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The Growth of the Soul: Coleridge's Dialectical Method and the Strategy of Emerson's Nature

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Barry Wood
Barry Wood*
Affiliation:
University of Houston, Houston, Texas
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Abstract

Extensive studies of the sources for Nature (1836) have so far failed to note Emerson’s discovery of a dramatic dialectical method in Coleridge’s writings. Emerson’s major ideas—self-reliance, the assimilative Soul, and compensation as balanced wholeness—had been worked out well before 1836; but the publication of these ideas was delayed until Emerson found and appropriated Coleridge’s method. Emerson is found exploring Coleridge’s precise formulations in 1835 while Nature was being planned. Nature itself is rigorously dialectical in content and form. Beginning with the dichotomy between soul and nature, the work proceeds through six major dialectical steps to a final synthesis, spirit. Individual chapters, too, proceed through as many as five distinct dialectical steps toward the major synthesis of the chapter. This method duplicates the central argument of the work; moreover, it carries through Coleridge’s important linkage between dialectical logic and organic growth.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 91 , Issue 3 , May 1976 , pp. 385 - 397
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1976

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References

Notes

1 Merton M. Sealts, Jr. and Alfred R. Ferguson, Emerson's “Nature”—Origin, Growth, Meaning (New York: Dodd, 1969), pp. 76, 89.

2 Emerson s “Nature,” p. 81.

3 Emerson's “Nature,” pp. 109–10. The version of Nature that this reviewer has seen was the first of several unauthorized editions, released as “The Religious Philosophy of Nature,” in D. G. Goyder, ed. The Biblical Assistant, and Book of Practical Piety (London: W. Newbery, 1841).

4 Freedom and Fate: An Inner Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press. 1971), p. 52.

5 The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Alfred R. Ferguson, ? (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1971—). 17–23, hereafter cited in the text as Of; The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Edward Waldo Emerson, Centenary Ed., 12 vols. (Boston and New York: Houghton, 1903–04), cited as W, remains the standard text until it is replaced by CW; The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. William H. Gilman et al.. 11 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1960—), cited as JMN; The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Stephen E. Whicher, Robert E. Spiller, Wallace E. Williams, 3 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1966–72), cited as EL; The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Ralph L. Rusk, 6 vols. (New York : Columbia Univ. Press, 1939), cited as L; Young Emerson Speaks: Unpublished Discourses on Many Subjects, ed. Arthur Cushman McGiffert, Jr. (New York: Kennikat, 1965). Cited as YES; The Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Edward Waldo Emerson and Waldo Emerson Forbes (Boston : Houghton, 1909–14), cited as J, remains useful as the only printed source for many letters subsequently omitted from L.

6 Bishop, in Emerson on the Soul (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1964), pp. 9–15, provides one of the finest readings of Emerson in his examination of the paragraph containing both the “bare common” and the “transparent eyeball” passages (CW, 1, 9–10; W, i, 8–10). Bishop calls the latter “one of the silliest” sentences in Emerson, noting however that “the doctrine about the Soul's relation to Nature, so far as it is paraphrasable, is the same as that of the ‘bare common’ sentence. But the speaker, the I, is innocently absurd at best; the rhythm is a coarse parody of the watchful casualness of the other sentence; and the language is vapid” (pp. 10, 15).

7 It was Christopher Pearse Cranch who, to some extent, created the absurd Emerson through his illustrations of passages from Nature (3 of these appear in Emerson's “Nature,” pp. 9, 29, 36). Emerson was told of them (L, ii, 190) but recorded no reaction. Bishop's reading of the “transparent eyeball” passage is overly influenced by the Cranch drawings; an alternate reading is provided in Warner Berthoffs fine introduction to Nature: A Facsimile of the First Edition (San Francisco: Chandler. 1968). pp. xxxiv-xxxvi, lxi-lxix.

8 A useful summary of the influence of Blair can be found in Sheldon W. Liebman. “The Development of Emerson's Theory of Rhetoric, 1821–1836,” American Literature, 41 (1969), 178–206. Kenneth Walter Cameron. Ralph Waldo Emerson's Reading (New York: Haskell, 1973), p. 45, lists Robert South's Sermons (1724-27) and Bishop Butler's Sermons (1749) as among Emerson's borrowings of 1823–24 from the Harvard Coll. Library; A. M. Baumgartner, “The Lyceum is My Pulpit' : Homiletics in Emerson's Early Lectures,” American Literature, 34 (1963), 478, lists other volumes of sermons Emerson was required to read while attending the Harvard Divinity School: Coppe's Sermons, Paley's Sermons, and Works of Tillotson. Emerson's adoption of the traditional divisions and subdivisions was flexible: of the sermons printed in YES just over one third (9 out of 25) utilize interior part or section numbers.

9 Matthiessen, American Renaissance : Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (New York : Oxford Univ. Press, 1941), pp. 67–68.

10 R. A. Yoder, “Toward the ‘Titmouse Dimension’: The Development of Emerson's Poetic Style,” ? M LA, 87 (1972), 255–70, argues that Emerson's poetry between 1834 and 1836 utilizes a carefully organized, meditative form modeled upon the poetry of George Herbert.

11 “The Architectonics of Emerson's Nature,” American Quarterly, 19 (1967), 39–53.

12 See Young Emerson's Transcendental Vision: An Exposition of His World View with an Analysis of the Structure, Backgrounds, and Meaning of “Nature” (1836) (Hartford: Transcendental Books, 1971).

13 Lewis P. Simpson, “Emerson's Early Thought: Institutionalism and Alienation.” The Man of Letters in New England and the South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1973), p. 75, drawing on remarks about the telescope made by Hannah Arendt, traces Emerson's “initial discovery of the Archimedean point” to Emerson's 1829 letter to his Aunt Mary (J, ii, 277). Simpson entirely overlooks Emerson's quotation from Archimedes 6 years earlier (JMN, ii, 187; J, i, 299) and the obvious connection it bears to Emerson's increasing assertion of self from 1823 on.

14 The imagery of the soul sweeping “the outmost orbit,” building a “tower of observation,” or climbing a “specular mount” utilizes the astronomer's observatory as an analogue for the action of the soul. In addition to Archimedes and Galileo, Emerson paid tribute to other astronomical thinkers, emphasizing the power gained through such distant vision. Newton particularly was singled out as early as 1823 and attributed with a perception of “correspondences” (J, I, 325–26); in 1833 Newton's phrase, “fits of easy transmission & reflection,” was used to summarize “the soul's law” (JMN, iv, 87; cf. JMN, v, 189), and in “The American Scholar” the same phrase from Newton was applied to “that great principle of Undulation in nature … Polarity” (CW, i, 61). In an 1832 sermon, Emerson credited Joseph Louis LaGrange (1736-1813) with a discovery of the universal law of compensation through his observations of periodical irregularities in planetary orbits (YES, p. 176); and in 1837, in a long discussion of the uncertain results of the scholar, he noted the “conspicuous, splendid, & useful” results of the astronomers “[John] Flamsteed [1647-1719] & [Sir William] Herschel [1738-1822] in their glazed observatory… . But he [the scholar] in his private observatory cataloguing obscure & nebulous stars of the human mind which as yet no man has thought of as such … must sacrifice display & immediate fame … must accept poverty, obscurity & solitude” (JMN, v. 359; CW, i, 62). The fullest accounts of Emerson's adoption of astronomical vision are found in Sherman Paul, Emerson's Angle of Vision: Man and Nature in American Experience (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1952), pp. 82–84. Still reliable for its treatment of Emerson's astronomical knowledge is Harry Hayden Clark's “Emerson and Science,” Philological Quarterly. 10 (1931), 225–60.

15 See Frank T. Thompson, “Emerson's Indebtedness to Coleridge,” Studies in Philology, 23 (1926), 55–76.

16 Emerson's Angle of Vision, p. 112. The presence of dialectics in Emerson's work was noted as early as 1884 by William T. Harris, “The Dialectic Unity of Emerson's Prose,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy. 108 (1884). 195–202. who argued that “the closest unity of the logical kind is the dialectic unity that begins with the simplest and most obvious phase of the subject, and discovers by investigation the next phase that naturally follows. It is an unfolding of the subject according to its natural growth in experience” (p. 195). While Harris emphasized the importance of a dialectical method in any essay that “expounds the genesis of (he subject” (p. 196), his demonstrations failed to disclose this method at work. The same lack of rigor is apparent in his essay “Emerson's Philosophy of Nature,” The Genius and Character of Emerson, ed. F. B. Sanborn (1885; rpt. Port Washington: Kennikat, 1971), pp. 339–64, where claims about “dialectic” appear again. Michael H. Cowan, City of the West: Emerson, America, and Urban Metaphor (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1967), utilizes the language of dialectics repeatedly as a way of talking about polar tensions in Emerson's thought, but fails to demonstrate anything like Coleridge's dialectical method in specific works.

17 The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Barbara E. Rooke (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1969), iv, 94, n. Hereafter cited as Works.

18 René Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism: 1750–1950, ii (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1955), 156, documents Coleridge's borrowing of dialectics from Schelling, as does Norman Fruman, Coleridge, The Damaged Archangel (New York: Braziller, 1971), pp. 211–14. Clear-cut lines of influence, however, are nearly impossible to establish. Thus, while Coleridge appropriated dialectical terminology from Schelling, conversations with Wordsworth may have nurtured his interest in a dialectical description of human experience. E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Wordsworth and Schelling: A Typological Study of Romanticism (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1960), pp. 99–105, shows the remarkable similarities between Wordsworth's descriptions of the “blending,” “transforming” power of Imagination, understood as a living dialectic, and Schelling's description of “productive perception” (produktiven Anschauung) characteristic of Imagination (Einbildungs-kraft). Both descriptions would seem to lie behind the famous passage in Ch. xiii of Biographia Literaria where Coleridge describes Secondary Imagination as a power that “dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create … it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital” (W. G. T. Shedd, ed. Complete Works of Coleridge, New York: Harper, 1884, iii, 364).

The paragraphs of Ch. xiii which precede Coleridge's discussion of imagination develop a dialectical logic similar to that found in The Friend and Aids to Reflection. Emerson was clearly familiar with Biographia Literaria, as several journal entries suggest (JMN, iii, 174, 211, 296, 336; v, 9, 27). But, while he had borrowed the volume from the Harvard Coll. Library on 16 Nov. 1826, his journal does not reveal a close knowledge of Ch. xiii until Aug. 1835 (JMN, v, 86), by which time he had already discovered Coleridge's discussion of dialectics in Aids to Reflection (JMN, v. 30).

19 Aids to Reflection: With a Preliminary Essay by James Marsh, D.D., ed. Henry Nelson Coleridge, 4th ed. (1840; rpt. Port Washington: Kennikat, 1971), p. 183.

20 Aids to Reflection, p. 184, n. My discussion in the next 2 paragraphs is summarized from the same note, pp. 185–86.

21 In The Friend Coleridge writes: “Method implies a progressive transition, and it is the meaning of the word in the original language. The Greek ?e??d??, is literally a way, or path of Transit… . without continuous transition, there can be no Method… . The term. Method, cannot therefore, otherwise than by abuse, be applied to a mere dead arrangement, containing in itself no principle of progression” (Works, iv, 457). Coleridge's treatment of Method begins with methodical thought (or its absence) in various Shakespearean characters. Thus, in 1831, Emerson wrote: “I read Shakspeare last ev.g & admired with all the fine minds his singular power… . His poetry never halts, but has what Coleridge defines [as] Method, viz. progressive arrangement. Another thing strikes me in the sonnets … and that is the assimilating power of passion that turns all things to its own nature” (JMN, iii, 299). The term “progressive arrangement,” occurring in the section of Nature under discussion, derives from Coleridge's “Preliminary Treatise on Method”; see also Emerson's Jan. 1836 entry, used in “Spiritual Laws,”—A man is a method; a progressive arrangement; a selecting principle gathering his like to him wherever he goes“ (JMN, v, 114; W, II, 144)—which links the notion of method to the gathering, assimilative power of the soul.

22 My reading of this section of Nature is done against the background of Warner BerthofFs superb commentary on this paragraph in his introduction to Nature: A Facsimile, pp. xlvi-lvi. Berth off concludes flatly and I think accurately that “Emerson is in fact being solidly philosophical here, as precise about the mind's relation to the phenomenal world as anybody had learned to be by 1836” (p. lii).

23 In July 1836 Emerson defined man as a synthesis or a “marriage” of matter and spirit and made this the basis of his distinction between the idealist and the spiritualist (or transcendentalist): “Man is the point wherein matter & spirit meet & marry. The Idealist says, God paints the world around your soul. The spiritualist saith, Yea, but lo! God is within you. The self of self creates the world through you, & organizations like you” (JMN, v, 187). The figure of marriage for the synthesis of transcendental vision recurs in Nov. 1836: “The world is full of happy marriages of faculty to object, of means to end; and all of Man marries all of Nature, & makes it fruitful. Man may be read therefore, if you choose, in a History of the Arts, or in a history of Sciences” (JMN, v, 236).

24 Emerson adopted the dialectical method 8 years later in “Experience” (W, iii, 43–86). Here the antithetical elements of experience which the soul must progressively assimilate—symbolized as the “lords of life” in the introductory poem—are conveniently listed in the final section of the essay: “Illusion, Temperament, Succession, Surface, Surprise, Reality, Subjectiveness” (W. iii, 82).