, and philosophical and spiritual apprehensions of nature. The final and highest stage of perception would entail a transparence between spirit, nature, and humanity; thus Emerson closed the first chapter of Nature with his most famous description of this state, the transparent eyeball passage: In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befal me in life,—no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball. I am nothing. I see all. The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.25

­     Emerson’s Nature: Coleridge’s Method and the Romantic Triad[ 125 At the highest level of perception, the duality of the many and the one, the natural and spiritual, could be transcended. Emerson’s literary style changed dramatically in this section: he shortened and compressed his sentences to shift to an Orphic tone. The language was terse and epigrammatic, the sentences pithy, culminating in the vatic stance, “I am nothing. I see all.” Thus the three stages of Nature – the call to renewed perception, using method to ascend from lower to higher perspectives of nature, and finally, the glimpse of a unified Romantic triad – are all encapsulated in this first chapter, a kind of précis of the larger work. Yet a permanent or systematic union was not the goal: in that case, the transparent eyeball would be the culminating vision of the essay.26 Rather, Emerson modeled a method of inquiry for his readers, using the intellectual tools Coleridge had given him. Then readers could instigate their own process of seeing nature freshly, fulfilling the directive to “Build, therefore, your own world.”27 Thus Emerson did not have to declare his debt to Coleridge here – after all, he was not thinking about Coleridge, he was thinking with Coleridge – exercising his method and distinctions in his own original way, and asking his readers to do the same.

The Domain of the Understanding: Commodity and Beauty The second chapter of Nature elaborated the “multitude of uses” that illuminate “the final cause of the world” – namely, “its ministry to man.”28 Emerson applied the reason and understanding distinction to organize an upward ascent through different perspectives on nature. The first set of “uses” was in the domain of the understanding, which observed the world from a practical and utilitarian perspective.29 The word “use” or “useful” appeared thirty-six times in the essay, indicating Emerson’s latent pragmatism. Revisiting Coleridge’s distinction, the understanding was aligned with the lower material and sensory powers: The understanding toils all the time, compares, contrives, adds, argues, near sighted but strong-sighted, dwelling in the present the expedient the customary. Beasts have some understanding but no Reason . . . But understanding that wrinkled calculator the steward of our house to whom is committed the support of our animal life contradicts evermore these affirmations of Reason . . .30

The understanding “toils,” “compares,” “contrives,” “adds,” and had committed to it “the support to our animal life,” namely our material rather than spiritual needs. This correlated with Emerson’s definition of

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“Commodity” as “those advantages which our senses owe to nature” and whose benefit was “temporary and mediate, not ultimate, like its service to the soul.” Commodity, like the understanding, was linked with lower perspectives of nature, yet also represented “the only use of nature which all men apprehend.”31 From this common base or platform Emerson prepared his readers to ascend to higher views. Commodity, for example, was “temporary and mediate, not ultimate,” suggesting further purposes yet to be discussed. Nature not only provided for humanity’s physical needs, but it also inspired the creation of “the useful arts” which “are but reproductions or new combinations by the wit of man.”32 Accordingly, the “Commodity” section ended with a yet higher purpose for nature: “A man is fed, not that he may be fed, but that he may work.”33 The reader was constantly hurried onward to the next perspective, a tactic found in Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection. In addition to each chapter moving upward in Nature, sub-sections within the chapters established further ladders of ascent. For example, “Beauty” identified three ascending tiers: 1) delight in the “simple perception of natural forms”; 2) natural beauty as promoting noble and virtuous acts; and 3) nature as it “becomes an object of the intellect.”34 In the first category, Emerson espoused a common Romantic theme that perceiving nature in a fresh or novel way was rejuvenating. On a higher level, “Nature satisfies the soul purely by its loveliness.”35 This first section of “Beauty” engaged in rapturous and detailed descriptions of natural forms, such as a January sunset, the changing seasons, flocks of birds, and a variety of plants and animals near a watercourse in July. The reader was invited to share in this delight through the evocative descriptions. However, toward the end of the section Emerson hastened the reader onward: But this beauty of Nature which is seen and felt as beauty, is the least part. The shows of day, the dewy morning, the rainbow, mountains, orchards in blossom, stars, moonlight, shadows in still water, and the like, if too eagerly hunted, become shows merely, and mock us with their unreality. Go out of the house to see the moon, and ’t is mere tinsel; it will not please as when its light shines upon your necessary journey. The beauty that shimmers in the yellow afternoons of October, who ever could clutch it? Go forth to find it, and it is gone: ’t is only a mirage as you look from the windows of diligence.36

This passage reveals the contradictory push and pull in the progress of Nature, in an alternating pulse of diction and contradiction. In the first line, Emerson seduces the reader with a list of gorgeous natural imagery: the dewy morning, orchards in blossom, shadows in still water. Then

­     Emerson’s Nature: Coleridge’s Method and the Romantic Triad[ 127 before the sentence ends, he abruptly contradicts the reality of these images, stating that they “become shows merely, and mock us with their unreality.” Emerson first invites the reader to enjoy nature’s beauty, then warns not to become engrossed, and finally urges an ascension to a higher vantage point in which humanity impressed nature with its own meaning. The simple beauty of nature was augmented by human need or purpose, such as the moon lighting a journey or the elusive beauty of the woods, half-created by the sensation of imprisonment indoors. Emerson’s intention was not to define nature, but to explore its relationship to the spiritual and human, creating a dynamic model of the Romantic triad. Emerson wanted a complete scale of ascent in Nature, but some sections were less well developed than others. A higher aspect of beauty was articulated as “the mark God sets upon virtue.” This section attempted to incorporate a moral facet to nature. Nature can “bend her lines of grandeur and grace to the decoration of her darling child.”37 Yet this section was brief and its conclusions somewhat tenuous. Emerson’s primary motive was to discern a congruity between nature’s works and the better actions of men, although the exact metaphysics of this relation were left in soft focus. Just as Coleridge wrote about morality in The Friend and Aids to Reflection, Emerson probably wanted to refer to the moral sphere for the sake of comprehensiveness, although the discussion appeared more as a place-holder in the hierarchy than a substantive elaboration. Coleridge’s distinction between talent and genius gave structure to the last and highest function of Beauty “as it becomes an object of the intellect.” Once again Coleridge gave Emerson a hierarchy to structure his meditation: a passive love of beauty was defined as taste, while the active desire to embody beauty in new forms marked the power of genius.38 In its highest form, the artist or poet-prophet transformed natural images into symbols of “il piu nell’ uno” or the many embodied in the one, an Italian phrase quoted from Coleridge.39 Emerson closed this section with yet another transition to higher ground: nature’s beauty, despite being “the herald of inward and eternal beauty . . . is not alone a solid and satisfactory good.”40 Coleridgean method provided the upward impetus for the inquiry “to what end is nature?” while his distinctions and definitions provided the rungs on the ladder ascending from lower to higher purposes of nature, from the material to the transcendental.

The Bridging Chapters: “Language” and “Discipline” The first three chapters of Nature investigated the outer appearances and practical uses of nature as useful and ministering. Up to this point, Emerson

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worked within concepts of nature that were familiar to his American audience: the metaphor of “the book of nature” as an alternative scripture, biblical typology, and the doctrine of correspondence, in which moral and natural law are parallel expressions of divinity. These were all comfortable commonplaces that accorded with the theology of his father’s generation.41 However, thanks to Coleridge, these ideas were about to be infused with new Romantic perspectives: as Laura Walls observed, the doctrine of correspondence “was also flexible enough to contain such exotic variants as Swedenborgian idealism, Coleridgean metaphysics, and German Naturphilosophie, all domesticated under the overarching cultural metaphor of design.”42 In the second half of Nature, Coleridge’s method, definitions, and distinctions gave Emerson confidence to push beyond traditional formulations by exploring nature idealistically. The chapters “Language” and “Discipline” were bridging chapters, where Emerson stood with one foot in each camp: material and spiritual, empirical and transcendental.43 Coleridge’s philosophy of natural language and symbol were crucial to the “Language” chapter of Nature.44 Emerson began this chapter with the statement, “Nature is the vehicle of thought, and in a simple, double, and threefold degree.”45 Emerson’s use of the word “vehicle” here was telling: he knew Coleridge’s definition of symbol as a “vehicle” from his reading in The Statesman’s Manual and Aids to Reflection, where Coleridge defined language as “not only the Vehicle of Thought but the Wheels.”46 This yoking of “vehicle” and “symbol” with the propulsive metaphor of “wheels” revealed Emerson’s interest in Coleridge’s philosophy of language: 1.  Words are signs of natural facts. 2.  Particular natural facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts. 3.  Nature is the symbol of spirit.47

Coleridge’s definition of a symbol, as sharing spiritual substance with that which it symbolized, bridged the divine, natural, and the human worlds through language. This fluid concept of symbol enabled Emerson to interleave more commonplace American views of nature with more radical Romantic and idealistic conceptions. Despite the authoritative appearance of Emerson’s tri-partite statements on language, at the philosophical heart of Nature was a process, not a system, namely a process of creating meaning through language by yoking natural forms and spiritual truths.48 Coleridge’s idea of symbol as a “vehicle” – itself a dynamic metaphor – supported this idea of language as continually embodying truth in form. The three statements formed a hierarchical ladder to conduct the reader from lower to higher ­faculties

­     Emerson’s Nature: Coleridge’s Method and the Romantic Triad[ 129 and perspectives, from understanding to reason and nature to spirit, without dwelling too long on metaphysical particulars. Emerson was not a monist: if he were, he would have stated here “Nature is spirit.” Rather, Coleridge’s symbol gave him flexibility, a model of the spiritual that was deeply intertwined with the natural, yet not simply equivalent to it; more­ over, elevated perception and constant effort was required to perceive it. This effort to train and hone the perception was elaborated at length in the second half of the essay, beginning with “Discipline” which referred to the intellectual and spiritual discipline of cultivating the reason in order to ascend to even higher vantage points. Thanks to Coleridge’s reason and understanding distinction, at this point Nature begins to cross over into the transcendental realm. Emerson left behind the practical uses of the understanding and shifted to spiritual perspectives possible through Coleridge’s reason: Who looks upon a river in a meditative hour, and is not reminded of the flux of all things? Throw a stone into the stream, and the circles that propagate themselves are the beautiful type of all influence. Man is 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: it is not mine or thine or his, but we are its; we are its property and men. And the blue sky in which the private earth is buried, the sky with its eternal calm, and full of everlasting orbs, is the type of Reason. That which, intellectually considered, we call Reason, considered in relation to nature, we call Spirit. Spirit is the Creator. Spirit hath life in itself. And man in all ages and countries, embodies it in his language, as the FATHER.49

Here the limits of Kantian reason have been dismantled and expanded even further than in Coleridge: reason was declared “the universal soul,” and “Reason, considered in relation to nature, we call Spirit.”50 Emerson fused biblical typology with idealism by claiming “the sky with its eternal calm, and full of everlasting orbs, is the type of Reason.” Finally “Spirit is the Creator. Spirit hath life in itself,” and according to Emerson, “man in all ages and countries, embodies it in his language, as the FATHER.” This barrage of definitions, all circling around the idea of Coleridge’s reason, wove a web of relationships between spirit, nature, and language in the disciplines of theology, philosophy, and literature. By conflating so many definitions, Emerson appropriated Coleridgean reason as a mode of mediating the Romantic triad. He was not attempting to make a philosophical or theological argument about the exact relation of nature and spirit, but rather trying to invoke in his readers a sense that

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the human mind, with its various perceptive abilities, was at the very center of all things: “man is an analogist, and studies relations in all objects. He is placed in the centre of beings, and a ray of relation passes from every other being to him.”51 The human mind, by employing Coleridge’s intellectual method, could make sense of the two halves of the world: knowledge from the senses and from beyond the senses, the empirical and transcendental. As Sherman Paul illuminated, Emerson transferred the dualism of the world into a dualism in the mind, thus side-stepping, at least momentarily, the Cartesian dualism that both he and Coleridge wished so fervently to overthrow.52 Creating language, a central activity of the human mind, could mediate between nature and spirit. The role of language, then, was to align a spiritual fact with its material expression, to marry “all the facts in natural history . . . to human history.” Coleridge’s symbol and attention to the “Science of Words” were of paramount importance here, as was the figure of the poet-prophet at the center of the Romantic triad.53 Emerson’s expansion of Coleridgean reason as a spiritual, intuitive mode of seeing enabled him to transcend language itself for purer apprehensions of the Romantic triad in the last section of “Language.” Nature did not exist solely to furnish images for speech, but rather “Parts of speech are metaphors because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind. The laws of moral nature answer to those of matter as face to face in a glass.”54 Here Emerson lapsed into rhapsodic, Orphic mode, that of the poet-prophet: 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. It appears to men, or it does not appear . . . for the universe becomes transparent, and the light of higher laws than its own, shines through it . . . 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 virtue of preceding affections, in the world of spirit. A Fact is the end or last issue of spirit. The visible creation is the terminus or the circumference of the invisible world.55

This passage demonstrates Emerson’s deep, but often hidden debt to Coleridge. On the surface there appears to be no connection to Coleridge, but his thought undergirds all of the principal ideas of this passage. The phrase at the beginning, “not fancied by some poet,” refers directly to Coleridge’s distinction between fancy and the imagination and genius and talent: the poet-prophet, as distinguished from the ordinary poet, created art by engaging the divine creative spirit through the imagination instead

­     Emerson’s Nature: Coleridge’s Method and the Romantic Triad[ 131 of the fancy. Then Emerson referred to a quotation from Plotinus, taken not from the original but from Coleridge’s Biographia, “It appears to us or does not appear.”56 Once again Emerson read Platonism via Coleridge: the truth could hypothetically “be known by all men,” but in reality is known by only a few with elevated powers of perception. However, the truly Coleridgean stamp on this passage is not the unacknowledged borrowings, but rather its literary stance. The tone is terse and lapidary, yet its authority does not come from philosophical argument but from a quasi-mystical, poetic admixture of religion, literature, and philosophy. The phrase “There seems to be a necessity” is unphilosophical yet sure of itself, paradoxically tentative and authoritative at once. Emerson claimed that “a fact is the end or last issue of spirit” and “the visible creation is the terminus or the circumference of the invisible world” in a Neoplatonic fashion, but did not explain how: instead orphic statements were layered one upon another. The universe “becomes transparent” to the higher laws that direct it, yet this was achieved through imaginative literary engagement rather than philosophical argument. Nature resulted from the application of Coleridge’s method in a literary mode, as opposed to a systematic exposition of the “prima philosophy.” If anything, an overemphasis on philosophy would hamper the poet, as it did for Coleridge when he lost himself (in his own words) “delving in the unwholesome quicksilver mines of metaphysic depths.”57 The poet-prophet could see the Romantic triad transparently by peering prophetically into a future in which “A life in harmony with nature . . . will purge the eyes to understand [nature’s] text . . . so that the world shall be to us an open book, and every form significant of its hidden life and final cause.”58 However, it is vital to note that this whole passage was written in the future tense: “will purge” and “the world shall be” indicated that this total transparence had yet to be permanently achieved. The final lines of the “Language” section ended with a quotation from Coleridge: “every object rightly seen, unlocks a new faculty of the soul.”59 This statement could be the cipher for all of Nature, as a call to engage continually higher faculties of perception. The next chapter, “Discipline,” articulated a key theme of Transatlantic Transcendentalism: education.60 It revealed the educative purpose of nature: it taught humanity through the senses and understanding, and then through the higher power of reason. While the understanding perceived the outside world as it “adds, divides, combines, measures,” the reason “transfers all these lessons into its own world of thought, by perceiving the analogy that marries Matter and Mind.”61 The first section of “Discipline” explained understanding (“1. Nature is a discipline of the ­understanding . . .”) while the second section explained reason (“2. Sensible objects

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conform to the premonitions of Reason . . .”). Emerson stated, “The wise man shows his wisdom in separation, in gradation, and his scale of creatures and of merits, is as wide as nature. The foolish have no range in their scale, but suppose every man is as every other man.”62 Coleridge’s reason and understanding distinction provided Emerson with this “range in their scale.” Of course figures other than Coleridge worked with such scales – so did Plato, Plotinus, Milton, Kant, and the post-Kantians – but Coleridge read and appropriated all of those sources. Emerson preferred working from Coleridge while attributing such “universal” thoughts to all his predecessors and, therefore, to none of them singly. “Discipline” was a prelude for the succeeding chapter on “Idealism,” a pivot point in Nature between the lower understanding and the higher power of reason. Emerson recognized the power of Coleridge’s distinction to harmonize traditional ideas of nature with Romantic conceptions of consciousness, potentially mediating between empiricism and idealism. Through the reason, the highest level of intellectual perception, the great riddle could potentially be resolved: “Herein is especially apprehended the Unity of Nature,—the Unity in Variety,—which meets us everywhere . . . Every particular in nature, a leaf, a drop, a crystal, a moment of time is related to the whole, and partakes of the perfection of the whole.”63 Yet this unity was not the formless, vague unity of the “foolish man,” but rather a unity paradoxically replete with diversity, like the great circle on a sphere “comprising all possible circles,” one of Coleridge’s favorite images.64 Nature educated the human mind in such paradoxes as unity in variety; Coleridgean faculties, distinctions, and method enabled Emerson, and his readers, to negotiate these paradoxes holistically.

Idealism and Beyond: The Final Chapters The “Idealism” and “Spirit” chapters of Nature revealed Coleridge’s vital importance for the development of American Transcendentalism. As discussed in Chapters 3 and 4 above, Coleridge’s idealism was an amalgamation of sources, broadly reinterpreted; Kant’s concept of reason, for example, was expanded into a quasi-mystical faculty of vision. At the same time, Coleridge also felt that idealism should be “the truest and most binding realism” that honored experiences gained from the natural world.65 Emerson appropriated these eclectic interpretations of idealism from Coleridge, marking a key juncture in Transatlantic Transcendentalism.66 Coleridge’s concept of reason as a religio-philosophical faculty was central to these sections of Nature. Emerson observed that “the presence

­     Emerson’s Nature: Coleridge’s Method and the Romantic Triad[ 133 of Reason” tends to “relax this despotism of the senses, which binds us to nature as if we were a part of it, and shows us nature aloof, and, as it were, afloat.”67 Exercising the power of reason liberated the mind: If the Reason be stimulated to more earnest vision, outlines and surfaces become transparent, and are no longer seen; causes and spirits are seen through them. The best, the happiest moments of life, are these delicious awakenings of the higher powers, and the reverential withdrawing of nature before its God.68

The Romantic triad, for a fleeting moment, appeared to be harmonized here: through the elevated power of reason, all phenomena became transparent to “causes and spirit.” Ultimately, nature itself withdrew “before its God.” Yet characteristically, these moments never lasted for Emerson, as evidenced in the transparent eyeball passage – he always shifted immediately from unity into diversity once again. These “best, the happiest moments of life” were brief: Emerson was never a monist for long.69 Even if nature and spirit were harmonized momentarily here, the third point of the triad – humanity – required a continual process of intellectual method to foster such transparent seeing, hence the return to further educative exhortations in Nature. The title “Idealism” was misleading, since both Coleridge and Emerson rejected the more extreme conclusions of systematic idealism. Emerson was troubled by the “noble doubt” implied by idealism – whether or not nature existed outside of human perception. He decided to bracket the question, by admitting his “utter impotence to test the authenticity of the report of my senses.”70 He basically adopted a pragmatic solution instead: “Whether nature enjoy a substantial existence without, or is only in the apocalypse of the mind, it is alike useful and alike venerable to me. Be it what it may, it is ideal to me, so long as I cannot try the accuracy of my senses.”71 The phrases “it is alike useful and alike venerable,” “it is ideal to me,” and “Be it what it may” entirely sidestepped the metaphysical implications of idealism by choosing a pragmatic stance over a closed system. If the schism between nature and spirit were permanently resolved through idealism, Nature would have lost its forward drive. Emerson avoided making metaphysical conclusions here by suddenly changing tack: “Let us proceed to indicate the effects of culture.”72 Emerson, having momentarily harmonized the Romantic triad, recentered the discussion to a more pragmatic discussion about culture’s uses for idealism, thereby eliding the question of whether nature outwardly existed or not. Firstly, he claimed broadly that “Nature is made to conspire

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with spirit to emancipate us.”73 Secondly, the poet subordinated nature to his thought, providing the creative fuel for art: “He unfixes the land and the sea, makes them revolve around the axis of his primary thought, and disposes them anew.”74 Emerson invoked Coleridge’s idea of the imagination as an echo of divine creation, a power capable of investing “dust and stones with humanity.” Thirdly, nature was subordinated by the philosopher, who searched for truth while the poet sought beauty. He too “postpones the apparent order and relations of things to the empire of thought.”75 Then Emerson progressed to science, which would “beget invariably a doubt of the existence of matter.”76 The final use of idealism by “religion and ethics” was responsible for “degrading nature and suggesting its dependence on spirit . . . both put nature under foot.”77 In this section Emerson created another ladder, an ascending series of idealistic uses of nature, from ministry, beauty, truth, science, to, finally, religion. All of these categories were discussed at length by Coleridge: indeed Nature could be seen as a fugue on Coleridge, in which his motifs repeated over and over in different variations. Yet while this seemed like another ascending and progressive series of tiers, in this case it was not: Emerson ultimately rejected idealism because it “put nature under foot.” Idealism did not adequately reverence the material world. Hence “Idealism” was subordinated to “Discipline,” because the latter used nature to stimulate an ongoing intellectual inquiry whereas the former turned its back on the material world: It appears that motion, poetry, physical and intellectual science, and religion, all tend to affect our convictions of the reality of the external world. But I own there is something ungrateful in expanding too curiously the particulars of the general proposition, that all culture tends to imbue us with idealism. I have no hostility to nature, but a child’s love to it. I expand and live in the warm day like corn and melons. Let us speak her fair. I do not wish to fling stones at my beautiful mother, nor soil my gentle nest. I only wish to indicate the true position of nature in regard to man, wherein to establish man, all right education tends; as the ground which to attain is the object of human life, that is, of man’s connexion with nature.78

Despite the benefits of subordinating nature to spirit, Emerson did not want to dispense with nature entirely. He even went so far, surely to the delight of his critics, as to associate himself with “corn and melons” to demonstrate his sense of sympathy and identity with the materiality of nature. Emerson’s idealism was also pragmatic. The question prompting

­     Emerson’s Nature: Coleridge’s Method and the Romantic Triad[ 135 the whole essay was not “What is nature?” but rather, “To what end is nature?” The answer was education: nature, if seen in the proper light, fostered a process of the mind’s development toward which “all right education tends.” Thus Nature was educative rather than systematic. Emerson began the “Idealism” chapter by declaring, “Thus is the unspeakable but intelligible and practicable meaning of the world conveyed to man, the immortal pupil, in every object of sense. To this one end of Discipline, all parts of nature conspire.”79 The purpose of nature (and Nature) was to galvanize an intellectual method which brought the human mind ever higher on its ladder of perception without finalizing a philosophical position: to do so would confine, even halt, that intellectual process. Emerson complained of “one crack . . . not easy to be soldered or welded” in the essay: that between nature and spirit, ontologically considered.80 Although the essay failed to resolve nature and spirit philosophically, it succeeded in establishing a dynamic working model of the Romantic triad in which the mind continually sought to know itself, the divine, and nature. The only permanent solution to this “crack” in Nature would be the completion of the first or dynamic philosophy in the distant and hypothetical future. In the meantime, Emerson contented himself with the pragmatic benefits of idealism, namely “The advantage of the ideal theory over the popular faith, is this, that is presents the world in precisely that view which is most desirable to the mind.”81 That is, idealism provided boundless opportunity for intellectual inquiry: It is essential to a true theory of nature and of man, that it should contain somewhat progressive. Uses that are exhausted or that may be, and facts that end in the statement, cannot be all that is true of this brave lodging wherein man is harbored, and wherein all his faculties find appropriate and endless exercise.82

The final sections of Nature, “Spirit” and “Prospects,” presented a ­seemingly limitless horizon for human knowledge. Coleridge’s religio-philosophical views fundamentally shaped the “Spirit” chapter of Nature as well as “Idealism.” Emerson declared that nature “always speaks of Spirit. It suggests the Absolute. It is a perpetual effect. It is a great shadow pointing always to the sun behind us.” Emerson relied upon Coleridge’s idealist and Platonic interpretations of nature and spirit, echoing his language when he declared, “the noblest ministry of nature is to stand as the apparition of God. It is the great organ through which the universal spirit speaks to the individual, and strives to lead back the individual to it.”83 The terms “ministry of nature” and “the great

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organ” were both taken from Coleridge, and while these concepts suggested a possible unity of the Romantic triad, they also emphasized that the human mind must actively mediate between nature and spirit. Coleridge’s thought provided Emerson with a nuanced, process-based model of the Romantic triad that would become central for the emerging movement of American Transcendentalism. His interpretations of idealism and Platonism gave metaphysical heft to Nature, without trapping its inquiry in systematic conclusions. Ultimately, Nature shifted to literature rather than philosophy in its final pages. Elements of Coleridge’s literary criticism played a pivotal role, in particular his organic theory of art and the creative imagination as an echo of divine creation: But when, following the invisible steps of thought, we come to inquire, Whence is matter? and Whereto? many truths arise to us out of the recesses of consciousness. We learn that the highest is present to the soul of man . . . that spirit creates; that behind nature, throughout nature, spirit is present; that spirit is one and not compound; that spirit does not act upon us from without, that is, in space and time, but spiritually, or through ourselves. Therefore, 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 . . . Once inhale the upper air . . . we learn that man has access to the entire mind of the Creator, is himself the creator in the finite.84

Here Emerson used a central image in Coleridge’s organic aesthetic theory: the tree, which “puts forth new branches and leaves through the pores of the old.” This literary metaphor depicted a divine spirit that linked nature, spirit, and the mind through the activities of the poet-prophet – Milton’s Comus was fittingly quoted here. Coleridge’s definition of the imagination was also directly invoked: “we learn that man has access to the entire mind of the Creator, is himself the creator in the finite.” By exercising the elevated powers of reason and imagination, humanity could be “nourished by unfailing fountains” and “draws, at his need, inexhaustible power.” Emerson was building toward a crescendo of transparence between the Romantic triad – “spirit creates; that behind nature, throughout nature, spirit is present; that spirit is one and not compound” – but it would be the poet-prophet, not the philosopher, who would articulate this privileged view in the final passages of the essay. While the above passage seemed to reconcile the natural, human, and divine, Emerson once again backed away from permanent unity. Both Coleridge and Emerson emphasized the constant intellectual, spiritual, and artistic effort required to see the Romantic triad transparently:

­     Emerson’s Nature: Coleridge’s Method and the Romantic Triad[ 137 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. But it differs from the body in one important respect. It is not, like that, now subjected to the human will. Its serene order is inviolable by us. It is therefore, to us, the present expositor of the divine mind. It is a fixed point whereby we may measure our departure. 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.85

Emerson reestablished rifts in the Romantic triad by stating, “We are as much strangers in nature, as we are aliens from God.” The goal was to encourage his readers once more to higher points of view, resisting any one fixed theological or philosophical formulation. Humanity must continually renovate powers of vision, since in our fallenness, “We do not understand the notes of birds. The fox and the deer run away from us; the bear and tiger rend us.”86 In the concluding section of Nature, the poet-prophet – the “orphic poet” – would rejuvenate our fallen vision through an act of ­literary imagination.

Conclusion: Imagining “A New Heaven and a New Earth” in Literature The final section of Nature, suitably entitled “Prospects,” shifted to the future tense to complete an imaginative reconciliation of the Romantic triad. Emerson began this section with the maxim that “In inquiries respecting the laws of the world and the frame of things, the highest reason is always the truest.”87 While the understanding and reason were again referred to in this section, an even higher quasi-mystical and intuitive state of mind was invoked at the end of Nature, since “a dream may let us deeper into the secret of nature than a hundred concerted experiments.”88 Here Emerson resorted to literature instead of other disciplines, quoting Plato who said, “Poetry comes nearer to vital truth than history.”89 Fittingly, he included a long selection from George Herbert, the seventeenth-century Metaphysical poet. Additionally he created a fictionalized figure of the “Orphic poet,” who spoke from mystical heights in italicized lapidary statements. This poet articulated “some traditions of man and nature . . . which, as they have always been in the world, and perhaps reappear to every bard, may be both history and prophecy.”90 This placed Emerson directly in a lineage of poet-prophets, thereby precluding his debt to any particular one. The Orphic poet lent an otherworldly and prophetic tone to the essay, liberating Emerson for an unfettered flight of the imagination. His use of a literary alter-ego may have been inspired by Coleridge’s

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­ ctional “letter from a friend” in the Biographia, which also spoke in italifi cized statements.91 Ultimately Emerson employed a literary mode through the utterances of a poet-prophet figure to express “the highest” and therefore “the truest” conclusion of this essay: an imaginative re-creation of the Romantic triad. Creating “a new heaven and new earth” imaginatively in literature – as opposed to the destruction and renewal of the physical world in the biblical apocalypse – was a central Romantic theme described by M. H. Abrams.92 This final section of Nature was indebted to a section of the Biographia where Coleridge championed the power of literature to renew the world: It was the union of deep feeling with profound thought; the fine balance of truth in observing with the imaginative faculty in modifying the objects observed; and above all the original gift of spreading the tone, the atmosphere, and with it the depth and height of the ideal world around forms, incidents, and situations, of which, for the common view, custom had bedimmed all the lustre, had dried up the sparkle and the dew drops.93 “To find no contradiction in the union of old and new; to contemplate the ANCIENT of days and all his works with feelings as fresh, as if all had then sprang forth at the first creative fiat; characterizes the mind that feels the riddle of the world, and may help to unravel it.94

The imagination could make the world new again, evoking the freshness of “the first creative fiat” of God’s creation. But this was a difficult state to sustain: Emerson declared “A man is a god in ruins . . . Man is the dwarf of himself.” This fallenness was caused because “man applies to nature but half his force. He works on the world with his understanding alone.” Although throughout history there were “examples of Reason’s momentary grasp of the sceptre,” humanity kept falling into lesser states, seeing a “ruin or blank” in nature instead of the harmonized Romantic triad.95 Only a radical “apocalypse within” could shear away old stale ideas and renew the world through an act of imagination.96 After ascending through a hierarchy of practical, intellectual, artistic, moral, and transcendent categories of nature’s uses, Emerson collapsed all these divisions by the end of the essay. By doing this, he demonstrated his commitment to Coleridge’s process of “distinguishing without dividing,” which separated categories to clarify thinking only to reunify them once again.97 Emerson proposed that “The problem of restoring to the world original and eternal beauty, is solved by the redemption of the soul.”98 But this redemption did not result from church sacrament, but rather by renewing and purifying the mind’s perceptive faculties:

­     Emerson’s Nature: Coleridge’s Method and the Romantic Triad[ 139 The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is, because man is disunited with himself. He cannot be a naturalist, until he satisfies all the demands of the spirit . . . There are innocent men who worship God after the tradition of their fathers, but their sense of duty has not yet extended to the use of all their faculties. And there are patient naturalists, but they freeze their subject under the wintry light of the understanding. Is not prayer also a study of truth,—a sally of the soul into the unfound infinite? No man ever prayed heartily, without learning something. But when a faithful thinker, resolute to detach every object from personal relations, and see it in the light of thought, shall, at the same time, kindle science with the fire of the holiest affections, then will God go forth anew into the creation.99

In this remarkable passage, the naturalist and the pious man were considered incomplete because they failed to “use of all their faculties” and holistically integrate their perceptions of the Romantic triad. Only “a faithful thinker” – a good description of Coleridge – could “kindle science with the fire of the holiest affections” and herald the return of the divinity to nature, when “God will go forth anew into the creation.” Thus the biblical “new heaven and earth” was refigured considerably: the individual “faithful thinker” – not the messiah – was pivotal in bringing such a new world about by engaging all of the mind’s powers. If the “faithful thinker” could imaginatively envision a new heaven and earth, then “So shall we come to look at the world with new eyes.”100 Emerson’s goal was to propel the reader to create their own new imaginative world: “Every spirit builds itself a house; and beyond its house, a world; and beyond its world a heaven. Know then, that the world exists for you.”101 Here Emerson used Coleridge’s concept of the imagination as an echo of divine creation to give unbridled power to individual consciousness. Imagery resonant with apocalypse and the “new heaven and new earth” abounded here: The sordor and filths of nature, the sun shall dry up, and the wind exhale. As when the summer comes from the south, the snow-banks melt, and the face of the earth becomes green before it, so shall the advancing spirit create its ornaments along its path, and carry with it the beauty it visits, and the song which enchants it; it shall draw beautiful faces, and warm hearts, and wise discourse, and heroic acts, around its way, until evil is no more seen.102

The destruction and rejuvenation of nature here was imaginative, not actual, and manifested itself in literature and art, as opposed to scripture. “The advancing spirit” created “beautiful faces, warm hearts, wise

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­iscourse, and heroic acts” – all human interpretations of the ideal, d embodied by the poet-prophet mediating the Romantic triad through literature and art, “until evil is no more seen.” Finally, then, Nature was not about nature, nor its opposite of spirit, but about the engagement of all the human mind’s faculties as articulated by Coleridge, including the understanding, reason, and imagination. Only then could humanity fulfill the final mandate of Nature: “Build, therefore, your own world.”103 Ultimately Nature was not a metaphysical treatise, but an educative and pragmatic modeling of the Romantic triad of nature, spirit, and humanity, created by applying Coleridge’s method to the question “To what end is nature?” Nature ended where it began, calling us to have “an original relation to the universe.”104 Coleridge’s call to awaken and refine the mind’s faculties shaped Emerson’s finest essay and the movement of Boston Transcendentalism. He was also central to another, lesser known movement: Vermont Transcendentalism. Later thinkers such as John Dewey would take Coleridge’s and Emerson’s ideas even further: once the door was opened to use ideas as tools and working models, the stage was set for the emergence of Pragmatism. The malleability of Coleridge’s thought ensured his relevance for Transatlantic Transcendentalism for at least another century, as the final chapter will illustrate.

chapter 8

Coleridge and Vermont Transcendentalism

Coleridge’s distinctions, definitions, and dynamic method galvanized Emerson’s thought at a critical moment in his intellectual maturation and simultaneously shaped the development of Boston Transcendentalism. Yet his influence extended even further into the nineteenth and early twentieth century via Vermont Transcendentalism, a movement that profoundly affected the development in America of modern higher education and the national press, and the emergence of the philosophical movement of Pragmatism. Although the movements issued from different ends of the theological spectrum, Coleridge was the common link between Boston and Vermont Transcendentalism.1 Coleridge’s thought provided a new model of the Romantic triad of nature, spirit, and humanity, categories that could be mediated in an open-ended, dynamic intellectual method instead of through systematizing. Because Coleridge’s prose was so obscure and fragmented, and because he himself had misappropriated Kant and other philosophers, he became a palimpsest, a multi-layered record of an ongoing reinterpretation of philosophical and theological traditions in a new American context. It was precisely this imprecision that enabled Coleridge to become such a vital link in Transatlantic Transcendentalism. Chapter 2 discussed the central role of James Marsh for the development of Boston Transcendentalism through his American editions of Coleridge, including his influential “Preliminary Essay” to Aids to Reflection. Marsh further broadcast Coleridge’s thought in America during his tenure as president of the University of Vermont from 1826 to 1833. He restructured the curriculum according to Coleridgean principles, subsequently igniting a pedagogical revolution in higher education. UVM became

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the hub of Vermont Transcendentalism, a movement which enjoyed an enduring legacy by influencing generations of students who later became important public intellectuals. Marsh’s curriculum shaped major figures in American letters such as H. J. Raymond, founder of The New York Times, and John Dewey, one of the founders of American Pragmatism. Marsh adapted Coleridge’s thought for an American audience and embedded it in American values, insuring Coleridge’s transatlantic relevance for another hundred years. While Coleridge’s pivotal role for American Romanticism has been widely acknowledged, a smaller number of scholars have traced his continuing influence in America, culminating in the philosophical movement of Pragmatism.2 Vermont Transcendentalism was a key juncture in this transmission. Russell Goodman elucidated “a tradition running through the work of Emerson, James, and Dewey to Cavell himself that is as much ‘transcendentalist’ as ‘pragmatic,’ as much ‘religious’ as ‘scientific,’ one representing a fundamentally Romantic response to the epistemological problem of the mind–world relation.”3 Similarly, Bruce Kuklick situated Vermont Transcendentalism as part of an ongoing discourse in New England Congregational Calvinism. Peter Carafiol did extensive work on Marsh that emphasized the differences between Vermont and Boston Transcendentalism, despite their mutual reliance on Coleridge.4 Louis Menand similarly portrayed the movements as polar opposites, claiming that “True to its origins . . . in the writings of its hero, Coleridge, Vermont Transcendentalism was fundamentally conservative. It was about preserving institutions, not (like the Concord edition) about ignoring, debunking, or reinventing them.”5 While at first glance Vermont Transcendentalism might seem to be a minor and conservative movement compared to its Boston cousin, James Marsh’s 1829 curricular revision of the University of Vermont was one of the most revolutionary – and enduring – applications of Coleridge’s thought in America. It is tempting to label Boston and Vermont Transcendentalism as diametrically opposed movements: after all, the former is associated with radical Unitarians and the latter with an orthodox Congregational Trinitarian, representing opposite ends of the theological spectrum in early nineteenth-century theology. Moreover, Marsh himself was openly dismissive of the Boston Transcendentalists, declaring “The whole of Boston Transcendentalism I take to be rather a superficial affair . . .”6 Marsh claimed that the Boston Transcendentalists interpreted Coleridge too loosely and for their own purposes – although he himself was guilty of the same. Despite these protestations, there was more continuity than disparity between these Transcendentalist movements, mainly due to their

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shared dependence upon Coleridge, who was cast as a redemptive figure for American letters. Both Vermont and Boston Transcendentalists responded to Coleridge in a flurry of intellectual activity, including the reform of higher education. Marsh’s Coleridgean curriculum at the University of Vermont was indeed a “reinventing” of the concept of higher education in America, and in this he was as radical as Emerson. On the other hand, Emerson’s “Divinity School Address” was in some sense a call for curricular revision rather than a “debunking” of the institution, especially since the address was given in the form of a final lecture to the graduating class.7 As discussed in the previous chapter, the essay Nature also promoted the educative role of nature and the importance of honing the mind’s powers. Viewed in this light, Boston and Vermont Transcendentalism were polar unities rather than polar opposites. Both Emerson and Marsh engaged Coleridgean thought in their own ways, but for goals they held in common: to mediate between empiricism and idealism, to answer Coleridge’s call to individual reflection, and to reconnect to venerable ideas in a fresh new way, something that Pragmatists accomplished by creating what William James called “a new name for old ways of thinking.” Vermont Transcendentalism played a pivotal role in this transmission of ideas, particularly through Marsh’s application of Coleridge’s thought in tangible, socially influential, and ground-breaking ways.

A Coleridgean Curriculum Coleridge wrote extensively on the principles of education, appealing for the creation of a clerisy or class of highly educated and pious intellectuals who would dedicate themselves to improving society. As president of the University of Vermont from 1826 to 1833, Marsh fulfilled this call: he implemented a new curriculum based on Coleridge’s concept of intellectual method, and encouraged his students to become active in public institutions. Groomed by a Coleridgean curriculum, generations of UVM graduates fanned out across the country and took up influential public roles: 81 became teachers and 72 became clergymen, and not just in the Northeast but in almost every area of the country.8 Marsh believed in the educative role of the national press, and planned an essay on the subject for a series on education for The Vermont Chronicle in 1829.9 Several students followed this path: H. J. Raymond, class of 1840, founded The New York Times as “an instrument of public instruction” as well as Harper’s Magazine; another student in the same class, James Spaulding, founded New York World.10 Marsh also inspired scores of important figures in education:

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Bronson Alcott, founder of the unconventional Temple School in Boston, was transfixed by Marsh’s “Preliminary Essay” to Aids to Reflection, which he read and reread for the rest of his life. William Torrey Harris, related to the Torreys who were professors at UVM, implemented some of Marsh’s ideas as Superintendent of Schools in St. Louis, and later as the US Commissioner of Education. He would later be associated with a group known as the St. Louis Hegelians. Harris was also the founder of the first public kindergarten and a lecturer at the Concord School of Philosophy established by Emerson and Bronson Alcott.11 Another student, W. G. T. Shedd, took over Marsh’s edition of Coleridge’s collected works; it was finished in 1853 and became the authoritative American edition of Coleridge for over a century. The most famous alumnus of Marsh’s UVM was John Dewey, who despite arriving a generation after Marsh’s death, was very much a product of his philosophy of education. In many ways, Dewey’s long and prolific career marked the consummation of Coleridge’s and Marsh’s vision of education. Marsh’s restructuring of the UVM curriculum in 1829 created a new and revolutionary model of pedagogy. Marsh adapted Coleridge’s interpretation of Kantian and post-Kantian idealism and Platonism, as well as his dynamic principles of intellectual method, to combat prevailing theories of knowledge that relied primarily upon Lockean empiricism and Scottish Common Sense philosophy.12 Rote learning, mechanical recitation, and standardized educational programs were the pedagogical norms for the tabula rasa – the mind as a blank slate waiting to be passively inscribed with knowledge. This mode of pedagogy had more or less dominated American education since the founding of Harvard College in 1636. Marsh used Coleridgean ideas not only to question prevailing views of philosophy, theology, and education, but to build a new model in its place based on Romantic idealism. In the rapidly changing economic and political climate of early nineteenth-century America, renovating the prescribed classical curriculum became an increasingly urgent issue.13 Marsh was certainly not the only innovator: the 1820s marked a flurry of changes in higher education, including the creation of new faculties and departments, more choices in courses of study, and the introduction of modern languages and sciences.14 However, Marsh’s curriculum was one of the most enduring, since it was reverently carried on by several generations of educators and prominent public intellectuals.15 Marsh implemented an elective system, seminarstyle classes, and an individualized program of study; these were attempts to carry out Coleridge’s mandate that education should be a process of “awakening the method of self-development [in order to] gradually excite

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[the mind’s] vegetating and germinating powers to produce new fruits of thought, new conceptions, and imaginations, and ideas.”16 He divided the university into four departments: “English Literature,” “Languages,” “Mathematics and Physics,” and “Political, Moral and Intellectual Philosophy.” Julian Lindsay suggested that, as a result of Marsh’s new scheme, UVM could lay claim to having “one of the oldest English departments in the world.”17 Instead of a uniform course studying a small, prescribed portion of each subject, the student undertook an in-depth study in one or two of the departments, and only more if he progressed to a satisfactory level.18 If a student’s studies were interrupted for some reason, he could adapt his schedule rather than lose an entire year; rigidly adhering to a lockstep program was akin to “virtually shutting the doors of the halls of learning against a large portion of our most valuable young men.” Students were encouraged to study at their own pace, which was facilitated by smaller seminar-style classes comprised of students “united by similarity of tastes and powers and pursuits.”19 Examinations were overhauled to make them more frequent and more thorough. Weekly public speaking exhibitions were implemented, which were not memorized recitations but rather “Original Exercises in Declamation or Forensic Disputation.”20 Smaller classes and intensive interaction with faculty necessitated the hiring of full-time professors as opposed to temporary tutors; the permanent professors “would be more exact, and more comprehensive in their instruction, and . . . would possess more weight of character, and power of influence, in personal intercourse.”21 At every turn, Marsh sought to individualize the learning experience. Under his guidance, UVM went from a small, unknown institution to one of the most cutting-edge universities in America, implementing many of the best educational practices found in today’s modern universities.22 Although these changes were innovative and ground-breaking, Marsh felt he was restoring an ancient tradition of philosophical idealism rather than creating something entirely new. An alumnus of Marsh’s program, William Pinson, claimed that Marsh “did a great and memorable work in introducing the intuitive or spiritual philosophy . . . restoring the sublime philosophy of Plato, of Cudworth and Hooker, of Bacon and Milton and Leighton . . . to its ancient and appropriate place in the university curriculum.”23 Marsh, following Coleridge, folded Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy into this tradition, marking an important transatlantic transfer of idealism to American shores.24 Coleridge’s distinctions and definitions provided an armature for this Vermont branch of Transatlantic Transcendentalism: once again the reason and understanding distinction was taken from Coleridge rather

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than Kant. While the accuracy of Coleridge’s (and Marsh’s) reading of Kant has been subsequently questioned, this mattered little to nineteenthcentury American intellectuals, who saw Kant as nothing less than a progenitor of a new model of the mind.25 The purpose of education, according to Coleridge and Marsh, was to awaken the powers of the human intellect progressively and hierarchically, beginning with the lower powers of the understanding and graduating to the higher powers of reason. This Kantian distinction, filtered through Coleridge, became the underpinning of Marsh’s curriculum: for example, year four of the “Political, Moral, and Intellectual Philosophy” major consisted of a course entitled “Phaenomena of Sensation & Faculties of the Human Understanding” and culminated with “Evidences of Natural and Revealed Religion” intended to develop the faculty of reason. If American Transcendentalism had destabilized the primacy of Locke and Scottish Common Sense philosophy, then Marsh’s curriculum built a new edifice in its place, based on Coleridgean idealism. In addition to Coleridge’s distinctions undergirding the new curriculum, his open-ended intellectual method was also instrumental to its pedagogical vision. Since the changes at UVM caused so much controversy, Marsh published a defense of the curriculum in 1829, entitled “An Exposition of the System of Instruction and Discipline Pursued in the University of Vermont.” A second edition was published in 1831, since “The subject of improvement in College Education has occupied much attention throughout our country during a few years past.”26 Marsh’s debt to Coleridge in this document was unmistakable: it was closely modeled on Coleridge’s ideas on education espoused in the 1818 “Treatise on Method” and the prospectus of the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana.27 Coleridge’s vision of education as an organic, individualized, and dynamic process of mental development became the very foundation of Marsh’s pedagogy. He virtually paraphrased large sections of Coleridge’s “Treatise on Method,” as seen in the passage below: [T]he legitimate and immediate aim of education, in its true sense, is, not by the appliances of instruction and discipline to shape and fit the powers of the mind to this or that outward condition in the mechanism of civil society, but, by means corresponding to their inherent nature, to excite, to encourage, and affectionately to aid the free and perfect developement of those powers themselves . . . what is the character of their minds, and what will best serve to stimulate their growth, to elicit and cultivate their latent powers.28

Marsh used key Coleridgean terms: he repeated the words “excite” and “developement” (keeping Coleridge’s archaic spelling of the word). His

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phrase “latent powers” echoed Coleridge’s “vegetating and germinating powers.” This passage mirrored, albeit less elegantly, the following passage from Coleridge’s “Treatise on Method”: We see, that the EDUCATION of the intellect, by awakening the method of self-developement, was his proposed object, not any specific information that can be conveyed into it from without. He desired not to assist in storing the passive mind with the various sorts of knowledge most in request, as if the human soul were a mere repository, or banqueting room, but to place it in such relations of circumstance as should gradually excite its vegetating and germinating powers to produce new fruits of thought, new conceptions, and imaginations, and ideas.29

Not only did Marsh adopt Coleridge’s terminology, he also appropriated Coleridgean principles such as organicism, method, and individualism as an educational blueprint. Organicism was implicit in a process designed to “gradually excite [the mind’s] vegetating and germinating powers” and was in direct opposition to the prevailing mode of educating “as if the human soul were a mere repository, or banqueting room.” The difference was significant: as Engell and Dangerfield noted, “Education (‘to lead out’) is the opposite, in spirit and etymology, of inculcation (‘to trample in’).”30 The former implied an organic, progressive method while the latter indicated a fixed model of mind as an empty vessel or blank slate. Marsh wrote, But if the energy of the divine word be as I have represented it in its relation to our powers of intelligence, an all-pervading energy; if it be as the sap of life to the living tree of our knowledge, will it not, and should it not, extend its influence, in a greater or less degree, not only to the mind of the scholar directly . . . and to the subject and material of our systems of instruction?31

The sap of the living tree was a favorite Coleridgean metaphor. It represented not only a fresh way to think about pedagogy, but a new model of the Romantic triad: organicism in education echoed the living powers at work in nature, humanity, and the spiritual world. As Carafiol explained, Marsh integrated the organic metaphor neatly into his essentially transcendental vision of the universe. He made all of life a growth of the spirit toward a reunion with God. Education was a preparation for grace. The individual ascends toward heaven, Marsh believed, by discovering and cultivating his own spiritual powers. By studying first nature and then man, the student both

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observes and participates in the ascent of the divine spirit through the material universe.32

Coleridge furnished a new vision of the Romantic triad for Marsh’s ­pedagogy that fundamentally informed the entire curriculum. Another Coleridgean legacy for Vermont Transcendentalism involved the pedagogical emphasis on the individual mind. John Wheeler, the succeeding president of UVM after Marsh (and his friend and classmate at Dartmouth), gave a synopsis of Marsh’s system that highlighted its Romantic organicism and individualism: If this course of study is carefully examined, it will be found to contain, perhaps, what no other course of Collegiate study in the United States has so fully attempted. It seeks to give a coherence to the various studies, in each department, so that its several parts shall present, more or less, the unity, not of an aggregation, nor of a juxtaposition, nor of a merely logical arrangement, but of a natural development, and a growth; and therefore the study of it, rightly pursued, would be a growing and enlarging process, to the mind of the student . . . An ideal theory of education! I hear some one say. True, it is so.33

The organicism of this approach did not imply a diffuse or unfocused curriculum: on the contrary, Marsh created a highly specific and ordered hierarchy of studies. Again mirroring Coleridge’s educational plan, Marsh’s philosophy program comprised the “Pure Sciences” of grammar, languages, logic, mathematics, metaphysics, morals, and theology in an ascending series. Other topics of study, such as the “Mixed and applied sciences,” from mechanics and optics, to the fine arts and natural history, were also taken verbatim from Coleridge. The goal was to interconnect all areas of study, while simultaneously guiding the student’s mind to ever higher perspectives. This hierarchy of studies was not artificial, not “a merely logical arrangement, but of a natural development” because it embodied natural patterns of organic growth. Moreover, in Marsh’s plan the student progressed at his own pace through this series of studies, underscoring the importance of the individual “mind of the student” at the heart of this pedagogy. The most distinctively Coleridgean imprint on Marsh’s curriculum was his commitment to dynamic method, which in many ways was his most enduring legacy for American letters.34 Marsh’s curriculum fostered a continual and open-ended process of intellectual growth, from lower to higher modes of thinking, according to a leading thought that drove the mind upward and outward in its inquiry. In language that echoed Coleridge’s

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The Friend with its “Landing-Places” between sections, Wheeler described Marsh’s upwardly spiraling plan of study: But in the ideal theory here set forth, every step enlarges the horizon of knowledge; and at the same time, the compass of vision to embrace it; – every landing place, in the system, on which the mind pauses, enables it to comprehend all below it, and to see the ladder reaching up to the scaffolding above. And as the student ascends, in the temple of science, from story to story, he may go forth from all, or from any one, on an errand of practical utility; but he will return with a reverent knowledge, that there are higher things still in store, than are dreamed of amidst the mere utilities of the hour.35

Coleridge’s distinction between reason and understanding was the armature of Marsh’s pedagogical method. Method propelled the student upward to hone ever higher faculties: the student “ascends . . . from story to story” in his education, beginning “on an errand of practical utility” – using the understanding – “with a reverent knowledge, that there are higher things still in store” – perceived through the reason. The distinction was so central that Marsh’s examinations featured a question dedicated to reason and understanding.36 For Marsh, education was not merely a preparation for life, but a process of formation and self-realization in the truest Romantic sense of these terms. In his dedication speech for a chapel at the University of Vermont in 1830, Marsh emphasized the need for education to transcend the merely practical and worldly concerns of the understanding in order to develop the power of reason: The great question will be, not to what worldly purpose can the mind be made serviceable, but what are the inherent claims of the soul itself; to what does it tend in the essential principles of its own being; what constitutes the perfection of its being, and by what methods and means of education can we promote its attainment.37

In this passage, and for several pages following, Marsh elaborated the importance of Coleridge’s interpretation of the distinction between reason and understanding. Exercising reason was not merely a rational endeavor, but a spiritual one. Marsh’s words rang with redemptive and transformative language when he stated, “Show me rather the youth whose soul has been wakened up and aroused from the thraldom and lethargy of sense . . . It is this waking up and actuating of the essentially human and the spiritual in man, which we are bound to consider the highest aim in the

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education both of individuals and of the community.”38 Marsh, following Coleridge, believed that awakening students from the “lethargy of sense” would be transformative not only intellectually and spiritually, but socially. He called for a process of self-realization in language that paralleled the Boston Transcendentalists at their most radical.

Marsh’s Continuing Legacy Although Marsh resigned as president of UVM in 1833, he was surrounded by devoted acolytes – students, like-minded professors, and administrators – who ensured that his legacy would endure well beyond his lifetime. His close friend John Wheeler took over the presidency and insisted that all curricular changes remain intact. Marsh relished his new position as chair of Moral and Intellectual Philosophy, where he had an equally lasting impact as a mentor and professor. His students spoke of him in rhapsodic language: But the “esprit de corps” of the University of Vermont, that which gave significance to the term “Burlingtonian” applied as a cognomen to the individuals of the Alumni . . . yielded to the silent force of a single philosophic mind that moulded them into unity of thought, and method in all the processes and aims of educational culture. The presiding genius that gave impress and individuality to the scholarship of the University, resided in the person of Dr. James Marsh . . . So broad, so profound, so universal were his researches in all that relates to human thought, and to language the instrument of thought in every age, that he came to be more than a vehicle to convey the teachings of the great masters to other minds. Himself, like the great philosopher of antiquity, by inhaling for a lifetime the atmosphere of truth in the loftiest altitudes, became personally an oracle of truth, and shed around himself a light so clear and so commanding as to eclipse the light of all false philosophy.39

The author of the passage above was C. A. Huntington, UVM class of 1837. Fifty years later he wrote about his transformative collegiate experience in fresh and vivid terms. He confirmed that Marsh’s system of education was a spiritual, as well as an intellectual liberation, and that “the Platonic philosophy, for which the school was distinguished” had become a creed for Vermont alumni. The “esprit de corps” at UVM had taken on a life of its own, and Marsh had become apotheosized as “an oracle of truth.” Marsh was a dynamic educator who connected personally with students, and was praised as a “presiding genius that gave impress and

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individuality” to the institution. In these accounts, he appeared to fulfill, rather than oppose, Emerson’s view of education espoused in the “Divinity School Address.” He resisted system-building in favor of continual intellectual progress, and built a curriculum centered upon the development of individual ­consciousness and the improvement of society. Huntington continued: The system of education which these men organized, and which had its roots deep in the Platonic philosophy, for which the school was distinguished, was felt by students as soon as they came under its influence . . . The ideas of these men were seen to rise at once beyond the recitations of the class room to the higher fields of spiritual truth, to which the preliminary drill is but a passport. We were made to see that each step in the course, if well and truly taken, was a step of progress towards the ultimate solution of the great problem of man and his relation to the infinite . . . my personal contact with the men themselves whose every word and act indicated that while their feet were on the ground, their heads were in the realms of the unseen, and that the material earth was but the scaffold that supported their bodies, while their minds were grappling with the great invisible law of things, powers of being, sources of life and eternal good.40

Mentorship was a central aspect of the UVM experience. Huntington described “my personal contact with the men themselves” and repeated the term “these men” several times in the passage above. Portraying Vermont Transcendentalism as conservative and institution-bound fails to address the fact that visionary and charismatic teachers personally defined and carried on this movement. Several figures played a pivotal role in the continuing legacy of Vermont Transcendentalism: Marsh’s successor to the UVM presidency, John Wheeler; his successor as chair of Moral and Intellectual Philosophy, Joseph Torrey; and Joseph Torrey’s nephew, H. A. P. Torrey, who was the teacher and mentor of John Dewey, class of 1879. Wheeler stated that James Marsh’s death greatly weakened both the unity, and the power of the Faculty, but the System of instruction remained. The savor of his example and the atmosphere of his affectionate life, still linger here, like the mellow radiance of the Zodiacal light, as it streams up, and spreads itself over the western sky.41

The intense intellectual kinship shared by these men and their students ensured that Vermont Transcendentalism would endure far beyond Marsh’s lifetime.

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Coleridge was recognized by the UVM community as Marsh’s chief inspiration, and he shared in the cult of personality. Another Marsh acolyte, Aaron G. Pease (class of 1837), lionized Coleridge and Marsh at the semi-centennial celebration of 1854, when he pronounced the “literary and philosophical creed of the Vermont alumnus”:42 1. He believes in Conscience—he believes that every man has a Conscience, and that it is the same in all men. 2. He believes in the distinction between the Reason and Understanding. Without this distinction there can be no such thing as rational faith . . . 3. He believes in the distinction between Nature and the Spirit, or between the Natural and the Spiritual. The one he regards as the region of freedom and responsibility, the other as the region of necessity. 4. He believes in Coleridge—not that he was destitute of error and faults; but he takes him as a minuend—a quantity to be diminished . . . but you will have enough left to set up an army of ordinary great men in a good and thriving business during life.43 5. He believes in Professor Marsh . . . for whenever one of these great names is pronounced, the other is not a great way off. He believes in Professor Marsh as the man to whom the University and the cause of education in this country, and his own mind, are more deeply indebted than to any other man . . . 6. He believes in the faculty of the University of Vermont. For that faculty, though changed and changing, is still in the view of the University man substantially one and the same. One spirit is running through it. The spirit of the instruction and discipline remains the same. 7. He believes in the University of Vermont. He believes that it has proved itself a force amid the institutions and educated minds of this country. That as its greatest teacher operated upon and moulded the minds of his immediate pupils, so in a degree has this University operated upon the Institutions and education of this country . . . The influence of this University has been a great good. It is felt and acknowledged almost everywhere. And many are the scholars and thinkers and teachers that inquire after its methods, and of the leading instructors their plan of instruction, and the modes by which they communicated knowledge, and exerted so great an influence over their pupils.   Finally, it is an article of our creed very deeply seated and sacredly held— that when another fifty years has passed away, those who shall come up here to celebrate the Centennial Anniversary, will come here with the same sentiments in their hearts, and ready to swear allegiance to the same faith. The same doctrine will be held, and the same great men will be revered.44

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This remarkable statement revealed the profound and enduring legacy of Coleridge and Marsh at UVM. The very first element of the creed, a belief in conscience, was indebted to Coleridge.45 Other phrases came word-forword from Marsh’s “Preliminary Essay” to Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection: “He believes in the distinction between the Reason and Understanding” and “He believes in the distinction between Nature and the Spirit, or between the Natural and the Spiritual.” This creed highlighted how specific elements of Coleridge’s thought had become permanently and indelibly incorporated into the UVM curriculum. Pease was uncannily prescient about the lasting influence of Coleridge and Marsh at UVM: he wrote “when another fifty years has passed away . . . the same doctrine will be held, and the same great men will be revered.”46 Just as he predicted, fifty years later at the Centennial Anniversary of UVM, classmates did come with the creed in their heart: John Dewey was a guest speaker at the 1904 Centennial where he delivered a speech entitled “Philosophy and American National Life” that was full of references to Marsh and Coleridge. Dewey returned four more times to UVM, and at each visit celebrated his connections to Vermont Transcendentalism, as will be discussed further below. Marsh continues to be celebrated at UVM today through the James Marsh Professors-at-Large Program, which brings distinguished intellectuals to campus, and a plaque dedicated to Marsh is still visible in the college chapel. Indeed, as Pease predicted, “the same great men” inspired by Coleridge’s educational principles are still revered at UVM.

H. A. P. Torrey and John Dewey The Coleridgean concepts and method central to Vermont Transcendentalism influenced UVM’s most famous graduate – John Dewey, a major figure in twentieth-century education and American Pragmatism. Dewey was the product of an unbroken tradition of teaching that had remained relatively undisturbed since Marsh’s death in 1842. The curriculum description of 1875–79, the years that Dewey attended, revealed its continuing similarity to Marsh’s plan.47 H. A. P. Torrey, Dewey’s most important teacher and mentor, was the nephew of Joseph Torrey, and both adopted Marsh’s pedagogical method. H. A. P. Torrey’s course description for Political, Moral, and Intellectual Philosophy resounded with Marsh’s language: “In all the studies of this division the end sought is the awakening and training of the powers of reflective thought. The student is encouraged to raise questions and to present difficulties, and the aim of instruction is not so much to impart

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a system, as to stimulate and guide philosophical inquiry.”48 Coleridge’s concept of education had endured for several generations after Marsh’s new curriculum was instituted. H. A. P. Torrey taught a legendary course at UVM called the “Mansfield Course” that epitomized Coleridge’s dynamic intellectual method. Based on a study of Vermont’s highest mountain, which was visible from campus, the course examined the mountain from an a­ scending series of perspectives: From the eastern windows of his lecture-room may be seen the serene and splendid mountain which every Vermonter loves, – none more so than did Professor Torrey. Looking out upon this mountain, so mighty, so steadfast, so real, and yet at the same time so transfigured with the light of imagination and sentiment, Professor Torrey conceived the happy thought of making it the centre and object of an enquiry into the nature of Reality. Starting with the problem: “What is Mount Mansfield?” he proceeded as only he could do, to analyze the mountain, first scientifically as to its constituent elements, then as a mental concept, in a manner so clear, so convincing, so fascinating as to lead the student into the profoundest problems of existence and knowledge by paths so pleasant and enticing that before he knew it he had become an ardent devotee of Divine Philosophy.49

Hence, fifty years after Marsh’s death, a course structured upon Coleridge’s distinction between reason and understanding was being taught at UVM. The course began by looking at the mountain scientifically as a physical or material fact, using the power of understanding. Then the mountain was examined “as a mental concept,” exercising the powers of reason. The Mansfield Course embodied Coleridge’s legacy for American education: its goal was to develop the individual mind, according to the lower and higher powers of reason and understanding; it sought to discern the organic powers at work in nature and spirit; and it cultivated an ever progressive method of individual intellectual inquiry based on Coleridge’s concept of method. All of these Romantic concepts deeply influenced Dewey’s philosophy and pedagogy.50 In addition to taking undergraduate classes with H. A. P. Torrey, Dewey was also personally tutored by him in the history of philosophy and philosophical German after he graduated and returned to Vermont to teach secondary school. This tutoring was formative for three reasons: firstly, the personal contact strengthened their intellectual connection.51 Secondly, Torrey gave Dewey a philosophical grounding in Kantian idealism, as interpreted through the lens of Vermont Transcendentalism.

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Torrey had studied Kant’s Critiques in the original; Dewey later acknowledged the importance of his influence in a letter to Torrey, writing, “Thanks to my introduction under your auspices to Kant at the beginning of my studies I think I have had a much better introduction into phil. than I could have had any other way . . . It certainly introduced a revolution into all my thoughts, and at the same time gave me a basis for my other reading and thinking.”52 Coleridge’s interpretation of Kant was taken up by Marsh and Torrey, and Dewey in turn read Kant in a similar vein. Thirdly, Torrey encouraged Dewey to abandon teaching secondary school and become a philosopher. Following his advice, Dewey undertook graduate study in philosophy at Johns Hopkins, the first major step in his career as a philosopher. Torrey wrote him two glowing letters of recommendation, one for admission and one for a scholarship, exclaiming that “I have never had a pupil in philosophy who has shown more clearness and penetration, as well as original power, and frequent conversations with him upon philosophical subjects since his graduation have led me to form a high opinion of his ability in that direction – Philosophy is his chosen pursuit.”53 Without Torrey’s influence on Dewey, and the Marsh– Coleridge nexus in Vermont Transcendentalism, American Pragmatism might well have taken a different direction.

Dewey, Coleridge’s Method, and Pragmatism Groomed by Marsh’s curriculum, personal mentorship by H. A. P. Torrey, and his own life-long engagement with Romantic writers, Dewey appropriated Coleridgean elements of idealism, organicism, and intellectual method into the emerging philosophical movement of American Pragmatism.54 It might seem surprising that Coleridge, a pious English writer, could be so central to a secular American philosophical movement, but his dynamic method endured even as interest in the stodgier particulars of his thought (such as the importance of the reason and understanding distinction) fell away. In the intervening generations separating Coleridge and Dewey, the world had changed a good deal: as Menand observed, the founding fathers of Pragmatism – Holmes, James, Peirce, and Dewey – “wished to bring ideas and principles and beliefs down to a human level because they wished to avoid the violence they saw hidden in abstractions. This was one of the lessons the Civil War had taught them.”55 However, one could argue a more intermediate position: on one hand, the earlier Romantic and Transcendentalist movements were engaged in pragmatic applications of their philosophy – as evidenced by their involvement in abolitionism, women’s rights, civil disobedience, and

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political and educational reform – while on the other, the Pragmatists were deeply grounded in Romantic ideas. Kuklick pointed out that the central figures of Pragmatism “all expounded doctrines about the nature of man and of science, and about the human place in the cosmic order, and did so by grappling with the problems German idealism articulated.”56 In short, concern with mediating the Romantic triad of nature, spirit, and humanity endured, even as its model of the “cosmic order” was described in more secular language. Goodman also investigated the themes of “reconciliation and reconstruction” as Romantic legacies that were transmuted into a new environment: a democratic, practical America concerned with societal reform and progress.57 Both of these accounts were absolutely correct, but the central role of Marsh – and Coleridge – in shaping Dewey’s response to Romanticism has been underappreciated. Dewey’s adaptation of Coleridge for pragmatic ends was not strictly an innovation, but rather the continuation of a multi-generational process of Americanizing Coleridge in Transatlantic Transcendentalism that began with James Marsh. Coleridge attempted to mediate between empiricism and idealism, and philosophy and theology, although he did so by misreading Kant.58 This same misprision was taken up by Marsh, in an attempt to apply Coleridge’s thought to theological and philosophical schisms in American letters.59 Dewey followed suit, adapting Romantic idealism to address the problems and needs of his own time. Dewey’s adaptation of Coleridge’s and Marsh’s pedagogy was revealed in a passage from The Child and the Curriculum: Abandon the notion of subject-matter as something fixed and ready-made in itself, outside the child’s experience; cease thinking of the child’s experience as also something hard and fast; see it as something fluent, embryonic, vital; and we realize that the child and the curriculum are simply two limits which define a single process. Just as two points define a straight line, so the present standpoint of the child and the facts and truths of studies define instruction. It is continuous reconstruction, moving from the child’s present experience out into that represented by the organized bodies of truth that we call studies.60

Dewey followed the pattern set out in Torrey’s “Mount Mansfield” course – an engagement of both the student’s “experience” on one hand and the “organized bodies of truth that we call studies” married into a “fluent, embryonic, and vital” process of learning on the other. He elaborated this dynamic process even more explicitly in “My Pedagogic Creed” where he stated, “I believe that education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living.”61 This statement bore an uncanny

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resemblance to Coleridge’s statement in Aids to Reflection that “Christianity is not a Theory, or a Speculation; but a Life. Not a Philosophy of Life, but a Life and living Process.”62 Article Four of Dewey’s creed, entitled “The Nature of Method,” directly engaged Coleridge’s method using language that mirrored Marsh’s 1829 defense of the new UVM curriculum: I believe that the question of method is ultimately reducible to the question of the order of development of the child’s powers and interests. The law for presenting and treating the material is the law implicit within the child’s own nature.63

These selections reveal Dewey’s essentially Romantic conception of education as an organically unfolding process. The development of the student’s powers was not arbitrary nor artificially applied, but evolved from “the law implicit within the child.” Finally, although Dewey is often cast as a secular figure, Coleridge’s theological concept of the clerisy was vividly apparent at the close of the essay:   I believe, finally, that the teacher is engaged, not simply in the training of individuals, but in the formation of the proper social life.   I believe that every teacher should realize the dignity of his calling; that he is a social servant set apart for the maintenance of proper social order and the securing of the right social growth.   I believe that in this way the teacher always is the prophet of the true God and the usherer in of the true kingdom of God.64

Although theological language gradually dropped away from Dewey’s writing later in his career, he never abandoned an essentially religious view of education: he merely secularized his language to adapt to changing times.65 This was part of Dewey’s pluralistic and democratic vision: if theological language divided or excluded members of his audience, then it needed to be removed in a pragmatic retooling of ideas. As Kuklick noted, the Pragmatists “enunciated their philosophy of religion from departments of philosophy and not from divinity schools. Their public platform was not the pulpit but the lecture hall.”66 This secularization coincided with the emergence of the modern university and the creation of new fields such as sociology and psychology. However, this did not signal an erasure of Romanticism in twentieth-century America, but rather a necessary adaptation. In many ways, Dewey fulfilled Coleridge’s vision of education: he continually applied Coleridge’s dynamic intellectual method throughout a lifetime of intellectual inquiry for the betterment of society.

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Coleridge’s concept of method – namely, a process of thinking that resisted systematization in favor of continual intellectual growth – was the most important legacy for Dewey. In Pragmatism, the search for truth was a continually ongoing process. William James wrote that Professor John Dewey, and at least ten of his disciples, have collectively put into the world . . . a view of the world, both theoretical and practical, which is so simple, massive, and positive that, in spite of the fact that many parts of it yet need to be worked out, it deserves the title of a new system of philosophy.67

Yet as the subtitle to James’ Pragmatism revealed, this “new system of philosophy” was in fact “A new name for old ways of thinking.”68 Coleridge’s dynamic method of inquiry was important for Pragmatism because it appeared both venerable and relevant to modern concerns. Adapting a fluid intellectual method empowered Dewey, like Emerson before him, to modify Coleridge’s ideas liberally to serve his own needs and times while rooting his thought in an ancient idealist tradition. In addition to patterning his pedagogy on Coleridge and Marsh, Dewey articulated his indebtedness to both men in a series of essays about philosophy. Dewey returned to UVM as an honored guest in 1890, 1904, 1929, and 1941. The addresses he wrote for each occasion reaffirmed his profound connection with Vermont Transcendentalism. In his first guest lecture at UVM, “Poetry and Philosophy,” he wrote, The same movement of the spirit, bringing man and man, man and nature, into wider and closer unity, which has found expression by anticipation in poetry, must find expression by retrospection in philosophy. Thus will be hastened the day in which our sons and our daughters shall prophesy, our young men shall see visions, and our old men dream dreams.69

These lines resounded with Coleridge’s and Marsh’s view of the Romantic triad, espousing an interconnection between nature, spirit, and humanity. Two later addresses given by Dewey were even bolder testaments to Coleridge’s American legacy: “Philosophy and American National Life” and “James Marsh and American Philosophy.”

“Philosophy and American National Life” Just as alumnus Aaron Pease had predicted in 1854, fifty years after UVM’s semi-centennial celebration “the same doctrine will be held, and

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the same great men will be revered.” In 1904 John Dewey returned to UVM as the guest speaker for the centennial anniversary and wrote an essay for the occasion entitled “Philosophy and American National Life.” A recurring theme in the essay was the need to resist subscribing to “some special philosophic -ism”: It is not a futile question to ask after the reciprocal influences of American national life and American philosophy. It is reasonably sure, however, that the answer is not to be sought in some special philosophic -ism . . . American philosophy must be born out of and must respond to the demands of democracy, as democracy strives to voice and to achieve itself on a vaster scale, and in a more thorough and final way than history has previously witnessed. And democracy is something at once too subtle and complex and too aspiring to be caught in the meshes of a single philosophical school or sect.70

Dewey resisted compartmentalizing philosophy, encouraging instead the open-ended development of the individual mind, a legacy espoused by Marsh’s and Coleridge’s educational theories. Dewey claimed that “If our civilization is to be justified we must reach a conception of the individual which shows, in general and in detail, the inherently significant and worthful place which the psychical, which the doubting, hoping, striving, experimenting individual occupies in the constitution of reality.”71 This reliance on the individual mind searching for meaning, as opposed to subscribing to a branch of systematic philosophy, became the keystone of Pragmatism. Coleridgean method, as interpreted by Marsh’s and Torrey’s pedagogy, provided the blueprint for this intellectual process. Dewey espoused Coleridgean method as follows: I conclude with a few words upon the subject of method. An absence of dogmatism, of rigidly fixed doctrines, a certain fluidity and socially experimental quality must characterize American thought. Philosophy may be regarded as primarily either system or method. As system, it develops, justifies and delivers a certain definite body of doctrine. It is taken to discover, or at least to guarantee, a more or less closed set of truths . . . But there is also struggling for articulation a conception of philosophy as primarily method: – system only in the sense of an arrangement of problems and ideas which will facilitate further inquiry, and the criticism and constructive interpretation of a variety of lifeproblems . . . it aims at a philosophy which shall be instrumental rather than final, and instrumental not to establishing and warranting any particular set of truths, but instrumental in furnishing points of view and working ideas which may clarify and illuminate the actual and concrete course of life.72

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Here Dewey outlined “a conception of philosophy as primarily method” – a concept clearly delineated in Coleridge’s “Essays on the Principles of Method.” However, Coleridge’s ideas were once again adapted for an American audience: not only was the method of philosophy dynamic, but the ideas themselves were mutable and provisional, suggested by the phrases “working ideas” and “instrumental rather than final.” Finally, and foremost for Pragmatism, philosophy was not abstract and removed from everyday life, but eminently practical – its goal was to “clarify and illuminate the actual and concrete course of life.” Coleridge and Marsh both endorsed the application of philosophy to social change. Marsh did not fully systematize his own theological and philosophical thought, nor did he impress any such system upon his students; his successors, Joseph and H. A. P. Torrey, also resisted systematizing. Dewey, as a product of Vermont Transcendentalism, explicitly adapted Coleridge’s continually evolving method as a defining characteristic for American philosophy.

“James Marsh and American Philosophy” Dewey underscored his indebtedness to Vermont Transcendentalism even more transparently in another UVM oration entitled “James Marsh and American Philosophy.” Written in 1929 to commemorate the centenary of Marsh’s “Preliminary Essay” to Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection, Dewey situated Marsh and Coleridge as exponents of “romantic philosophy” and declared Marsh “a disciple of Coleridge.” More importantly for American letters, he explicated aspects of their thought that influenced his own philosophy: an organic relationship between mind and matter, the educative role of social institutions, and the importance of cultivating the individual mind. In “James Marsh and American Philosophy,” Dewey went to considerable lengths to explicate the underlying principles of Marsh’s and Coleridge’s thought, not only to memorialize their important role at UVM, but also to reframe their relevance for contemporary philosophy: The record discloses a mind at once deeply sensitive and deeply rational. The period was not favorable to far-reaching thought, which always demands a certain audacity lacking both to the period and to Dr. Marsh’s temperament. He did not carry his questionings beyond the received order of beliefs in religion. He depended upon others, notably Coleridge and the German idealists, for the language in which to clothe his philosophical speculations. But, none the less, because of his sensitivity one feels that . . . there is nothing secondhand in his thought. There were realities of which he had an intimate personal sense behind his most transcendental speculations. It is characteristic of him

Coleridge and Vermont Transcendentalism[ 161 ­

that he holds that knowledge of spiritual truth is always more than theoretical and intellectual. It was the product of activity as well as its cause. It had to be lived in order to be known.73

Dewey celebrated several of Marsh’s philosophic principles that would become key for Pragmatism: ceaseless intellectual activity (“product of activity as well as its cause”); the centrality of experience (“it had to be lived in order to be known”); the importance of the intuitions of the individual mind (“intimate personal sense behind his most transcendental speculations”); and the organic interrelation of feeling and thinking (“deeply sensitive and deeply rational”). He wrote an apologetic, claiming that “the period was not favorable to far-reaching thought,” but at the same time envisioned Marsh as a forerunner of contemporary American philosophy, a champion of individualism, open-ended intellectual inquiry, and social engagement. In addition to admiring Coleridge’s and Marsh’s dynamic intellectual method, Dewey valued their commitment to social institutions, which should also be “essentially educative in nature and function”: Coleridge, in common with the German school which he represented, conceived social institutions as essentially educative in nature and function. They were the outward manifestation of law and reason by means of which the intelligence and conscience of individuals are awakened and by which they are nourished till they become capable of independent activity, and then express themselves in loyalty to social institutions and devotion to improving them until these institutions are still better fitted to perform their educative task for humanity.74

Following Marsh and Coleridge, Dewey believed that the goal of education was not merely to prepare for a specific profession, but to improve society as “the intelligence and conscience of individuals are awakened.” Marsh’s restructuring of UVM was an embodiment of this belief, further confirmed by the illustrative careers of many of his students in the ministry, education, and the national press. In this sense, Dewey upheld Coleridge’s ideal of a clerisy, or “a community of cultivated individuals”: [Marsh’s] points sound strangely like the criticisms and proposals of education reformers from his day to this. They were not, however, with him concessions to practical expediency. They were reflections of his fundamental faith in individuality and in the spirit as opposed to the letter and mechanical form. But this emphasis upon the value of individuality was accompanied, in his views

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on education as elsewhere, with an equal sense that the ultimate end was a community of cultivated individuals.75

Perhaps it was disingenuous for Dewey to say that Marsh’s points “sound strangely like the criticisms and proposals of education reformers from his day to this,” since he himself had been responsible for transmitting the principles of Vermont Transcendentalism into the contemporary educational arena. Dewey resuscitated Marsh as a vital figure for modern life, as someone who integrated a “fundamental faith in individuality” with a desire for “a community of cultivated individuals.” Dewey refashioned Marsh as a link between the individualism of Romanticism and the social vision of Pragmatism. Dewey revealed an even deeper personal connection with Marsh and Coleridge in his reminiscences late in his life. A friend and former student, Herbert Schneider, presented a copy of Marsh’s edition of Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection to Dewey for his birthday. Upon receiving the gift, he responded: “Yes, I remember very well that this was our spiritual emancipation in Vermont. Coleridge’s idea of the spirit came to us as a real belief, because we could be both liberal and pious; and this Aids to Reflection book, especially Marsh’s edition, was my first Bible” . . . And then we said, “Well, when did you get over Coleridge?” He said, “I never did. Coleridge represents pretty much my religious views still, but I quit talking about them because nobody else is interested in them.”76

Despite changing times and mores, Dewey never strayed far from the principles of Marsh and Coleridge. The connection was ideological, but it was also personal: Vermont Transcendentalism had been handed down via generations of like-minded intellectuals, shaping the deepest paradigms of his thinking. Dewey wrote, Upon the whole, the forces that have influenced me have come from persons and from situations more than from books – not that I have not, I hope, learned a great deal from philosophical writings, but that what I learned from them has been technical in comparison with what I have been forced to think upon and about because of some experience in which I found myself ­entangled.77

Dewey’s life-long engagement with Vermont Transcendentalism certainly fitted this description. From his pedagogical formation under Marsh’s

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Coleridgean curriculum, his personal tutoring in philosophy from H. A. P. Torrey, and commemorative speeches for his alma mater stretching across his entire intellectual career, Dewey found himself “entangled” in a vital intellectual transmission of ideas from Europe to America. Vermont Transcendentalism endured for more than a century after the first transatlantic crossing of Coleridge’s texts to America. Coleridge’s influence on Marsh, the Torreys, and Dewey transformed American nineteenth- and early twentieth-century letters, constituting a multigenerational link in Transatlantic Transcendentalism. Dewey’s long and influential public career could be regarded as the crowning achievement of Coleridge’s and Marsh’s ideas of education. Coleridge’s theories of education had a limited impact on higher education in England;78 although Marsh successfully employed Coleridge’s ideas in a university curriculum and influenced generations of students, he died relatively young. Dewey, on the other hand, who lived for ninety-three years and remained intellectually active for much of that span, engaged in a tireless and ever unfolding intellectual inquiry dedicated to the improvement of society. In this light, Dewey was not only “the last of the Vermont Transcendentalists,” as Menand wrote, but also one of the most influential. While it has been previously cast as a fundamentally conservative and institution-bound movement inherently different from its Boston cousin, Vermont Transcendentalism in fact galvanized social change in radical, far-reaching, and enduring ways. Coleridge might have considered himself a poor poet in England, although we must question that modest assertion, but indeed without doubt he was a great philosopher in America, indeed a pivotal figure for Transatlantic Transcendentalism.

Notes

Chapter 1 1. CWE II 203. 2. J II 277. 3. Reid, The Life, Letters, and Friendships of Richard Monckton, II 432. 4. Milnes, “American Philosophy – Emerson’s Works,” 186. Thanks to Robert Scholnick for introducing me to this quotation, which is cited in “Boston and Beyond,” 495. 5. Keane, Emerson, Romanticism, and Intuitive Reason, 8–9 and McFarland, Originality and Imagination, 1–30. 6. Another contemporary, George Gilfillan, included two back-to-back essays on Coleridge and Emerson in A Gallery of Literary Portraits where he wrote in Coleridgean language, “There is nothing more remarkable about the literature of this age, than the harmony it has exhibited in many signal instances, between the analytic and the imaginative powers; between the genius which combines, and the intellect which resolves, – between an energic philosophy, and a most ideal and impassioned poetry.” Gilfillan, 265. 7. Cameron, Emerson the Essayist, I 78. 8. The Houghton Library at Harvard University is the repository of some of Emerson’s library, including his annotated copies of Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection, Biographia Literaria, Statesman’s Manual, Specimens of Table Talk, Letters, Conversations and Recollections, and The Friend. Most of these American editions were published between 1829 and 1836, coinciding with the period of Emerson’s most intense engagement with Coleridge. 9. I am grateful to Jim Engell’s insightful description of the Coleridge and Emerson connection as so intense that it amounted to a kind of collaboration. 10. Richardson observed, “Before this time [of Ellen’s death] Emerson was a rationalist who was fascinated but not wholly convinced by the truth of

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i­dealism. After this time Emerson believed completely, implicitly, and viscerally in the reality and primacy of the spirit, though he was always aware that the spirit can manifest itself only in the corporeal world.” Richardson, Emerson: The Mind on Fire, 110. 11. Emerson declared, “I will be a naturalist.” J III 163. 12. J III 190. 13. CWE V 9. 14. J III 180. 15. JMN IV 407–9. 16. CL VI 949. 17. Pochmann, German Culture in America, 175. 18. J III 185. 19. JMN IV 242. 20. JMN IV 335. 21. In this letter Coleridge wrote, “I would not lecture on any subject for which I had to acquire the main knowledge . . . on no subject that had not employed my thoughts for a large portion of my life since earliest manhood, free of all outward and particular purpose.” The Literary Gazette and Journal of the Belles Lettres, 629. Reprinted in Cameron, Emerson the Essayist, I 155–6. In this same letter, Coleridge noted that his most important works could be confined to the second volume of the Biographia, the third volume of The Friend (which includes the “Essays on the Principles of Method”) and some half dozen of his poems. Emerson copied Coleridge’s comments on the flyleaf of his personal copy of the 1818 edition of The Friend, Houghton Library, Harvard University. 22. Gravil discerned the Transcendentalists “sustained effort to restate Romanticism in American terms, redeemed from the tentativeness, the doubt, the indirections, the failures and the compromises, of their English precursors, or to fulfill in America what was only promised in England.” Romantic Dialogues, xvii. 23. JMN IV 360. Weisbuch described Emerson as “the pure Golconda, what miners call a high-grader, working his way rapidly through vast mines of material and pocketing the richest bits.” Atlantic Double-Cross, 67. 24. J II 279. 25. See Anderson, “Perpetual Affirmations, Unexplained”; Harris, Carlyle and Emerson, and also his article, “Reason and Understanding Reconsidered.” 26. Emerson, The Correspondence of Emerson and Carlyle, 4. 27. Thompson, “Emerson and Carlyle,” 453. 28. Cabot, A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson, I 241. 29. Thompson, “Emerson and Carlyle,” 443. 30. Harris, Carlyle and Emerson, 55. 31. JMN V 59. 32. As quoted by Richardson, Emerson: The Mind on Fire, 184. 33. JMN XVI 67.

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34. The word “benefactor” is key here: the Oxford English Dictionary defines it as “One who renders aid or kindly service to others, a friendly helper; one who advances the interests of a cause or institution, a patron.” 35. CWE I 80. 36. As Gravil observed, while the intellectual history of British Romanticism has long been acknowledged, “American Romanticism has too often been read as if Emerson conjured it from the soil itself.” Romantic Dialogues, xii. 37. CWE II 203. 38. Keane, in Emerson, Romanticism, and Intuitive Reason, devoted particular attention to this line from Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” and elaborated the importance of intuitive reason for Emerson and Transatlantic Romanticism. 39. JMN V 252. 40. I refer here to Harold Bloom’s two books that bookend a long career ­discussing influence: The Anxiety of Influence and more recently The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as Way of Life, as well as his essay, “Emerson: Power at the Crossing.” 41. Bloom, Anxiety of Influence, 56. 42. Bloom, Anatomy of Influence, 8. 43. Bloom, Anatomy of Influence, 213. 44. Pace and Scott, Wordsworth in American Literary Culture, 2. 45. Chai, The Romantic Foundations of the American Renaissance; Brantley, Coordinates of Anglo-American Romanticism; Weisbuch, Atlantic Double-Cross, xvii–iii. 46. Gravil, Romantic Dialogues, xviii. 47. Newman, Pace, and Koenig-Woodyard, eds, Transatlantic Romanticism: An Anthology; Pace, “Towards a Taxonomy of Transatlantic Romanticism(s).” 48. Manning and Taylor, “Introduction,” Transatlantic Literary Studies, 7. 49. Hutchings and Wright, eds, Transatlantic Literary Exchanges; Bannet and Manning, eds, Transatlantic Literary Studies. 50. Manning and Taylor, “Description of Edinburgh Studies in Transatlantic Literatures.” 51. Manning, “Grounds for Comparison,” 26. 52. J II 278. 53. Walls, “Global Transcendentalism,” 518. 54. These are the dates chosen by Newman, Pace, and Koenig-Woodyard, editors of Transatlantic Romanticism: An Anthology. 55. See the third volume of Coleridge’s Responses, ed. Harvey, which collected and explicated Coleridge’s writings on artistic, philosophical, and religious views of nature. 56. Boggs, “Transatlantic Romanticisms,” 222. 57. As Scholnick commented, it is vital not to obscure “an essential truth about the movement [of American Transcendentalism]: In both its origins and continuing development, it was transnational.” “Boston and Beyond,”

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496. See also, for a discussion of how “[t]he Transcendentalists saw their achievement in global, planetary, and even cosmic terms,” Walls, “Global Transcendentalism,” 514. 58. CWE I 206. 59. Manning and Cogliano, “Introduction: The Enlightenment and the Atlantic,” 2. 60. Vigus and Wright, eds, Coleridge’s Afterlives, vii. 61. M I 747. 62. EL I 224. 63. As quoted in Walls, Emerson’s Life in Science, 34. 64. BL I 260–1. 65. Richardson, “Liberal Platonism and Transcendentalism,” 3. Marjorie Nicolson also noted Coleridge’s key role in bringing Platonic ideas across the Atlantic in “James Marsh and the Vermont Transcendentalists,” 49. See Chapter 8, footnote 24. 66. Engell, “Coleridge and German Idealism,” 155. 67. Emerson’s copy of The Friend, Houghton Library, Harvard University. 68. Walls made a brief mention of Coleridge’s method in “Ralph Waldo Emerson and Coleridge’s American Legacy,” as do Gravil, Romantic Dialogues; Thompson, “Emerson’s Indebtedness to Coleridge”; Toulouse, “Emerson, Coleridge and the Shaping of Self-Evidence”; and Beach, “Coleridge, Emerson, and Naturalism,” but a more in-depth treatment of this important legacy is long overdue. 69. F I 455. 70. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, 6. 71. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism. 72. McFarland, “A Complex Dialogue,” 115. See also McFarland, Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition, 110. Similarly, Whicher observed that Emerson’s mind was “complex and many-sided, so was the world it built. His greatest gift was the ability to endure the push and pull of contrary directions in his thought without a premature reaching out after conclusions that would do violence to his whole nature.” Whicher, Freedom and Fate, vii. 73. McFarland, Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition, 110. 74. Sherman Paul commented, “Emerson retained the cosmological dualism of the Platonic tradition. His universe was a universe of levels and platforms, a progressive staircase leading to unity. Worldliness and other-worldliness, lower and higher, material and spiritual – he needed these polarities; they described the tensions he experienced and that as facts of consciousness his vision reconciled.” Paul, Emerson’s Angle of Vision, 34. 75. Perry, Coleridge and the Uses of Division, 11. 76. Perry, Coleridge and the Uses of Division, 23. 77. Beer, Coleridge the Visionary, 31. Even the names of Coleridge’s children manifested the importance of the categories of the Romantic triad: Hartley was named after a materialist philosopher, Berkeley after an idealist, Derwent

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after a lake in the Lake District, and Sara after his wife and his unrequited love, Sara Hutchinson. 78. Weisbuch wrote, “Transcendentalism was not only a literary, philosophical, and religious movement; it was also, inescapably, a social and political movement as well . . . Transcendentalism believes that the purpose of education is to facilitate the self-development of each individual.” Weisbuch, Atlantic Double-Cross, 250. 79. Hutchings, “Ecocriticism in British Romantic Studies,” 178. 80. Older scholarship in the history of ideas chronicled shifting conceptions of nature in the long eighteenth century, including Willey, The Eighteenth Century Background; Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory; and Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being. 81. Rigby, Topographies of the Sacred. 82. Nichols, Beyond Romantic Ecocriticism. 83. Slovic, “Foreword,” xi. 84. McKusick, Green Writing, and Hutchings, Romantic Ecologies. 85. The following books have excellent commentary on Coleridge and Emerson: Buell, Emerson; Richardson, Emerson: The Mind on Fire; Packer, The Transcendentalists. 86. Keane, Emerson, Romanticism, and Intuitive Reason, 20. 87. Packer, “Romanticism,” 97. 88. Sostaric, “Coleridge and Emerson,” 258, 275. 89. See three pieces by Harding, “Coleridge and Transcendentalism”; “The Divinity in Man”; and “James Marsh as Editor of Coleridge.” See also Carafiol’s “James Marsh’s American Aids to Reflection,” and Transcendent Reason. 90. Wood, “The Growth of the Soul,” 387. 91. See three works of Vallins, “Self-Reliance”; “Coleridge, Transcendental Idealism, and the Ascent of Intelligence”; and Coleridge and the Psychology of Romanticism, 5. 92. Harris, “Reason and Understanding Reconsidered,” 275. 93. Kern, “Coleridge and American Romanticism,” 118; Walls, “Ralph Waldo Emerson and Coleridge’s American Legacy,” 112. 94. Thompson wrote, “Coleridge felt that he had a system of philosophy of his own to present, and we are almost led to think that Emerson discovered it.” Thompson, “Emerson’s Indebtedness to Coleridge,” 76. Beach also presented a comprehensive view of the role of Plato, Kant, Schelling, and Stallo and the Coleridge/Emerson connection in “Coleridge, Emerson, and Naturalism.” Chapter 2 1. Hedge, as quoted in Cabot, A Memoir II 244–5. 2. Kern, “The Rise of Transcendentalism,” 274–5. 3. Packer, The Transcendentalists, 27.

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Notes[ 169 4. German idealism was the strongest force, yet Platonic and Neoplatonic forms were also vital. See Richardson, “Liberal Platonism and Transcendentalism.” Hunt suggests that “It would appear that Coleridge habitually regarded later philosophies through Platonic spectacles.” Hunt, “Coleridge and the Endeavor of Philosophy,” 830. For more on Coleridge’s unique brand of Platonic idealism, see Vigus, Platonic Coleridge; Howard, Coleridge’s Idealism; Newsome, Two Classes of Men; and Schrickx, “Coleridge and the Cambridge Platonists.” 5. As Packer described, “The young men and women around Cambridge who read these works delighted in a portrait of the individual mind and its relationship to nature that made ordinary perception seem revelatory and ordinary maturation Odyssean.” Packer, The Transcendentalists, 27. Simmons also attributed Coleridge’s popularity in America to his fusion of “the spiritual, the higher point of view achieved as the result of the imaginative process, with the practical.” Simmons, “Coleridge’s American Reputation,” 369. 6. Vigus and Wright, eds, Coleridge’s Afterlives, vii. See Carafiol’s article, “James Marsh’s American Aids to Reflection,” and Beer, “James Marsh’s Edition of 1829 and the American Reception,” cxvi–cxxviii. Goodman called Emerson “America’s first Romantic philosopher,” observing how “the ideas and projects of the European Romantics . . . developed in a philosophically distinctive way on American soil.” Goodman, American Philosophy and the Romantic Tradition, 34–5. Kern also examined how “Coleridge produced unanticipated results because of the different American environment.” Kern, “Coleridge and American Romanticism,” 114. 7. Emerson might have had access to other accounts of Coleridge via articles in Fraser’s Magazine and the Edinburgh Review. John Abraham Heraud wrote an anonymous article entitled “Some Account of Coleridge’s Philosophy” in Fraser’s Magazine in 1832. In 1831, Emerson withdrew from the Boston Athenaeum volume 27 (1816) of the Edinburgh Review, which contained a review of Coleridge’s Statesman’s Manual. See two articles by Dameron, “Emerson and Fraser’s on Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection,” and “Emerson and the Edinburgh Review of Coleridge’s Statesman’s Manual,” 31. 8. Wahr noted, “Emerson never read German with ease. He was no linguist. He labored with the language in order to read Goethe in the original, and found it difficult, and it was convenient for him to have a dictionary within reach.” Wahr, “Emerson and the Germans,” 51. See also Wellek, “Emerson and German Philosophy.” 9. Kern, “The Rise of Transcendentalism,” 275. 10. Marsh, “Preliminary Essay,” in the first American edition of Aids to Reflection (Burlington, VT, 1829). Reprinted in AR 491–529. 11. Marsh, Coleridge’s American Disciples, 233. 12. Carafiol, “James Marsh’s American Aids to Reflection,” 29. For further clarification of the complex theological landscape of early nineteenth-century America, see Carafiol, Transcendent Reason; Kuklick, Churchmen and Philosophers; Harding, “The Divinity in Man”; and Ledbetter, “Changing Sensibilities.”

170 ] 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

Notes

Marsh, “Preliminary Essay,” 498. Marsh, “Preliminary Essay,” 499. Carafiol, “James Marsh’s American Aids to Reflection,” 32, 45. Carafiol, “James Marsh: Transcendental Puritan,” 127. Letter to Rev. S. H. Hodges from S. H. Cox, 12 March, 1845, Marsh Papers, Special Collections, University of Vermont. 18. Almost thirty years later, the matter was rekindled once again when President Buckham of UVM asked A. G. Pease to find the letter and make a fair copy of it, since the original letter was in tatters by that point. Pease considered himself, “a reputed & professed Coleridge man”: he was the author of the “Vermont Creed” that honored Coleridge and Marsh, which will be discussed in the final chapter. Pease complained that “if Pres. B. had known how worthless & vile a thing it is he would not asked that it should be unearthed & brought again into the light of day to sicken the soul of truth, honor, fairness, & decency . . .” Letter from A. G. Pease, 5 March, 1874, Marsh Papers, Special Collections, University of Vermont. 19. Marsh, Coleridge’s American Disciples, 3. 20. Marsh, The Remains of the Rev. James Marsh, 93–4. 21. J VI 266. 22. Marsh, “Preliminary Essay,” 408. I am indebted to Richard Brantley’s feedback on this section. 23. Miller, The Transcendentalists, 34. 24. These included the appendix to the Statesman’s Manual, a letter “from a professional friend,” with a response from Coleridge, and a fascinating note, “On the Philosophic Import of the Words Subject and Object,” which was annotated by Emerson. 25. This “Preliminary Essay” still influences noted Coleridge scholars today: Anya Taylor recalled feeling compelled to read Aids to Reflection after reading Marsh’s essay. 26. AR 47. 27. Marsh, “Preliminary Essay,” 492. 28. Marsh, “Preliminary Essay,” 509. 29. AR 80. 30. Marsh, “Preliminary Essay,” 510. 31. Harding stated, “But without Coleridgean metaphysics, that which made Christianity unique among religions, the antithesis of ‘natural’ and ‘spiritual,’ would inevitably be lost – either to a degrading materialism or to an ostensibly noble but essentially pernicious pantheism.” Harding, “James Marsh as Editor of Coleridge,” 235. 32. Marsh, “Preliminary Essay,” 510. 33. CN IV 5293. 34. Carafiol, Transcendent Reason, 53. See Chapter 4 for more on Coleridge, Emerson, and Kant. 35. Beach, “Coleridge, Emerson, and Naturalism,” 329.

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36. JMN V 271–2. 37. Packer, The Transcendentalists, 25. 38. LE I 412–13. 39. Engell, The Creative Imagination, 336. 40. Steele, “Romantic Epistemology and Romantic Style,” 189. 41. McFarland, Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition, 156. 42. Carafiol, Transcendent Reason, 54. Pochmann noted, “No philosophy with which [Emerson] was acquainted previous to 1830, whether of Greek or British or some other origin, seemed to supply the means for bridging the gap between what he called variously ‘spirit’ or ‘mind’ on one hand and ‘nature’ or ‘matter’ on the other . . . How to reconcile philosophically the dualism patent on the very surface of things? This remained an open question until he discovered Kant.” Pochmann, German Culture in America, 158. 43. Nicolson, “James Marsh and the Vermont Transcendentalists,” 39–40. See also Buell, Literary Transcendentalism, 5. 44. “Dedication of the Marsh Tablet, by William P. Pierson,” Marsh Papers, Special Collections, University of Vermont. The Coleridge quotation is from “A Tombless Epitaph,” PW 16 1.2 865. 45. Pochmann, German Culture in America, 144. 46. Pochmann, German Culture in America, 170. 47. Hedge, “Coleridge’s Literary Character.” 48. Hedge, “Coleridge’s Literary Character,” 111. 49. Hedge, “Coleridge’s Literary Character,” 119. 50. Hedge, “Coleridge’s Literary Character,” 129. 51. However, Hedge’s summary was not perfect: according to Chai, he incorrectly interpreted Fichte’s description of the nature of consciousness. This misinterpretation was passed on to Emerson: “In the history of Emerson’s development, such a lacuna or misprision must be judged significant. It forms a stimulus for his notion of consciousness as a form of pure seeing and, by so doing, contributes to his rejection of traditional philosophy, his quest for a higher, transcendent form of knowledge that would be at the same time a form of existence.” Chai, The Romantic Foundations of the American Renaissance, 336–7. 52. Hedge, “Coleridge’s Literary Character,” 117. 53. Bowen, “Locke and the Transcendentalists,” 175. 54. Hedge, “Coleridge’s Literary Character,” 109. 55. Hedge, “Coleridge’s Literary Character,” 116. 56. Gravil, Romantic Dialogues, xvii. 57. Hedge, “Coleridge’s Literary Character,” 117. 58. Hedge, “Coleridge’s Literary Character,” 124. 59. “The present age” for Hedge was a time of intellectual upheaval and renewal: “There are certain periods in the history of society, when . . . mankind are particularly disposed to inquire concerning themselves and their destination, the nature of their being, the evidence of their knowledge, and the grounds

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of their faith. Such a tendency is one of the characteristics of the present age, and the German philosophy is the strongest expression of that tendency; it is a striving after information on subjects which have been usually considered as beyond the reach of human intelligence, an attempt to penetrate into the most hidden mysteries of our being.” Hedge, “Coleridge’s Literary Character,” 120–1. 60. Hedge, “Coleridge’s Literary Character,” 120, 119. 61. Hedge, “Coleridge’s Literary Character,” 120. Barth and Nordbeck noted, “many bright young men and women now found themselves with a new religion, and no way to talk about it. Having dispensed with the language and categories of traditional theology, they were searching for a new vocabulary, new forms and concepts with which to express their new faith.” Barth and Nordbeck, “Coleridge’s Orthodoxy in Transcendentalist New England,” 142. Coleridge supplied the new vocabulary, forms, and concepts to American letters. 62. Hedge, “Coleridge’s Literary Character,” 121. 63. Hedge, “Coleridge’s Literary Character,” 121; BL I 297. 64. BL II 11. 65. Hedge, “Coleridge’s Literary Character,” 121. 66. F I 496–7. 67. Hedge, “Coleridge’s Literary Character,” 121. 68. Hedge, “Coleridge’s Literary Character,” 121n. 69. Hedge, “Coleridge’s Literary Character,” 122–3. 70. Hedge, “Coleridge’s Literary Character,” 126. 71. Hedge, “Coleridge’s Literary Character,” 128. 72. Hedge, as quoted in Cabot II 244–5. 73. LE I 402. 74. Richardson, Emerson: The Mind on Fire, 166. Chapter 3 1. Engell’s edition of the BL has done a great service to Coleridge studies by tracing the exact “borrowings” from other thinkers in the philosophical chapters of this volume. For differing views of Coleridge’s plagiarism, see Engell, “Editor’s Introduction,” BL; Holmes, Coleridge: Darker Reflections, 281; McFarland, Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition, ch. 1; and Fruman, Coleridge: The Damaged Archangel. 2. McFarland, Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition, 109. 3. Berkeley wrote, “The fundamental problem here is that being systematic is not, as many Coleridgean scholars seem to assume, a sign of quality. System is not an achievement. System is itself a philosophical claim, so that arguing that Coleridge had a ‘system’ is neither a defence of his originality, nor of his intellectual prowess, and nor is it particularly informative since we can easily see that he was committed to the idea of system, whether or not he actually

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Notes[ 173 managed to stack enough ideas together to claim one.” Berkeley, Coleridge and the Crisis of Reason, 11. 4. The term “dynamic” was widely used in German idealism. Kant’s “dynamic theory” is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “a theory according to which matter was conceived to be constituted by two antagonistic principles of attraction and repulsion.” Schelling speaks of a “dynamic process,” which influenced Coleridge (see BL I 129n) and Coleridge also referred to his “obligations to the polar logic and dynamic philosophy of Giordano Bruno,” which influenced Schelling. BL I 161; BL I 260–1. 5. Emerson borrowed the Biographia for two days in 1819, but as Cameron noted it was not until 1826 that he “was to begin his serious quest for the prima philosophia in the Biographia Literaria, which he withdrew from Harvard on November 16. Its influence upon his developing transcendentalism can hardly be exaggerated, for it not only became the basis of his mature criticism and introduced him to Coleridge’s principal definitions, but also led him eventually to The Friend and to Aids to Reflection.” Cameron, Emerson the Essayist, I 162–3. See also Cameron, Emerson’s Reading, 48. 6. Thompson, “Emerson’s Indebtedness to Coleridge,” 76, 64. 7. Wilson detailed how “Romantic thinkers merged empirical observation with sublime vision . . . [combining] intuition and observation, deduction and induction, reason and understanding, Plato and Bacon.” Wilson, Emerson’s Sublime Science, 14. 8. Richardson, “Liberal Platonism and Transcendentalism,” 3. 9. Engell explained, “The Dynamic Philosophy set a framework, not only for philosophy and personal experience, but also for science, history, and art.” Engell, The Creative Imagination, 334. 10. Barfield, What Coleridge Thought, 13. 11. JMN V 270. 12. BL I 299. 13. CL IV 589. Holmes elaborated upon the importance of the Logosophia for Coleridge: “In an unbroken progression, from rational perception (“Understanding”) through artistic vision (“Imagination”) to the highest forms of intuition (“Reason”), all human experience moved towards a transcendent meaning. For Coleridge, the challenge to articulate this faith in a single apocalyptic work was never met. But by seeing each of his future books as a necessary preface or prelude to the final achievement, he was able to continue productively.” Holmes, Coleridge: Darker Reflections, 372. 14. In a series of letters written in 1817, Coleridge outlined the objective pole of the dynamic philosophy, complete with diagrams of electrical polarity. CL IV 767. 15. For an in-depth analysis of Coleridge’s interest in Naturphilosophie, see Abrams, The Correspondent Breeze, 159–222; Levere, Poetry Realized in Nature; and Modiano, Coleridge and the Concept of Nature. Modiano explained the overarching aims of the Naturphilosophen, who “generally conceived the universe as a

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complicated web of polar forces, operating in distinct though related modes, in both inorganic and organic nature, matter and spirit. They commonly rejected the Newtonian atomistic conception of nature, proposing instead a dynamic theory which explained the manifestations of given phenomena on the basis of original forces opposed to one another.” Modiano, Coleridge and the Concept of Nature, 141. 16. Volta and Laplace discovered (or produced) electricity in 1798, but earlier experiments in electricity by William Gilbert were conducted in 1600. 17. BL I 252. 18. BL I 244. 19. BL I 282–3. 20. BL I 273. 21. F I 94. Regarding the essential role of polarity in Coleridge’s dynamic philosophy, Engell stated, “The dialectic of matter and spirit, the ‘polar logic’ of nature and mind, objective and subjective, gave the system great flexibility. We can think of this dialectic, with its initial stress on an act of intelligence that creates matter or nature, as the ‘dynamic’ in the concept of the ‘dynamic philosophy.’ It requires a ‘force’ or creative act to transform and to reconcile the two ‘halves’ of the whole.” BL I lxxvi. 22. F I 94n. 23. For more on Coleridge’s use of polarity, see McFarland, “A Complex Dialogue”; Barfield, What Coleridge Thought, 35–7; Fogle, The Idea of Coleridge’s Criticism, 4; Fruman, “Ozymandias and the Reconciliation of Opposites”; and Thorslev, “Dialectic and its Legacy.” 24. BL I 297. For another rendition of this idea, see BL I 286: “The intelligence in the one tends to objectize itself, and in the other to know itself in the object.” 25. M II 1018–19. 26. BL I 255. 27. Coleridge was present at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science when the term “scientist” was coined by William Whewell. See Holmes, The Age of Wonder, 449. 28. Levere, “Coleridge, Chemistry, and the Philosophy of Nature,” 375. Miller pointed out that Coleridge’s scientific musings, “based mainly on mis-­ information, wild guesses and wishful thinking, make no contribution to modern biology.” Miller, “Coleridge’s Concept of Nature,” 93. Abrams described Coleridge’s nature philosophy, in which “the powers of light and gravity evolve by a progressive synthesis of prior syntheses. Their evolution can be viewed as a great ascending spiral through the several distinctive orders of organized forms . . .” Abrams, The Correspondent Breeze, 211. 29. F I 479. 30. As quoted by Holmes, The Age of Wonder, 288. 31. CL IV 806. 32. CL IV 807. 33. BL I 299.

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34. CL IV 768. 35. BL I 299. 36. In Chapter 2 Coleridge’s concept of the arch was discussed, and it is relevant here: while constructing the arch, a support must be put in ­ place first. Once the structure is complete and capable of standing on its own, it is removed. Similarly, the dynamic philosophy depends on an assumption that the system can and will be completed, requiring an act of faith or intuition. 37. Newsome explained, “Coleridge, Goethe, Hegel and Schelling were all convinced that science was on the threshold of the most important ‘breakthrough’ which would establish beyond any shadow of doubt that the law of polar opposites . . . was the one fundamental law of the universe, from which all dynamism sprang and through which unity was achieved.” Newsome, Two Classes of Men, 49. 38. BL I 256. 39. Emerson, “Papers from the Dial,” 210. 40. JMN IV 354–5. 41. Vallins, Coleridge and the Psychology of Romanticism, 5. 42. JMN V 270. 43. Coleridge wrote, “God is a Circle, the centre of which is every where, and circumference nowhere.” AR 233n. According to Beer’s footnote, the saying was attributed to Aristotle and repeated by medieval theologians such as Bonaventura, and later found in Luther, Böhme, and More. 44. Here Emerson quoted Coleridge’s The Friend; JMN VI 202. 45. JMN III 360. 46. JMN V 218. 47. See recent work on Emerson’s interest in science such as Wilson, Emerson’s Sublime Science; Brown, The Emerson Museum; and especially Walls, Emerson’s Life in Science, since it dovetails with many of the topics of this book. 48. For more on Emerson’s use of Coleridgean dialectic, see Wood, “The Growth of the Soul”; Burke, “I, Eye, Ay – Emerson’s Early Essay on ‘Nature’”; and Paul, Emerson’s Angle of Vision, 112–17. 49. CWE II 57. 50. CWE III 143–4. 51. CWE III 144. 52. EL III 284. 53. “Most of my readers will have observed a small water-insect on the surface of rivulets, which throws a cinque-spotted shadow fringed with prismatic colours on the sunny bottom of the brook; and will have noticed, how the little animal wins its way up against the stream, by alternate pulses of active and passive motion, now resisting the current, and now yielding to it in order to gather strength and a momentary fulcrum for a further propulsion. This is no unapt emblem of the mind’s self-experience in the act of thinking. There are evidently two powers at work, which relatively to each other are active

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and passive; and this is not possible without an intermediate faculty, which is at once both active and passive.” BL I 124; EL III 311. 54. JMN V 51. 55. Paul, Emerson’s Angle of Vision. 56. See Chapter 8 for more on Dewey, and for Nietzsche, see Stack, Nietzsche and Emerson; and Keane, Emerson, Romanticism, and Intuitive Reason. 57. JMN III 361. 58. Anderson, “Perpetual Affirmations, Unexplained,” 37. 59. JMN V 221. The notes anticipated the “Humanity of Science” lecture series. 60. JMN V 221–2. Chapter 4 1. F I 148–9. 2. F I 445–6. See CWE III 27 for similar imagery in Emerson. For more on the motif of the upward and outwardly expanding spiral, see Abrams, The Correspondent Breeze, 211. Walls noted the importance of the spiral in Emerson’s Life in Science. Hodder described Emerson’s “interplay of centripetal and centrifugal forces” in Emerson’s Rhetoric of Revelation, and Wood illuminated the pattern of “alternation of ascent and assimilation” in Emerson’s early lectures in “The Growth of the Soul,” both of which could be interpreted as describing an upwardly spiraling motion. 3. Beer noted “an oddity . . . in Coleridge’s writing . . . that is, an argument which seems to be pointing firmly in one direction turns out to contain within itself a statement which acts as a counter-current, suggesting somewhere an alternative motion of the mind.” Beer, “Coleridge’s Religious Thought,” 43. 4. Coleridge discussed the errors of sectarianism at length in The Friend, and Emerson sympathized with his distrust of partial views. See JMN V 221–2. 5. AR 6–7. 6. M I 175. 7. BL II 11. 8. JMN V 344. 9. J II 279. 10. Barfield observed that often Coleridge contrasted a process with the result of that process, as will been seen below when examining specific distinctions. See Barfield, What Coleridge Thought, 19. Wheeler asserted that Coleridge’s distinctions all follow a polar expression: “The relation of reason to understanding, whole to part in the organic sense, and Coleridge’s conception of the creative imagination can all be seen as variant metaphors for polarity. For all are informed by the same IDEA of relation as interpenetration.” Wheeler, Sources, Processes and Methods, 49. 11. BL I 31. 12. LS 178. 13. EL I 378.

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14. EL I 378–9. 15. EL I 379. 16. LE I 412. 17. For more on Coleridge and Kant, see Engell, “Coleridge and German Idealism”; Shaffer, “Metaphysics of Culture”; Lovejoy, “Coleridge and Kant’s Two Worlds”; Micheli, The Early Reception of Kant’s Thought in England; Wellek, Immanuel Kant in England; and Sostaric, Coleridge and Emerson. For Emerson and Kant, see Cascardi, “Emerson on Nature”; Cavell, “Genteel Responses to Kant?” and In Quest of the Ordinary; Harding, “Coleridge and Transcendentalism”; Harris, “Reason and Understanding Reconsidered”; and Van Cromphout, Emerson’s Ethics. 18. Paul, Emerson’s Angle of Vision, 35–6. 19. Van Leer, Emerson’s Epistemology, 5. 20. Vallins, Coleridge and the Psychology of Romanticism, 5. 21. Paul, Emerson’s Angle of Vision, 3. 22. AR 216. 23. Emerson’s copy of Specimens of Table Talk, Houghton Library, Harvard University, 99. 24. LS 59–60. 25. F I 156. 26. This same line of thinking was found in Coleridge’s notion of symbol, which shared identity with that which it symbolized, to be discussed in Chapter 5 below. For more on Coleridge’s redefinition of reason, see Berkeley, Coleridge and the Crisis of Reason, and Hedley, Coleridge, Philosophy and Religion. Johnson examined Emerson’s metaphorical use of reason: “For Emerson, the truth of nature was its ability to lead humans to exercise reason in its highest form.” See Johnson, Passions for Nature, 147. 27. F I 156. 28. AR 233n. 29. J III 237. 30. This notion of a drowsy, unawakened mind was a central theme in AR 406. 31. J III 237. 32. LE I 412–13. 33. Harris, “Reason and Understanding Reconsidered,” 264. 34. This drive toward continual progress was recognized by Emerson’s nineteenth-century readers: a character in Henry James’ novel The Europeans commented, “Emerson is so improving.” 35. Engell revealed the origin of the terms with Averroes in his commentary on Aristotle De coelo 1.1. The terms were later taken up by Bruno, Bacon, Spinoza, and Schelling. BL I 241n. See also Beer’s notes in AR 252n, 558, and Barfield, What Coleridge Thought, 22–4. Coburn noted that Coleridge borrowed heavily from Schelling’s usage, in which natura naturata is “object or product” and natura naturans is “subject or essence,” Einleitung zu seinem Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie as quoted in PL I 220n. For Schelling’s use of the

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terms, see Modiano, Coleridge and the Concept of Nature, 166–7. For Spinoza’s use, see Vallins, “Production and Existence,” 111–12. For its relevance for Coleridge’s definition of symbol, see Wilson, “Two Modes of Apprehending Nature.” Coleridge also used the terms in PL II 556–7. 36. Barfield, What Coleridge Thought, 19. 37. See BL II 72–3n for an excellent explanation. The distinction was also closely related to the symbol/allegory distinction. 38. CN III 4397 f 51. 39. CN III 4397 f 50. 40. PL II 555–6. 41. PL II 558. 42. CWE III 104. See also CWE III 103. 43. CWE III 104–5. 44. LE I 435. 45. The essay “Circles” was a good example of Emerson’s tendency to set contradictory statements against each other, vaulting the reader to ever higher points of view. See CWE II 177–90. 46. F I 448–524. Walls also mentioned the importance of Coleridge’s method in “Ralph Waldo Emerson and Coleridge’s American Legacy,” 117. For more on Coleridge’s method, see Wheeler, Romanticism, Pragmatism and Deconstruction, 58–60. 47. Emerson’s copy of The Friend, Houghton Library, Harvard University; Cabot, Memoir II 723–4. 48. EL I 379. 49. J II 277. 50. The editor of the first volume of EL observed, “At the time he undertook this series [on English Literature], Emerson was well read in English Literature . . . This was the period when he was most immediately under the spell of Coleridge’s philosophy, and there are many evidences of a close reading of The Friend and other volumes but no memory of his personal disillusionment upon meeting Coleridge at Highgate in 1833.” EL I 207. 51. The first definition is from the Oxford English Dictionary, the second from Coleridge himself, F I 457. Blair and Faust argued that Emerson used Plato’s concept of method, in particular the “twice bisected line,” to establish the relations between the visible and invisible universe in a kind of “ladder of perception.” See Blair and Faust, “Emerson’s Literary Method.” Thompson disagreed, stating that Emerson relied more on Kant and Coleridge than on his first great master, Plato. Thompson, “Emerson’s Indebtedness to Coleridge.” 52. F I 445–6. 53. F I 455. 54. JMN VI 38, AR 118. 55. F I 476. 56. F I 492–3. 57. Levere, Poetry Realized in Nature, 221.

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58. CWE I 129. Emerson emphasized method as a “progressive state” in the following passage: “Let the mind of the student be in a natural, healthful and progressive state, let him, in the midst of his most minute dissection, not lose sight of the place and relations of the subject.” J III 293–4. 59. J III 295. 60. Packer noted Emerson’s persistent use of ocular metaphors, perhaps because of a debilitating eye condition that plagued him. See Emerson’s Fall, 54. Tanner compared the use of visual and aural imagery in American and European Romanticism in “Notes for a Comparison between American and European Romanticism,” 90. 61. F I 446. 62. F I 451. 63. F I 451. 64. F I 457. 65. F I 455. 66. F I 455. 67. F I 457. 68. J III 295–6. 69. J III 163. 70. EL II 22. 71. F I 470, 457. 72. F I 497. 73. F I 471. 74. F I 497–8. 75. F I 511. 76. EL III 36–7. 77. This was a phrase attributed to the fictional “reader” in the Biographia who claimed the Ten Theses made everything seem upside-down and backwards. 78. F I 511. Chapter 5 Lects 1808–1819 II 217, 219, 224. Coleridge’s Miscellaneous Criticism, 205–13. CWE II 209. Toulouse observed, “For Emerson as for Coleridge, external forms become important only insofar as they manifest the working of an inner Spirit that continually discards them.” Toulouse, “Emerson, Coleridge, and the Shaping of Self-Evidence,” 129. 5. Thompson claimed that “With the reading of The Friend three years later, though, Emerson came into contact with a new type of criticism. He accepted readily what Coleridge had to say of Bacon, Shakespeare, and Plato. And this acceptance of ancient writers prepared the way for the acceptance of Wordsworth.” Thompson, “Emerson’s Indebtedness to Coleridge,” 76. 1. 2. 3. 4.

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6. The term originated in late Antiquity, when Chrysostom and Augustine coined the phrase, and became popular in the early modern period. For its importance in the Romantic era, see Van Berkel and Vanderjagt, eds, The Book of Nature in Early Modern and Modern History, ix; Hodder, Emerson’s Rhetoric of Revelation, 12–22; and Brantley, Wordsworth’s “Natural Methodism,” ch. 4, which explicated the importance of the “book of nature” for Wordsworth that closely paralleled Coleridge’s interest in the metaphor. 7. For a valuable analysis of Coleridge’s understanding of the “book of nature” and “natural language,” see McKusick, Coleridge’s Philosophy of Language, ch. 1, and my article, “Wordless Words.” 8. See Perkins, Coleridge’s Philosophy. 9. John 6: 63 as quoted by Coleridge in AR 407. 10. F I 108. 11. Regarding nature’s “ministry,” Coleridge stated, “But whatever of good and intellectual Nature worketh in us, it is our appointed task to render gradually our own work. For all things that surround us, and all things that happen unto us, have (each doubtless its own providential purpose, but) all one common final cause: namely, the increase of Consciousness, in such wise, that whatever part of the terra incognita of our nature the increased consciousness discovers, our will may conquer and bring into subjection to itself under the sovereignty of reason.” LS 89. Emerson similarly remarked, “Thus the world exists for the mind, whilst thus the man is ever invited onward into shining realms of knowledge and power by the shows of the world which interpret to him the infinitude of his own consciousness.” EL II 201. 12. LS 70. 13. Coleridge referred to “the Volume of the World, that there we may read the Transcript of [the Omnipotent.]” Lects 1795 I 194. For Emerson, see “this natural alphabet, this green and yellow and crimson dictionary,” EL I 8; “Nature is a language,” EL I 26; “a transcript of nature,” EL I 214–15; and “a kind of mnemonics or inventory of his inward kingdom,” EL II 201. 14. PL II 541. 15. As Engell wrote, “While nature acts on the senses, it is in moments of suspension or intellectual ecstasy that reason and imagination react and see back into natural language. Here is no distrust of nature but faith in it as teacher and transmitter. Nature acts upon Coleridge and is read into – not an imaging of nature but an imagining into it.” Engell, “Imagining into Nature,” 90. 16. EL I 25. 17. EL I 24–5. 18. CWE IV 68. 19. EL I 26. 20. Fulford remarked, “There is no final language of nature, then, only the constantly renewed transformation of the arbitrary into the meaningful. If the pressure towards transformation produced occasional disenchantment,

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self-praise, and fragmentation, it also produced the theory and practice of symbolism through which we are still working, in science, theology, and ­ literary studies.” Fulford, “Coleridge, Böhme, and the Language of Nature,” 52. For Romantic millennialism, see Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, 17–70. 21. LS 71. 22. Beer discussed Coleridge’s interest in the metaphor of light, “As the eye must have something of the sun within itself in order that the sun may be perceived, so the human soul must have something of the divine within itself in order to achieve communion with the divine. This use of the ‘sol intelligibilis’ to depict the ‘translucence’ of the human intellect at its highest is one of his most important images. It lies at the heart of his theories of Reason, of Imagination, and of Genius; each of which is conceived as being, in its own way, a reproduction in little of the divine light . . . The new concept, however, gave the passive element in the process an importance of its own: the divine creativity and harmony were now made to pass through certain individuals in a way which made them, in their turn, creators and harmonizers.” Beer, Coleridge the Visionary, 92–3. 23. EL III 170. 24. This idea of the poet-prophet was important to German Romantics such as Schiller, Goethe, and Schelling, but the tradition stretches back further to the seventeenth-century Metaphysical poets like Donne, Vaughan, and Herbert, the epic poets, Milton and Dante, and the poets of Antiquity who believed they were inspired by the gods. 25. Haynes, “Coleridge, Emerson, and the Prophet’s Vocation.” 26. BL II 15. 27. F I 61. 28. CWE IV 152–3. 29. EL II 49. 30. AR 406–7. 31. EL I 228. 32. LS 62. 33. BL II 25–6. 34. EL I 303, 302. 35. BL II 15–16. 36. EL III 356. 37. EL II 276. 38. CWE I 10. Emerson wrote, “Consent to accept the place the Divine Providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries; the connexion of events. Live in the new age and be the passive organ of its idea. Great men have always done so and confided themselves to the genius of their age . . . We have nothing to do but to obey piously to follow. Why need you choose? Certainly there is a possible right for you that precludes the need of balance and wilful election. For you there is a reality, a fit place,

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and ­congenial duties. Place yourself in the middle of the stream, the stream of power and wisdom which flows into you, as Life; place yourself in the full centre of that flood; then you are without effort impelled to truth, to right, and a perfect contentment.” EL III 139. 39. CWE I 130. 40. EL III 360. 41. CWE I 38. 42. Abrams discussed the imagination at length in The Mirror and the Lamp, particularly the contrast between mechanical and organic theories of art implicit in the fancy versus imagination distinction. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, 168. See also Barth, The Symbolic Imagination, and “Theological Implications of Coleridge’s Theory of Imagination”; Engell, The Creative Imagination; and Richards, Coleridge on Imagination. 43. BL II 15–16. 44. BL I 168n. 45. Perry, Coleridge and the Uses of Division, 34. 46. BL II 16–18. 47. CWE III 19. 48. Emerson also used Coleridge’s distinction between mechanical copying versus true artistic creation, controlled by the imagination rather than the fancy. See CWE III 3, 35, 137 and CWE II 17. 49. BL I 304. 50. JMN VIII 229. 51. EL I 224. 52. BL I 124. Engell perceptively explained, “More than ever the idea of the imagination was crucial because it now was intended not only to explain how the mind makes sense out of nature or conversely, how nature shapes the mind through the senses, but also to reconcile these two poles in one process.” Engell, The Creative Imagination, 329. 53. CWE I 31. Note in this passage Emerson’s linking of imagination and reason. Thompson observed that Kant linked the understanding to imagination and intuition, while Emerson and Coleridge linked reason and imagination instead, which is quite a significant adaptation. See Thompson, “Emerson’s Indebtedness to Coleridge,” 64–5. 54. CWE III 30. 55. CWE III 15. 56. Barth, The Symbolic Imagination, 12. Prickett noted, “Coleridge saw the human mind itself as essentially a myth-making and symbolizing structure.” Prickett, Coleridge and Wordsworth, 176. For more on Coleridge on symbol, see Halmi, “How Christian is the Coleridgean Symbol?” 26–30; and Modiano, Coleridge and the Concept of Nature, ch. 4. 57. LS 28–9. 58. CWE III 20. Paul surmised that “Emerson, in a way, viewed spiritual truth pragmatically, as something discovered in an activity, in process. His theory

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59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

of the moment and therefore of symbolism recognized the fragmentary, perspective grasp of truth and the necessity of continually taking new positions and sights.” Paul, Emerson’s Angle of Vision, 62–3. CWE I 31. LS 30. CN III 3325 21.1/2.19 f 12. CN I 1387 8.106. EL III 352. CN II 2546 17.104 f 69. EL III 349–50. EL III 348–9. CWE II 132. Chapter 6

1. Packer, The Transcendentalists, 31. 2. F I 515–16. 3. Abrams pointed out, “Since the cultural myth of concern that Coleridge had inherited was the Judeo-Christian one set forth in the Bible, and since Coleridge felt a greater need than contemporary German philosophers to salvage the essentials of its creed of salvation, he undertook explicitly to ground his world-vision on bases common both to the Old and New Testament and to ‘speculative physics.’” Abrams, The Correspondent Breeze, 186. For more on the Romantics’ translation of biblical themes into philosophical concepts such as “subject and object, ego and non-ego, the human mind or consciousness and its transactions with nature,” see Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, 13. 4. “Revelation,” Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church. 5. BL I 268. 6. BL I 203. 7. Schelling’s concept of consciousness was very influential for Coleridge, especially since, as Engell observed, he “seemed able to synthesize the ‘I am’ with Nature, subject with object, creating a system where perception, knowledge, and being, become resolved organically.” Engell also noted that “Coleridge felt that choosing the transcendental postulate of mind or ‘I am’ need not deny the existence of the material and sensual, but only established a priority.” Engell, “Coleridge and German Idealism,” 170, 165. 8. BL I 272–3. 9. EL II 247–8. 10. CWE II 166. 11. Packer, Emerson’s Fall, 47. 12. F I 516. 13. PL II 541. 14. BL II 247–8.

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15. For more on “logos” as a philosophical and religious concept, see Perkins, Coleridge’s Philosophy. 16. Modiano, Coleridge and the Concept of Nature, 187. 17. Toulouse wrote, “As did the preachers before him, Emerson believed in the power and necessity of preaching as the middle term linking the world of Spirit and the world of letter, which he, however, defined not only as verbal revelation, but also as the ‘language’ of nature.” Toulouse, “Emerson, Coleridge, and the Shaping of Self-Evidence,” 123. 18. CWE II 198–9. 19. For the use of terms “genius” see BL I 33, 81–2 and for “vehicle” see AR 7. 20. Chai, The Romantic Foundations of the American Renaissance, 71. 21. EL II 90. 22. EL II 92. 23. EL II 355. 24. EL II 92. 25. BL I 283. 26. AR 268n. 27. This principle of humanity’s return to our “Parent Mind” is illustrated in the following passage: “if in some gracious moment one solitary text of all [the scriptures] inspired contents should but dawn upon us in the pure untroubled brightness of an IDEA, that most glorious birth of the God-like within us, which even as the Light, its material symbol, reflects itself from a thousand surfaces, and flies homeward to its Parent Mind enriched with a thousand forms, itself above form and still remaining in its own simplicity and identity!” LS 50. 28. It must immediately be clarified that Coleridge in no way subscribed to the Darwinian sense of evolution. He wrote to Wordsworth in 1815 about “the absurd notion of Pope’s Essay on Man, Darwin, and all the countless Believers – even (strange to say) among Xtians of Man’s having progressed from an Ouran Outang state.” CL IV 969. 29. Oxford English Dictionary, 1975 ed. 30. For more on Coleridge’s idea of evolution, see Barfield, What Coleridge Thought, 45; Potter, “Coleridge and the Idea of Evolution”; Levere, Poetry Realized in Nature; and Vallins, Coleridge and the Psychology of Romanticism, ch. 5. 31. Paradise Lost V 469–88, as quoted in BL I 295. 32. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being, 59. 33. SW I 509. 34. Lovejoy explained, “Not only had the originally complete and immutable Chain of Being been converted into a Becoming, in which all genuine possibles are, indeed, destined to realization grade after grade, yet only through a vast, slow unfolding in time; but now God himself is placed in, or identified with, this Becoming.” Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being, 325–6. For more on the reworking of the Great Chain of Being, see Engell, The Creative Imagination, 6; and Chai, who charted the Romantic reworking of the “scala natura” from

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a static externalization of God to a mode of the self realizing its divine nature. Chai, The Romantic Foundations of the American Renaissance, 66. 35. See Coleridge’s discussion of the distinction in BL I 171. 36. For example, Coleridge saw the workings of the understanding in “the filial and loyal Bee; the home-building, wedded, and divorceless Swallow; and above all the manifoldly intelligent Ant tribes, with their Commonwealths and Confederacies . . .” AR 117–18. 37. Barfield explained that Coleridge’s evolution encompassed both the “physical” and “mental” realms: “Of course the word life is most commonly applied to organic phenomena. But that is only because it is in the realm of organic life that the process of transformation is most rapid and therefore noticeable. All nature is in a perpetual evolution, for which the words change, life and growth become appropriate at one point and another.” Barfield, What Coleridge Thought, 44. 38. LS 179. 39. SW I 557, 517. 40. M III 102. 41. Another interesting note on the centrifugal and centripetal tendencies of nature is found in Shorter Works: “all the primary Powers of Nature may be reduced to Two . . . For in the first all Power is either that, the nature of which is to manifest; or that, that nature of which is to hide or keep hidden —. It either tends to draw out and distinguish; or to draw back & to bring into one mass, without distinction of parts.” SW II 849–50. 42. Vallins, “Production and Existence,” 122–3. 43. SW I 503. 44. For more on Emerson and evolution, see Francis, “The Evolution of Emerson’s Second ‘Nature,’” 33–5. 45. CWE II 33. 46. AR 118. 47. CWE IV 38. See the essay “Circles” in CWE II 177–90 for a particularly powerful example of Emerson’s commitment to the principle of continual progress and ascent in the human and natural worlds. 48. EL II 247. See also EL I 29: “Man who stands in the globe so proud and powerful is no upstart in the creation, but has been prophesied in nature for a thousand thousand ages before he appeared; that from times incalculably remote there has been a progressive preparation for him; an effort . . . to produce him; the meaner creatures, the primeval sauri, containing the elements of his structure and pointing at it on every side, whilst the world was, at the same time, preparing to be habitable by him. He was not made sooner, because his house was not ready.” 49. References to that common soul “brooding” over nature as well as “infant man” here echoed Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” which Emerson called “the high-water-mark which the intellect has reached in this age.” CWE V 168. For more on Emerson’s interest in this poem, see Keane,

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Emerson, Romanticism, and Intuitive Reason; Pace, “‘Lifted to Genius?’”; and Gravil, “The First ‘Poem to Coleridge.’” 50. CWE II 180–1. 51. CWE II 181. 52. EL III 29–30. 53. Wood discussed “growth” as a two-fold process: “Once assimilation from a given perspective is complete the ascent begins again, so that increasing self-reliance entails an alternation of ascent and assimilation. This alternation suggests a dialectical process, though Emerson does not describe it dialectically at this early point in his development. Instead he adopts another ­metaphor, that of growth.” Wood, “The Growth of the Soul,” 387. 54. CWE IV 61–2. 55. CWE III 14. 56. CWE IV 46. 57. CWE I 7. 58. EL II 215. 59. “Pantheism,” Oxford English Dictionary. 60. “Theism,” Dictionary of the Christian Church, 1957 ed. 61. “Panentheism,” Oxford English Dictionary. 62. This definition was based on Krause’s Vorlesungen über die Grundwahrheiten der Wissenschaft as interpreted by McFarland, Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition, 268. 63. Coleridge said, “In this sense the position of Malbranche, [sic] that we see all things in God, is a strict philosophical truth” and he mentioned him again in the Notebooks: “The more I think, the more solidity & beauty do I perceive in Mallebranche’s [sic] Idea that we see all things in God.” BL I 285 and CN 3974, 14.57. Nadler, “Malebranche.” 64. An anecdote reveals Coleridge’s passionate ambivalence toward pantheism: once Coleridge kissed Spinoza’s picture in a book, saying, “This book is a gospel to me,” adding shortly afterward, “his philosophy is nevertheless false.” Robinson, Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson, I 399–400. For reconsiderations of some of McFarland’s arguments, see Berkeley, Coleridge and the Crisis of Reason, and Hedley, “Pantheism, Trinitarian Theism and the Idea of Unity,” 64. 65. McFarland, Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition, 268. 66. McFarland, Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition, 270. 67. Vallins, Coleridge and the Psychology of Romanticism, 135. See also Vallins, “Production and Existence,” 114. 68. Engell, The Creative Imagination, 251–2, 309. See also Dombrowski, “McFarland, Pantheism and Panentheism.” 69. AR 6–7. 70. Acts 17: 28. Additionally, see Ephesians 4: 6: “One God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in all.” 71. BL I 277–8n.

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72. Ezekiel 1: 20 as quoted in LS 29. 73. M III 919–20. 74. McFarland, Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition, 330. 75. LS 48. 76. LS 71. 77. M II 298. 78. For a discussion of Emerson’s resistance to pantheism, see Chai, The Romantic Foundations of the American Renaissance, ch. 14, “Emerson: The Divinity of the Self.” 79. Buell credited Coleridge as the importer of European pantheisms that emphasize “a metaphysical correspondence between nature and spirit.” Buell, Literary Transcendentalism, 149. 80. CWE II 160. 81. CWE II 161. 82. EL II 89–90. 83. CWE II 182. 84. BL II 244. 85. “Faith,” Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church. 86. See Engell, “Coleridge and German Idealism,” 158. 87. McNiece, The Knowledge that Endures, 4. Vallins also commented that for Coleridge reason “is a means of communication between God and man, whereby faith is reconciled with philosophical knowledge. Metaphysical knowledge is conceived as being mysteriously transfused into man by means of his reason, which is the part of him closest to the divinity.” Vallins, “Coleridge, Transcendental Idealism, and the Ascent of Intelligence,” 68. 88. BL II 247. It is significant that this passage was originally a bit of marginalia from Böhme, revealing Coleridge’s willingness to pass into mysticism when the power of reason has reached its limit. 89. LS 18. 90. CWE I 204. 91. EL I 26. 92. CWE I 206. 93. CWE II 159. 94. CWE I 213. 95. CWE I 205. Chapter 7 1. JMN V 183. 2. Cameron carefully catalogued the essay’s many allusions to Coleridge in Emerson the Essayist, 200–22. 3. Emerson, The Correspondence of Emerson and Carlyle, 157. 4. Gravil, Romantic Dialogues, 99. 5. LE II 26. Another mention of the proposed essay “Spirit” can be found in LE

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II 30 and LE I 42. It is intriguing to imagine Nature and Spirit as two separate pieces in a single volume. However, considering the interdependence of Emerson’s definitions of nature and spirit, the two essays would have been very similar. Understanding why Emerson did not choose the title Nature and Spirit is more perplexing. One possibility is that Nature was intended as a sustained meditation upon a single topic, that of the uses of nature. The fact that the meditation ends with nature’s “opposite” of spirit was thus evidence of the success of the intellectual process, namely finding the point where, in Coleridge’s parlance, “Extremes Meet.” 6. Francis called Nature “a blueprint, an architectonic, for the construction of the self out of the world’s body, of the me out of the not me. This imaginative act of creation is an affirmation of the transcendent truth of man’s divine nature.” Francis, “The Architectonics of Emerson’s Nature,” 50. 7. Francis, “The Evolution of Emerson’s Second ‘Nature,’” 45. 8. AR vii–viii. 9. CWE IV 46. Blair and Faust saw Plato’s “bi-sected line” as an organizing trope in Nature, which would also enable Emerson to attribute his debt to Plato, not Coleridge. “Emerson’s Literary Method,” 80. 10. Thompson also noted briefly the role of the reason and understanding distinction in the structuring of Nature. Thompson, “Emerson’s Indebtedness to Coleridge,” 67. 11. F I 446. 12. CWE I 39. 13. As Gravil observed, “The broad strategy of Nature is Coleridgean: Emerson starts by seeing nature fully as the solace of our being, passes to an insistence that as the mind is spiritual, nature must be transcended, and then enacts a recovery of nature as a system of spiritual signs.” Gravil, Romantic Dialogues, 98. 14. Ellison, Emerson’s Romantic Style, 87. 15. Hodder, Emerson’s Rhetoric of Revelation, 78. 16. Francis, “The Evolution of Emerson’s Second ‘Nature,’” 34. 17. See Chapter 3, footnote 53. BL I 124. 18. AR 3. 19. CWE I 7. 20. CWE I 7. 21. Italics mine. CWE I 9. 22. Brown discussed Emerson’s interest in transparence at length in The Emerson Museum. 23. CWE I 8. 24. CWE I 9. 25. CWE I 10. As discussed above in Chapter 4, footnote 60, Emerson’s use of ocular imagery was striking, a testament to the importance of outer, material vision as well as inner, spiritual vision. The final line of Nature testified to this: “The kingdom of man over nature . . . he shall enter without more wonder

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than the blind man feels who is gradually restored to perfect sight.” CWE I 45. 26. Harding commented that “the state of ecstasy invoked in the ‘transparent eyeball’ passage is discovered, in the light of later experience, to have depended on an inherently unstable harmony between the self and the world.” Harding, “The Divinity in Man,” 164. 27. CWE I 45. 28. CWE I 11. 29. As Paul noted, this distinction was meant to distinguish not divide: “For Emerson, like Coleridge, never intended to separate man’s consciousness into faculties. What was intended in the distinction was a reëmphasis of the dynamic and imaginative aspects of the mind in its totality as compared with its tool-like capacities for ‘reasoning.’” Paul, Emerson’s Angle of Vision, 38. 30. LE I 412–13. 31. CWE I 11. 32. CWE I 11. 33. CWE I 12. 34. CWE I 16. 35. CWE I 13. 36. CWE I 14. 37. CWE I 16. 38. See BL I 31–2. 39. JMN V 116. 40. CWE I 17. 41. See Paul’s Emerson’s Angle of Vision for more on the philosophical sources of Emerson’s concept of correspondence. Emerson Americanized the Coleridgean symbol by tempering it with typology, a familiar theological concept in New England Puritanism. See Hodder, Emerson’s Rhetoric of Revelation, 16. 42. Walls, Emerson’s Life in Science, 49. 43. Harris surmised that Nature was a “poetic miniaturization” of Kant’s First Critique because it “addresses the same twofold problem of preserving faith while justifying scientific knowledge, and it advanced the same solution, which is to adopt a dual epistemology of empirical realism and transcendental idealism.” Harris, “Reason and Understanding Reconsidered,” 275. 44. See McKusick, Coleridge’s Philosophy of Language. 45. CWE I 17. 46. Emerson used the Coleridgean idea of nature as a vehicle for language in many of his other essays, including “vehicle or act,” in “Intellect,” CWE II 98; “vehicles and symbols of thought” in “English Literature – Introductory,” EL I 219; and “momentary vehicles of the true life,” EL III 314. 47. CWE I 17. 48. Porter saw Nature as an exercise in “the process of signification itself”: “The process of making meaning, in other words, constitutes the real content of the

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essay; and it is this process, rather than any particular meaning it yields which is authorized by Spirit.” Porter, “Method and Metaphysics in Emerson’s ‘Nature,’” 529. 49. CWE I 18–19. 50. This marked yet another radical warping of the definition of reason from Kant to Coleridge and then to Emerson. See Emerson’s lecture “The Transcendentalist” for his discussion of “transcendentalism as it stands in 1849.” CWE I 201–16. 51. CWE I 19. 52. Paul, Emerson’s Angle of Vision, 3. 53. AR 6–7. 54. CWE I 21. 55. CWE I 22. 56. Plotinus, Enneads, 5.5.8 as quoted in BL I 241. 57. BL 1 17. 58. CWE I 23. 59. CWE I 23, taken from Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection (1829 edition), 150–1. 60. Emerson wrote in his journal, “I remark the increasing earnestness of the cry which swells from every quarter that a systematic moral education is needed. Channing Coleridge Wordsworth Owen Degerando Spurzheim Bentham Pestalozzi.” JMN XII 110. 61. CWE I 23. 62. CWE I 24. 63. CWE I 27. 64. CWE I 28, possibly taken from Coleridge’s AR 233n. 65. BL I 261. 66. Cascardi saw Nature as both a celebration – and an overcoming – of Kantian idealism: “Part of Emerson’s response will be to join transcendental idealism to pragmatism, concluding that nature is in good (logical) order when it is regarded as an object for human use . . . This pragmatic development of idealism is certainly Emerson’s most American, if not also his most original, revision of Kant.” Cascardi, “Emerson on Nature,” 202. For more on Emerson’s pragmatism, see Poirier, The Renewal of Literature, and Levin, The Poetics of Transition. 67. CWE I 30. 68. CWE I 30. 69. The point may be raised whether these really were “the best, the happiest moments of life” for Emerson, since he never lingered in these mystical, abstracted states for long, but rather shifted into concrete, material, and often joyful descriptions of nature, like in the passage in CWE I 35–6 detailed below. 70. CWE I 29. 71. CWE I 29. Hodder regarded this “apocalypse of the mind” as a central trope in Nature. Hodder explained, “And just as Saint John’s Revelation culminates

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in the creation of a new heaven and earth, Emerson’s culminates in his famous exhortation: ‘Build, therefore, your own world.’ The rhapsodic finale of Nature, concluding with the allusion to Luke 17, is itself a miniature apocalypse – ‘the sordor and filths of nature’ giving way to ‘the advancing spirit.’” Hodder, Emerson’s Rhetoric of Revelation, 24. 72. CWE I 30. 73. CWE I 30. 74. CWE I 31. 75. CWE I 33. 76. CWE I 34. 77. CWE I 35. See also, “Idealism is a hypothesis to account for nature by other principles than those of carpentry and chemistry. Yet, if it only deny the existence of matter, it does not satisfy the demands of the spirit. It leaves God out of me. It leaves me in the splendid labyrinth of my perceptions, to wander without end. Then the heart resists it, because it baulks the affections in denying substantive being to men and women.” CWE I 37–8. 78. CWE I 35–6. 79. CWE I 29. 80. LE II 32. Porte believed that this “crack” revealed Emerson’s “simple denial of the inherent worth of matter and sense experience.” Porte, “Nature as Symbol,” 471. I do not agree entirely with Porte – Emerson had a great love for the material world, although admittedly in a mediatory role such as a language or symbol for spirit. It was true that he had deep reservations about both materialism and idealism, yet he never abandoned nature nor sense experience completely, but rather attempted to establish nature’s proper place in relation to spirit. 81. CWE I 36. 82. CWE I 36–7. 83. CWE I 37. 84. CWE I 38. 85. CWE I 38–9. 86. CWE I 39. 87. CWE I 39. 88. CWE I 39. 89. CWE I 41. 90. CWE I 41–2. 91. BL I 300. 92. See Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, ch. 7. 93. The quotation mark following this note marks a passage where Coleridge quoted himself, from a passage found in F II 73–4. 94. BL I 80–1. 95. Porter observed, “As long as one is in the act of building his world, he is in touch with Spirit and is exercising his Reason. During this process, nature becomes fluid. It is only when he is not acting in accord with Reason, not

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96. 97.

98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104.

Notes

using the world as sign-system, that it appears other. Then he requires the ­assurance that this otherness is not a necessary ontological fact, but the result of his own failure to build his world.” Porter, “Method and Metaphysics in Emerson’s ‘Nature,’” 528. See Hodder, Emerson’s Rhetoric of Revelation. As discussed in Chapter 4, Coleridge wrote, “In order to obtain adequate notions of any truth, we must intellectually separate its distinguishable parts; and this is the technical process of philosophy. But having so done, we must then restore them in our conceptions to the unity, in which they actually coexist; and this is the result of philosophy.” BL II 11. CWE I 43. CWE I 43–4. CWE I 44. CWE I 44. CWE I 45. CWE I 45. CWE I 7. Chapter 8

1. Emerson asked Coleridge during his visit in 1833 if he had been corresponding with James Marsh; Marsh had indeed recently sent him a letter. JMN IV 411. 2. See Goodman, American Philosophy and the Romantic Tradition; Menand, The Metaphysical Club; Kuklick, Churchmen and Philosophers; Richardson, A Natural History of Pragmatism; Good, “Introduction.” 3. Goodman, American Philosophy and the Romantic Tradition, 33. 4. See Carafiol, “James Marsh’s American Aids to Reflection.” 5. Menand, The Metaphysical Club, 249–50. 6. Marsh, Coleridge’s American Disciples, 3. 7. I am indebted to Joel Pace’s editorial comments on this chapter, especially on the pragmatic social reform advocated by Coleridge, Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, Peabody, and Alcott, among others. 8. Nicolson, “James Marsh and the Vermont Transcendentalists,” 48n. 9. A transcript of this nine-part series of articles can be found in the James Marsh Papers, Special Collections, University of Vermont. 10. See Carafiol, “James Marsh to John Dewey,” 1. 11. White, “James Marsh: Educational Pioneer,” 224. 12. I am so grateful for Richard Brantley’s careful reading of this chapter, and in particular his illuminating comments about Locke in America. 13. See Lane, “The Yale Report of 1828 and Liberal Education,” 330–1, 331n, and Schmidt, “Intellectual Crosscurrents in American Colleges.” 14. Cremin, American Education, 272. Thomas Jefferson expanded the traditional curriculum at William and Mary and the University of Virginia; other

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innovators included William Smith at the College of Philadelphia; Eliphalet Nott at Union College; Horace Holly at Transylvania; George Ticknor at Harvard; Phillip Lindsley at the University of Nashville; Francis Wayland at Brown; and Henry Philip Tappan at the University of Michigan. 15. Francis Wayland’s curricular changes are still evident in Brown’s curriculum, and George Ticknor and Frederic Henry Hedge’s at Harvard. 16. SW I 659. 17. Lindsay established the importance of Coleridge’s curriculum in “Coleridge and the University of Vermont,” and Tradition Looks Forward. Lindsay himself had a personal link to Vermont Transcendentalism as a professor at UVM and a historian of the university. He recalled his first dinner at the Faculty Club when he heard a speech of UVM president Buckham, “who came under the influence of the Marsh–Coleridge tradition when it was still a live and active force, and reflected their early training in method and belief in progressive and dynamic principles.” Lindsay, “Coleridge and the University of Vermont,” 13. 18. Marsh, “An Exposition of the System of Instruction,” 4. 19. Marsh, “An Exposition of the System of Instruction,” 14. 20. Marsh, “An Exposition of the System of Instruction,” appendix. 21. Wheeler, Historical Discourse, 30. 22. See Nicolson, “James Marsh and the Vermont Transcendentalists,” 35. Bickman examined Marsh’s legacy for “active learning” in American higher education, tracing a line through Emerson, Marsh and Dewey, in “From Emerson to Dewey,” and Minding American Education. 23. William Pinson, as quoted by Huntington, The University of Vermont Fifty Years Ago, 33. 24. Nicolson commented, “If for no other reason, Marsh would be important to students of English and American thought because of his insistence on the direct descent of English idealistic thought, and his constant reiteration that the characteristic ideas of the Kantian school were already implicit in the work of the seventeenth century thinkers . . . One’s final estimate of Marsh must be that he was himself but a later Cambridge Platonist.” Nicolson, “James Marsh and Vermont Transcendentalists,” 49. Richardson would consider this the same tradition as “Liberal Platonism,” discussed in Chapters 3 and 7. Richardson, “Liberal Platonism and Transcendentalism,” 3. 25. Menand explained this complex interrelation: “The most interesting thing about the Burlington philosophy was how long it managed to survive. For the whole system was based on a rather glaring misunderstanding. Contrary to what Coleridge, Marsh, and Marsh’s heirs at the University of Vermont all taught, Kant had never claimed that we can establish religious truths by looking into our own minds, or by any other means . . . He only wanted to improve on empiricism by explaining how it is that human beings do “know” certain things that they can’t have apprehended through the senses.” Menand, The Metaphysical Club, 261–2.

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26. Marsh, “An Exposition of the System of Instruction,” 3. 27. This “Treatise on Method” resembled the later “Essays on the Principle of Method” in Coleridge’s The Friend; however, the latter was significantly elaborated and revised. SW I 625–85. 28. Marsh, The Remains of the Rev. James Marsh, 589 (italics in original). 29. SW I 659. 30. Engell and Dangerfield, Saving Higher Education in the Age of Money, 131. 31. Marsh, The Remains of the Rev. James Marsh, 600–1. 32. Carafiol, “James Marsh and John Dewey,” 5. 33. Wheeler, Historical Discourse, 38. 34. Lindsay referred to Coleridge’s method as central to the UVM curriculum repeatedly in “Coleridge and the University of Vermont.” See Chapter 4 for more on method. 35. Wheeler, Historical Discourse, 39. 36. Marsh Papers, Special Collections, University of Vermont. The collection also features some of Marsh’s lecture notes; many lectures were based on Coleridgean definitions and distinctions. 37. Marsh, The Remains of the Rev. James Marsh, 590–1. 38. Marsh, The Remains of the Rev. James Marsh, 594–5. 39. Huntington, The University of Vermont Fifty Years Ago, 15. 40. Huntington, The University of Vermont Fifty Years Ago, 6. 41. Wheeler, Historical Discourse, 40–1. 42. This is the same Pease who was referred to in Chapter 2, in relation to the theological controversy among orthodox clergymen ignited by Coleridge’s thought earlier in the century. 43. This statement certainly embodied Coleridge’s idea of the clerisy. 44. Lindsay, Tradition Looks Forward, 143–4. The full text of the creed extends to a page and a half and is a remarkable testament to Coleridge’s and Marsh’s lasting legacy at UVM. 45. Many thanks are due to Engell for noting that this first element of the creed was another lesser-known debt to Coleridge, who placed great emphasis on conscience. See AR 30, 125, and 349 for discussions of conscience that Marsh would have known; conscience was also discussed at length in Opus Maximum and in Coleridge’s notebook entries CN 4606 and 5167. 46. Lindsay, Tradition Looks Forward, 144. 47. “Synopsis of the Course of Recitations and Lectures: 1875/6–1878/9,” University of Vermont Catalogue. Lindsay stated that despite changing times, Marsh’s plan “was jealously guarded and protected. The old schematic table of courses, for example, was kept inviolate with only minor shifts and changes, up to 1890.” Lindsay, “Coleridge and the University of Vermont,” 12. 48. “Description of the Academic Course 1878/79,” University of Vermont Catalogue. 49. In Memoriam Henry A.P. Torrey, 30–1.

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50. See Carafiol, “James Marsh to John Dewey,” 4. 51. As Dykhuizen related, “These conversations usually took place during their walks in nearby woods. Teacher and pupil came to understand each other to a degree not possible in the classroom: the teacher expressed himself more freely and fully, while the pupil discovered the man and the thinker behind the professor.” Dykhuizen, The Life and Mind of John Dewey, 25. 52. As quoted by Dykhuizen, The Life and Mind of John Dewey, 15–16. 53. As quoted by Feuer, “H. A. P. Torrey and John Dewey,” 47. 54. Dewey was also influenced by Coleridge’s idea of the imagination: see Goodman, American Philosophy and the Romantic Tradition, 121–4. Granger observed that the index of Dewey’s Collected Works contained sixty citations to Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Keats, and Shelley, as well as Emerson. Granger, “Expression, Imagination, and Organic Unity,” 51. See also Milnes, The Truth about Romanticism, and Wheeler, Romanticism, Pragmatism and Deconstruction, for different views of the complex legacy of Romanticism for Pragmatism. 55. Menand, The Metaphysical Club, 440. 56. Kuklick continued, “As I shall argue for Dewey, the writing of these philosophers was religious in orientation. The most influential – Dewey again is exemplary – spoke out on public issues.” Kuklick, Churchmen and Philosophers, 196. 57. Goodman wrote, “These twin themes of reconciliation and reconstruction connect Dewey to the Romantics, who . . . are concerned with connecting self and world, feeling and thought, and the natural and the supernatural or spiritual. They are also concerned with the transformation of the world, with its redemption, as in Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Emerson, and specifically the power of humanity to bring about that redemption . . . These are exactly Dewey’s concerns.” Goodman, American Philosophy and the Romantic Tradition, 91. 58. Nor was Coleridge alone in doing this: as Gravil asserted, Wordsworth and Pestalozzi, the Swiss educational reformer, mediated between empiricism and idealism. See “‘Knowledge not Purchased with the Loss of Power,’” 238. 59. Kuklick observed, “Although indebted to Kant, Coleridge hardly philosophized systematically. Consequently, Americans were given the tools to dismiss the passive notion of mind . . . the active view of mind and its role in creating the world was all that was authentically Kantian.” Kuklick, Churchmen and Philosophers, 122. 60. Dewey, The Child and the Curriculum, 189. 61. Dewey, My Pedagogic Creed, 7. 62. AR 202. 63. Dewey, My Pedagogic Creed, 13. 64. Dewey, My Pedagogic Creed, 18. 65. In “James Marsh’s American Aids to Reflection,” Carafiol interpreted Dewey as rejecting Marsh’s religio-centrism, but I think that the passages above

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(and especially the closing quotation below) indicate that Dewey retained an essentially theological orientation even as he secularized his language in later works. 66. Kuklick, Churchmen and Philosophers, 196. 67. James, “The Chicago School,” 1. 68. James knew Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria and quoted from it in The Principles of Psychology, I 641–2. 69. This essay was later re-titled, “Matthew Arnold and Robert Browning,” 17. 70. The University of Vermont: The Centennial Anniversary, 107–8. 71. The University of Vermont: The Centennial Anniversary, 109. 72. The University of Vermont: The Centennial Anniversary, 111–12. 73. Dewey, “James Marsh and American Philosophy,” 149. 74. Dewey, “James Marsh and American Philosophy,” 143. 75. Dewey, “James Marsh and American Philosophy,” 148. 76. Lamont, Dialogue on John Dewey, 15–16. 77. Dewey, “From Absolutism to Experimentalism,” 22. 78. However, UVM was not the only university founded on Coleridgean principles: Lindsay referred to King’s College, London, as a “sister university” to UVM because, upon its founding in 1828, it was also inspired by the educational ideas of the “sage of Highgate.” Lindsay, “Coleridge and the University of Vermont,” 11.

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index

abolitionism, 18, 155; see also reform Abrams, M. H., 16, 18, 138, 173n, 174n, 176n, 181n, 182n, 183n active and passive, 44, 83, 84, 86, 88, 122, 175n; see also water-insect Alcott, Bronson, 29, 144, 192n Anderson, Wayne Christopher, 165n, 176n Andover Theological Seminary, 26, 29 apocalypse, 138, 139 “of the mind,” 133, 138, 190n see also millenarianism arch, 38, 175n Aristotle, 48, 64, 175n, 177n art, artist, 10, 16, 18, 22, 41, 49, 63–4, 76–94, 100–1, 118, 124, 126, 127, 130, 134, 136, 138–40, 148, 173n; see also interdisciplinarity; nature ascent, ascension, 16, 20, 23, 54, 68, 70, 103, 104, 106–7, 108, 115, 120, 124, 125, 126, 127, 134, 138, 176n, 185n, 186n “ascending scale of Nature,” 107 “definitional escalation,” 120 as a pedagogical method, 147, 148, 149, 154 see also centripetal and centrifugal; evolution; hierarchy; spiral imagery assimilation, assimilative, 2, 3, 6, 9, 10, 87, 96, 119; see also influence Averroes, 177n

beauty, beautiful, 31, 62, 80, 83, 93, 114, 117, 121, 124, 125–7, 129, 134, 138, 139 Beer, John, 16, 18, 169n, 175n, 176n, 177n Being, 22, 30, 33, 43, 44–5, 78, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 104, 106, 107, 112, 116, 124, 149, 183n “Supreme Being,” 78, 99, 136 Berkeley, George, 77n Berkley, Richard, 41, 172n, 177n, 186n Bible, biblical, 25, 43, 78, 90, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 112, 116, 138, 139, 162, 180n, 183n, 186n, 187n, 190–1n biblical typology, 79, 88, 128, 129, 189n see also Scriptures Bickman, Martin, 193n Blair, Walter, 178n, 188n Blake, William, 11, 195n Bloom, Harold, 11, 166n Boggs, Colleen Glenney, 13 Böhme, Jakob, 40, 79, 175n, 181n, 187n borrowing, 3, 6, 9, 34, 40, 131, 172n; see also influence; originality and indebtedness; plagiarism Bowen, Francis, 35 Brantley, Richard E., 11, 170n, 180n, 192n Brown, Lee Rust, 175n, 188n Bruno, Giordano, 48, 173n, 177n Buckham, Matthew, 193n Buell, Lawrence, 168n, 171n, 187n Burke, Kenneth, 175n

Bacon, Sir Francis, 15, 32, 40–1, 42, 48, 49, 52, 145, 173n, 177n, 179n Bannet, Eve Tavor, 12 Barfield, Owen, 42, 63, 174n, 176n, 177n, 184n, 185n Barth, J. Robert, 90, 172n, 182n Beach, Joseph Warren, 20, 30, 167n

Cabot, James Elliot, 7, 168n, 172n, 178n Cameron, Kenneth Walter, 41, 164n, 165n, 173n, 187n Carafiol, Peter, 20, 27, 32, 142, 147, 168n, 169n, 170n, 192n, 195n Carlyle, Thomas, 3, 7–8, 19, 119, 165n Emerson’s first visit with, 4, 5, 7

Index[ 211 ­

Cascardi, A. J., 177n, 190n cause, 6, 30, 64, 65, 97, 98, 102, 106, 107, 125, 131, 133, 161 Cavell, Stanley, 142, 177n centrifugal and centripetal, 44, 49–50, 68, 105, 122, 176n, 185n; see also polarity; spiral imagery Chai, Leon, 11, 101, 166n, 171n, 184n, 187n Channing, William Ellery, 190n Christianity, Christian, 3, 15, 25, 79, 95, 101, 107, 113, 138, 157, 183n, 184n circles, circular imagery, 44, 48–9, 104, 107–8, 129, 132, 175n clerisy, 18, 82, 143, 157, 161, 194n Dewey’s view of, 157, 161–2 Emerson’s view of, 82 Coburn, Kathleen, 177n Cogliano, Francis, 14 Coleridge, Henry Nelson, 27 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor definitions, 21, 29, 30, 64, 66–7, 85–9, 90–2, 120, 128–9, 136, 145, 173n, 177n, 178n Emerson’s visit to, 4, 5 literary criticism, 22, 76–94, 136 works: poetry “Dejection: An Ode,” 89 “Destiny of Nations,” 79 “Frost at Midnight,” 92 “Nightingale, The,”92 “Rime of the Ancient Mariner, The,” 62 “A Tombless Epitaph,” 33–4 works: prose Aids to Reflection, 3, 5, 7, 27, 29, 30, 37, 55, 59, 61, 62, 66, 67, 68, 70, 78, 82, 83, 92, 103, 106, 111, 120, 123, 126, 127, 128, 130, 141, 144, 153, 157, 160, 162, 164n, 168n, 169n, 170n, 173n, 175n, 184n, 185n, 190n, 194n Biographia Literaria, 3, 5, 7, 15, 16, 21, 27, 30, 37, 40–3, 44, 45, 46, 47, 51, 56, 57, 63, 67, 77, 82, 83, 84–7, 88, 97, 99–100, 102, 103, 112, 116, 122, 127, 131, 132, 138, 164n, 165n, 172n, 173n, 174n, 175n, 176n, 178n, 179n, 184n, 185n, 186n, 188n, 190n, 192n, 196n Coleridge’s Miscellaneous Criticism, 179n Constitution of the Church and State, 67 Encyclopaedia Metropolitana, 146 “Essays on the Principles of Method,” 16, 22, 37, 66–8, 160, 165n, 194n Friend, The, 3, 5, 7, 16, 37–8, 44, 45, 54, 55, 60, 66–8, 70, 71, 73, 74, 75, 77, 78, 82, 83, 96, 99, 121, 127, 138, 149, 164n, 165n, 173n, 174n, 175n, 176n, 178n, 179n, 191n, 194n Lay Sermons, 60, 78, 81, 83, 90, 91, 92, 105, 112, 113, 116, 184n Lectures 1795: On Politics and Religion, 180n Lectures 1808–1819: On Literature, 76 Lectures 1818–1819: On the History of Philosophy, 64, 65, 78, 99, 178

Opus Maximum, 42–3, 66, 69, 173n Statesman’s Manual, 3, 77, 82, 128, 164n, 169n, 170n Table Talk, 59, 164n “Theory of Life,” 104, 105, 106, 109 “Treatise on Method,” 66, 144–5, 146, 147, 194n see also distinctions Concord School of Philosophy, 144 conscience, 152, 153, 161 consciousness, 17, 20, 22, 25, 37, 38, 43–5, 46–7, 48, 55, 59, 96, 97, 98, 105, 106, 107, 115, 132, 139, 151, 171n, 180n, 183n, 189n; see also self Copernicus, Nicolaus, 36 correspondence, correspondency, 56, 66, 73, 74, 79, 109, 128, 187n, 189n Cousin, Victor, 1, 19, 26 Cox, S. H., 28 creation, 22, 46, 65, 77, 87, 88, 95, 98–102, 103, 105, 107, 109, 110, 112, 113, 115, 126, 130, 131, 134, 136, 138, 182n, 185n, 188n, 191n Coleridge’s view of, 98–100 Emerson’s view of, 100–2, 107, 108, 115, 139 see also creator; revelation creator, 41, 50, 85, 91, 97, 99, 112, 129, 136 Cremin, Lawrence, 192n Cudworth, Ralph, 145 culture, 70, 133, 134 Dameron, John Lasley, 169n Dangerfield, Anthony, 147 Dartmouth College, 26, 148 Darwin, Charles, 19, 184n; see also evolution Davy, Humphry, Sir, 45 De Quincy, Thomas, 8 de Staël, Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker, 26 Dewey, John, 13, 23, 33, 38, 52, 140, 142, 144, 151, 153–63, 157, 158, 162, 196n The Child and the Curriculum, 156 “James Marsh and American Philosophy,” 160–2 “My Pedagogic Creed,” 156 “Philosophy and American National Life,” 153, 158–60 “Poetry and Philosophy,” 158 dialectic, dialectical, 38, 61, 68, 99, 174n, 175n, 186n; see also polarity distinctions, 9, 20, 21, 24, 38, 57–66, 77, 99, 120, 121, 127 degree and kind, 104 Emerson’s interest in, 9, 17, 29, 31, 56, 86, 88, 119, 125 genius and talent, 8, 56, 57, 77, 127, 130 idea and conception, 57 imagination and fancy, 56, 57, 130, 182n imitation and copy, 63, 182n

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Index

distinctions (cont.) Marsh’s interest in, 28, 29–32, 145–6, 149, 194n primary and secondary imagination, 77 symbol and allegory, 56, 63, 91, 178n see also “distinguishing without dividing;” natura naturans and natura naturata; reason and understanding “distinguishing without dividing,” 21, 54–66, 121, 124, 138, 189n Dombrowski, Daniel A., 186n dualism, duality, 44, 50, 59, 64, 97, 125, 130, 170n Cartesian, 50, 130 see also polarity Dykhuizen, George, 195n ecocriticism, 18–19 Edinburgh Review, 169n education, 25, 131, 168n, 190n and Coleridge, 67–8, 143, 146–7, 156, 157, 163 and Dewey, 155–7 and Emerson, 132, 133, 134, 135, 140, 143, 144 higher education, 141–53 and Marsh, 143–50, 156, 163 see also method; reform; University of Vermont; Vermont Transcendentalism electricity, 43, 50 Ellison, Julie, 122 Emerson, Ellen, 4 Emerson, Mary Moody, 3, 10, 67 Emerson, Ralph Waldo comments on Coleridge, 1, 5–6, 10, 48, 57, 58, 67, 71–2 works “Art,” 77 “Circles,” 108, 115, 178n, 185n “Compensation,” 50 “Divinity School Address,” 9, 143, 151 “English Literature,” 15, 57, 58, 67, 83, 87, 178n, 189n English Traits, 4, 5, 185n “Experience,” 89 “Goethe, or the Writer,” 82 “Human Culture,” 70, 84, 101, 107, 110 “Human Life,” 74, 81, 108 “Intellect,” 1, 10, 101, 189n “The Method of Nature,” 69, 84 “Nominalist and Realist,” 50 “The Over-Soul,” 98, 114, 115, 117 “The Philosophy of History,” 67, 72, 82, 101, 102, 115 “Plato,” 106–7, 109, 120 “The Poet,” 86, 89, 90, 109 “The Present Age,” 51, 175n “Prudence,” 93 “Quotation and Originality,” 9 “Science,” 79, 80, 117, 185n

“Self-Reliance,” 106 “Swedenborg, or the Mystic,” 79–80, 108 “The Times,” 84, 91, 92 “The Transcendentalist,” 13, 116–18, 129, 190n see also Nature Engell, James, 15, 31, 111, 147, 164n, 172n, 173n, 174n, 177n, 180n, 182n, 183n, 184n, 187n evolution, 26, 95, 102–10, 174n Coleridge’s view of, 91, 101–6, 111, 184n, 185n Darwinian, 65, 103, 104, 184n Emerson’s view of, 106–10, 185n experience, 15, 18, 21, 26, 35, 55, 60, 68, 69, 108, 116, 117, 121, 156, 161, 162 Eye, ocular imagery, 113, 123, 179n, 181n in Emerson, 6, 84, 89, 131, 139, 188n “eye of Reason,” 116 “master-eye,” 113 “transparent eyeball,” 84, 120, 124, 125, 189n Ezekiel, “chariot of,” 90, 112, 113, 128; see symbol faith, 32, 80, 81, 95, 113, 116–18, 173n, 175n, 187n, 189n Coleridge’s views of, 105, 109, 113, 116 Emerson’s views of, 79, 80, 116, 117–18, 124 “faithful thinker,” 139 fanaticism, 55 fancy see imagination Faust, Clarence, 178n, 188n Feuer, Lewis S., 195n Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 3, 34, 38, 40, 43, 59, 97, 110, 171n Fogle, Richard Harter, 174n fragment, fragmentation, 36, 48, 78, 141 Francis, Richard Lee, 122, 185n, 188n Francis, Robert Lee, 120, 188n Fraser’s Magazine, 169n French Revolution, 81 Fruman, Norman, 172n, 174n Fulford, Timothy, 180n galvanism, 50 genius, 8, 14, 50, 57, 77, 85, 150 Coleridge’s view of, 14, 73, 181n, 184n Emerson’s view of, 4, 51, 89, 101, 127, 181n philosophic, 42, 47 see also distinctions Gilbert, William, 174n Gilfillan, George, 164n God, 5, 6, 22, 44, 60, 61, 78, 81, 84, 93, 97, 98, 99, 100, 102, 103, 104, 107, 110–15, 116–17, 123, 124, 130, 133, 135, 137, 138, 139, 147, 157, 175, 185n, 186n, 187n, 191n Emerson’s secularized terms for, 95–6, 101, 114, 129 see also “I AM”

Index[ 213 ­

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 3, 8–9, 11, 19, 175n, 181n Good, James A., 192 Goodman, Russell, 142, 156, 169n, 192n, 195n Granger, David, 195n Gravil, Richard, 12, 119, 165n, 166n, 167n, 171n, 186n, 188n, 195n Great Chain of Being, The, 18, 104, 107, 184n; see also Lovejoy, Arthur Greenham, David, 19 Halmi, Nicholas, 182n Harding, Anthony John, 20, 168n, 169n, 170n, 177n, 189n Harper’s Magazine, 143; see also Raymond, H. J. Harris, Kenneth Marc, 8, 20, 62, 177n, 189n Harris, William Torrey, 144 Harvard College, 24, 25, 144, 173n Harvey, Samantha C., 166n, 180n Haynes, Gregory Miller, 82 Hedge, Frederick Henry, 21, 24, 25, 26, 34–9 Hedley, Douglas, 177n, 186n Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1, 175n Heraclitus, 48, 56 Heraud, John Abraham, 169n Herbert, George, 137, 181n hierarchy, hierarchical, 18, 20, 60, 70, 71, 83, 91, 93, 104, 107, 113, 114, 115, 120, 127, 128, 138, 148 Hodder, Alan, 122, 176n, 180n, 189n, 190–1n, 192n Hodges, S. H., 28 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 155 Holmes, Richard, 172n, 173n, 174n Howard, Claud, 169n humanity, 18, 22, 76–94, 98, 99, 120, 127, 131, 133; see also Romantic triad Hunt, Bishop, 169n Huntington, C. A., 150, 151, 193n Hutchings, Kevin, 12, 18, 19 “I AM,” 44, 46, 87, 97–8, 100, 102, 112 and “it is,” 17, 32, 44, 99, 183n see also consciousness; God; revelation idea, 99, 105, 114, 130, 184n idealism see philosophy imagination, 17, 22, 77, 78, 82, 83, 85–9, 90, 100, 113, 116, 131, 138, 139, 173n, 176n, 181n, 182n, 195n Coleridge’s definition of, 85–7, 88, 89, 90–1, 136 and divine spirit, 77, 86, 87, 88, 130, 134, 136, 139, 181n, 182n Emerson’s use of, 86, 87, 88, 90, 92–3, 120, 134, 136, 137, 139, 140, 182n and fancy, 17, 130–1 philosophic imagination, 46 primary vs. secondary, 8, 77, 85, 86, 90

individual, individualism, individuality, 10, 18, 20, 22, 38, 50, 53, 55, 102, 108, 111, 115, 135, 139, 151, 159, 161, 162 and pedagogy, 143, 145, 146, 147, 148, 150, 154, 157 see also mind individuation, 46, 105, 111 influence, 1, 2, 5, 6, 8–11, 166n assimilative, 2, 6, 9 denial of, 9–11 see also assimilation; borrowing interdisciplinarity, 13, 18–19, 21, 35, 42–3, 49, 55, 67, 72, 82, 83, 129, 131, 134, 173n intuition, intuitive, 25, 31, 32, 36, 41, 42, 46–7, 51, 61, 73, 74, 91, 92, 93, 95, 106, 112, 113, 117, 121, 123, 137, 161, 173n, 175n, 182n; see also reason Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich, 43 James, Henry, 177n James, William, 15, 142, 143, 155, 158 Jesus Christ, 1, 28, 78, 100, 101, 139 “minister of the pure Reason,” 101 see also logos John, Saint, 43, 180n, 190n Johns Hopkins University, 155 Johnson, Rochelle, 177n Kant, Immanuel, 1, 13–14, 20, 25, 30–3, 36, 38, 40, 41, 43, 56, 58–9, 62, 97, 120, 129, 132, 146, 170n, 173n, 190n, 193n, 195n and Coleridge, 25, 26, 30–3, 58, 60, 97, 141, 146, 155, 156, 168n, 177n and Emerson, 1, 13, 56, 58–9, 120, 129, 132, 168n, 169n, 170n, 177n, 178n, 189n, 190n and Vermont Transcendentalism, 29–33, 144, 145–6, 154, 155, 193n see also philosophy Keane, Patrick, 3, 19, 25, 166n, 176n, 185–6n Kern, Alexander, 20, 25, 26, 169n King’s College, London, 196n knowledge, knowing, 1, 9, 10, 13, 37, 44, 45, 46, 48, 56, 59, 60, 65, 97, 105, 116, 171n, 180n, 183n, 187n Koenig-Woodyard, Chris, 12, 166n Krause, K. C. F., 110 Kuklick, Bruce, 142, 156, 157, 192n, 195n Lamont, Corliss, 196n Landing-places, 21, 54–75, 149 Landor, Walter Savage, 4, 5 Lane, Jack C., 192n language, 50, 51, 78, 83, 85, 90, 91, 92, 100, 101, 127–31 “Science of Words,” 29, 55, 111, 130 see also nature Laplace, Pierre-Simon, 43

214 ]

Index

law, 30, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 53, 60, 63, 74, 75, 79, 87, 92, 105, 109, 130, 137, 151, 157, 161 Ledbetter, Mark T., 169n Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm von, 32, 43, 111 Leighton, Robert, 145 Levere, Trevor H., 44, 68–9, 173n, 184n Levin, Jonathan, 190n light imagery for Coleridge, 81, 113, 181n, 184n for Emerson, 114, 116 see also nature Lindsay, Julian Ira, 145, 193n, 194n, 196n literature, 13, 18, 20, 21, 22, 42, 49, 55, 76–94, 129, 131, 138, 139 in Marsh’s curriculum, 145 rather than philosophy, 66, 74, 76, 123, 136, 137–40 see also interdisciplinarity Locke, John, 24, 25, 29, 30, 35, 112, 192n logos, or Word, 43, 78, 91, 100, 101, 147, 184n; see also Jesus Christ Lovejoy, Arthur, 104, 168n, 177n, 184n; see also Great Chain of Being Luther, Martin, 175n Malebranche, Nicholas, 110, 186n Manning, Susan, 12, 14, 166n Marsh, James, 21, 26–34, 96, 141–55, 160, 192n as chair of Moral and Intellectual Philosophy, 150 as Coleridge’s editor, 3, 21, 24, 26–34 and the national press, 18, 141, 143, 161 notable students of, 143–4, 161 opinion of Boston Transcendentalism, 28, 142 as president of UVM, 23, 26, 29, 33, 38, 141–62 works “Exposition of the System of Instruction,” 146–7 “Preliminary Essay,” 21, 27–34, 67, 141, 144, 153, 160, 170n see also University of Vermont; Vermont Transcendentalism Matthiessen, F. O., 10 McFarland, Thomas, 16, 17–18, 40–1, 111, 113, 172n, 174n, 186n McKusick, James, 19, 189n McNiece, Gerald, 116 “me and not-me,” 38, 49, 61; see also polarity Menand, Louis, 142, 155, 163, 192n, 193n Metaphysical poetry, 137, 181n metaphysics, 4, 15, 25, 30, 82, 96, 106, 127, 128, 129, 133, 136, 140, 148, 170n, 187n “unwholesome quicksilver mines of,” 131 see also religion; theology

method, 3, 16, 21, 22, 24, 36–7, 39, 55, 58, 66–75, 141, 167n, 178n, 179n Coleridge’s definition of, 67–8 and Dewey, 158, 159–60 and education, 143, 144–5, 147, 154, 157, 158 Hedge’s “transcendental method,” 36–7, 39 and Marsh, 144, 149, 150 in Nature, 119, 120, 121, 124, 125, 127, 130, 131, 133 and Pragmatism, 155, 159 see also process: vs. system; Romantic triad Micheli, Giuseppe, 177n millennialism, 51, 181n “a new heaven and a new earth,” 80, 137, 138, 139, 190n see also apocalypse Miller, Craig, 174n Miller, Perry, 29 Milnes, Richard Monckton, 2–3 Milnes, Tim, 195n Milton, John, 19, 32, 77, 104, 132, 145, 181n “intuitive reason,” 31, 104 works Comus, 136 Paradise Lost, 103–4, 184n mind, 1, 6, 10, 18, 25, 36, 37, 41, 45, 48, 52–3, 55, 57–8, 61, 62, 63, 64, 68, 72, 73, 79, 80, 82–3, 85, 87, 91, 92, 95, 96, 100, 108, 109, 117, 130, 136, 138, 140, 142, 143, 147, 160, 174n, 180n, 182n, 183n “divine mind,” 27, 84, 95, 98, 136, 137 and matter, 18, 50, 52, 130, 131 “Parent Mind,” 184n see also consciousness; individualism Modiano, Raimonda, 100, 173–4n, 178n, 182n moral, morality, 43, 48, 49, 70, 79, 120, 127, 130, 138, 148, 153, 190n More, Thomas, 175n Moses, 97 mysticism, 15, 25, 48, 61, 79, 112, 113, 114, 121, 131, 137, 187n, 190n Nadler, Steven, 186n natura naturans and natura naturata, 22, 55, 56, 63–6, 177n Emerson’s use of, 65, 120 natural history, naturalist, 4, 71–2, 139, 148, 165n nature, 26, 30, 40–53, 64, 73, 78, 79, 80, 91, 100, 103, 107, 108, 113–14, 119–40 as alphabet, 87, 180n and art, 63–4 book of, 15, 22, 78–81, 82, 96, 98, 99, 117, 128, 131, 180n as educative, 131 as hieroglyphic, 87 language of, 63, 78, 79, 80, 91–2, 128–31, 180n, 184, 189n

Index[ 215 ­

laws of, 46, 53 life of, 81, 113 light of, 81, 113, 114 ministry of, 121, 125, 127, 134, 135, 143, 180n “Nature is transcendental,” 117 “primary Powers” of, 185n “soul of,” 107 see also ecocriticism; natura naturans and natura naturata; Nature; nature and spirit; “riddle of the world;” Romantic triad Nature, 8, 37, 48, 65, 67, 78, 90, 91, 119–40 “Commodity” and “Beauty,” 121, 125–7 “Idealism” and “Spirit,” 121, 132–7 “Introduction,” and “Nature,” 120, 123–5 “Language” and “Discipline,” 121, 127–32 “Prospects,” 120, 121, 137–40 nature and spirit, natural and spiritual, 7, 14, 17, 25, 29, 30, 38, 41, 44, 49, 50, 55, 56, 59, 60, 61, 64–5, 71, 73, 74, 79, 80, 87, 93, 99, 101, 106, 112, 115, 116, 120, 122, 128, 130, 133, 140, 170n, 171n, 187n, 188n, 195n in ascending tiers, 120, 125, 128, 129 in Marsh’s curriculum, 152, 153, 154 Naturphilosophie, 25, 40, 44, 47, 103, 128, 173n, 174n, 183n Neoplatonism see philosophy New York Times, The, 23, 143 New York World, 143; see also Spaulding, James Newman, Lance, 12, 166n Newsome, David, 169n, 175n Newton, Isaac, Sir, 112, 174n Nichols, Ashton, 19 Nicolson, Margorie, 32, 168n, 192n, 193n Nietzsche, Friedrich, 11, 52, 176n Nordbeck, Elizabeth C., 172 object, objective see polarity; subject and object Oken, Lorenz, 40 one, and many, oneness and allness, each and all, 7, 14, 60, 75, 86, 98, 111, 114, 122, 125, 127; see also union organ, 60, 82, 105, 108, 135–6, 181n organicism, 3, 10, 76, 77, 90, 92, 105, 109, 136, 155, 160, 161, 176n, 182n, 183n in education, 146, 147, 148, 154, 157 originality and indebtedness, 3, 6, 8, 9, 10, 22, 57, 77, 119, 125, 137; see also borrowing; plagiarism Pace, Joel, 11, 12, 166n, 186n, 192n Packer, Barbara, 19, 25, 31, 96, 99, 168n, 169n, 179n Paley, William, 26 Panentheism, 22, 95, 110–16, 186n definition of, 110–11 see also pantheism; theism

Pantheism, 22, 71, 95, 109, 111, 112, 114, 115, 170n, 186n, 187n definition of, 110 paradox, 38, 66, 75, 121, 122, 132 Parker, Theodore, 29 Paul, Saint, 61, 112 Paul, Sherman, 17, 52, 58–9, 130, 175n, 177n, 182n, 189n Pease, Aaron G., 152, 153, 158–9, 170n; see also University of Vermont Peirce, Charles Sanders, 155 perception, 22, 51, 63, 78, 83, 100, 110, 112, 113, 114, 123, 124, 125, 129, 131, 138, 183n, 191n Perkins, Mary Anne, 180n, 184n Perry, Seamus, 16, 17, 85 Pestalozzi, Johann Heinrich, 190n, 195n philosophy, philosopher, 13, 18, 20, 21, 35–6, 40–53, 55, 57, 67, 72, 100, 129, 137, 153–63 Cambridge Platonism, 15, 25, 32, 145, 193n “dynamic philosophy,” 21, 40–53, 105, 173n, 174n, 175n empiricism, 7, 15, 20, 25, 32, 59, 193n “first philosophy,” 21, 40–53, 131 German idealism, 7, 15, 21, 25, 26, 28, 34–5, 38, 44, 49, 57, 59, 97, 98, 107, 110, 132, 144, 145, 154, 156, 160, 161, 169n, 172n, 173n, 177n, 183n, 190n, 193n idealism, 7, 15, 20, 21, 25, 26, 32, 36, 40, 41, 43, 44, 67, 70, 79, 103, 128, 132–6, 144, 155, 156, 158, 165n, 169n, 191n, 193n “Liberal Platonism,” 15, 42, 169n, 193n mechanism, 26, 112 mediating empiricism and idealism, 7, 20, 25, 32, 41, 44, 59, 72, 113, 121, 128, 132, 143, 156, 189n, 195n Neoplatonism, 25, 40, 72, 79, 93, 103, 107, 131, 169n Platonism, 7, 15, 17, 25, 40, 41, 44, 57, 79, 98, 107, 131, 135, 136, 144 Pragmatism, 2, 16, 23, 38, 59, 66, 123, 125, 133, 134, 140, 141, 142, 143, 153, 155–63, 182–3n, 190n, 195n Scottish Common Sense, 25, 30, 144 see also interdisciplinarity; method; Naturphilosophie; process: vs. system; religion Pierson, William, 33 Pinson, William, 145, 193n plagiarism, 8, 172n; see also borrowing; influence Plato, 9, 15, 31–2, 40, 41, 48, 49, 56, 57, 68, 88, 106–7, 109, 120, 132, 137, 145, 168n, 173n, 178n, 179n, 188n; see also philosophy Plotinus, 40, 48, 56, 57, 72, 131, 132; see also philosophy Pochmann, Henry, 5, 171n

216 ]

Index

poet, poetry, 9, 14, 35, 57, 61, 66, 76, 77, 81–5, 88, 137 Coleridge’s definition of, 3, 20, 21, 24, 57, 66, 82, 83, 85 Emerson’s view of, 84, 86, 87, 88, 92, 124, 134 and philosophy, 72, 83, 97, 134, 136, 158 see also interdisciplinarity; poet-prophet poet-prophet, 5, 14, 42, 72, 76, 77–9, 80, 81–5, 88–9, 93, 97, 120, 123, 127, 130–1, 136, 137, 138, 139, 181n “Orphic poet,” 130, 131, 137–8 Poirier, Richard, 190n polarity, polar opposites, 17, 21, 38, 42, 44, 49– 52, 56, 75, 85, 86, 103, 142, 143, 173n, 174n, 175n, 176n, 182n “polar unities,” 32, 44, 46, 143 see also active and passive; centrifugal and centripetal; dualism; me and not-me; subject and object Porte, Joel, 191n Porter, Carolyn, 189–90n, 191–2n Potter, George R., 184n power, 44, 45, 56, 57, 64, 65, 116 for Coleridge, 81, 83, 85–7, 112, 146–7, 174n, 175–6n, 185n for Dewey, 157 for Emerson, 87, 108, 114, 180n for Marsh, 147 Prickett, Stephen, 182n process, 16, 37, 52, 56, 57, 63, 66, 96, 98, 102, 104, 105, 106, 111, 113, 118, 121, 122, 136, 148, 149, 156, 157, 176n, 189n, 192n vs. system, 38, 40–1, 46, 66, 69, 72, 73, 97, 126, 128, 135, 141, 153–4, 159 see also education; method progress, progressive, 20, 51, 66, 70, 72, 77, 88, 108, 111, 134, 135, 147, 154, 179n, 185n; see also method prophet, prophecy, 82, 114, 115, 120, 137, 157, 158, 185n Proteus, 65, 80 Raymond, H. J., 23, 142, 143; see also New York Times, The reason Coleridge’s view of, 27, 29, 30–3, 58–63, 90, 102, 113, 116, 132, 177n, 180n, 181n, 187n Emerson’s view of, 31, 32, 88, 101, 115, 123, 124, 125, 129, 130, 132–3, 136, 138, 182n, 190n, 191n God as “Supreme Reason,” 27, 60 intuitive, 31–3, 60, 104, 130, 166n see also Kant; reason and understanding reason and understanding, 8, 17, 21, 22, 28, 29, 30–3, 43, 55, 56, 57, 58–63, 100, 109, 120, 131, 132, 155, 173n, 176n, 182n for Marsh, 145–6, 149, 152, 153 in Nature, 121, 125, 129, 132, 137, 140, 188n

in the UVM curriculum, 154 see also Kant; reason; understanding Reed, Sampson, 49 reflection, 60, 123, 143, 153 reform educational, 141–53, 161–2 social, 18, 81, 155–6, 160, 161, 163, 192n see also abolitionism; society Religion, 18, 49, 50, 90, 113, 116, 134, 142, 146 Congregationalism, 27, 34, 142 liberalism vs. orthodoxy, 27, 29, 34, 96, 142, 162, 172n merging with philosophy, 21, 27, 28, 29, 34, 38, 43, 96, 97, 98, 131, 135, 141, 154, 156, 157, 183n Puritanism, 15 Trinitarianism, 5, 142, 186n Unitarianism, 4, 24, 25, 31, 34, 100, 142 see also Christianity; interdisciplinarity; mysticism; theology revelation, 78, 95–8, 99 Coleridge’s view of, 96, 97 and creation, 98, 99, 100, 103 Emerson’s view of, 98, 100, 101, 102 Richards, I. A., 182n Richardson, Robert D., 15, 39, 42, 164n, 168n, 169n, 192n, 193n “riddle of the world,” 14, 15, 40, 44–6, 99, 121, 132, 138 Rigby, Kate, 18 Ripley, George, 24, 25 Romantic triad and the “book of nature,” 78–81 definition of, 14–19 mediating of, 21, 22, 32, 37, 46, 50, 55, 59, 60, 63, 75, 86, 91, 97, 100, 101, 113, 117, 118, 124, 129, 133, 138, 139, 156, 158 and method, 17, 22, 68, 71, 72–5, 119–40, 156 a new model of, 25, 26, 30, 38, 120, 141, 147, 148 open-ended vs. systematic, 22, 33, 41, 71, 85, 88, 90, 93, 95, 109, 116, 121, 122, 123, 127, 135, 136, 140 and the poet-prophet, 76, 82, 84, 87–9, 130, 131, 140 potential resolution of, 40, 52, 61, 66, 82, 109–10, 120, 125, 136, 137 transparence of, 51, 80, 84, 95, 121, 136 see also humanity; nature; poet-prophet; spirit Romanticism, Romantic, 3, 13–14, 18, 19, 25, 26, 67, 81, 88, 96, 107, 112, 116, 119, 120, 126, 128, 132, 138, 142, 144, 154, 155, 156, 157, 162, 184n American, 18, 19, 20, 119, 142, 166n British, 13, 18, 19, 119, 166n European, 2, 7, 13, 25, 96 transatlantic, 2, 12, 13–14, 19, 33, 53

Index[ 217 ­

St. Louis Hegelians, 144 Schiller, Friedrich von, 19, 181n Schmidt, George P., 192n Schneider, Herbert, 162 Scholnick, Robert J., 164n, 166n Schrickx, W., 169n science, 13, 14, 18, 25, 42–3, 44, 49, 50, 67, 72, 73, 100, 105, 107, 134, 139, 142, 148, 149, 173n, 174n, 175n, 189n; see also Naturphilosophie; philosophy Scott, Matthew, 11 Scriptures, 90, 96, 100, 101, 139, 184n; see also Bible sectarianism, 176n self, 46, 73, 81, 97, 102, 112, 185n self-consciousness see consciousness sense, senses, 90, 101, 120, 123, 131 “debasing slavery to,” 61, 83 “lethargy of sense,” 149, 150 and supersensual, 35, 130 Shaffer, Elinor, 177n Shakespeare, 77, 83, 179n Shedd, William Greenough Thayer, 144 Simmons, Nancy Craig, 169n Slovic, Scott, 19 society, 143, 150, 157, 160, 161, 181n improvement of, 151, 157 public institutions, 143, 152 see also clerisy; reform Sostaric, Sanja, 20, 177n soul for Coleridge, 46, 60, 64, 81, 83, 84, 85, 98, 100, 105, 131 for Emerson, 1, 9, 13, 31, 56, 62, 66, 77, 84, 92, 101, 107, 108, 114, 115, 126, 129, 138, 139, 185n and reason, 115, 129 Spaulding, James, 143; see also New York World Sphinx, the, 15 Spinoza, Benedict, 177n, 178n, 186n spiral imagery, 54–5, 68, 70, 103, 104, 108, 121, 149, 174n, 176n; see also centripetal and centrifugal spirit, spiritual, 14–17, 18, 25, 32, 33, 44, 46, 60, 78, 95–118, 148, 149, 158, 165n, 179n, 191n Coleridge’s definition of, 30, 64, 162 Emerson’s definition of, 129 in Nature, 120, 129, 133, 134, 135, 137, 139, 184n, 187–8n see also nature and spirit Stack, George J., 176n Stallo, J. B., 168n stars, 36, 99–100 Steele, H. Meili, 32 Steffens, Henrik, 40 Stuart, Moses, 26 subject and object, subjective and objective, 18,

38, 42, 43, 44, 45, 50, 51, 61, 64–5, 97, 105, 114, 116, 170n, 173n, 174n, 177n, 183n; see also polarity Swedenborg, Emanuel, 1, 40, 48, 56, 79–80, 88, 128 symbol, 22, 26, 77, 78, 80, 82, 90–4, 100, 120, 177n, 178n, 182n Coleridge’s definition of, 89, 91 Emerson’s view of, 88, 91, 92–3, 128, 182–3n, 189n “nature is the symbol of spirit,” 128 see also distinctions; Ezekiel Tanner, Tony, 179n Taylor, Andrew, 12, 166n Taylor, Anya, 170n Temple School, the, 144 theism, 22, 95, 111, 112 definition of, 110 theology, 13, 16, 18, 20, 21, 24, 25, 27, 28, 29, 30, 34, 35–6, 42–3, 49, 55, 72, 95–118, 128, 129, 137, 141, 142, 144, 146, 148, 156, 172n, 196n; see also creation; evolution; interdisciplinarity; metaphysics; religion; revelation; theism Thompson, Frank T., 8, 20, 42, 165n, 167n, 178n, 179n, 188n Thorslev, Peter, 174n Torrey, H. A. P., 151, 153–5, 156, 160, 163 Torrey, Joseph, 29, 144, 153, 160 Toulouse, Teresa, 167n, 179n, 184n transatlantic Romanticism see Romanticism transatlantic studies, 2, 11–14 transcendence, transcendent, transcendental, 20, 21, 48, 109, 110, 114, 138, 142, 147, 160, 171n, 173n confusion between two terms, 59 Emerson’s definition, 13 and immanence, 95, 110, 113 Transcendentalism American, 1, 15, 22, 25, 40, 132, 136, 155 Boston, 2, 15, 16, 20, 21, 23, 24–39, 140, 141, 142, 143, 150, 190n Emerson’s definition of, 13, 26, 116, 117 “global,” 13 James Marsh’s opinion of, 28 naming of, 13, 15 Transatlantic, 1– 23, 26, 34, 35, 40, 42, 49, 55, 56, 58, 73, 77, 78, 82, 118, 119, 121, 122, 131, 132, 140, 141, 145, 156, 163 Vermont, 2, 15, 16, 20, 21, 23, 26, 33–4, 59, 140, 141–63 translucence, 91, 181n transparency of nature and spirit, 15, 41, 51, 78, 81, 89, 99, 109, 114, 123, 124, 130, 131, 133, 136, 188 “transparent eyeball,” 84, 124, 133 see also translucence

218 ]

Index

understanding, 31, 59, 61, 70, 79, 105, 121, 125–7, 131, 138, 146, 182n, 185n “wintry light of,” 139 see also Kant; reason and understanding union, unity, 7, 37, 38, 44, 52, 53, 56, 61, 68, 71, 85, 91, 92, 97, 102, 105, 106, 109, 110, 133, 136, 138, 139, 150, 158, 192n “the eternal ONE,” 114 and multiplicity, 103, 105, 106, 108, 132 of nature and spirit, 22, 73, 74, 75, 117 “a tone, and spirit of unity,” 82, 85 see also one and the many University of Vermont, 23, 33, 141–63, 170n, 193n Centennial Anniversary of, 152, 153, 159 and idealism, 145, 146, 148, 150, 169n “literary and philosophical creed” of, 152–3 see also Dewey, John; Marsh, James; Torrey, H. A. P.; Transcendentalism Vallins, David, 20, 48, 59, 106, 111, 178n, 184n, 187n Van Berkel, Klaas, 180n Van Cromphout, Gustaaf, 177n Van Leer, David, 59 Vanderjagt, Arjo, 180n vehicle, 100, 101, 112, 150, 184n, 189n “Nature is the vehicle of thought,” 128 see also Ezekiel; symbol Vermont Transcendentalism see Transcendentalism; University of Vermont

Vigus, James, 14, 169n Virgil, 46 vision, 51, 84, 87, 109, 113, 123, 124, 132, 133, 137, 188–9n; see also eye Volta, Alessandro, 43 Wahr, Fred B., 169n Walls, Laura Dassow, 13, 20, 128, 167n, 175n, 176n, 178n water-insect, 51, 122, 175n; see also active and passive Weisbuch, Robert, 11, 12, 165n, 168n Wellek, René, 169n, 177n Wheeler, John, 148, 149, 150, 151, 193n Wheeler, Kathleen, 176n, 178n, 195n Whewell, William, 174n Whicher, Stephen, 167n White, Ruth Williams, 192n Whitehead, Alfred North, 15 will, 30, 83, 97, 116, 130, 137 Willey, Basil, 168n Wilson, Douglas Brownlow, 178n Wilson, Eric, 174n Wood, Barry, 20, 175n, 176n, 186n Word see logos Wordsworth, William, 11, 19, 77, 179n, 180n, 190n, 195n Emerson’s visit with, 4, 5 “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” 10, 166n, 185–6n Wright, Jane, 12, 14, 169n