6 - The Old and New Worlds: English Trait

Summary

THE MACHINE IN THE ENGLISH GARDEN

“In the lonely woods I remember London, and think I should like to be initiated in the exclusive circles”

(JMN, 8:127).

The pragmatic reorientation of Emerson's philosophy accelerated in the late 1840s, spurred by his pivotal lecture tour in England in 1847–8. He undertook the journey with the lectures that made up Representative Men substantially completed, and thus with a conviction of the lapse of the hero fresh in his mind. The exhaustion of his hope for the human possibility suggested in Representative Men seemed to be mirrored in his own psyche. He looked to England as a source of personal renewal, and the journey was a catalyst of change arguably as significant as his first European tour of 1833–4, which marked his transition from preacher to lecturer and essayist.

We can trace to the journey the rebirth of his conviction that science might offer a usable interpretive paradigm for the ultimate translation of nature's metaphysical code. Shocked into the hope for science as an instrument of intellectual renewal early in his career by his 1834 visit to the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, he found himself stimulated again in England by a new exposure to the work of scientists such as Michael Faraday and Richard Owen. The clearest evidence of that impact is the largely unrealized project he called Natural History of Intellect, which will be examined later.