Emerson's Metaphors 9781666901573, 9781666901580, 1666901571

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Emerson’s Metaphors

Emerson’s Metaphors David Greenham

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2023 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on File Names: Greenham, David, 1971- author.   Title: Emerson's metaphors / David Greenham.   Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, [2023] | Includes bibliographical     references.  Identifiers: LCCN 2023039474 (print) | LCCN 2023039475 (ebook) | ISBN     9781666901573 (cloth) | ISBN 9781666901580 (ebook)   Subjects: LCSH: Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 1803-1882--Criticism and     interpretation. | Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 1803-1882--Technique. | Metaphor     in literature.  Classification: LCC PS1641 .G74 2023  (print) | LCC PS1641  (ebook) | DDC     814/.3--dc23/eng/20231005  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023039474 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023039475 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

For Jen

Contents

Acknowledgments ix Abbreviations xi Introduction: ‘Fossil Poetry’



1

PART 1: EMERSON’S THEORY OF METAPHOR



15

Chapter One: ‘A Golden Link’: Emerson’s Doctrine of Correspondence 17 Chapter Two: ‘Apposite Metaphors’: Analogy and Symbolism



47

Chapter Three: ‘Leaving Me My Eyes’: Nature’s Embodied Theory of Metaphor

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PART 2: EMERSON’S PRACTICE OF METAPHOR Chapter Four: Nature



Chapter Five: Humankind Chapter Six: God

Index

111 113



149



181

Conclusion: ‘The Maker Not the Made’ Bibliography





211

217

223

About the Author



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vii

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the many Emerson scholars who have supported my work on Emerson from its conception, especially David Robinson, Wes Mott, and Joseph Urbas, whose encouragement and generous conversations were always stimulating. I would also like to thank my former colleague Jonathan Charteris-Black, who helped me deepen my understanding of conceptual metaphor theory. I’d also like to extend my sincere gratitude to the host of Emerson scholars, most of whom I have not met, whose work on the remarkable and possibly unique corpus of the critical editions of Emerson’s writings enabled a sustained interrogation like this to happen. I would also like to thank Dr. Jennifer Lewis for reading the work in its various draft stages and for supporting me and the work over many, many years. Earlier versions of parts of the introduction and a section of Chapter 5 were previously published in “The Work of Metaphor: Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ‘Circles’ and Conceptual Metaphor Theory” (ESQ. Vol. 64, No. 4, 2019: 402– 34). Some of the exploratory ideas for the book were published as “Emerson’s ‘Apposite Metaphors’ and the Grounds of Creativity” (Anglo-Saxonica, 12, 2016: 101–20).

ix

Abbreviations

For regularly cited works, I have used the following abbreviations parenthetically in the text, followed by volume and page number as appropriate. BM: Mark Johnson.1987. The Body in the Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. CR: George Lakoff and Mark Turner. 1989. More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. CS: Ralph Waldo Emerson. 1989–1992. The Complete Sermons of Ralph Wado Emerson. Edited by Albert Von Frank et al. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. CW: Ralph Waldo Emerson.1971–2013. The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. 10 volumes. Edited by Alfred R. Ferguson, Joseph Slater et al. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. EL: Ralph Waldo Emerson. 1959–1971. The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson. 3 vols. Edited by Robert E. Spiller, Stephen E. Whicher, and Wallace E. Williams. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. JMN: Ralph Waldo Emerson. 1960–1982. The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson. 16 vols. Edited by William H. Gilman, Ralph H. Orth et al. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Lakoff: George Lakoff. 1995. ‘The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor.’ In Metaphor and Thought. 2nd Edition. Edited by Andrew Ortony. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 202–51. LL: Ralph Waldo Emerson. 2001. The Later Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson: 1843–1871. 2 vols. Edited by Ronald A. Bosco and Joel Myerson. Athens: University of Georgia Press. PF: George Lakoff. 1999. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books.

xi

Introduction

‘Fossil Poetry’

Emerson’s Metaphors is a fundamental reinterpretation of the American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson and an interdisciplinary intervention in literary criticism and intellectual history. Examining Emerson’s journals, and lectures and reassessing the major essays, I demonstrate how Emerson’s prose ‘thinks’ through its figurative language, ultimately enabling the symbolic reconceptualization of the human, nature, and God that would prove so crucial for the emergence of American literature. As the first full-length work on a major American author to draw on the methods and conclusions of the paradigm-shifting Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), Emerson’s Metaphors contends that metaphor in Emerson’s work is a cognitive form rather than a rhetorical or ornamental feature. That Emerson himself became aware of the interdependence of thought and metaphor is evidenced throughout his writing career, beginning in the early 1820s with his intuition of an ‘eternal analogy’ between ‘nature’ and ‘mind’ (JMN1 19), developing across the 1830s and 1840s to the view ‘that the material world is a symbol or expression of the human mind and part for part’ (EL1 289), to his conclusion as late as 1866 that ‘The Mind must think by means of Matter; find Matter or Nature the means and words of its thinking and expression’ (JMN16 4). At each stage, Emerson is describing metaphorical thinking, where metaphors drawn from ‘Matter or Nature’ are ‘the means and words’ of thought itself. How he moved through these stages against the backdrop of his intellectual milieu is one of the stories I will tell as the book progresses, but I can introduce a key element now by looking closely at one example of Emerson’s many material metaphors. In his 1844 essay, ‘The Poet,’ Emerson provides an example of a thinking metaphor: ‘Language is fossil poetry’ (CW3 13). Through this novel metaphor, Emerson seems simply to imply that a now-dead language was once a living, creative thing. However, we can understand more of the cognitive work metaphor does for Emerson if we look at the 1841 journal passage that inspired it: ‘As the limestone in our quarries is found to consist of infinite 1

2

Introduction

masses of the remains of animalcules, so language is made up of images or poetic tropes which now in their familiar secondary use have quite ceased to remind us of their poetic origins, as howl from owl, ravenous from raven, rotation from wheel, and so on to infinity’ (JMN8 160). Emerson’s intriguing extended metaphor produces an original concept of linguistic history. Just as limestone is made up of ‘infinite masses’ of living creatures, language is made up of metaphors ‘on to infinity’; just as the original creatures have died and turned to stone, the metaphors have been forgotten and become the dead metaphors that make up our literal language. Emerson’s examples show how the process works. First there were words that named things, such as birds, sounds, and objects. Then there was a ‘poetic’ transference, when the object’s name—‘owl,’ ‘raven,’ ‘wheel’—was used for some other meaning, a noise (‘howl’), a feeling (‘ravenous’), an abstract movement (‘rotation’). The thought that Emerson’s metaphor gives us is surprising: the first use of a word, where it names a thing, is not where the word is ‘alive.’ The living moment of a word is its first metaphorical use, when the word is transferred into a new domain; it is this ‘living’ metaphor that makes the fossil. Despite the inevitability of human forgetting, prior creative poetic activity leaves a non-living discoverable trace in language itself. Emerson figures etymology as paleontology, and in so doing uses the ‘fossil poetry’ metaphor to conceptualize a history of language.1 Emerson’s idea of the importance of metaphor in understanding the history of language, as well as the way he uses metaphor to conceptualize thinking, foreshadows and exemplifies Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT). This theory, which emerged out of late-twentieth-century linguistics, has influenced the study of numerous disciplines—from philosophy to theology, from poetics to physics—and makes a powerful case that ‘conceptual’ metaphors, often seen as literary or idiomatic ornaments, are crucial components of thought.2 Just what a relationship between thought and metaphor means will evolve as this book progresses. To begin with, it is important to understand what a ‘conceptual metaphor’ is. Zoltán Kövecses’s definition of a conceptual metaphor runs as follows: ‘when one conceptual domain is understood in terms of another conceptual domain’ (Kövecses 2010, 248). The key word here is understood, as opposed to, say, described or figured, with an implication that conceptual metaphor is an active part of thinking. Such thinking is at work in Emerson’s ‘fossil poetry’ trope, where the conceptual domain of etymology is ‘understood’ in terms of the conceptual domain of paleontology; Emerson’s striking inference about language living as metaphor could not happen without some knowledge of fossils, the study of which was a vibrant field in North America by the 1840s. Etymology is what CMT calls a ‘target domain,’ the aspect of experience that needs understanding, usually because its abstract nature makes it hard to comprehend. Paleontology is what CMT

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calls the ‘source domain’ (Lakoff, 206–7), typically a simpler or more familiar concept that helps us to understand the more abstract target. Using concrete metaphors to present abstract concepts is, of course, conventional in literary writers like Emerson. The practice is, according to CMT, more common in all aspects of conceptual life than we typically like to admit. As George Lakoff observes, ‘much of what is real in a society or in the experience of an individual is structured and made sense of via conventional metaphor’ (Lakoff, 244). CMT contends that metaphor, far from being an ornament or a rhetorical flourish, is central to the ways in which we experience and think about our everyday life. Typical everyday examples of conceptual metaphor include: ‘life is a journey’—if only I’d taken a different path, my life would be different, where ‘life’ is the target domain and ‘journey’ is a source domain; or ‘argument is war’—she attacked all my best points, where ‘argument’ is the target domain and ‘war’ is the source domain (see Lakoff and Johnson 2003, 3–33). Even basic concepts like ‘good is up’ and ‘bad is down’ are conceptual metaphors that shape how we understand and express our experience of the world, from theology (the Fall) to psychology (depression). Moreover, as we shall see, Lakoff, Johnson, and others have compellingly argued that conceptual metaphor is the basis of many of our most long-standing and powerful philosophical ideas, such as those of time, essence, causality, identity, the self, and categorization. Here CMT is building on a tradition traceable to Friedrich Nietzsche’s 1873 essay, ‘On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense,’ in which Nietzsche contended that truth is a ‘mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphism’ (Kaufman 1971, 46), contending that what we call truth is made up of dead metaphors that trap us in ‘herd-like’ (47) linguistic behavior—something that, as we shall see, Emerson had earlier called ‘custom.’ Nietzsche’s glimpse into metaphor’s cognitive power was sharpened by I.A. Richards, in his 1936 lectures, The Philosophy of Rhetoric, in which he wrote that metaphor ‘is a borrowing between and intercourse of thoughts, a transaction between contexts. Thought is metaphor and proceeds by comparison, and the metaphors of language derive therefrom’ (Richards 1936, 94; Richards’s emphasis). For Richards, metaphor is the fundamental structure of thinking itself, a process that works by comparison, combining two distinct concepts into one new idea. The philosopher Max Black called Richards’s ‘transaction between contexts’ an ‘interactive’ metaphor, claiming that interactive metaphors are those that cannot be translated back into literal speech without ‘a loss in cognitive context’ (Black in Johnson 1981, 79; Black’s emphasis). Thus, for Black, interactive metaphors create insight and knowledge. Paul Ricoeur called this blending of contexts in metaphor a ‘commerce between thoughts’ and a ‘talent of thinking’ (Ricoeur 1986, 81), again recognizing the cognitive power of metaphor

4

Introduction

to create new knowledge through ‘semantic innovation’ (98; Ricoeur’s emphasis). Richards, Black, and Ricoeur go further than Nietzsche in not only recognizing the cognitive nature of metaphor, but also, and more importantly for our purposes, in claiming that metaphors are not merely a linguistic trap, but can also renew thought; something that, as we shall see, Nietzsche could have learned from reading the Emerson he so admired. Indeed, one of the claims I make in Emerson’s Metaphors is that Emerson should be considered a vital precursor of CMT. For CMT, as Lakoff puts it, metaphor is ‘fundamentally conceptual, not linguistic, in nature’ (Lakoff, 244). Importantly, CMT distinguishes individual metaphorical expressions from underlying conceptual metaphors. When we examine literary writers, we tend, as critics, to fixate on the novelty of their literary expressions, not seeing that these expressions very often have conventional conceptual bases. In everyday language, ‘hitting a dead end,’ ‘spinning my wheels,’ ‘getting stuck in a rut’ are all non-literary linguistic expressions relating to the same conceptual metaphor: life is a journey (CMT uses small capitals to indicate the conceptual metaphors that underlie their linguistic expressions). But, as Lakoff and Johnson point out, so is Dante’s ‘At one point midway on our path in life/I came around and found myself now searching/Through a dark wood, the right way blurred and lost’ (Dante 2006, 3; cf. CR, 9). So, we might add, is Emerson’s own ‘Where do we find ourselves? In a series of which we do not know the extremes, and believe that it has none. We wake and find ourselves on a stair: there are stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended; there are stairs above us, which go upwards and out of sight’ (CW3, 27). What we think of as literary language is rarely original in the ways critics like to think. Rather, as Lakoff tells us, ‘Poetic metaphor is, for the most part, an extension of our everyday, conventional system of metaphorical thought’ (Lakoff, 244, 246). A conventional basis for literary expression does not diminish any claims we might want to make for originality. Rather, as we shall see later, it increases their value and their consequence. Emerson’s ‘Language is fossil poetry’ is, for all intents and purposes, a novel conceptual metaphor (its quasi-conventional base in natural history will be explored in Chapter 4). The ‘cross-domain mapping,’ as CMT calls it, between etymology and paleontology, which gives us etymology is paleontology, is hardly as established, or as useful, as life is a journey. The two metaphors work, though, in fundamentally the same way. In both cases, the source domain, ‘journey’ or ‘paleontology,’ provides what Mark Johnson calls a ‘schema’: ‘A schema consists of a small number of parts and relations, by virtue of which it can structure indefinitely many perceptions, images, and events’ (BM, 28). According to Lakoff and Turner, schemas have unique

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‘slots’ that can be mapped from the source domain to the target domain (CR, 61–2). In the case of life is a journey, these slots include a directional path, forks in the road, dead ends, bumpy ground, hills, narrow tracks, ways not taken, starting points, midpoints (Dante and Emerson), and destinations. Each slot maps from the source domain to the target domain and in so doing provides the relational structure for an aspect of life. The very idea that life has a purpose at all can be traced to the life is a journey metaphor, where purpose maps onto the destination slot. Paleontology also has slots that make up its concept: a stone object that is the fixed record of a once-living thing, the discovery and analysis of which gives us access and insight to a distant living past. When Emerson writes, ‘Language is fossil poetry’, one domain is mapped onto another with surprisingly little effort: individual fossils map individual metaphors, these metaphors were once living, this life is their etymological (metaphorical) history, which can be discovered and analyzed to recover the evidence of that life. However, in both metaphors, it is a little more complex and a lot more interesting than just conceptual mapping. What each metaphor enables is not just a way of describing something, say life or etymology, but as suggested above, a way of thinking. It is the connection between thought and metaphor, firmly established by CMT (though, as we shall see, long anticipated but deliberately avoided) that really matters. The critical tradition has not ignored metaphor in Emerson; even so, metaphor has never been central to the interpretative canon. For example, Jonathan Bishop’s 1964 Emerson on the Soul contains a few pages on metaphor, in which he makes some significant points. For example, he recognizes that in bringing two different aspects of experience into a unity, Emerson’s metaphors enable a moment of ‘intellectual discovery.’ Bishop also notes the instability of metaphor, and that the ‘consummation of every metaphor [ . . . ] should be a new opportunity for radical doubt that immediately commences a search for alternative terms.’ Bishop concludes that metaphor restlessly moves forward in Emerson’s prose. However, he regards metaphor as just one aspect of Emerson’s literary language, alongside rhythm and tone (Bishop 1964, 58, 56, 116−19, 128−7). Julie Ellison’s 1984 Emerson’s Romantic Style also has several pages on metaphor. For Ellison, as for Bishop, the purpose of Emersonian metaphor is ‘constant change’ and ‘perpetual transition.’ Ellison sees metaphor as a point of style, and more particularly an effort to avoid ‘literary influence’ by using old words in new ways. Ultimately Emerson’s use of metaphor becomes a process of flux, where ‘everything can stand for everything else, and that, where all is symbolic, all symbols are arbitrary’ (Ellison 1984, 198, 200, 205). That metaphors are not—indeed cannot be— arbitrary is something I shall demonstrate in what follows. Bishop and Ellison recognize metaphor as an important aspect of Emerson’s literary technique,

6

Introduction

but not, as I shall argue here, fundamental to the very process of his thought. Additionally, Emerson critics have located metaphor in more general theories of “correspondence” or “symbolism,” where Emerson’s untenable Swedenborgianism gives way to a more sophisticated symbolism (Feidelson Jr. 1953, 61−82 and Chai 1987, 62−71) that I explore in detail in Chapter 2. Laura Dassow Walls’s 2003 book, Emerson’s Life in Science, also has a section on metaphor, in which she argues that despite the density of his metaphorical language, ‘Emerson himself fought against the metaphoricity of language. What he sought was not linguistic play, but truth, the single reality beyond language’ (Walls 2003, 22). Metaphor, Walls maintains, points beyond itself, to something non-linguistic. Drawing on I.A. Richards’s distinction between the tenor and the vehicle of a metaphor, Walls contends that for Emerson, metaphors are ‘merely the vehicle’; the tenor, or ‘true knowledge,’ lies elsewhere (26). She argues that the limits of metaphor took Emerson to science so he could ‘get beyond the mere succession of apposite metaphors’ (25). Metaphor is something passed through on the way to ‘science.’ Shira Wolosky, in a 2009 essay on ‘Emerson’s Figural Religion,’ writes that ‘Emersonian religion is essentially figural’ (26), and her insights that poetry and religion become unified in their use of nature as an inexhaustible resource for tropes, and moreover, that ‘Emerson’s theory of figures is a theory of language’ (30), are consistent with my argument here, though I take Emerson’s tropes beyond poetry and religion, and I use CMT to offer a fully-worked-out interpretation of Emerson’s figural theory of language. David LaRocca’s Emerson’s English Traits and the Natural History of Metaphor (2013) picks up from where Walls leaves off, and forms an exception to this partial treatment of metaphor. For LaRocca, rather than passing through metaphor to science, science itself—as ‘natural history’—becomes the metaphor to understand Emerson (I shall consider natural history at length in Chapter 4). He writes: ‘natural history as the primary metaphor that underwrites most, if not all, of his work [ . . . ] is then not just an area of inquiry but the very condition for thinking’ (LaRocca 2013, 8). LaRocca’s deliberately paratactic and idiosyncratic work is fascinating. It offers glimpses into Emerson’s metaphorical practice but does not provide a usable methodology or make a case for wider applicability. Even so, LaRocca takes me closer to my own point of entry by recognizing metaphor as a ‘condition for thinking,’ and as such at the root of Emerson’s thought. His use of small capitals for ‘natural history’ is also important, implying that he uses the term as a ‘conceptual metaphor’ (LaRocca 2013, 161–2). LaRocca, though, only lightly touches on the key claim of Conceptual Metaphor Theory that I have been outlining here: metaphor is fundamental to thought (Lakoff, 208).3 These examples illustrate that the critical tradition has partially recognized the importance of metaphor, but only LaRocca has made it central to an

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extended study (albeit in an unconventional way). Here I take a more systematic and penetrating line, demonstrating that metaphor, understood conceptually, is not merely a tool for insight, as suggested by Bishop, an arbitrary point of style, as it as for Ellison, or a linguistic item that points somewhere else, as for Walls, but that, picking up from LaRocca, metaphor is the ‘condition’ of Emerson’s thought. However, I shall not, as LaRocca, make a claim for the exclusive interpretive validity of one metaphor: natural history. Rather, I shall examine a large range of Emerson’s metaphors in detail, arguing that metaphor does not illustrate Emerson’s thought; Emerson’s thought is metaphorical. Though my focus is on Emerson’s earlier writings, showing how his conceptual metaphors take shape across his first journals, lectures, and essays, I also make sure to demonstrate their persistence throughout his work. As such, Emerson’s Metaphors does not offer a survey of Emerson’s metaphors, in the vein of Caroline Spurgeon’s extraordinary Shakespeare’s Imagery (1935). Instead, this book is an attempt to understand and account for the metaphorical basis of Emerson’s ways of thinking. As the critical tradition shows, one reason for the limited interest in Emerson’s metaphors is that figurative language is usually seen as an aspect of rhetoric, usefully adding emotion or ornamentation to ‘literal’ language (Richards 1936, 89–91; Hawkes 1972, 6–33). Thus, critics will generally try to translate Emerson’s metaphors into something literal–what they ‘really’ mean—rather than seeing them as enacting cognitive work in their own right. However, the opening question of his 1844 essay, ‘Experience’—‘Where do we find ourselves?’ (CW3 27)—is not a rhetorical flourish, but, as we shall see, an existential question that belongs to ideas of the self that are essentially metaphorical. CMT tells us that when we try to think about ourselves, we typically think about being in a particular location—I am in a bad mood; she is in trouble—or in relation to a particular location (he’s beside himself; she’s on the way up). Such phrases are not, for CMT, unique individual expressions. They are linguistic expressions that relate to the same metaphorical conception of the self as something located, or states are locations as CMT puts it. We inevitably use these metaphors to think about who we are as where we are. Hence, we immediately know Emerson’s question ‘Where do we find ourselves?’ is not a literal question and cannot have a literal answer. But more importantly, it is also not a rhetorical question: it belongs to metaphorical thinking. For CMT, then, whether we are thinking about who we are as where we are, or where we are going, metaphor is central to our everyday ability to reason. Lakoff and Turner write, ‘Our knowledge of a domain allows us to draw inferences about that domain. When a domain serves as a source domain for a metaphoric mapping, inference patterns in the source domain are mapped onto the target domain’ (CR, 64). Using the underlying life is a

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Introduction

journey conceptual metaphor, then, a significant life problem is thought of as a ‘dead end,’ allowing no projection forward; another way forward will be sought. Deploying the states are locations metaphor, Emerson and Dante also consider ourselves to be in that position. For Dante and Emerson, this existential problem is not just figured as being lost on a path; for both writers, the path is a way of thinking—or reasoning—about the place where they find themselves, and, by implication, where they ought to be going. The metaphor gives the concept of life a direction and a goal that is not present in life’s mere literal concept. As a complex idea of life is developed, we quite unconsciously use the resources of metaphorical schemas. Lakoff and Turner develop the point: ‘Part of the power of such a metaphor [as life is a journey] in our life is its ability to create structure in or understanding of life. Life, after all, need not be viewed as a journey. [ . . . ] Thus, the power to reason about so abstract an idea as life comes very largely through metaphor’ (CR, 62). There are at least three claims here. First, as a pure experience, life is so complex that we need to create structure to understand it. Second, metaphor creates this structure, which gives us a way of reasoning about such complexity. Third, we could use different metaphors and, consequently, think differently. Indeed, if we think of life as a game of chance, or a race, or a cycle, or a trial (all quite conventional metaphors), we may reason our way to very different decisions about how to act. Nevertheless, we would still be using conceptual metaphors. Conceptual metaphor enables us to structure a huge range of common abstract concepts, most of which (perhaps all of which) would be impossible to think about otherwise. Try to think of time without using the source domains of space or money; try to think in a complex way about death without using departure or rest—it is very hard, and you will perhaps unavoidably find yourself reaching for some other apt metaphor. Conceptual metaphors are so common as to appear natural and inevitable. Indeed, Lakoff and Turner observe that our recourse to metaphor is almost always unconscious, and as such is both powerful and potentially insidious: For the same reason that schemas and metaphors give us power to conceptualize and reason, so they have power over us. Anything that we rely on constantly, unconsciously, and automatically is so much part of us that it cannot be easily resisted, in large measure because it is barely even noticed. To the extent that we use a conceptual schema or a conceptual metaphor, we accept its validity. Consequently, when someone else uses it, we are predisposed to accept its validity. For this reason, conventionalized schemas and metaphors have a persuasive power over us. (CR, 63; emphasis in original)

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Conceptual metaphors, then, are most powerful when least recognized. They shape our worldviews, and as we do not hear them as metaphors, they silently determine how we think about the world. Deeply ingrained in our culture, some of these metaphors can exist for hundreds, if not thousands of years. As such, they can appear completely natural, just as though that is the way the world is. To return to the ‘fossil poetry’ metaphor, we can see exactly what worries Emerson. When we are creating ‘living’ metaphors, we are all poets; when metaphors are fossils and are ‘dead,’ then we ossify, deprived of our creativity: all we can do is quote, and our thoughts are nothing more than an empty inheritance fixed by a language not of our making. Even so, as we shall see in the opening chapters, Emerson, like all of us, ‘finds’ himself amidst the fossils of the past: the invisible metaphors that organize thought for a culture; but through them, he aims to create a living language to express himself and rethink his world. I have divided the following book into two parts, each of three chapters, followed by a conclusion. The first part, ‘Emerson’s Theory of Metaphor,’ has three distinct but mutually informing strands: firstly, the development of Emerson’s practice of metaphorical thinking and its eventual theorization; secondly, Emerson’s intellectual context, with a particular focus on the prevailing and competing accounts of the philosophical and theological limits of figurative language in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; thirdly, the gradual introduction of the methodology of Conceptual Metaphor Theory, the application of which allows the other two strands to come into sharp focus and presents an original version of Emerson’s intellectual maturation as a process of literary thinking. The second section, ‘Emerson’s Practice of Metaphor,’ is a thematic reinterpretation of Emerson’s works, showing how the theory of metaphor arrived at in the first section shapes and reshape Emerson’s metaphorical practice as it develops across his long career. This section’s three chapters focus on concepts that iterate throughout Emerson’s writings, beginning with ‘Nature,’ the source of all Emerson’s metaphors; moving on to ‘Humankind,’ the principal target for all his metaphors; and finally engaging with ‘God,’ the concept that brings a metaphorical unity to all things. Chapter 1, ‘A Golden Link,’ begins in 1823 with a twenty-year-old Emerson trapped in a metaphor—The Great Chain of Being—used for centuries to locate all aspects of the universe relative to each other and to God. What CMT tells us is that the Great Chain metaphorically maps our experience of the known visible world, with inanimate matter at the bottom and humankind at the top, onto an unknown spiritual world, with humankind at the bottom and God at the top. Emerson, in line with the tradition, locates humankind in the middle of the Great Chain—‘a golden link.’ A conceptual metaphor, then, is telling Emerson how to think about the world and defining

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Introduction

his relationship to it, and, as the chapter explains, CMT’s methodology shows us just how our material experience constructs spiritual structure. Moreover, expanding on an important early intuition of Emerson, CMT also tells us that metaphorical structures make possible the whole inner life of the mind. Emerson’s intuition was ideal preparation for the Swedenborgian and NeoPlatonic ‘Doctrine of Correspondence,’ which also uses material nature to understand—and indeed, create—a spiritual world, arguing there are ‘correspondences’ between them. These correspondences, CMT shows us, are metaphoric structures. After a decade of working through The Great Chain and Correspondence, by the early 1830s Emerson comes to understand that thinking itself is essentially a metaphorical process, anticipating one of the major claims of CMT: metaphors do not just give structure to spiritual and mental life; they enable us to think. Chapter 2, ‘Apposite Metaphors,’ tells the story of Emerson’s increasing grasp of metaphorical thought from two distinct angles—empirical philosophy and Romantic literature. Back in his early twenties, Emerson recognized that philosophy works through metaphor, whether idealist Platonism or materialist Empiricism. Philosophy, though, refuses to credit metaphor with any value, instead investing in analogy. Emerson initially rejects both metaphor and analogy as ways of understanding what is beyond sense experience, but eventually, through his study of empiricism and the influence of Correspondence, he comes to recognize that metaphor and analogy are the same thing. Philosophy can only create its metaphysical interpretations of humankind and the world by using material metaphors, and as such, metaphor has a radical epistemological value. Emerson’s epistemic insight becomes central to his literary thought in the early 1830s, as he moves beyond the influence of Correspondence and is drawn to the British Romanticism of Coleridge and Carlyle. The theory of symbolism they present takes the matter/ spirit metaphors that enable philosophical thought and adds another dimension: the part is the whole. Not only are spiritual and intellectual aspects of the world constructed by material metaphors, but also each of these metaphors is one aspect of a vast divine whole. Understood through CMT, these two conceptual metaphors—‘the spiritual is the material’ and ‘the part is the whole’—combine to offer an innovative reinterpretation of the Romantic symbol. The influence on a well-prepared Emerson is immediate, and he uses symbolism in this CMT-defined sense to construct a compelling metaphoric cosmology where humankind and God are creatively symmetrical. Chapter 3, ‘Leaving Me My Eyes,’ takes my account of Emerson’s theory and practice of metaphor to its first published version in the 1836 essay, Nature. The focus is a crucial development of the ‘embodied’ material basis of spiritual and intellectual concepts. CMT tells us that our basic metaphors, those that most intimately structure our understanding of the world and

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the ways we think about it, derive from our bodily interactions with the world around us. Both Emerson and CMT find key evidence for the embodied origin of mental life in etymology. Many—and perhaps all—our words for the spiritual or mental life trace back to embodied metaphors (‘We say heart to express emotion; the head to denote thought’, CW1 18). Emerson presents his theory in his 1835 lectures on English Literature, where he asserts that the great writers of the past invented these metaphors, laments how these metaphors have become traps for the current age, and projects how thought may be released from them. Shakespeare is exemplary, providing the model for a liberational figurative poetics. A year later, in 1836, Emerson publishes Nature. In the language section of that essay, Emerson outlines a full theory of language that, understood in CMT terms, is really a theory of embodied metaphor and a prolegomenon to a rejuvenated language. Also, in Nature, Emerson presents his reader with an innovative but wholly embodied metaphor that is representative of Romantic symbolism—the ‘transparent eyeball.’ An extended reading of Emerson’s metaphor shows that even the most far-reaching literary metaphors of transcendence are rooted in embodied experience. Chapter 4, ‘Nature,’ begins the second part of the book, moving from Emerson’s theory of metaphor to his practice of metaphor. The chapter’s primary focus is Emerson’s use of natural history as a source domain of material metaphors to conceptualize humanity’s spiritual estate. I recognize that for nearly a century, critics have been aware of Emerson’s use of natural history as a source of analogy and metaphor for spiritual understanding. In this chapter, I expand on that critical tradition, using CMT to reexamine Emerson’s early lectures on natural history while recontextualizing the famous epiphany in the Jardin des Plantes that inspired them. I also revisit the metaphor of ‘design’ in a natural history context, showing how Emerson’s concept of a ‘divine artist’ shifts him from natural history toward an aesthetics of nature that becomes equally determinate for his metaphorical practice and his concept of the ‘naturalist.’ Finally, I consider the ‘meaning’ of nature for Emerson. Chapter 5, ‘Humankind,’ explores an essential dualism in the concept of the human. If the idea of the human comes from the metaphors we use, then Emerson is always defining the human by what it is not, which Emerson understands as the Fall. The chapter begins with an account of the ‘me’ and the ‘not me’ in Nature, focusing in on one aspect of the ‘not me,’ Emerson’s body, tracing this as a trope across his writings. I then look in more detail at the idea of the Fall, considering the standards and measures against which Emerson’s metaphors judge our decline. Also, picking up on the conclusions of Chapter 3, I consider the ways in which Emerson attempts to put metaphor to work in a counternarrative of ascension that relies on the possibilities of

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Introduction

metaphor itself. However, the dualism upon which his metaphors for the human rely is perhaps impossible to overcome, and the chapter shows how Emerson’s concept of humankind remains necessarily dualistic. Chapter 6, ‘God,’ is the final chapter. I begin with an exploration of the metaphorical underpinnings of Emerson’s supposed pantheism, contrasting it with the metaphorical structure of panentheism, determining the extent to which Emerson’s metaphors conceptualize a God within and a God without. I then turn to perhaps Emerson’s most well-known metaphor for God, the ‘Over-Soul,’ considering in detail how his metaphor works, and how in the essay of the same name, Emerson’s metaphors construct an idea of God through causation and obedience. I then look at the Emerson’s use of silence as a source domain, and how the limits of language and even the limits of metaphor that silence connotes, become themselves extraordinarily rich metaphors enabling a further conceptualization of the divine. In the final part of the chapter, I return to Emerson’s theory of symbolism as understood in CMT terms and as proposed in ‘The Poet.’ What I show is that throughout his intellectual life, Emerson’s view of the power of the poet to liberate through metaphor, understood as symbolism, was consistent. However, what we also see is that Emerson’s liberation is constructed by a small number of increasingly familiar metaphors that always pull Emerson back from the spirit, from God, to the body and its relationship to the world. NOTES 1. Emerson’s etymologies are doubtful. ‘Ravenous,’ for example, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, comes from the Anglo-Norman ‘raveine, ravein,’ meaning ‘impetuosity, force, violence,’ and the word ‘raven’ from the ‘Middle Dutch rāven,’ and is probably onomatopoeic, suggesting no connection between the two terms. Emerson’s origins for ‘howl’ and ‘rotation’ are equally dubious. If this correction deflates Emerson’s specific point, it does so while confirming the ‘fossil poetry’ figure. Even though Emerson’s etymologies are wrong, the words he selects have still left a recoverable ‘fossil’ record: ‘ravenous’ and ‘raven’ were once metaphors. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. ‘ravenous (adj.)’; s.v. ‘raven (n.),’ accessed August 1, 2018, http:​//​www​.oed​.com. 2. The foundational works in CMT include: Lakoff and Johnson 2003 (first published 1980); Johnson 1987; Lakoff 1987; Lakoff and Turner 1989; Gibbs Jr. 1994; Lakoff 1995; Lakoff and Johnson 2010. 3. Sean Ross Meehan focuses on metonymy: ‘Emerson’s rhetoric of metonymy names not just the beginning of intellect, it characterizes thought’s purpose, its means, and its continually moving destination: in other words, metonymy figures thinking’s dynamic, unfinished ends’ (Meehan 219, 27). For Meehan, Emerson’s metonymies

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harness contiguity to keep thought on the move, in contrast with metaphor, which is based on similarity and is therefore relatively static. In what follows I will argue that Emerson’s metaphors are the mobile force of his thinking.

PART 1

Emerson’s Theory of Metaphor

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Chapter One

‘A Golden Link’ Emerson’s Doctrine of Correspondence

Emerson’s metaphors ‘think’ by connecting disparate entities, seeing one thing in terms of another. We have seen Emerson use fossils to construct a history of language, and as we shall see at the end of this chapter, potatoes floating in a tub can explain the canon of Western literature. Fossil poetry is a small-scale metaphor: one object used to structure one concept. But, as the first part of it shows, Emerson’s metaphors combine in more and more complex ways as he deploys the objects of the material world to construct, challenge, and refine his worldview. Ultimately, Emerson’s metaphors make the real, functional, and adaptive cognitive connections that create his key concepts of the human, the natural, and the divine. In so doing, Emerson’s metaphors liberate language from its fossilized state, enabling his distinct contribution to American thought and literature. In the first chapter, I will begin to reveal how these acts of metaphorical creation work, commencing by discussing in detail a fundamental metaphor that has long connected humankind, nature, and the divine: The Great Chain of Being. This metaphor, profoundly influential in Western intellectual history, stands, as we shall see, at the foundation of Emerson’s thought. I then go on to interrogate how the Great Chain relates to what Emerson would have known as the Doctrine of Correspondence, another metaphorical structure that considers the tripartite cosmic relationship between humanity, nature, and God, and which underpins the Neo-Platonic and Swedenborgian worldviews that influenced Emerson as he came into his intellectual maturity. Throughout the chapter, I shall gradually introduce the methodology of conceptual metaphor theory, using it to shed new light on Emerson’s metaphors and those of his intellectual tradition. Finally, I shall use CMT to demonstrate how metaphor enables the development of Emerson’s thought as he restlessly moves beyond the Great Chain and the Doctrine of Correspondence to develop the 17

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Chapter One

new metaphorical connections that make possible his transformation of the concepts of the human, nature, God, and, along the way, language itself. THE GREAT CHAIN OF BEING As Emerson’s theory and practice of metaphor develops in the 1820s and ’30s, he is caught by one of Western thought’s most pervasive conceptual metaphors: the Great Chain of Being. The Great Chain looms large in a journal extract that Emerson wrote in 1823, on his twentieth birthday: ‘It is [ . . . ] the proud distinction of our human nature whereby man is privileged to stand in the lower world akin to the beings of the upper—in himself forming a golden link in the system of things to unite unlike orders’ (JMN2, 132). The Great Chain of Being structures Emerson’s thought in several ways: it provides a vertical hierarchy, with upper and lower sections; it gives him links, of which the human is one; and it offers connections, or kinships, between the different links. The Great Chain of Being provides Emerson with a systematic concept of the universe and his place in it. Just how the Great Chain works as a conceptual metaphor I will come to in a moment. First, we need to have a better idea of why the Great Chain was so influential. The Great Chain of Being, as Arthur Lovejoy reminds us, was foundational to the understanding of the natural and supernatural worlds from ‘the Middle Ages and down to the late eighteenth century [and] many philosophers, most men of science, and, indeed, most educated men, were to accept [it] without question’ (Lovejoy 1964, 59). The metaphor remained important in the nineteenth century even as science gradually took over as the dominant way of understanding the world (see CR, 166–213). Lovejoy’s classic definition runs as follows: the conception of the universe as a ‘Great Chain of Being,’ composed of an immense or [ . . . ] 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 [ . . . ] highest possible kind of creature, between which and the Absolute Being the disparity was assumed to be infinite—every one of them differing from that immediately above and that immediately below by the ‘least possible’ degree of difference. (Lovejoy 1964, 59)

Though conventional and, for centuries, invisible, the metaphor of the Great Chain of Being is highly complex. That said, its fundamental metaphorical structure is simple: a vertical chain source domain conceptualizes an abstract target domain comprised of all existent beings (including those believed to be

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existent). As everything in the universe, known and unknown, has a place in the chain, we cannot overstate its importance. Taking the time to see just how the Great Chain of Being works as a conceptual metaphor will not only provide an insight into its importance for Emerson as he tries to orient himself in the cosmos, it will also give us a much better sense of the methodology of CMT, demonstrating how our most complex ideas derive from our most basic experiences. The Great Chain metaphor, or the great chain, to use CMT typography, where small capitals indicate a conceptual metaphor as opposed to a linguistic expression of that metaphor, is a composite of several much more basic metaphors. Two of these are the link and the scale. We can begin with the link. In our everyday experience, things are linked in a variety of ways. Newborn babies are linked to their mothers, limbs are linked to bodies, buttons are linked to coats, and leaves are linked to the branches of trees, etc. The ‘link’ as a concept literally registers a physical or spatial contiguity. We also experience non-physical linking: children are linked to parents and siblings, to their toys, and eventually to their culture. Events in time are also linked together: ‘[e]vent A is linked to event B by a series of temporally interceding events’ (BM, 117). These three ways of linking—spatial, non-physical, and temporal—are part of the literal experience of the world. In the great chain, these literal links, so basic as hardly to be noticed, act as a source domain for a more complex target domain: the full richness and interconnectedness of the material and spiritual worlds. Each part of the world is represented by a single link, and each link is connected physically, non-physically, or, as we shall see, temporally, to every other link. Through this schematic mapping, something as abstract as ‘everything’ can become conceptually ordered. In a similar way, we have a fundamental experience of scales. When we add things to a pile, the pile gets higher, leading to a basic more is up schema (WFDT, 276). When we take things away from a pile, the pile gets lower, leading to a basic less is down schema. These literal experiences become the basis for the more abstract scalar metaphors that give us our sense that greater things are higher up a vertical scale, and that lesser things are lower down a vertical scale. The consequence is that a target domain of quality gets mapped onto a source domain of quantity: higher is better. Together scale and link construct a chain where things considered lower—because of a perceived lack of ‘human’ qualities, like complexity, intelligence, animation, liberty, articulacy, spirit, etc.—are mapped onto the lower links, and things considered higher—the more human or even super-human—are mapped onto the higher links. It is not that what we are trying to understand, namely the fullness of the world in all its difference, does not literally exist. Emerson’s metaphors do not create a world; they create an interpretation, or, better, a conceptualization,

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Chapter One

of the world. Such metaphorical conceptions are essential if the world is to become meaningful. As CMT tells us, what we can know ‘literally’ about the world is not adequate to provide a rich understanding. As Lakoff puts it: ‘Many, if not all, of our abstract concepts are defined in significant part by conceptual metaphor. Abstract concepts have two parts: (1) an inherent, literal, nonmetaphorical skeleton, which is simply not rich enough to serve as a full-fledged concept; and (2) a collection of stable, conventional metaphorical extensions that flesh out the conceptual skeleton in a variety of ways (often inconsistently with one another)’ (PF, 128). In the case of the great chain, there is the raw experience of nature in all its diversity—the inherent literal and non-metaphorical skeleton—our experience of which is not rich enough to provide its own concept. We can experience minerals, flora, and fauna, but they have no inherent hierarchy or self-evident relationship to each other. It is the basic metaphors, the link and the scale, that give the world a shape, order its manifold parts, and create a rich way of understanding what we are experiencing. The link metaphor connects individual aspects of nature physically, non-physically, or temporally. The scale metaphor provides a hierarchy in which beings higher up the chain possess more value than those lower down the chain. The two basic metaphors work together, locating, for example, fauna above flora and flora above mineral. Fundamentally, though, as a conceptual metaphor, the great chain does not just model or illustrate a natural order of things: it creates our concept of that order. As Lakoff writes, ‘The fundamental role of metaphor is to project the inference patterns from the source domain to the target domain. Much reasoning is therefore metaphorical’ (PF, 128). There is no inherent linear structure to nature’s complexity; nor is there any inherent hierarchy; nor are all natural things physically linked to each other in experience. Linear structure and hierarchical value are cross-mapped by the metaphor itself. We can now go back to Emerson’s ‘golden link,’ locating it within the great chain metaphor. Emerson is interested in humanity’s place in ‘the system of things’ as organized by the great chain. The human, Emerson argues using the chain’s vertical hierarchy, is at the midpoint of the chain, ‘unit[ing] unlike orders.’ This location and this role draw directly on the classic version of the chain. As Lovejoy argues, a further inference from the great chain is that ‘man’ is a single link who ‘occupies a particular place in the scale, a place that could not conceivably be left vacant’ (Lovejoy 1964, 65). One of the peculiarities of the great chain metaphor is that, as it is vertically linear, any point on it implies an absolute division between what is above and what is below, even though any actual difference is infinitesimally small. So, as the chain links ascend from the lowest beings, mere atoms of matter, to the highest beings, made entirely of spirit, there would need to be a single point of transition, which, as Emerson’s ‘golden link’ implies, is

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humankind. Indeed, as the medieval philosopher Thomas Aquinas understood the chain, that division happens in the human—in the ‘relation of mind and body.’ The human mind belongs to the ascending links, the human body to the descending links. Lovejoy glosses Aquinas’s point: ‘the material, the genus corporum, at its highest, namely in man, passes over into the mental. Man’s constitution is aequaliter complexionatum, has in equal degree the characters of both classes, since it attains to the lowest member of the class above bodies, namely, the human soul, which is at the bottom of the series of intellectual beings—and is said, therefore, to be the horizon and boundary line of things corporeal and incorporeal’ (Lovejoy 1964, 79). Humankind, then, precisely because of inferences drawn from the conceptual metaphor of the great chain, find themselves at the division between matter and spirit. That division defines their very being as both mental and material. What was a continuous gradation of infinitely small differences becomes, in Aquinas’s account, a binary structure, with the human fixed at the midpoint. We can see that this increasingly rich metaphorical model of the universe is the background against which Emerson’s ‘golden link’ trope sits if we look at a longer extract: It is [ . . . ] the proud distinction of our human nature whereby man is privileged to stand in the lower world akin to the beings of the upper—in himself forming a golden link in the system of things to unite unlike orders.—In the brute creation [all wait] on God; they have few & single powers which they cannot alter or restrain; they can do no violence to their sensual nature, for they have no other. But Man is made their lord and can accommodate his mind to any condition, his body to any clime. He can improve all his faculties and give up the reins to none. (JMN2, 132)

Emerson’s version of the great chain metaphor is binary and anthropocentric like Aquinas’s, with humankind in the middle. In Emerson’s version, man looks up toward God because he has a ‘mind’ and a ‘body’ that can adapt. Those creatures of the lower links are ‘brute’ and inflexible. As he says later in the same passage, the beaver ‘is never tempted to climb the precipice,’ the goat ‘never descends to dwell by the river side,’ the elephant does not migrate to ‘the polar cold,’ and the bee does not ‘gather corn like her neighbour the ant’ (132). All occupy only those links in the chain that befit them. Interestingly, though, Emerson ‘elaborates the chain metaphor.’ ‘Elaboration’ occurs, according to Lakoff and Turner, when slots available in a conventional metaphor are used in an unusual way (CR, 67–8). Here, and unlike in the classical version of the great chain, the material of the chain matters. The human is a ‘golden’ link. Emerson is using the unique value of gold to figure humankind’s uniquely valuable place in the great chain.

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Chapter One

Significantly, Emerson’s golden link elaboration does not divide the higher and lower orders: it unites them. Chains ‘link’ things together, so the basic link schema allows his conclusion, and a vital first step of Emerson’s theory of metaphor falls into place: the human is the link between spirit and matter. ASCENDING THE CHAIN In the early 1820s, Emerson uses the great chain metaphor, albeit unconsciously, to think through a complex metaphysical concept—the place of humankind in the universe. The great chain metaphor, though, because of its ubiquity and its hierarchical schema, also has direct social and political implications for Emerson. If we consider metaphor as a tool for thinking, then the young Emerson does not just use the great chain to think about the relationship between humanity and God, but also that between one human and another; more specifically and more problematically, between the different races of humankind. In November 1822, Emerson cites a phrase from the Declaration of Independence: ‘all men are born equal.’ However, Emerson immediately disputes the assumptions: ‘all men are born unequal in personal powers and in those essential circumstances, of time, parentage, country, fortune.’ Emerson’s question, as we shall see, asks whether all humans belong to the same ‘golden link,’ or whether they occupy different but contiguous links. He follows his assertion with a manifestly racist question about the differences between types of people that draws explicitly on the hierarchy of the great chain. As Emerson puts it, the ‘European, Moor, Tartar, African?’ are ‘plainly assigned different degrees of intellect [ . . . ] and the barriers between them are insurmountable’ (JMN2, 42–3). The question mark in the quotation after ‘African’ indicates that Emerson is unsure where Africans sit on the scale (‘degree’) of being. If they possess ‘reason,’ a spiritual quality that would align them with the upper half of the scale, then there is no excuse for slavery. If they do not possess reason, then they are subject to the dominion of those who do, as the divided hierarchy of the great chain dictates. Emerson is placing America’s founding statement against its continuing commitment to slavery and using the great chain’s scalar principle of gradation as a way of thinking through the problem. Emerson’s response to the ‘insurmountable barriers’ of race is to change tack without changing the underlying metaphor: ‘if we abandon this generalization and compare the classes of one with the classes of the other we shall find our boundary line growing narrower and narrower and the individuals of one species approaching individuals of the other, until the limits become finally lost in the mingling of the classes’ (JMN2, 44). Emerson is pursuing the logic of the great chain in its classical form. According to Lovejoy, the

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classical version of the great chain has three underlying principles: plenitude, continuity, and gradation (Lovejoy 1964, 50–59). Plenitude assumes fullness: a good and loving God would create all the beings that could possibly be; not to do so would be an impossible limitation on the divine. Continuity asserts that each kind of being differs from those next to it in the chain by the smallest possible amount. Again, a good God would be efficient and thus leave no gaps in created nature. Gradation provides a hierarchy from the most basic beings, which barely exist at all, up to the highest of creatures, who, in this medieval conception, would be spiritual beings (notice also how a concept of God is emerging from the metaphor). Continuity and gradation are clear entailments of the link and scale basic schemas respectively. Plenitude emerges because of the chain’s length: if it is infinite, then it must encompass everything. In Emerson’s metaphorical reasoning, the great chain’s principle of gradation locates every kind of thing in a unique place—each race has its own link. But the principle of continuity works against these barriers to reduce the differences between things to the infinitely small. Ultimately, Emerson’s metaphorical reasoning concludes that the great chain metaphor’s infinitely small subdivisions do not allow for the clear binarism needed to support slavery. Even so, this conclusion on its own does not defend the young Emerson from charges of racism. A few entries later, again drawing on the great chain, Emerson locates the elephant above and the monkey equal to the African (JMN2, 48). It is some small relief to his contemporary reader that Emerson ends his journal entry admitting that he is ventriloquizing ‘what is offered in behalf of slavery; we shall next attempt to knock down the hydra’ (JMN2, 49; Emerson’s italics). When he returns to the subject, he calls slavery ‘the worst institution on earth’; the reason for its existence is not metaphysical; it is nothing to do with gradations on a chain. The reason for slavery is commercial: ‘the bias of private interest’ (JMN2, 57; Emerson’s emphasis). Now Emerson condemns slavery as an affront to freedom and to any human aim to raise themselves in the sight of God: ‘A creature who holds a little lease of life upon the arbitrary tenure of God’s good pleasure improves his moment strangely by abusing God’s best works, his own peers’ (JMN2, 58). All humans, Emerson concludes, are God-created peers and comprise but one link in the chain. ‘No ingenious sophistry,’ even that constructed by his previous argument, can ‘ever reconcile the unperverted mind to the pardon of Slavery’ (JMN2, 57; Emerson’s emphasis). The great chain metaphor, in asserting equality between all races, offers no reasoned support to America’s peculiar institution, and the cognitive work of metaphor ultimately forces Emerson to conclude that the ‘golden link’ represents all humanity.1 Underlying Emerson’s reasoning process is another basic metaphor that belongs to the great chain: the part is the whole. It is worth spending

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Chapter One

time on the part is the whole, as it is not only central to CMT, but will also become one of the defining metaphors for Emerson’s intellectual development. The first thing to say is that the part is the whole is at the root of all basic and complex metaphors. Any source domain, if it is to operate conceptually, is comprised of what Mark Johnson calls a ‘gestalt’; that is, it consists of ‘parts standing in relations and organized into a unified whole’ (BM, 218). Basic schemas are the simplest of these ‘gestalt’ wholes, which may only have a small number of parts, such as link or scale. More complex schemas, such as the great chain, still have a unifying gestalt: a vertical line of uniform links organized linearly. What both have in common is that they are minimal structures—if you take away an aspect from the gestalt, say by removing a single link, you will change the structure of the metaphor itself, its continuity. The source domain uses this gestalt or whole to provide structure for the abstract target domain. The gestalt provides the minimal structure upon which we build our fundamental concepts (BM, 41). Moreover, the schematic whole provides what CMT calls a ‘cognitive topology’ on which the target domain will draw. For example, the scale schema has a topology, or set of unchanging relationships between its parts, that the conceptual metaphor preserves when used to make cognitive inferences. Things that are, metaphorically, larger in quantity will always be mapped onto the upper part of the scale, and things that are lower in quantity are always mapped on the lower part of the scale, no matter what scale is used—physical (a chain), numerical (0 to Ꝏ), or otherwise. Cognitive topology is why the Great Chain of Being can be figured as a ladder (a scala natura): for the purposes of the conceptual metaphor, it is topologically homologous—a continuous linear structure of identical connected units that can be organized hierarchically. It is the shape, or topology, of the relations between the different parts of a schema that allows for the inferences we draw when we use it as a source domain for a target domain. Schemas, then, as gestalts, are part-whole structures, and conceptual metaphor uses those structures as a crucial aspect of cross-mapping. The part-whole schema structures Emerson’s consideration of the place of the human within the great chain. On the one hand, within the chain itself, each link is part of a larger whole, and the human is part of the cosmos. On the other hand, each individual link represents a whole category of being, and all humans occupy the same location. Along with the principle of continuity, which locates all the races at the same point, by using the part-whole schema Emerson can infer that that everyone shares an essential identity and thus is equal. So far, then, Emerson’s take on humankind’s position in the universe aligns with the classical model that can be traced back at least as far as Aquinas. However, an important inference from the principles of plenitude, continuity, and gradation in the classic version of the Great Chain of Being is that

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creation is complete. There is no space for anything new under the sun; nor would a perfect God have left any possible aspect of creation unexpressed. Also, in God’s perfect creation, the Great Chain of Being fixes every link into position, and they cannot change their relationship to those links above or below. Indeed, the great chain’s value as a metaphor was that it enabled people to give a rigid structure to all they saw or believed to be around them. That structure was hierarchical, thoroughgoing, and static, and it located all individual things at a fixed distance from an Absolute Being, or God. Emerson’s chain, however, is not, as in the classic model, static. That all men may be represented by a single link does not mean for Emerson that the human is fixed in its position relative to the divine. Rather, as a ‘golden link,’ Emerson’s human can ‘improve all his faculties’—a difference that distinguishes humankind from the beasts. Emerson goes on, ‘God is the maximum of that very character we recommend to imperfect man’ (JMN2, 132). The implication is that humanity has the potential to improve, to become more perfect: that is, to ascend the chain. Emerson would have read of an ascendable great chain in Book 5 of Milton’s Paradise Lost (Milton 2007, 5:493–8). Here, the archangel Raphael, eating the food of Eden, tells Adam that matter can convert to spirit: ‘and time may come when men/With angels may participate, and find/No inconvenient Diet, nor too light Fare:/And from these corporeal nutriments perhaps/Your bodies may at last turn all to Spirit.’2 Emerson uses the same analogy as Milton’s Raphael just a week after he wrote the ‘golden link’ passage: ‘Mind, which is the end & aim of the Divine operations, feeds with unsated appetite upon moral and material nature, that is, upon the order of things which He has appointed. It is perpetually growing wiser & mightier by digesting this immortal food, and even in our feeble conceptions of the heavenly hosts we seek to fill up the painful chasm that divides God from his humble creatures upon earth by a magnificent series of godlike intellects’ (JMN2 136–7). This passage is a highly complex example of Emerson thinking through metaphor. Even so, the individual metaphors are conventionally conceptual. For example, ideas are food is very common—we often digest our thoughts or may even choke on new notions. Emerson’s mind ‘feeds with unsated appetite on moral and material nature.’ Food connects literally and metaphorically to growth and strength, and to becoming what we eat. If Emerson digests ‘immortal food,’ then he will take on its character, growing wiser and more spiritual. The emerging assumption, as Emerson uses these conventional metaphors to think, is that humans can, as Milton implies and Emerson hopes, become more Godlike. Emerson’s ‘feeble conceptions of the Heavenly host’ reflect another implication of the great chain: the gap between God and material creatures, such as humans. As the great chain metaphor does not allow for space (the

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principle of plenitude), then the great chain projects a further series of links onto this space. These links map ‘the Heavenly host,’ the ranks of spiritual creatures, ascending in goodness, power, and perfection. As Emerson’s point demonstrates, the existence of a spiritual realm and its denizens is an important consequence of the infinite chain. (Indeed, if metaphor is vital in the conceptualizing the material world, the significance of its role in creating a spiritual world, as we shall see later, is of a higher order altogether.) However, Emerson’s metaphorical thinking implies that not only angels fill that ‘painful chasm’ between matter and God. Humans, using the ideas are food metaphor, can also ‘grow wiser and mightier,’ which, in turn, enables them to fill that chasm by becoming ‘a magnificent series of godlike intellects.’ Humans ascend the chain by extending their reach, and they can do so, according to Emerson’s metaphor, by ‘feasting’ upon God’s work, upon the ‘order of things which he has appointed.’ That order of things is the Great Chain of Being itself. The great chain becomes the means for its own ascension. That is, as shall become clearer as this book progresses, we must understand our relationship to nature in new ways. Emerson’s conceptual development is enabled by one more basic schema that is not normally a part of the great chain composite: path-goal. The path-goal schema has a very basic gestalt, again drawn from everyday experience: a starting point A and a finishing point B, and any number of points on the way (life is a journey, which we saw in the introduction, is based on the path-goal schema). Because of its linear nature and its fixed end point, path-goal maps easily onto the great chain, with the links as stages between humankind at point A and the divine at point B. The inclusion of path-goal constructs a scalable chain. A metaphorical reconceptualization of the great chain enables humans to become more spiritual, more godlike. As Emerson put it above, ‘Mind’ is the ‘end & aim of divine operations.’ These revisions of the great chain are explained by two more insights of CMT: extension and composition. ‘Extension’ is the use of a slot in the source domain that is typically left unused in the metaphor. A vertical chain can be either pulled up or climbed up; the activation of this typically redundant slot affords ascension. ‘Composition’ is putting more than one metaphor together. The great chain is already an example of composition (scale, link, and part-whole); adding the path-goal metaphor challenges its static linear form and renews the metaphor. Along with elaboration, which, as we saw above, was the unusual use of a slot, extension and composition can challenge and transform even the most entrenched metaphors. In using the tools of metaphor to conceptualize an ascendable great chain, Emerson was a child of his time. As we have already seen, Milton figures an ascendable chain, and his view became more dominant during the eighteenth century, when the conceptual work of the great chain changed radically

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from earlier static accounts that reflected God’s perfection (Lovejoy 1964, 242–5). According to Lovejoy, this change took place for two reasons. First, eighteenth-century natural science had discovered more and more species, and thus it put more and more links in the chain. Initially these findings gave strength to the underlying conceptual metaphor, as ‘Every discovery of a new form could be regarded, not as the disclosure of an additional unrelated fact in nature, but as a step towards the completion of a systematic structure of which the general plan was known in advance’ (232). As such, the inclusion of further species confirmed the principles of continuity, plenitude, and gradation. Indeed, the process of discovery and taxonomy proved the overwhelming influence of a great chain metaphor that forced scientific discoveries to accord with its schematic topology (232–3). There was ‘nothing new under the sun’ (243). The later idea of the ‘missing link’ is a legacy of the great chain metaphor: a slot to fill. However, as the eighteenth century progressed, the picture grew more complicated, especially when the geological record was making it clear that the earth itself was not static, alongside evidence of many beings that were no longer living and that many had not always been there—most obviously humans themselves. As Emerson would put it in his 1833 lecture, ‘The Uses of Natural History’: ‘The science of Geology which treats of the structure of the earth has ascertained that before the period when God created man upon the earth very considerable changes had taken place in the planet’ (EL1, 15). A transforming planet challenged the idea of plenitude, that God had created all possible creatures in one stroke. The world, it now appeared, was a constantly changing process; the great chain had to adapt to remain a useful conceptual tool. And as a metaphor, rather than a thing in nature, the Great Chain of Being could adapt. In CMT terms, the great chain was extended by using a heretofore redundant slot in the link schema, where events A and B are ‘linked in time,’ and the path-goal dynamic of the Great Chain of Being is temporalized, with perfection its aim. The second reason for change in the metaphor of the great chain, Lovejoy argued, was that its static nature did not accord with eighteenth-century optimism. For the eighteenth-century philosophe, humanity was perfectible, and able to ascend the chain. As such, by the time Emerson makes use of the great chain metaphor, ‘The Scale of Being [has become] literally a ladder, with an infinite number of rungs up which individual souls forever climb’ (Lovejoy 1964, 247–8). Through a further metaphorical extension that brings out the ladder’s climbable structure, the idea of nature and its God has changed from a static whole, with each part eternally fixed in place, to a dynamic system, in which the parts can ‘literally’ change their places over time. Now that which is lower on the scale can become that which is higher, with a final aim of becoming divine. In the new conception, God’s perfection is no longer static, but creative. As Lovejoy puts it, citing Emerson, after the

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eighteenth century, God ‘manifests himself through change and becoming; nature’s incessant tendency was to the production of new kinds; and the destiny of the individual was to mount through all the spires of form, in a continual self-transcendence’ (296; my italics). Lovejoy’s quotation, which he uses twice, is from Emerson’s epigraphic poem to his 1836 work Nature: ‘A subtle chain of countless rings/The next unto the farthest brings[/]And striving to be man, the worm/Mounts through all the spires of form’ (CW1, 7; see Lovejoy 1964, 251). The clear implication here is that the lowest forms of nature, metonymically the worm, can ascend the ‘countless rings’ of the great chain ‘unto the farthest,’ becoming spiritual humanity. The unspoken corollary is that humankind is striving, link by link, to become Godlike. Back in 1823, Emerson continued to work through the conundrum set by the static great chain metaphor. If, as he then wrote, ‘Nature mixes the Angel & the brute in the moulding of Man’ (JMN2, 145), how do we ascend from one to the other? The human is but ‘the proud lord of the lower creation,’ and, as such, not exempt from ‘Nature’s laws’: laws that, as articulated by the great chain, separate him utterly from the divine. As the great chain tells us, and as Emerson has already lamented, there is a ‘chasm’ in the order of nature and thus ‘in man’s greatest relation, viz. his intercourse with the deity’ (146). The ‘godlike intellects’ whom he advocated earlier seem to remain hypothetical: ‘men of lofty genius turn with aversion from the idea of god.’ Humans are apathetic to, disinterested in, their own best interests, hence the existence of slavery. However, a few years later, when Emerson reflects on the same problem of ‘intercourse with the deity,’ he at last finds an appropriate scalar metaphor to enable humankind’s upward movement. It is, for the young Emerson, through ‘prayer’ that we ascend. He uses an analogy from Edmund Burke: ‘If I borrow the aid of an equal understanding I double my own; if of a higher I raise my own to the stature of that I contemplate’ (JMN3, 183). The vertical scale schema is from the great chain metaphor. In prayer, we converse ‘with one who is wholly pure and benevolent & whom we know we cannot deceive,” and, as such, ‘we must grow godlike’ (183). The material half of the chain, then, can ‘converse’ with the spiritual half and, by doing so, break down the static hierarchies of the Great Chain of Being. Playing on the conversation metaphor, we might say that matter and spirit ‘correspond’ with each other. CORRESPONDENCE Another entailment of the great chain is the division between what Emerson calls humankind’s ‘two natures’: ‘flesh and spirit’ (JMN1, 139; see Lovejoy 1964, 198–9). To ascend the scale, he must bring these two apparently very

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different aspects of the Great Chain of Being into correspondence. In the early 1830s, Emerson found just a such a ‘Doctrine of Correspondence’ in the renaissance Neo-Platonists Ralph Cudworth and John Norris, as well as the works of the late-eighteenth-century scientist and mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg. Forms of the doctrine were also to be found in the writings of the two British Romantics who were important to Emerson at this time: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas Carlyle.3 In considering the relationship between the great chain and the doctrine of correspondence, I am developing an insight of Leon Chai, who wrote, ‘One of [the Great Chain of Being’s] corollaries, the theory of correspondences between aspects of different classes or species of being, possesses for [Emerson] a particular importance. Seen in its proper context, it forms a part of his doctrine of symbolism’ (Chai 1987, 63). Though I shall discuss Emerson and symbolism in detail the next chapter, here I shall argue that correspondence, as Emerson deploys it, correlates much more closely to the idea of conceptual metaphor. On these terms, the doctrine of correspondence, in all its forms, is a way of understanding how the two parts of the great chain reflect each side of the human midpoint: how the lower material half of the chain ‘corresponds’ to the higher spiritual half, giving it meaningful structure. The Doctrine of Correspondence is fundamentally a process of metaphorical mapping that uses the source domain of matter to conceptualize the target domain of spirit. Over the years of Emerson’s writing life, a binarism between spirit and matter is a constant. The linguistic expressions for these terms vary: ‘spirit’ could be ‘mind,’ ‘thought,’ ‘intellect,’ ‘the invisible,’ ‘the moral,’ or ‘soul’; matter could be ‘nature,’ ‘natural facts,’ ‘material nature,’ ‘the visible,’ ‘the corporeal,’ or ‘commodity.’ The relationship between them, though, is consistent: the material exists to articulate, linguistically and conceptually, the spiritual. The development of this idea of correspondence can be traced through the first two decades of Emerson’s journals. At each stage, Emerson evokes a conceptual mapping from the source domain of nature or matter onto the target domain of spirit or mind, using a conceptual metaphor that is thematic across his lifetime and that, using the terminology of CMT, I will call the spiritual is the material. His earliest recorded recognition of a relationship between the material and the spiritual world occurs in his very first journal, ‘Wide World 1,’ in a passage from June 1820: ‘I love the picturesque glitter of a summer morning’s landscape; it kindles this burning admiration of nature & enthusiasm of mind. We feel at these times the eternal analogy which subsists between the external changes of nature & scenes of good & ill that chequer human life’ (JMN1, 19). The seventeen-year-old Emerson’s version of the pathetic fallacy records a connection between the world as a varied ‘picturesque [ . . . ] landscape’ and the human moral situations ‘good & ill.’ This connection is

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not accidental or merely poetic; it is an ‘eternal analogy’ between nature and mind. Nature does not just reflect a feeling; it gives that feeling shape and form: it conceptualizes it. In 1828, while in training to become a minister, Emerson puts his idea of an analogy between nature and moral feeling to work: ‘It is proposed as a question whether the business of the preacher is not simply to hunt out & exhibit the analogies between moral and material nature in such a manner as to have a bearing upon practice’ (JMN3, 130). For Emerson, the minister in training, the analogy between morality and nature is a way of communicating spiritual complexities, which he sees as the fundamental role of the preacher, and which will become the task of Emerson the lecturer and essayist. Just a few weeks later, in what looks like a draft of an unwritten sermon, he uses several aspects of material nature as moral analogies: a gale, a house, a mariner at sea (and more wind), a glass of wine, and, with reference to Hamlet, a ‘mere pipe’ (JMN3, 132–3). Each of these figures develops the quasi-sermonic thesis: ‘that men do not rule themselves but let circumstances rule them’ (JMN3, 132). From the outset of Emerson’s intellectual and literary career, there is a consistent binarism. On one side is his experience of material nature and its physical facts; on the other side are moral and spiritual facts. The purpose of the former is to express the latter. Emerson calls this process ‘analogy,’ which, as we shall see in the next chapter, is nothing more than a specific way of using conceptual metaphor. By 1832, Emerson’s sense that the purpose of the world is to express our inner lives meant he was well-prepared to concur with a general view of poetry, analogy, and metaphor that he found in an 1829 back issue of the Edinburgh Review. Here, Francis Jeffrey, in his evaluation of the poems of Felicia Hemans, writes of ‘that subtle and mysterious analogy which exists between the physical and the moral world—which makes outward things and qualities natural types and emblems of inward gifts and emotions’ (cited in JMN4, 11). Or, as Emerson records in his journal: ‘Jeffrey’s true theory—the effect produced by making every thing outward only a sign of something inward’ (JMN4, 11); which Emerson sees as a ‘true theory’ because it reflects and articulates his own long-standing thought. But, as Emerson was coming to realize, Jeffrey’s theory was only one example of a widespread ‘doctrine of correspondence’ between spirit and matter that he would find reinforced in his contemporary reading of Swedenborg and his disciples Guillaume Oegger and Sampson Reed, as well as the Neo-Platonism of Cudworth and the Romanticism of Coleridge and Carlyle. As Chai reminds us, ‘In the relation between matter and spirit (or mind) we encounter the determining element of Emerson’s doctrine of correspondences’ (Chai 1987, 64). Also important for my CMT interpretation of the doctrine is Gura’s observation of ‘the explicitly linguistic turn [that Emerson] gives to Swedenborg’s doctrine of correspondences’ (Gura 1981, 35–6). Indeed, as we are seeing, language, and

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in particular figurative language, conceptualizes for Emerson the relationship between matter and spirit, human and God. In the early 1830s, when he was experiencing the serious doubts about administering Communion that would eventually lead to his resignation from the Church, Emerson became increasingly interested in the works of the eighteenth-century mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg. He cites Swedenborg in the summer of 1832, at the height of his personal crisis: “Swedenborg ‘considered the visible world & the relation of its parts as the dial plate of the invisible one’” (JMN4, 33). This view, originally printed in the New Jerusalem Messenger, an organ for the emergent sect of the Swedenborgian ‘New Church,’ is one for which Emerson would have much sympathy. In the 1820s, Emerson had already felt the physical world was an index of the divine. According to the Swedenborgian doctrine of correspondence, there is a literal one-to-one correlation between all the beings in the spiritual world and all the beings in the material world. Correspondence is not arbitrary or accidental: it is because each being in the spiritual world is the cause of its material counterpart. As Swedenborg puts it: ‘The whole natural world corresponds to the spiritual world, and not merely the natural world in general, but also every particular of it; and as a consequence every thing in the natural world that springs from the spiritual world is called a correspondent’ (Cameron 1945, 1:231). It is worth spending some time unpacking this extract’s metaphorical underpinnings as they will prove important for Emerson. Swedenborg is thinking through the spirit/matter binarism that emerges from the inferences of great chain metaphor, inheriting a hierarchy that prioritizes the spiritual world over the material world, and an implicit point of division between the two worlds. However, as Swedenborg deploys the metaphor, though separate and different in kind, matter ‘corresponds’ to spirit. In Swedenborg’s account, correspondence exists because matter really comes from (‘springs from’) spirit. That is, for Swedenborg, spirit literally causes matter. Another basic metaphorical schema is at work here: causes are forces. Prototypically, as Lakoff puts it, ‘causation is the direct application of force resulting in motion or other physical change’ (PF, 177). However, we almost inevitably seem to experience this literal or skeletal element of the causes are forces in human terms. For example, if we want a drink, we move our hand toward a glass of water and bring it to our lips—an application of force resulting in motion or physical change. As a source domain, causal experience has a three-part structure: an original desire (we want a drink), a willed movement (we bring a glass of water to our lips), a satisfaction (our original desire is met). In the causes are forces schema, we can simplify these three slots to intent, will, and effect. As such, using the causes are forces metaphor to generate inferences will entail certain outcomes. A force, for example, will have an original intent, which is prior to the application of

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force, giving Swedenborg a slot for God; there will be the subsequent volition, which gives a slot for divine fiat; and it will have an effect, in this case divine creation. The basic causes are forces schema easily forms composites with other metaphors. We often understand the changes brought about by causes as ‘movements from location to location’ (PF, 176). If we remember the states are locations metaphor we looked at in the Introduction (I’m in trouble, he’s out of his mind; Emerson lost on the stairs), then we are now dealing with the change of state is change of location metaphor (you can move, metaphorically, from being in trouble, to being out of trouble). In Swedenborg’s writings, a change of location figure spirit’s change of state to matter, the movement from the spiritual ‘world’ to the material ‘world.’ Together causes are forces and change of stage is change of location conceptualize the movement across the boundary between worlds from spirit to matter that generates Swedenborg’s idea of ‘correspondence.’ Matter corresponds to spirit: literally, for Swedenborg, it ‘answers’ (co-responds) to it. As a Swedenborgian contemporary of Emerson’s put it, ‘The spiritual world is a world of causes, and the natural world is a world of effects’ (Cameron 1945, 1:232). The same composition of conceptual metaphors is at work in Swedenborg’s description of humankind: Since man is both a heaven and a world in smaller form after the image of the greatest, there is in him both a spiritual and a natural world. The interior things that belong to his mind, and that have relation to his understanding and will, constitute his spiritual world; while the exterior things that belong to his body, and that have relation to its senses and activities, constitute his natural world. Consequently, every thing has its existence from his spiritual world (that is, from his mind and its understanding and will) is called a correspondent. (Cameron 1945, 1:231)

As in the great chain metaphor, the human is in the middle, comprising spirit and matter. As in the causes are forces metaphor, humankind’s spirit causes its material form. In so doing, spirit transforms into matter, figured by a change of location, from inside to outside, which conceptualizes that change of state. For Swedenborg, mind and body have a correspondent causal relationship even while remaining separate, one inside and the other outside. The importance of inside and outside as a binary category difference leads us quickly to another basic and ubiquitous conceptual schema: the container. Container schemas are crucial as, according to CMT, they play a central role in the ability to categorize, which is one of the cornerstones of reason. Containers can play this role because of their shape. As Lakoff explains:

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A container schema has the following structure: an inside, a boundary, and an outside. This is a gestalt structure, in the sense that the parts make no sense without the whole. There is no inside without a boundary and an outside, no outside without a boundary and an inside, and no boundary without sides. The structure is topological in the sense that the boundary can be made larger, smaller, or distorted and still remain the boundary of a container schema. (PF, 32; see also BM, 22, 35, 39)

Containers, as source domains, have a prototypical shape, a ‘cognitive topology’ that provides a structure that allows us to reason about categorical differences using the ideas of inside and outside, and about categorical overlapping/change, the movement from outside to inside and vice versa. In this way, Swedenborg conceptualizes humanity’s spiritual inside and material outside as categorically different, but also inevitably related to each other. When Swedenborg adds the container to change of state is change of location and causes are forces, his metaphors conceptualize a movement from inside to outside that causes spirit to create matter. Swedenborg’s complex worldview stems from a composite of entirely conventional basic metaphors. Indeed, humankind, in Swedenborg’s account, has another figurative quality based on a basic metaphor—its direct correspondence to God that draws on the part is the whole. God is the whole, and his spirit causes the natural world in all its infinite particularity. Man is a part, and his spirit causes his natural world in all its finite particularity—his body, for example. Man is the limited correspondent of an unlimited God. Swedenborg uses this metaphorical structure to make sense of the cosmos, where all natural things are the caused correspondents of spiritual precursors. There is, for example, a spiritual sun and a natural sun. The sun of the spiritual world is the cause of the spiritual world; correspondingly, the sun of the natural world is the cause of the natural world. But importantly, the sun of the spiritual world is also the cause of the sun of the natural world. As Swedenborg sees it, the modern scientific approach to nature is wrong—and we must remember that for much of his life, Swedenborg was a successful and innovative chemist and engineer. An empirically driven Enlightenment, Swedenborg argues, in recognizing the causal power of the natural sun, neglects the ultimate causal power of the spiritual sun. Using another metaphor, Swedenborg calls the determinative relationship between the spiritual and the natural sun an ‘influx.’ We need, he contends, a very particular vision to see this influx: ‘No one can apprehend [the doctrine of] spiritual influx, unless he also knows the origin of it; for all influx proceeds from a sun, spiritual influx from its sun, and natural influx from its sun; the internal sight of man, which is that of his mind, receives influx from the spiritual sun, but his external sight, which is

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that of his body, receives influx from the natural sun; and both are conjoined in operation in like manner as the soul is conjoined with the body’ (Cameron 1945, 1:235). Here, then, as CMT’s methodology explains, the causes are forces metaphor combines with the container metaphor in the concept of an ‘influx’: spirit flows into matter, causing it. The container schema then maps a categorical difference between types of vision: inner and outer. Our inner vision is adequate to see, and thus understand, the spiritual influx that causes the natural sun. Our external vision only sees the physical causes of the natural sun. We can only see half of what is; and only the poorer half at that. Our ‘blindness, darkness and fatuity’ is itself a consequence of our ‘fall’ (235). Swedenborg’s works will provide Emerson with one of the conceptual metaphors that will enable him to reverse the Fall, itself an aspect of the vertical hierarchy of the great chain metaphor: understanding is seeing. Swedenborg tells Emerson that to reverse the Fall, he needs to see the world through the lens of correspondence, and thus understand it in a different way. Swedenborg’s key metaphor of vision finds reinforcement in Emerson’s reading of another non-conformist Christian, George Fox, the founder of the Quakers. Emerson cites the following from Fox in the same journal entry as the ‘dial-plate’ metaphor: ‘“The visible,” he said, “covereth the invisible sight in you” (JMN4 31). The conventional conceptual metaphor understanding is seeing underlies the ways in which these two mystic writers use visibility and invisibility. Understanding is seeing appears in such everyday linguistic expressions as I see what you mean; that’s clear; I’m in the dark; now I see; she’s seen the light; and so on. Understanding is seeing also appears in more technical linguistic expressions—‘theory’, for example, stems from the ancient Greek theoria, contemplation or vision. Understanding is seeing is a binary schema—either you see or you do not. Knowledge and ignorance map onto those slots. The cognitive topology of the metaphor also accounts for impediments to vision: anything that obscures light is a source of ignorance. Anything that enables or transmits light is a source of knowledge. For Fox, then, the visible world is an impediment to our spiritual vision—it ‘blocks the invisible sight in you.’ Fox’s metaphor takes Emerson away from the world, into personal vision. However, Swedenborg’s metaphors of correspondent vision take Emerson out into the world, into the ‘relation of its parts,’ to find the divine. Swedenborg’s material world becomes a gestalt whole that can map the whole of spirit. Though Emerson has a strong sense of the value of Fox’s Quaker ‘inner vision’ (see, for example, JMN4, 50), when it comes to the relationship between matter and spirit, his sympathies are with Swedenborg. To mark the importance of Swedenborg’s metaphorical conception on Emerson’s development, it is worth comparing the idea of the divine derived

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from the Doctrine of Correspondence to Emerson’s conceptualization of God in June 1822, ten years before the influence of Swedenborg. Then Emerson’s ‘system’ of the ‘Universe’ was binary, split between ‘Perfection and Imperfection,’ with ‘Their boundary line as distinct, as is the separation of Vice and Virtue’ (JMN1, 144). As the boundary line indicated, Emerson was using the basic container schema to form his categories, and it was ‘Imperfection’ that contained humankind’s ‘bounded faculties’ (JMN1, 144). As such, the material world offered no insight into the divine—it was utterly separate. The ‘faculties’ of the human ‘which were adequate to the examination of a worm must sink prostate in the presence of God’ (JMN1, 144). Despite this limitation, Emerson does attempt to rally himself, probing the idea that reason can discern at least some aspect of the divine. Abstracting from the great chain, he uses the image of an ascending line to figure the distance between men and God. We have a capacity to ‘comprehend a portion of the line’ (JMN1, 145), but despite our efforts, the line extends ‘above and beyond the straining orbs of imagination’ (JMN1, 145). The bottom of the line is in ‘darkness,’ and we ‘strain’ our ‘orb’-like eyes toward a glimpse of the ‘light’ hoping for something that will break through our ‘cumbering flesh-bond’ and allow access to the ‘spiritual estate’ of the Archangels (JMN1, 145). Ultimately, though, Emerson recognizes that all he has are inadequate metaphors—which, as we can see, are a mixture of the container (‘bounded faculties,’ ‘flesh-bond’), the great chain (‘the line’), understanding is seeing (‘strained orbs’), and states are locations (‘spiritual estate’). As he writes, ‘The subject upon which I have adventured, is apt to lead away and bewilder the imagination until it mistakes strained metaphors and refined mysticisms for strong conceptions of its object’ (JMN1, 146). At this stage, Emerson lacks the key metaphorical insight that will allow him to connect spirit and matter and ascend the chain. Though we have seen the spiritual is the material metaphor at work in Emerson’s thought from the beginning, it takes several years before he trusts his metaphors to provide theological truths. Ten years later, in 1832, immediately after Emerson cites Swedenborg’s ‘dial plate,’ he presents his idea of God in Swedenborgian terms as ‘One who is the life of things & from whose creative will our life & the life of all creatures grows every moment, wave after wave, like the successive beams that every moment issue from the sun’ (JMN4, 33). Emerson’s metaphorical presentation of God now derives from the same basic causes are forces metaphor that Swedenborg deployed, using the same three-part schema: intent, willed action, effect. Just as the sun’s heat/light warms the earth allowing for growth, so God’s invisible spiritual creativity causes existence. For Emerson in the early 1830s, as for Swedenborg, the sun is a natural correspondent of a spiritual God, a new conceptualization of the divine that fully emerges through

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Emerson’s reading of Swedenborg and the Neo-Platonists. Indeed, Emerson would have understood Swedenborgianism as a form of Neo-Platonism, as at the same time he was fascinated by seventeenth-century Neo-Platonists, and Ralph Cudworth in particular. His principal source for Neo-Platonism was the 1820 multivolume reprint of Cudworth’s True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678). Cudworth’s True Intellectual System was a theodicy that drew on a huge range of classical texts, to support a nondeterministic view of Christianity, thus setting Cudworth against the prevailing Calvinism of the mid-seventeenth century. In Emerson’s day, Neo-Platonism, with its focus on the spiritual correspondences of the material world, was something he could, like Swedenborgianism, set against the emergent empiricist hegemony of the early nineteenth century. Indeed, Neo-Platonist correspondence, when understood through CMT, is almost homologous with Swedenborgian doctrine, though more focused on inferences drawn from the great chain and causes are forces metaphors. The Neo-Platonic Great Chain of Being, as Cudworth presented it, had four levels. At the top of the scale was a unified and perfect Being; the second level comprised mind; the third level soul; the fourth level was mere matter. Thus, the great chain mapped the graded distinctions between God and matter. It has a causal structure because each level below the highest is an emanation of the divine, descending from mind to matter and from unity to manifoldness (Cameron 1945, 1:48). Emanation is a causes are forces metaphor and carries the same inferences as Swedenborg’s ‘influx’: an origin, a change of state as a change of place, and an ultimate effect. The consequence of emanation is (as we saw with the great chain) increased distance from God, and each lower level is less autonomous and less creative from the one above until, at the bottom, lies inert nature. As with Swedenborg, humans sit in the middle of the chain, relating to the whole structure as a microcosm to a macrocosm, corresponding to the four-part structure in miniature. The human, thus, has four parts. Three of these are spiritual: the upper part, which can attain true knowledge through intuition; the middle part, which reasons; and the lower part of the mind, which merely feels. The human body, which is mortal, belongs to the fourth level of matter. The three upper levels provide man with his full range of possibilities, from the contemplative life of the mind to the appetitive life of the senses. The cosmos also corresponds to the same underlying divine scale. As such, and again cognate with Swedenborgianism, nature is readable: ‘the whole visible and material universe, printed all over with the passive characters and impression of divine wisdom and goodness, but legible only to an intellectual eye’ (Cameron 1945, 1:68). Here the understanding is seeing metaphor almost completes the conceptual homology with Swedenborg. What the ‘intellectual eye’ can see is the mark of the Creator in creation, the harmonic unity amidst the variety of material

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nature. For Swedenborg and the Neo-Platonists, what humankind can see, if they look in the right way, is the internal correspondence of nature, that all its parts make a whole, and that this, in turn, corresponds to a higher unity. Their insight is, of course, predicated on a familiar conceptual metaphor: the part is the whole. However, having absorbed Swedenborg and Neo-Platonism into his metaphorical arsenal, Emerson uses their concepts—and their metaphors—to construct his own conceptual forms. In November 1833, shortly after his return from a nine-month trip to Europe, and after having left the ministry preparatory to take up a career as a lecturer, Emerson reflects on the legibility of nature: ‘Bacon said man is the minister & interpreter of nature: he is so in more respects that one. He is not only to explain the sense of each passage but the scope & argument of the whole book’ (JMN4, 95). At this moment, Emerson is moving, in Bacon’s terms, from minister to interpreter of nature. But what he reads in the ‘book of nature’ metaphor is not the same text as the Doctrine of Correspondence typically discloses. One of the entailments of the book of nature metaphor is, of course, that ‘nature’ has an author. Usually, as with the causes are forces metaphor, that originating slot figures God—‘divine wisdom and goodness,’ as Cudworth put it. Emerson, though, has a very different author in mind. His journal passage continues: There is more beauty in the morning cloud than the prism can render account of. There is something in it that resembles the aspects of mortal life[,] its epochs & its fate. There is not a passion in the human soul[,] perhaps not a shade of thought but has its emblem in nature. And this does not become fainter this undersong, this concurrent text, with more intimate knowledge of nature’s laws[,] but the analogy is felt to be deeper & more universal for every law that is revealed it almost seems as if an unknown wisdom intelligence in us was satisfied with expressed its recognition of each new disclosure. (JMN4, 95; editors interpolations)

What Emerson sees in nature’s beauty, then, is not the empirical facts of Newton’s ‘prism,’ and it is not God, for it ‘resembles the aspects of mortal life,’ rather nature is emblematic of the ‘human soul,’ its ‘passion,’ its ‘epochs & its fate.’ However much his idea of God has been reconceptualized, Emerson’s valuation of nature as an emblem for the soul has not changed in the decade since he first wrote of the connections between mind and nature in 1822, but now his book of nature is written in human characters. Even as the laws of nature are revealed, ‘this concurrent text’ discloses that that knowledge is ‘in us.’ Indeed, Emerson revises divine ‘wisdom’ to human ‘intelligence,’ an intelligence that recognizes ‘each new disclosure’ as its own.

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Nature’s whole, then, corresponds to our part; it is, in Neo-Platonic terms, a macrocosm to our microcosm. Two days after composing his journal entry, Emerson gave his first public lecture on November 4, 1833. Ostensibly on ‘The Uses of Natural History,’ the lecture directly quotes from the above passage, but frames it in terms of the doctrine of correspondence while anticipating the conclusions of CMT, asking his audience ‘whether, the most mysterious and wonderful fact [ . . . ] be not, the power of expression which belongs to external nature; or, that correspondence of the outward world to the inward world of thoughts and emotions, by which it is suited to represent what we think’ (EL1, 24; Emerson’s emphasis). External nature, through correspondence, provides the ‘inward world,’ but, moreover, it represents ‘what we think.’ As evidence of correspondent, or rather metaphorical, thinking, he then rehearses the ‘morning cloud’ passage, and building on it, draws on the great chain metaphor, bringing mind and matter into a unity in humankind. As he continues: ‘Is there not a secret sympathy which connects man to all animate and to all the inanimate beings around him? Where is it these fair creatures (in whom an order and a series is so distinctly discernible,) find their link, their cement, their keystone, but in the Mind of Man? It is he who marries the visible and the Invisible by uniting thought to Animal Organization’ (EL1, 24). This passage, in line with the great chain metaphor, is about connections. Again, the human is the ‘link’; but now the human does not just link spirit and matter, but all things, ‘animate’ and ‘inanimate.’ There is, Emerson suggests, a distinct order ‘discernible’ in nature, but humanity does not discover that order: they create it. The order they think they find there is really a Neo-Platonic emanation of their own thought. Putting Emerson’s metaphors together, humankind, not God, is the Author of the book of nature. Emerson’s anthropocentric elaboration of Neo-Platonism fundamentally reshapes his view of the cosmos. Two further metaphors Emerson deploys here help to conceptualize human authorship. Nature is disparate and diverse, but humanity is the ‘cement’ or ‘keystone.’ His architectural metaphors are linguistic expressions of the conventional ideas are buildings metaphor (the foundations of her system, his ideas are shaky, the theory collapsed). Cement suggests the connection of diverse parts into something larger; the keystone a connection between two sides; there is both multiplicity and duality, part and whole. Humans are related to all things, but they are still a midpoint. The keystone metaphor takes Emerson back to the marriage of visible and invisible (understanding is seeing); what is invisible here, however, is not something divine, but rather thought itself. As such, while the influence of Swedenborg and Cudworth on Emerson was profound, reinforcing his basic metaphors, the spiritual is the material, the part is the whole, understanding is seeing, causes

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are forces, container, change of state is change of location, and nature is a book, the examination of his use of these metaphors shows how he transcends them. From their metaphors, Emerson derives his key ideas of creativity and vision, of the correspondence between spirit and matter, of intuitive insight. But he rejects Swedenborg’s idea of humankind as a finite correspondent or Cudworth’s limitation of the human to the microcosm. For Emerson, the ascension of humanity always entails a closer and closer relationship between the human and God than Neo-Platonism or the New Church would entertain (something I’ll examine at length in Chapters 5 and 6). As Emerson’s thought develops, we shall see both humankind and God are essentially creative, and that the connection between thought and metaphor is the key to understanding this shared power. ‘BETWEEN THOUGHT AND MATTER’ In his 1833 lecture, Emerson refers explicitly to the relationship between thought and matter, beginning where he left off in 1822 and ending up where he arrives after moving beyond Swedenborg and the Neo-Platonists. It is worth quoting from the lecture at some length as it shows the first fruit of Emerson’s theory of metaphor: The strongest distinction of which we have an idea is that between thought and matter. The very existence of thought and speech supposes and is a new nature totally distinct from the material world; yet we find it impossible to speak of it and its laws in any other language than that borrowed from our experience in the material world. We not only speak in continual metaphors of the morn, the noon and the evening of life, of dark and bright thoughts, of sweet and bitter moments, of the healthy mind and the fading memory; but all our most literal and direct modes of speech—as right and wrong, form and substance, honest and dishonest, etc., are, when hunted up to their original signification, found to be metaphors also. And this is because the whole of Nature is a metaphor or image of the human Mind. (EL1, 24)

As in 1822, Emerson begins with absolute division. Then it was spirit and matter; now it is thought and matter. By 1833, though, because of his passage through correspondence, thought and spirit are synonymous. As the passage goes on, Emerson tells his audience that thought is connate with speech. They are both ‘totally distinct’ from matter. Then we get the metaphorical turn: we cannot speak of thought (or spirit) without using language ‘borrowed from our experience of the material world.’ Here, in CMT terms, is Emerson’s first explicit use of the hitherto implicit the spiritual is the material conceptual metaphor. He then gives us a series of conventional metaphors: life is a day

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(‘morn, noon and evening of life’), ideas are food (‘sweet and bitter’), the mind is a body (healthy and failing memory), etc. He even goes further, and anticipating his fossil poetry metaphor, he reminds his listener that everyday words, even those considered ‘most literal and direct,’ have metaphorical origins. Emerson is utterly sanguine about the paradox that mind is separate from matter, but also dependent upon it for its expression and its function, at least in part because his conclusions allow him to relegate matter altogether. As he draws his lecture to an end, matter, or ‘Nature,’ is just a ‘metaphor or image of the human Mind.’ Nature, as Swedenborg and the Neo-Platonists have told him, is an influx or emanation of the divine spark; as such, nature is spiritual. Indeed, shortly after, Emerson again quotes Swedenborg’s ‘dial plate’ metaphor as an authority (EL1, 24–5). However, for Emerson the divine creative spark is within the human mind, and thus the mind creates (is the cause of) the matter it uses to express itself. As Emerson’s early anxieties about ‘strained metaphors’ give way, and Swedenborg’s literal correspondences between matter and spirit become blended at the single point of the great chain where humankind sits, the world turns to metaphor. Recalling Emerson’s earlier recourse to prayer, one of the entailments of correspondence is to collapse the distance between matter and spirit, humanity and the divine, entailed by the great chain. Humankind, as a ‘golden link,’ becomes a kind of singularity where creativity, divine and human, exist at the same location. By 1833, then, Emerson had moved beyond Swedenborg and the Neo-Platonists, turning their ideas of literal correspondence into a metaphorical connection between spirit and matter, where the latter was a source domain for the former precisely because it was, itself, spiritual. What excited Emerson about Swedenborg and Neo-Platonism was not their mystic conclusions; upon leaving the Church, Emerson was not looking for a new doctrine. What excited Emerson was what happened when he conceptualized their hieratic systems into a metaphorical cycle of spirit and matter. To see how this transformation develops, it is helpful to compare the ideas of the orthodox New England Swedenborgian Samson Reed to a crucial shift in emphasis in the work of another contemporary French Swedenborgian, Guillaume Oegger, whose work Emerson read in early 1835. Emerson first heard Reed when he delivered the 1821 Harvard commencement oration. Reed was a promising Divinity student, but after his conversion to Swedenborg, the ministry was out of the question, and he became an apothecary in Boston. Later Emerson was much taken with Reed’s 1826 Observations on the Growth of the Mind, calling it ‘a book of such character as I am conscious betrays some pretension even to praise it,’ and a ‘revelation’ (JMN3, 45). However, it is a few lines from Reed’s short 1829 essay, ‘On Animals,’ that would influence Emerson’s emerging conception of the relationship between

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mind and world: ‘All things material are produced from things spiritual; and when this is seen and acknowledged, the mind is borne outward into the external universe, by the very power which constantly creates this universe’ (Cameron 1945, 2:35). In what is clearly a paraphrase of Swedenborg, Reed reiterates three familiar conceptual metaphors: understanding is seeing, the container, and causes are forces. Reed’s metaphor, though, has an added dynamic: God is the cause of the mind’s engagement with the universe. There is also an implied circularity in the correspondence between spirit and matter that, as we have seen, will become important to Emerson. Spirit causes matter, but matter through metaphor reveals spirit; that is, matter reveals the Creator. In going out from ourselves, we find in creation itself the Source of that creation; its material objects are effects that reveal their correspondent cause; which is the equivalent of the earlier dial plate metaphor. Objects, though, as we have already seen, serve another function. As figures, as metaphors and symbols, material objects give us a language for the spiritual world. It is the poets, for Reed, who enable the journey back into the self and then onto its divine origin: ‘Poetry may be defined as all those illustrations of truth by natural imagery which spring from the fact that this world is a mirror of Him who made it’ (21). If nature is a mirror of God, then the language we use to describe nature is a divine lexicon; its use returns to its Maker. A French priest, Guillaume Oegger, who was born in the decade before Emerson, developed Swedenborg’s idea of a causal and creative God in a direction even more useful to Emerson. Oegger published his Vrai Messie et La Lange de la Nature in 1829. In the early 1830s, Emerson’s friend, Elizabeth Peabody, translated parts of Vrai Messie and circulated her manuscript (eventually publishing it in 1842). In an almost unprecedented gesture, Emerson devoted seven pages of an 1835 journal to lengthy passages from Peabody’s translation of Oegger. His series of quotations begins with the following passage, the ideas of which should now be largely familiar: People suppose that when God produced our visible world the choice that he made of forms & colours for animals, plants, & minerals was entirely arbitrary on his part. This is false. Man may sometimes act from whim; God never can. The visible creation then cannot must not (if we may use such expressions) be anything but the exterior circumference of the invisible & metaphysical world, & material objects are necessarily kinds of scoriae of the substantial thoughts of the Creator; scoriae which must always preserve an exact relation to their first origin; in other words visible nature must have a spiritual and moral side. (JMN5, 66)

Here we have a further iteration of the doctrine of correspondences, based on the container metaphor, blended with the causal metaphor of Neo-Platonic

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emanation theory. Oegger’s metaphorical addition is the idea that material nature is ‘scoriae,’ the waste product from the smelting industry. The word itself derives from the ancient Greek skōr, meaning ‘dung.’ Oegger’s metaphor would suggest that the natural world is a kind of emanated excrement. The ‘scoriae’ metaphorical elaboration fits an established entailment of the great chain. As Lovejoy reminds us, humankind lies at the lowest point of spirit, as far away from God as anything that thinks can be: ‘at the bottom of the creation, to which its dregs and baser elements sank’ (Lovejoy 1964, 101–2). But this dunglike emanation, as a paradoxical ‘substantial thought,’ holds within it ‘an exact relation’ to its divine origin. As Oegger puts it in another passage quoted by Emerson, ‘No fibre in the animal, no blade of grass in the vegetable, no form of crystallization in the inanimate matter, is without its clear & well-determined correspondence in the moral and metaphysical world’ (JMN5, 66). As such, and as we have seen, nature not only reveals its Creator, but it is also determined by its Creator—a willed effect of His intent. Unlike Swedenborg or Cudworth, Oegger’s Vrai Messie is deterministic. Man’s only freedom is an ‘infinitely little degree of consent to receive’ (JMN5, 66–7); namely, our only choice is whether or not we understand divine necessity. Oegger, in Emerson’s lengthy citations, once again locates humankind at the midpoint of creation: ‘It was at the intermediate point between the infinite which is all & the finite which is nothing that God & man met. And this point is life, life manifested, life revealed by emblems’ (JMN5, 67). Here finite and infinite act as analogies for matter and spirit, the limited and the unlimited. The human connects the finite and the infinite, partaking of both, but being different from either in their pure state. Also, for Oegger, life is emblematic; that is, life communicates the divine, and Emerson copies the following passage into his journal: ‘Do but take a dictionary of morals & examine the terms in it: you will see that all of them from first to the last are derived from corporal & animal life. &c. & but for those emblems furnished by nature herself, the moral & metaphysical world would have remained entirely buried in the eternal abyss’ (JMN5, 67; Emerson’s punctuation). This confirms Emerson’s earlier insight that any access to the moral and metaphysical world of spirit is through the language of nature; not nature’s mere physical presence, but the metaphorical possibilities it allows. Without the sensible world, Oegger concludes, and Emerson agrees, we would have no access to the intellectual world, because the intellectual world derives from emblems. Just a few days before Emerson had quoted Oegger at length, but after he had read him, he wrote a passage recalling his first lecture, ‘On the Uses of Natural History,’ given eighteen months earlier: ‘All the memorable words of the world are [ . . . ] figurative expressions. Light & heat have passed into all speech for knowledge & love. The river is nothing but as it typifies the flux of

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time’ (JMN5, 64). Here Emerson reinforces the idea that metaphors create our intellectual and emotional ideas. A few days later, he echoes Oegger when he writes, ‘the world exists [ . . . ] for a language or medium whereby God may speak to man’ (76), highlighting the communicative value of nature. Then, on the following day, August 1, 1835, after a conversation with his brother Charles, Emerson records the essential idea that will shape his own original theory of metaphor: Charles wonders that I don’t become sick at the stomach over my poor journal yet is obdurate habit callous even to contempt. I must scribble on if it were only to say in confirmation of Oegger’s doctrine that I believe I never take a step in thought when engaged in conversation without some material symbol of my proposition figuring itself incipiently at the same time. My sentence often ends in babble from a vain effort to represent that picture in words. (JMN5, 77)

Material nature does not just give us access to God or to moral notions. In Emerson’s secular version of the doctrine of correspondence material, nature, as metaphor, enables thought itself: his spontaneous thought is associated with a ‘material symbol.’ This material symbol is not a rhetorical ornament— some image conjured up to illustrate the thought—but, as a metaphor, it is part of the thought process itself. Emerson notes that his act of thinking takes place during conversation, and as such reinforces the metaphor’s spontaneity. The material symbol arises ‘incipiently’ with the thought and even causes some problems for the thought’s expression, as if the metaphor is closer to the thought than language can express. What we have here is, perhaps, an inkling of a key idea in CMT: ‘A metaphor is not merely a linguistic expression (a form of words) used for artistic or rhetorical purposes; instead, it is a process of human understanding by which we achieve meaningful experience that we can make sense of’ (BM, 15). As we have frequently observed, metaphor is not a linguistic expression as such; it is a process of conceptual mapping. The linguistic expression is merely a consequence of metaphorical thought. Emerson is not fully aware of the distinction, of course, but he is conscious that metaphorical expressions and ideas are working together, and that his language is not yet fully able to express and explain what is going on. Emerson continues to explore the place of metaphor in his thinking as the journal entry continues. Though the initial tenor of the entry is secular, Emerson’s first example of a ‘material symbol’ is religious—as if the pull of Swedenborg and Oegger is still in place: ‘How much has a figure, an illustration availed every sect. As when the reabsorption of the soul into God was figured by a phial of water broken in the sea’ (JMN5, 77). Here a simple part-whole image-schema figures a complex spiritual concept: the unity of humankind and God. However, Emerson’s next example is wholly secular:

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This morn. I would have said that a man sees in the gross of the acts of his life the domination of his instincts or genius over all other causes. His wilfulness may determine the character of moments but his Will determines that of years. While I thus talked I saw some crude symbols of the thought with the mind’s eye, as it were, a mass of grass or weeds in a stream of which the spears or blades shot out from the mass in every direction but were immediately curved round to float all in one direction. (JMN5, 77–8; Emerson’s italics)

Here Emerson figures ‘wilfulness’ of character (the target domain) by a mass of disorganized grass or weeds in a stream (the source domain); the ‘Will’ is the flow of the stream that pulls the weeds in a single direction. In the written account, of course, the thought comes before the image; but, as the ‘while’ suggests, what Emerson ‘saw’ coincided with his thinking. Material nature provides a figure for the mind. Emerson’s third example reinforces his account: When presently the conversation turned to the subject of Thomas a Kempis’s popularity & how Plato & Aristotle come safely down as if God had brought them in his hand [ . . . ] & of the Natural Academy by which the exact value of every book is determined maugre all hindrance or furtherance, then I saw as I spoke the old pail in the Summer street kitchen with potatoes swimming in it[,] some at the top and some at the bottom; & I spoiled my fine thought by saying books take their place according to their specific gravity ‘as surely as potatoes in a tub.’ I suppose any that man who will watch his intellectual process will find a material image contemporaneous with his every thought and furnishing the garment of the thought. (JMN5, 78; my ellipses and italics)

Emerson spent the first years of his life in the family home in Boston’s Summer Street, moving after his father’s death in 1811 a short way across Boston Common to Beacon Street, where his mother took in boarders. The potatoes swimming at different levels in the pail is an old memory; nothing connects it to a canon of classic texts apart from its metaphorical value. As a source domain, it helps to explain—or perhaps to confirm—the apparently natural hierarchy of the authors in question, which is the target domain. Such contemporaneous material images, as he acknowledges, may even ‘spoil [a] fine thought’—the works of Thomas à Kempis and Plato as bobbing potatoes; even so, the metaphor is part of Emerson’s thought process, not a mere trope. As Emerson comes to understand, and as CMT tells us, metaphors as large as the Great Chain of Being, or as small as a bobbing potato, enable thought. Such metaphors are not illustrative of preexisting concepts: there are none for thought, just as there none for spirit or mind; and as such, the metaphors are the concepts themselves. As Lakoff puts it, ‘In domains where there is no clearly discernible preconceptual structure to our experience, we import such

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structure via metaphor’ (WFDT, 303). It is evident from his earliest writings that Emerson had a working insight into the intimate relationship between matter and mind that is the basis of the conceptual metaphor that underlies much of his life’s work: the spiritual is the material. The metaphor of the great chain revealed Emerson’s ambition to cross the chasm that separates humanity from God. As he read into the works of the Swedenborgians and the Neo-Platonists, his sense of the ways in which matter corresponds to mind grew richer and gathered strength, especially when he learned that material nature itself is an emanation of the divine. As such, mind finds itself as language in the metaphors that derive from the very nature that is a consequence of the mind’s own divinity, a complex process that, as we shall see in subsequent chapters, unfolds through Emerson’s metaphors. These metaphors, ultimately, are for Emerson acts of divine creation, allowing any distinction between spirit and matter, humanity and God, to collapse into a unified point: the circulation of mind as metaphor itself. NOTES 1. Emerson’s views on race and slavery remained complex throughout his life. For a positive analysis of Emerson’s progression toward abolitionism, see Gougeon, 1990. Gougeon’s take on Emerson’s rejection of racism is challenged in Sorisio, 2002, 104–42. 2. Samantha Harvey also points to Milton’s version of the Great Chain, relating it to Coleridge’s idea of ‘evolution’ and citing them both as influences on Emerson’s use of the concept. Emerson’s journals, though, show Emerson was aware of the great chain metaphor, and developing ideas of its ascension, long before he had studied Coleridge (Harvey 2013, 102–4). 3. For the fullest account of the early-nineteenth-century New England context of reception of these European ideas, see Gura, 1981. Gura’s invaluable account is a late entry into the myth and symbol school, which anticipates Chai’s (1987) conclusion that the doctrine of correspondence contributes to the development of symbolism in the American Renaissance. Gura’s principal contribution is to provide a necessary European counterweight to Feidelson (1953). See also Warren (1999).

Chapter Two

‘Apposite Metaphors’ Analogy and Symbolism

As we saw in the last chapter, in 1822 Emerson dismissed the ‘strained metaphors’ of his early theological speculations. Yet, ten years later, metaphor had become the ground of his theology and, indeed, his very thinking process. In 1824, Emerson had almost identical doubts about the metaphorical bases of philosophy: ‘Metaphysicians are mortified,’ he wrote, ‘to find how entirely the whole materials of understanding are derived from sense’ (JMN2, 224). Metaphysicians, a dismayed young Emerson realizes, do not generate their ideas in some pure realm of the spirit or mind; they are ‘derived’ from the senses. He continues: ‘No man is understood who speculates on mind and character until he borrows the /emphatic/specific/ imagery of Sense’ (JMN2, 224; Emerson’s punctuation). Philosophy needs the ‘imagery of sense’— which is, of course, to say philosophy needs metaphor—to be ‘understood.’ The young Emerson’s concern is that philosophy cannot reach the metaphysical truths of the mind or of Being, just as theology would fall short of the spiritual and the divine. Speculative thought can only move from one figure to another, and in resignation he concludes: ‘I fear the progress of Metaphys[ical] philosophy may be found to consist in nothing else than the progressive introduction of apposite metaphors’ (JMN2, 224; editors’ interpolation). Emerson was able to accept the metaphorical basis of theology through his adoption of the Doctrine of Correspondence, where metaphor itself becomes a divine creative act, unifying humanity, God, and nature. Correspondence, though, is only one way to understand this tripartite relationship. In this chapter, I want to look at two others that prove crucial for Emerson. The first is empiricism, which also proposed that the senses were crucial for all forms of metaphysical speculation, while ruling out metaphor in favor of analogy. The second is Romanticism, which gave Emerson a way of developing the Doctrine of Correspondence into a theory of symbolism that, as I shall show, is based on a theory of metaphor. 47

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‘THE IMAGERY OF SENSE’ Emerson’s fear that ‘the materials of understanding derive from sense’ expresses a fundamental principle of empiricism: there is nothing in the mind that is not first in the senses. This Aristotelian tenet, maintained by Aquinas, becomes the bedrock for John Locke’s empiricist philosophy, itself a cornerstone of Emerson’s Harvard education (Todd 1943, 64). In Locke’s 1690 Essay Concerning Human Understanding, all activity of the mind derives from two sources: the experience of sensible objects, or the reflection upon those objects. As Locke puts it, ‘Let any one examine his own thoughts, and thoroughly search into his understanding; and then let him tell me, whether all the original ideas he has there, are any other than of the objects of his senses, or of the operations of his mind, considered as objects of his reflection’ (Locke 2004, 110–1). The consequence, for Locke, is that there is no innate ‘mind’ as such; all knowledge and understanding derives from sense. If the mind’s activity derives from sense, then reflection itself, Locke’s ‘understanding,’ is nothing but the manipulation of sensible data, Emerson’s ‘imagery of Sense.’ Emerson’s first example of the ‘imagery of sense’ in his 1824 journal is not explicitly philosophical: ‘A mourner will try in vain to explain the extent of his bereavement better than to say a chasm is opened up in society’ (JMN2, 224; Emerson’s emphasis). Here, as we have seen in the first chapter, a material image communicates a mental experience. The conceptual metaphor that will enable correspondence, the spiritual is the material, is emergent. If this expression is mere communication, then there is no problem, and metaphor finds its usual place in rhetoric. But if the metaphor constructs a concept of mourning—that is, understanding death as a ‘gap’ followed by the attempt to fill that gap with something else, say, drink—then it becomes an epistemic concern. Expanding on his anxiety, Emerson offers two philosophical examples: Platonism and Empiricism. The ‘Platonists,’ he writes, ‘congratulated themselves for ages upon their knowing that Mind was a dark chamber whereon ideas like shadows were painted’ (JMN2, 224–5). Emerson is alluding to the famous ‘allegory of the cave’ from Plato’s Republic (Plato 1997, 1132–34). Humans, Plato’s Socrates argued, are akin to prisoners chained inside a cave, whose only access to knowledge comes from shadows cast against the back wall of the cave from objects in the world outside. That is, humans have no direct access to the ‘true’ knowledge symbolized by the sun. Plato communicates his idea through metaphor. But, as Emerson’s ‘their knowing’ suggests, the metaphor is not merely rhetorical; it is also doing epistemological work. Plato conceptualizes the mind as a ‘dark chamber.’ In rudimentary CMT terms, Plato is using the container schema and the

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understanding is seeing metaphor to assert a categorical difference between the world as it really is ‘outside’ in the light and the ways in which we see it ‘inside’ in the dark. The metaphor gives his philosophical ideas a unique structure, such that, in Platonic philosophy, the sun will be associated with the divine, as both the highest good and as pure knowledge. Taking the sun to be the highest form in nature, in turn, leads to the symbolic cosmology of Neo-Platonism we saw in the last chapter. Returning to his journal passage, Emerson’s second example of a metaphysical metaphor is the Lockean rejection of innate ideas that we have just seen, which he expressed in a famous figure: ‘Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas’ (Locke 2004, 109). Again, Locke, like Plato, is ostensibly using a metaphor to communicate a philosophical point. In CMT terms, however, he is using the source domain of writing upon a blank sheet of paper to conceptualize the mind’s initial blankness and a subsequent accretion of ideas from an external source; the inferences being that the mind itself is blank, but also that it can be ‘written upon.’ Locke’s metaphor creates a concept of a passively receptive mind. As Emerson puts it, ‘the Mind was a sheet of white paper whereon any & all characters might be written’ (JMN2, 225). The young Emerson is concerned that the aptness of these metaphors, an idea that we saw in the last chapter, plays a significant part in creating our understanding of the mind rather than merely illustrating or communicating it. If ‘speculation’ on the mind relies on the language of sense, then philosophers have no non-metaphorical access to intellectual or rational truth. Emerson contends, then, that Plato and Locke have mistaken the ‘imagery of sense’ for real knowledge of the mind, hence his anxious reduction of philosophical speculation to a progression of ‘apposite metaphors.’ The spiritual is the material conceptual metaphor is more than a rhetorical problem; it is an epistemological crisis. Emerson’s conclusion that there is a crisis derives from a paradox at the center of his Empiricist education, which itself reflects in miniature a neglected philosophical problem. In his Essay, Locke had written that ‘all the artificial and figurative application of words eloquence hath invented, are for nothing else but to insinuate wrong ideas, move the passions, and thereby mislead the judgment; and so indeed are perfect cheat’ (452). In his search for clear and distinct ideas, and in line with a tradition in English philosophy that leads back to Bacon and Hobbes (Forrester 2010, 612–6), Locke dismissed metaphor from any discourse that was to ‘inform or instruct’ or that would make any claim to ‘truth and knowledge’ (Locke 2004, 452). But, at the same time, and this is the paradox Emerson notices, he presents his most influential ideas metaphorically. Only the most prominent among these is the ‘white paper’; the very concept of ‘clear and distinct’ ideas derives from understanding is seeing—indeed, Locke litters his language with unacknowledged metaphors

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such as ‘insinuate’ and ‘move,’ as though metaphors are mobile and not to be trusted. Which is, of course, precisely Emerson’s concern: taking philosophical metaphors as metaphors, rather than as something dead and now literal, or merely as part of a communicative act, reveals the limits of philosophy. By 1824, what Emerson has realized, both for theology and for philosophy, is that the mind, at its fullest extent, works through ‘apposite metaphors’ derived from sense. Rather than being an antidote to metaphor, ‘clear and distinct ideas’ are just further examples (see Vogt 1993, 1–4; Clark 1998, 242–5). The denigration of metaphor, of course, goes back much further than Locke, or even Hobbes and Bacon. It is a philosophical staple that arguably begins when Plato turned the poets out of his Republic because they relied on images, or mimesis—mere imitations of real things (Plato 1997, 596–603), and it continues in contemporary Analytic philosophy.1 Even so, it was of concern to Emerson, as we have seen, that Plato’s and Locke’s philosophies relied on metaphors not just for communication, but also for their epistemic structure. Emerson’s 1824 ‘apposite metaphors’ passage, in addition to being symptomatic of this problem in the history of philosophy, continues in a way that strongly foreshadows the insights of CMT. Emerson immediately offers other examples of thought that demonstrate the essentially metaphorical nature of our conceptualization of abstract ideas. He begins with ‘life’ itself: ‘Life is nothing, but the lamp of life that blazes flutters, & goes out, the hill of life which is climbed and tottered down, the race of life, which is run with a thousand Competitors and for a prize proposed, these are distinctly understood’ (JMN2, 225; Emerson’s emphases). These examples are linguistic expressions of the conceptual metaphors: life is light/heat, life is a journey, and life is a race—all of which are thoroughly conventional figures. We should also note Emerson’s use of the word distinctly. Locke’s aim was for ideas to be clear and distinct by avoiding figures. Emerson’s observation is that ideas, even ‘life’ itself, are only ‘distinct’ when they are figurative. Life, literally, has no particular meaning; it is ‘nothing,’ without some kind of metaphor to give it structure. As we saw in the last chapter, abstract experiences, be they metaphysical, like Locke’s innate ideas or Plato’s the Good, require metaphors to give them richness and complexity. Emerson continues with a reference to Shakespeare’s Macbeth: “Sleep, the cessation of toil, the loss of volition, &c, what is that? But ‘sleep that knits up the ravelled sleave [sic.] of care,’ is felt” (225). Conceptual metaphor gives richness and tangibility to even daily (or nightly) occurrences, like sleep.

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ANALOGY Philosophy had been uncomfortable about metaphor’s place in thought for over two thousand years by the time Emerson registered his anxieties. Philosophy has had a range of solutions, from denial—all figurative language is really literal—to an ultimate rejection of language altogether—symbolic logic (see PF, 375, 545). However, perhaps the most pervasive, and successful, way of dealing with the problem of metaphor had been to call figurative reasoning by another name and thus conceal its metaphorical nature. For centuries, the term philosophers have used for metaphorical reasoning is analogy (WFDT, 21). In their hands, analogy becomes a heuristic for thought, the assumption being that any knowledge generated does not lie in the analogy, but in what the analogy supports (analogy as ‘scaffolding’) or what it points toward (analogy as ‘compass’). The truths to which it gives us access are not just extra-linguistic, they are extra-conceptual. CMT tells us differently: analogy, as a form of metaphor, is necessarily cognitive, and relies on the often-unconscious recourse to a figurative conceptual structure. Philosophers like Locke were aware that restricting knowledge to what passes through the senses limits what is knowable. There are things we want to know, or feel that we do know, that fall outside the realms of what the senses can witness or what the mind can reflect upon. Such things as ‘the existence, nature and operations of finite immaterial beings without us; as spirits, angels, devils, etc. Or the existence of material beings; which either for their smallness in themselves, or remoteness from us, our sense cannot take notice of’ (Locke 2004, 587). It is also not possible to access ‘the manner of operation in most parts of the works of nature: wherein though we see the sensible effects, yet their causes are unknown’ (587). In such cases, it is from ‘analogy’ that we ‘draw all our grounds of probability’ (588). An empiricist can use analogy to reason from the known to the unknown, though he or she can never quite be certain thereby. Analogy, for Locke, is philosophically useful; but it will produce ‘no clear distinct idea’ (400). Locke’s principal example is, happily for us, the Great Chain of Being. Thus finding in all parts of creation, that fall under human observation, that there is a gradual connexion of one with another, without any great or discernible gaps between, in all that great variety of things in the world, which are so closely linked together, that, in the several ranks of beings, it is not easy to discover the bounds betwixt them, we have reason to be persuaded, that by such gentle steps things ascend upward in degrees of perfection. [ . . . ] Observing, I say, such gradual and gentle descents downwards in those parts of creation, that are beneath man, the rule of analogy may make it probable, that it is so also in things above us, and our observation; and that there are several ranks of

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intelligent beings, excelling in several degrees of perfection, ascending upwards towards the infinite perfection of the creator, by gentle steps and differences, that are every one at no great distance from the next to it. (588)

This is the great chain in its classic form: a series of gradual links from the lowest to the highest things in nature, each increasing in perfection, hierarchically organizing the variety of creation. When Locke’s chain reaches the human, who is at the top of the ‘sensible’ chain, analogy authorizes (Locke has ‘reason to be persuaded’) the existence of an upper half of the chain that ascends from humanity to God. Through his ‘rule of analogy,’ Locke locates humans at the middle point of a chain that descends to matter and ascends to God. Despite Locke telling us that metaphor ‘insinuates wrong ideas,’ whereas analogy ‘leads us . . . into the discovery of truth,’ they both work by mapping a source domain onto a target domain and drawing inferences based on the schema of the source domain. Structurally there is no difference between analogy and metaphor. In this case, Locke use the great chain metaphor to develop inferences about what cannot be known; that is, he uses matter to analogize spirit. The inferences he draws are the hierarchy of the ‘several ranks,’ the ‘gentle steps and differences,’ and the gradual progress toward ‘perfection.’ Such analogical inferences, Locke argues, if used carefully, can arrive at the truth: ‘wary reasoning from analogy leads us often into the discovery of truths, and useful productions, which would otherwise lie concealed’ (589). Analogy, it would appear, is a word empiricist philosophers use, either consciously or unconsciously, when they want to avoid making a connection between metaphor and thought. We have already seen the young Emerson recognize an ‘eternal analogy’ between ‘the external changes of nature & scenes of good & ill’ (JMN1, 19). Here analogy is one basis for Emerson’s slow development of the idea of correspondence. Emerson, though, in his early journals, is highly skeptical about analogy’s ability to reason from the material world to the spiritual world, to move from the seen to the unseen, at least in part because he is more aware than Locke allows himself to be of the epistemic problem of metaphor. In June 1822, Emerson attempts to use reasoning by analogy as a defense against atheism in an implicitly empiricist context, recalling ‘an ancient argument of the Atheist’ that ‘the declarations of religion cannot claim belief because they are not objects of human sense and may therefore be fabulous’ (JMN1, 141). Limited to the senses, Emerson’s hypothetical atheist proposes, we have no access to religious truths. Emerson tries to disagree: ‘The evidence of things not seen, is capable, I presume, of being made out as satisfactorily as any thing subject to the eye of reason; and he that is not persuaded is criminal in wilfully shutting his eyes to the whole truth’ (JMN1, 141; Emerson’s emphasis). Here Emerson uses understanding is seeing in

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two contrary ways. Firstly, he limits the ‘eye of reason’ to empirical vision: a synecdoche of wider sense experience that confirms empirically valid truths. Secondly, the ‘evidence of things not seen’ is visible, metaphorically, to those who do not ‘wilfully’ shut their eyes. The understanding is seeing metaphor is so flexible it can figure opposing perspectives: a literal and a figurative seeing, where the second is more valued that the first, just as, for Emerson, spirit will always be more valuable than matter. As he continues, it becomes clear that Emerson’s second kind of ‘seeing’ is analogical, and he starts out from a conventional analogical proof: we can all believe there is a city called London even if we have not seen it, and we send our ‘merchandise’ there in an act of faith in the testimony of others (JMN1, 142). Faith in London, then, becomes an analogy for faith in general: You have thus found it possible in one case to believe entirely the existence of something not seen, and to believe it on fallible testimony; what now makes the difference between this truth and those other to which your assent is required. The answer is, that the first are in themselves objects of sense but that the second are only prophecied [sic.] and promised to be, and are never objects of sense. But the second, besides bringing with them the highest internal evidence as that of adaptation, analogy, and naturalness are confirmed by the distinguished & supreme evidence of miracles. (JMN1, 142)

It is clear from the passage that the nineteen-year-old Emerson is unable to maintain his stance that analogy is an adequate tool to reason from the seen to the unseen; its inconsistencies are all too evident. He only feels properly comfortable when he falls back on biblical miracles (which he will later deny). Indeed, over the next few journal pages, Emerson returns to fundamental mystery as the ground of faith: ‘shall we not rest satisfied with faith in those matters which from their nature transcends the evidence of sense.’ As such, the empiricist ‘must [ . . . ] find himself set at nought in every effort so long as he looks to earth only as an interpreter of its affairs’ (JMN1, 143). Emerson finds faith in feelings of order and moral consequence that have no analogous equivalent in material nature. At this point, as we saw in the last chapter, the spiritual is the material does not yet hold. Later that same year, analogy is again inadequate to explain the ways of God, and Emerson aims his critique, albeit implicitly, at the Deist Argument from Design. The passage is worth quoting at length because it gives a sense of the limits of analogy while reinforcing the importance of metaphor to Emerson’s thought process. We commonly say that God ordained the laws of Nature and that by that ordination they have remained. As man contrives a machine which when once wound up performs its part without human interference for a certain length of time so

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hath God adjusted a vast system of Nature which has within itself, independent sources of motion. But there is a fallacy in this statement because it neglects a fundamental difference between the works of God and the works of men. The machines of man depend for their operation upon the continuance of certain laws of nature, as, upon the continuance of elasticity or gravitation, and would cease to act were these laws once broken. Now upon what law do the revolutions of the Universe depend? That is; what causes the operation of gravitation which is thus constant? We plainly have no other principle, but must answer directly— the Power of God. And therefore the art of man hangs directly upon the same cause. For when the Artist has wound up a clock, what causes its motion? Gravitation. And what causes Gravitation?—The Power of God. (JMN2, 46–7)

Emerson begins by setting up a standard analogy that uses the source domain of a clockwork machine to conceptualize the target domain of the ‘system of nature.’ What is interesting, though, is the way Emerson responds to the extended metaphor’s slots. He quite conventionally maps the slot of the person who winds up the clock onto God, who has created nature’s ‘independent’ sources of movement. Emerson’s mapping draws on the causes are forces metaphor. But, as Emerson observes, there is a fallacy in the analogy: humankind and God are not equivalent. The machine a human makes, and they cause to move, still requires the laws that God has made: gravitation and elasticity. This version of the Argument from Design does not work as an analogy because its terms neglect the causal necessity of what the analogy is aiming to prove: the mechanic artist is not analogous to God because their works inevitably rely on God’s laws. Analogy is inadequate because it begs the question. Nevertheless, Emerson is still unconsciously drawing on the causes are forces metaphor to underpin his faith. He has no access to or evidence of God’s creation of the laws of nature; the ‘willed action’ slot in the causes are forces schema creates the space for his inference of God as original cause. Conceptual metaphor allows for Emerson’s faith in the divine mystery of creation. Emerson revisits the clockwork version of the Argument from Design a few years later, in 1826, when training to become a minister. Now, in parallel with the intellectual shifts we saw in the last chapter, he sees analogy as one of the ‘abutments to the structure of our faith,’ helping to ‘bear evidence to the truth of Christianity’ (JMN3, 46, 47). He recalls Bishop Butler, whose 1736 Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, had defended Christianity against Deist empiricism for ninety years. Butler had argued that no one aspect of nature could evidence divine design as our empirical experience was too chaotic, but we could pick out patterns that suggest a deeper intelligence behind creation. Drawing on another familiar basic metaphor, Butler saw nature’s parts in relation to a whole. Emerson paraphrases Butler’s

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argument as follows: ‘It was a most just observation of Butler that as he who had precisely examined every wheel, spring, & pin of a watch had no notion of a watch until he had also made the correlation & joint operation an object to study, so the account of every faculty & affection is not at all an account of Man till the Whole has also been beheld in its harmony’ (JMN3, 47). The human part-whole relationship becomes an organic ground for the argument from design: The same reasoning can be accurately applied to all the parts of truth that become the object of our knowledge. One instance of design how decisive soever in its character must always fail of proving the Deity from the known imperfection of the human understanding in the uncertainty in which the foundations of knowledge lie involved. But when all the facts accumulated in many years lend their confederated evidence to the same result, we feel the evidence to the Div[ine] exist[ence] to be indisputable, for that knowledge out of which it grows has become one with us, and to assault it is almost to unsettle consciousness. (47; editors’ interpolations)

The limitations of human understanding cause individual arguments from analogy to fail to reach the truth. However, the more analogies there are, the more persuasive they become. The essential difference from the single clock/ clockmaker analogy is the addition of Butler’s the part is the whole, which enables each part of creation to provide evidence for the unique causal force of God. These entailments of the causes are forces metaphor construct an idea of God through iteration. The truth ‘confederated evidence’ provides to Emerson, though, is a truth of ‘feel[ing]’; to lose it would be to ‘unsettle consciousness.’ Indeed, after a few pages of rather fruitlessly trying to find a ground for the evidence of the divine in design—one entry just simply giving up after beginning ‘It is clearly the design of God that’ (49)—Emerson falls back on the comfort of familiar metaphors, beginning with ‘The summer is past, the harvest is ended & still we are not saved’ (50), which draws on the conventional metaphors the human is a plant and a life is a year. He then repeats a long-held view: ‘The changes of external nature are continually suggesting to us the changes in the condition of man’ (50–1), followed up by images of leaves falling, winter, and the returning spring. Nature provides the metaphors by which we understand ourselves; but as we can also see, it also provides the metaphors by which Emerson attempts to understand God. Emerson’s fundamental conceptual metaphor, the spiritual is the material, is coming into view.

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EMPIRICAL METAPHORS Though its full epistemological ramifications are never quite exposed, metaphor was an explicit issue for the British, and particularly the Scottish, post-Lockean empiricist tradition that was central in New England during the years of Emerson’s education. Hugh Blair was perhaps the most important in this regard. Blair’s 1783 Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres was widely read on both sides of the Atlantic and went through multiple editions. Emerson cites Blair several times in his early journals, and his lectures were set reading on the Harvard syllabus (JMN1, 35, 55–56, 215; cf. West 2000, 46–7; Newfield 1992, 11–13). Undoubtedly an influence on Emerson, Blair recognized that figurative language was at the heart of language itself. Prepositions, for example, derive from metaphors. It is literal to say: ‘The man was killed in the wood’ (Blair 1787, 353; Blair’s emphasis), but it is figurative to say: ‘being in health or in sickness, in prosperity or in adversity’ (353; Blair’s emphases). Blair’s examples are linguistic expressions of what, as we saw earlier, CMT calls the states are locations metaphor. Blair goes on to add, in line with Locke, that ‘The operations of the mind and affections, in particular, are, in most languages, described by words taken from sensible objects’ (353). For Blair, words for objects precede words for thoughts, therefore we borrow them, ‘so we speak of a piercing judgement, and a clear head; a soft or hard heart’ (353–4), and so on. It is the same history of language that Emerson will go on to complicate in his ‘fossil poetry’ metaphor. For Blair, however, metaphorical borrowing is purely historical. Metaphors become dead rather than conceptual. As such, he recognizes no sustained influence of metaphor in discursive language or in cognition. As the title of his lectures would suggest, Blair is primarily interested in metaphors as an aspect of rhetoric. He begins by presenting the classical non-cognitive view of metaphor, writing that ‘Figures give us the pleasure of enjoying two objects presented together without confusion; the principal idea, which is the subject of the discourse, along with its accessory, which gives it figurative dress. We see one thing in another, as Aristotle expresses it; which is always agreeable in the mind’ (361). For Blair, even though in using figurative language we have two ideas in one, the principal idea remains distinct from the metaphor used, and there can be no confusion between the two. As such, metaphor is ornamental (‘accessory,’ ‘dress’—Blair’s own metaphors) rather than conceptual. His example is using ‘the morning of life’ instead of ‘youth.’ We can relate a certain time of day to a certain time of life ‘without embarrassment or confusion’ (361–2). For CMT, Blair’s example would be a linguistic expression that draws on the schema of the conventional life is a day metaphor. Its usage is not ornamental as it structures

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a way of understanding life: the cognitive topology of a day has morning, noon, afternoon, evening, and night slots. Youth becomes one aspect of a four-part process, that ascends toward the meridian (noon), followed by a decline (evening) and death (night). The conceptual entailment of mapping youth onto morning is that old age maps onto evening, which inevitably constructs an idea of old age as decline. In contrast to Blair, CMT tells us that the very ‘confusion’ between the target and source domains creates meaning. Blair is also interested in the expressive power of figurative language, and the influence of the following passage on a young Emerson with designs on the ministry is clear: Figures are attended with this farther advantage, of giving us frequently a much clearer and more striking view of the principal object, than we could have if it were expressed in more simple terms, and divested of its accessory idea. This is, indeed, their principal advantage, in virtue of which, they are very properly said to illustrate a subject or throw light upon it. For they exhibit the object, on which they are employed, in a picturesque form; they can render an abstract conception, in some degree, an object of sense; they surround it with such circumstances, as enable the mind to lay hold of it steadily, and to contemplate it fully. (362)

First, Blair recognizes that metaphors give a ‘clearer and more striking view of the principal object,’ because the metaphor provides what he calls an ‘accessory idea.’ Thus, Blair distances himself from Locke, and foreshadows Emerson, for whom metaphors present ideas in a more ‘emphatic’ and ‘specific’ way. As we saw earlier, an idea like ‘life’ can only become meaningfully ‘distinct’ for Emerson when expressed using the ‘imagery of sense.’ Blair comes very close to CMT, when his idea of a metaphor ‘render[s] an abstract conception [ . . . ] an object of sense [ . . . ] enabl[ing] the mind to lay hold of it.’ That is, the metaphor is helping its user to think. Nevertheless, as we just noticed with the ‘morning of youth’ metaphor, Blair does not take full cognizance of the consequences of his reasoning. Ironically, the expression of the ‘principal object’ remains distinct from, even as the figure presents it more clearly. It is as if, for example, the Great Chain of Being is preexistent, and the great chain metaphor merely illustrates it, presenting the natural order in a striking manner, and not playing any role in the construction of the concept, which, of course, is exactly what people thought for hundreds of years. What CMT tells us is that the metaphor itself structures our concept of the ‘principal object’; a thought that worries the young Emerson, as we have seen. Blair, like Locke, is also unaware of his own metaphors, such as ‘clearer and more striking view’ and ‘throw a light upon,’ both based on understanding is seeing. Even ‘enable the mind to lay hold of it’ and ‘accessory ideas’

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are composites of understanding is grasping (the etymology of ‘comprehend,’ from the Latin comprehendĕre, ‘to grasp, seize,’ is telling here) and ideas are things. Ultimately, for Blair, in good writing, metaphor is a useful trope with explanatory and clarificatory powers that writers must not overuse (379). More importantly, and in agreement with Locke, reasoning must avoid metaphor: ‘Nothing can be more unnatural, than for a writer to carry on a train of reasoning in the sort of Figurative Language which he would use in description. When he reasons, we look only for perspicuity; when he describes we expect embellishment; when he divides, or relates, we desire plainness and simplicity’ (379). Despite Blair’s recognition of the importance of metaphors, he ultimately sides with the empiricist tradition in consigning them to a role in embellishment and ornamentation. If the philosopher uses metaphors in their reasoning, as analogies, then it must be clear that they are post-hoc figures and quite distinct from that which they are illustrating. Thomas Reid’s 1764 An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense preceded Blair and was also highly influential in New England (see Gura 1981, 21–2; West 2000, 47–8). Analogy, for Reid, is the ‘most common way [ . . . ] in which men form their opinions concerning the mind and its operations’ (Reid, 1983, 104). Reid agrees with Locke that analogies can ‘facilitate the conception of things, when they are not easily apprehended without such a handle, and lead us to more probable conjectures about their nature and qualities, when we want the means of more direct and immediate knowledge’ (104). Through analogy, we can ‘conjecture’ about Jupiter from what we know about the earth because: ‘There is nothing in the course of nature so singular, but we can find some resemblance, or at least see some analogy, between it and other things with which we are acquainted’ (104). That said, even though Reid, like Blair, is keenly aware of the cognitive roles analogies play, he remains, like Locke, wary of them. The potato plant, he recalls, very much ‘resembles the solanum in its flower and fructification,’ but the former is food, whereas the latter (deadly nightshade) is poisonous (105). Analogy, for Reid, is a spontaneous consequence of ‘fruitful imagination’ (105). We have easy access to ‘objects of sense,’ and we will derive our ideas of the mind and its faculties from those objects by analogy (106). As such, analogy has long been the most trusted way of forming our ideas of the mind. For Reid, however, analogy is a false path. As Hans Aarsleff points out, Reid is wary of the mind/body analogy (Aarsleff 1967, 99–100). As Reid puts it: ‘we ought never to trust to reasonings drawn from some supposed similitude of body to mind’ (cited in Aarsleff 1967, 99). In Reid’s brief historical account of the development of metaphysics, Descartes frees philosophy from the method of mere analogy, because he ‘attend[s] more to the operations of the mind by accurate reflection, and [trusts] less to analogical reasoning upon

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this subject’ (Reid 1983, 109). ‘Accurate reflection,’ then, opposes analogy, and enables the forming of clear and distinct ideas of the mind, even though it ‘requires a habit of attentive reflection, of which few are capable’ (105). That ‘reflection’ is itself a metaphor, which creates a dualistic idea of the mind (the body that experiences and the mind that examines it), does not seem to have occurred to Reid. For him, Descartes saves metaphysics from analogy by focusing entirely on ‘the testimony of the senses’ and opened the way for Locke, the subsequent empiricists, and Reid’s own ‘commonsense’ philosophy (111). Our language may be replete with bodily metaphors for the ‘operations of the mind,’ but there is no reason, Reid argues, that we should be ‘imposed upon by those analogical terms and phrases’ (cited in Aarsleff 1967, 99). Philosophers may have to use those terms, but they can define them as appropriate to their methodology, and as such, analogy does not limit philosophical progress, as Emerson feared. Reid’s ‘commonsense’ philosophy culminated in the work of Dugald Stewart, whose 1822 Elements of Philosophy went further than Reid’s caution and aimed to remove analogy and figurative thought from metaphysics altogether (see Aarsleff, 1967, 107–9; Gura 1981, 21–3; West 2000, 47–50). Stewart, like Reid, notes that it is ‘natural to every person at the commencement of his philosophical pursuits, to explain intellectual and moral phenomena by the analogy of the material world’ (Stewart 1822, 15). Again, for Stewart, the language of sensible objects is prior to that of mind, and ‘the words which express [the mind’s] different operations, are almost all borrowed from the objects of our senses’ (15). However, rather than dwelling on similarities, Stewart reminds his reader that ‘the two subjects are essentially distinct,’ and as such, ‘the analogies we are pleased to fancy between them, can be of no use in illustrating either’ (15). So, he concludes, ‘The analogy of matter, therefore, can be of no use in the inquiries which form the object of the following work; but on the contrary, it is to be guarded against, as one of the principal sources of the errors to which we are liable’ (15). For Stewart, analogy and other figures are even less useful than they were for Locke or Blair. They have no philosophical function—which, of course, can only work if Stewart assumes that all the metaphors he uses are dead. Take, for example, the following passage, on the subject of the ‘advantages to be expected of a successful analysis of the human mind’: ‘I shall endeavour to illustrate a few of these advantages, beginning with what appears to me to be the most important of any; the light, which a philosophical analysis of the principles of the mind would necessarily throw on the subjects of intellectual and moral education’ (18; my emphases). The key conceptual metaphor is understanding is seeing. Of course, Stewart knows that the language we have for mind is ‘borrowed from the objects of our senses,’ and as such, he cannot realistically avoid seemingly ‘dead’ metaphors. Illustrating once again

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an almost necessary blindness in philosophy when it refuses to engage with the metaphorical bedrock of its own discourse even while it is explicitly raising the very problem of ‘apposite metaphors’ that Emerson identified. Unitarianism, which had replaced Puritanism as the hegemonic faith in Emerson’s cultural milieu, had a strong empiricist and Scotch Common Sense bent, which made it uncomfortable with figurative language. William Ellery Channing, perhaps the most significant Unitarian preacher of the period, is typical. As Gura tells us, for Channing the metaphors in the Scriptures were figurative only because they were primitive. The Jewish patriarchs, Channing observes, ‘had scarcely the power of apprehending a truth presented to them as a philosophical abstraction, in its naked and literal form’ (cited in Gura 2007, 30). The Unitarians sought to see through figures to what underlay the language. As Gura puts it, ‘Revelation was conceptual rather than verbal, and the exegete’s primary goal was the recovery of those concepts that could return men to the purity of the original churches’ (30). The rational faith of the Unitarians who raised Emerson had little time for figures. In 1822, the young Emerson was concerned that his theological speculations were ‘apt to lead away and bewilder imagination, until it mistakes strained metaphors and refined mysticisms for strong conceptions of its object’ (JMN1, 146). But, as we saw in the last chapter, Emerson the preacher came to see figures, especially those that mapped a correspondence between matter and spirit, as the most important vehicle to express divine truths. Emerson ultimately rejects the empiricist conclusions of Reid and Stewart, despite the similarity of his own early concerns about analogy and its limits. As he writes in 1830, ‘Mr Stewart’s words are like Dr Clarke’s description of Moscow—All splendour & promise till you enter the gate, & and then you look before & behind but only cottages & shops’ (JMN3, 198). What Emerson takes from the empiricists is what they are attempting to deny—namely, that thought and philosophy are fundamentally metaphorical and that those metaphors derive from the senses. Indeed, the truth that, on these terms, underlies empiricist anxieties about analogy, becomes more and more important as Emerson increasingly recognises the power of correspondence. Even the simplest analogies, he argues, can provide spiritual insights, as we can see in a journal passage from 1830: ‘All man’s conversation must be tinged by his occupations. His trade commonly furnishes his mind, and therefore his talk, with the analogies that furnish him with most conviction; and the more natural wisdom that will give him, through increased skill or invention, or extension of its processes, the more will the spiritual wisdom also be augmented that he draws therefrom’ (JMN3, 204–5; Emerson’s emphasis). Emerson’s claim here is that everyday experience is adequate for our spiritual needs, precisely because it provides the analogies to conceptualize ‘spiritual wisdom.’ We believe and understand the language that is closest to our experience, and

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the metaphors that draw from that experience will provide the clearest schemas for analogical repurposing. The ‘natural wisdom’ of trade, then, through invention and extension, becomes ‘spiritual wisdom.’ Access to spiritual wisdom does not require a special language, say that of philosophy or metaphysics—and certainly not that of Descartes. What it requires, on the contrary, is a language rich in metaphors taken from daily life—‘the imagery of sense.’ As we saw with Emerson and the Doctrine of Correspondence, it is the material world that will provide the language for the spiritual world. The Doctrine of Correspondence, directly replacing that of analogy as a metaphysical ground, becomes a key aspect of Emerson’s model of symbolism. Before looking in detail at Emerson’s model of symbolism, it is important to explore one other possible precursor: the Puritan conception of the symbolic relationship between spirit and matter proposed in Charles Feidelson’s 1953 Symbolism and American Literature and Sacvan Bercovitch’s 1975 The Puritan Origins of the American Self. Feidelson calls the underlying structure of the Puritan interpretation of the relationship between mind and matter ‘radical metaphor’ (Feidelson1953, 78): a form of misrecognized figurative language in which the Puritans take their figures literally. This occurs when Emerson’s ancestors understand real events as literal expressions of Scripture; that is, matter is spirit. A famous example is the serpent that appeared behind the pulpit in John Winthrop’s Cambridge synod, or meetinghouse, in August 1648, only to be killed by one of the church elders. Winthrop gave this ‘literal’ event a figurative interpretation, which he took to be the event’s literal meaning: ‘the serpent is the devil, the synod, the representative of the Churches of Christ in New England. The devil had formerly and latterly attempted their disturbance and dissolution, but their faith in the seed of the woman overcame him and crushed his head’ (Winthrop in Miller 1956, 48). Each real thing—the snake, the church, the elder—has a respective figurative interpretation as the devil, the New England Church, and the children of Eve. Winthrop takes this figurative interpretation as the real meaning of the event. As Feidelson puts it, ‘the devil-serpent and the body-house took shape and were experienced as radical metaphors made by God’ (Feidelson 1953, 78). All aspects of Puritan life were liable to such an interpretation, from the large-scale ‘Errand’ in the wilderness, figured as the journey of the Jews, but revealing the truth of the Puritan mission, to a favorable wind as ‘god’s answer to a prayer’ (81). Radical metaphors, for Feidelson’s Puritans, were not ornamental or rhetorical. They were ‘a mode of perception that united past and present, idea and material fact, in the objectively given’ (81). For Emerson’s forbears, radical metaphor reveals the literal truth of events as the confirmation of scriptural truth. As well as an implicit theory of radical metaphor, the Puritans also had a parallel doctrine of correspondence. This was the theory of ‘typology,’

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which, as Feidelson puts it, the ‘Puritans gingerly preserved’ from earlier Catholic theology. Typology was a “system of correspondences between the Old Testament and the New. Adam and David were types of Christ, and the deliverance from Egypt and Babylon ‘shadowed forth’ the deliverance of the Church from the Antichrist” (Feidelson 1953, 88). This deliverance was the settlement of New England by the Puritans. ‘Typological’ correspondences were not merely human attempts to understand the relationship between different parts of Scripture. For the Puritans, ‘it was God’s prerogative to make Types’ (Samuel Mather cited in Feidelson 89); as such, they were a divine truth. In his later work, Bercovitch prefers the term figura to type, though it is clear he means the same thing. Bercovitch’s principal example is the great Puritan theologian Jonathan Edwards, who sees the week of creation as ‘figura: the creation [ . . . ] of order out of chaos foreshadowed the emergence now, after “great confusion,” of the end-time kingdom” (Bercovitch 1975, 155). The beginning, then, for Edwards, is a type, or figura, of the end: ‘Things even before the fall, were types of . . . redemption. The old creation . . . was a type of the new’ (Edwards cited in Bercovitch 1975, 155). These types related past biblical events to current and prospective happenings in the Puritan world, namely the redemption of the Church from pre- and post-reformation confusion: Eden as the model for the redeemed world. As Bercovitch takes this forward, the relationship between the Old World and the New World also becomes typological: ‘Jerusalem [ . . . ] is a remarkable type of the redemption that is to . . . take its rise from this new world’ (Edwards cited in Bercovitch 156). For Edwards, America’s promise is a ‘type’ of the future (156). Both Feidelson and Bercovitch see a direct line between radical metaphor, typology, figura, and Emerson. For Feidelson, ‘The intellectual stance of the conscious artist in American literature has been determined very largely by problems inherent in the method of the Puritans’ (Feidelson 1953, 89). The person who solved this inherent problem was Emerson. The ‘problem’ for the Puritans had been, Feidelson argued, that in seeing everything as radical metaphor, they had struggled to allow any ambiguity, instead settling on a logical literalism. But ‘Emerson was prepared to accept the incompleteness of any logical statement; he saw that every proposition aims at an absoluteness which its very nature precludes, since “we cannot strongly state one fact without seeming to belie some other”’ (94). Thus, according to Feidelson, Emerson’s purposive adaptation of ambiguity, which was for the Puritans an insuperable problem and thus denied, becomes the great enabling gesture of American literature. Metaphors, unfixed and ambiguous for Emerson, become open to a range of interpretations. Objects and events in nature, for example, are not as for the Puritans, radical metaphors that present Divine truths; they are open to a range of different metaphorical applications, some

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of which may contradict others. This ambiguity becomes, for Feidelson, the definition of symbolism—as we shall see shortly, it is Emerson’s reading of the Romantics and the consequent addition of the part is the whole to the Puritan’s literalist version of the spiritual is the material that will make all the difference. Bercovitch, on the other hand, picks up on Edwards’s prophetic interpretation of the New World, where the land itself offers the possibility of a secular redemption through self-creation. As he puts it: ‘for both Edwards and Emerson, the image of the New World invests the regenerate perceiver with an aura of ascendant millennial splendour; and for both of them, the perceiver must prove his regeneration by transforming himself in the image of the New World’ (Bercovitch 1975, 157). The objects available in the New World, as themselves new, allow for a new sense of self through the symbols they can create. I will return to Bercovitch’s point in more detail when I look at the opening of Emerson’s Nature in the next chapter; now, though, I will turn to the development of Emerson’s concept of symbolism understood as conceptual metaphor.2 ROMANTIC SYMBOLS Emerson does not use the term symbol very often in his early journals, and when he does, it is typically amidst a complex knot of ideas. Take, for example, the following rather awkward passage from 1832: A strange poem is Zoroastrism. It is a system as separate and harmonious & sublime as Swedenborgianism. congruent. One would be glad to behold the truth which they all shadow forth. For it cannot but be that they typify & symbolize as the play of every faculty reveals an use, a cause, & a law to the intelligent. One sees in this & in all the element of poetry according to Jeffrey’s true theory— the effect produced by making every thing outward only a sign of something inward. (JMN4, 11)

At the time of this writing, Emerson had been dipping into an eclectic French book, Histoire de L’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, a vast, multivolume collection of ancient and classical reference published between 1736 and 1808. In Volume 37, which he withdrew from the Boston Athenaeum in the spring of 1832, he came across a long article on Zoroaster by Anquetil du Perron. The details of the article do not seem to have made much of an impression, but Emerson does translate a few quotations about the origins of law, creation through fire, and evil (JMN3, 11–12). What matters to Emerson is that even though Zoroastrianism and Swedenborgianism are ‘separate systems,’ he can recognize them as ‘congruent.’ They both

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‘shadow forth’ (a Platonic metaphor) the same truth through types and symbols. According to Jeffrey’s ‘true theory’ of poetry, Swedenborg and Zoroaster are poets, using outward nature as a symbol of inner or spiritual life. Jeffrey’s theory, as you will recall from the last chapter, is based on the analogy ‘which exists between the physical and the moral world.’ The following is an example from Perron, translated in his journal by Emerson: ‘Fire, the son of Ormuzd was also created. He represented tho’ imperfectly the original Fire which animates all beings [,] forms the relations which exist between them & which in the beginning was a principle of union between Ormuzd and Time-sans-borne’ (JMN3, 12). Fire, as an originating principle in Zoroastrianism, parallels the sun as the animating principle in Swedenborg, which we saw in the last chapter. Both are using the familiar the material is the spiritual, causes are forces, and the part is the whole conceptual metaphors.3 One of the things that makes Emerson difficult to follow is that by using ‘type,’ ‘symbol,’ ‘poetry,’ and ‘sign,’ Emerson blurs distinctions between various figurative forms; for Emerson, they all use outward nature to give shape to inward spirit, allowing it into discourse. Emerson’s easy conflation of terms is very different from his Romantic precursor, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Though Emerson read most of Coleridge’s prose works in the 1820s and 1830s, temperamentally he was the English poet’s opposite. Coleridge was costively methodical, hoping that his work would add up to, or at least reflect, a complete system. Emerson quickly gave up any such totalizing ambitions, aiming rather for a synthetic method, based on the fluid principle that as any single part reflects the whole, you can begin anywhere and end everywhere. It is perhaps ironic that, as we shall see, Coleridge, far more than Butler, theorized the part is the whole metaphor for Emerson. For Coleridge, it was essential to discriminate between terms like symbol, analogy, metaphor, and allegory—to ‘desynonymize’ them. For Emerson, as I just indicated, these words could all mean the same thing, and he often used them interchangeably. Nevertheless, Coleridge’s concept of symbolism is an important influence in the development of Emerson’s theory and practice of metaphor. Coleridge undertakes the laborious and sometimes confusing process of ‘desynonymization’ in several of his major prose works: The Statesman’s Manual (1816), Biographia Literaria (1817), and Aids to Reflection (1825). The Statesman’s Manual provides a lengthy illustration of his approach: It is among the miseries of the age that it recognizes no medium between Literal and Metaphorical. Faith is either to be buried in the dead letter, or its name and honors usurped by a counterfeit product of the mechanical understanding, which in the blindness of self-complacency confounds symbols with allegories. Now an Allegory is but a translation of abstract notions into a picture-language which

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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 more shapeless to boot. On the other hand a Symbol [ . . . ] is characterised by a translucence of the Special in the Individual or the General in the Especial or the Universal in the General. Above all by the translucence of the Eternal through 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. The other are but empty echoes which the fancy arbitrarily associates with the apparitions of matter, less beautiful but not less shadowy than the sloping orchard or hill-side pasture-field seen in the transparent lake below. (Coleridge 1816, 36–7; Coleridge’s emphases)

Coleridge’s aim here is to instruct his reader how to understand the figurative aspects of scriptural language. He wants to find the ‘medium’ between the literal and the metaphorical, the inference being that his dilation upon symbol and allegory provides a solution. Allegory, for Coleridge, belongs to the ‘mechanical understanding’—a code phrase for the despised empiricism of Locke and his followers. Indeed, his definition of allegory is very similar to Locke’s definition of metaphor—the use of the ‘object of the senses’ to stand for ‘abstract notions’: a ‘picture-language,’ as Coleridge puts it. To allegorize is to use the world as merely ‘understood’ as a proxy for further abstractions, using, in CMT terms, material images as source domains for abstract ideas. When Coleridge moves on to define the symbol, much hangs on his post-Kantian (and anti-Lockean) distinction between the ‘Understanding,’ the merely rational interpretation of the world as received by the senses, and ‘Reason,’ the direct intuition of truth.4 Allegory belongs to Understanding; the symbol belongs to Reason. It is not at all clear from the passage what ‘Special,’ ‘Especial,’ ‘Individual,’ ‘General,’ or ‘Universal’ mean, and Coleridge does not usefully define these terms in the rest of the work. What Emerson would have been able to gather, though, is that the symbol enables the kind of part-whole relationship that will be very important to him. For at least one thing a symbol does, in Coleridge’s account, is allow the general to appear in the particular; more importantly, for the Eternal (the divine) to appear in the Temporal (the everyday object). Though Emerson would certainly take Coleridge’s definition of symbol to mean that the spiritual can appear in the material, as in correspondence theory, his reading does not exhaust Coleridge’s point. What matters for Coleridge is that a symbol is a ‘living part’ of a divine ‘Unity.’ When, for example, we read the stories in the Bible, we must take them symbolically, not allegorically. Each character ‘appears and acts as a self-subsisting individual: each has a life of its own, and yet all are one life’ (38). Read merely allegorically, characters represent individual stories and may teach lessons to the Understanding. When read

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with the eye of Reason, each individual biblical character is a symbol of divine Unity. As Coleridge continues, ‘Of this the Bible never suffers us to lose sight. The root is never detached from the ground. It is God everywhere’ (39). Biblical characters are parts of the divine whole and as such, they are symbolic. Symbolism’s divine truth provides Coleridge’s solution to the problem of the difference between the literal and the metaphorical: figurative language in scripture is literally, divinely, true. We can see this more clearly, and in a way that becomes increasingly significant to Emerson, when Coleridge looks at that other ‘revelation of God—the great book of his servant Nature’ (Coleridge 1816, xiii). Nature, Coleridge reminds us, ‘has been the music of gentle and pious minds in all ages, it is the poetry of all human nature, to read it likewise in a figurative sense, and to find therein correspondences and symbols of the spiritual world’ (xiii). Nature reveals its symbolism only to Reason, which, again, discovers the unity behind its particulars. When meditating, for example, on a flowery meadow before him, Coleridge writes: ‘I seem to myself to behold in the quiet objects, on which I am gazing, more than an arbitrary illustration, more than a mere simile, the work of my own Fancy! I feel an awe, as if there were before my eyes the same Power, as that of the Reason—the same Power in a lower dignity, and therefore a symbol established in the truth of things’ (Coleridge 1816, xiv). To intellectually conjecture that any part of nature was part of divine plan would be a ‘simile’ conjured by the Fancy, which is for Coleridge a mere ‘association’ of experiences recomposed from memory (Coleridge 1985, 313). Such a work of the Understanding, for example, the Deist argument from design, which infers a designer God (the target domain) from a visible design (the source domain), would be based on the idea that all designs have a designer; but crucially, it does not see the designer as part of the design. In empirical accounts, God is always absent. As such it is, in Coleridge’s terms, an allegory, which was, of course, Emerson’s conclusion when he examined the empiricist argument from design back in the 1820s. That version of the argument, based on the clockwork analogy, neglected that which gave the clockwork its power, namely gravity and elasticity. These are divine laws, not attributable to any clockmaker. As such, the analogy, or allegory in Coleridge’s terms, fails to be universal. To see nature as properly symbolic of the divine, in Coleridge’s terms, would be to intuit the absolute Unity of nature’s perfect cause, God, in each individual part (Coleridge 1816, xv). Coleridge calls this kind of seeing ‘Reason’: it unites Humankind and God, Part and Whole. As he continues in The Statesman’s Manual: I feel it [Reason] alike, whether I contemplate a single tree or flower, or meditate on vegetation throughout the world, as one of the great organs of the life of

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nature. Lo!—with the rising sun it commences its outward life and enters into open communion with all the elements, at once assimilating them to itself and to each other. At the same moment it strikes its roots and unfolds its leaves, absorbs and respires; steams forth its cooling vapour and finer fragrance, and breathes a repairing spirit, at once the food and tone of the atmosphere, into the atmosphere that feeds it. Lo!—at the touch of light how it returns an air akin to light, and yet with the same pulse effectuates its own secret growth, still contracting to fix what expanding it had refined. Lo!—how upholding the ceaseless plastic motion of the parts in the profoundest rest of the whole it becomes the visible organismus of the whole silent or elementary life of nature and, therefore, in incorporating the one extreme becomes the symbol of the other; the natural symbol of that higher life of reason, in which the whole series (known to us in our present state of being) is perfected, in. which, therefore, all the subordinate gradations recur, and are re-ordained ‘in more abundant honor.’ We had seen each in its own cast, and we now recognize them all as co-existing in the unity of a higher form, the Crown and Completion of the Earthly, and the Mediator of a new and heavenly series. (Coleridge 1816, xiv–iv; Coleridge’s emphases)

Here each individual part of nature—a tree, a flower, a root, or a leaf—is a ‘symbol’ of the whole of nature, not just in its momentary existence, but in its growth and development. What Coleridge is arguing is that none of these natural objects exist and change merely in and of themselves; they can exist and grow only because of the larger whole that, as parts, they symbolize. Coleridge’s deliberately organic extended metaphor succeeds, on his own (and Emerson’s) terms, where the clockwork argument from design fails. It succeeds because it puts God as a sustaining cause into every aspect of creation. Natural objects can symbolize a larger whole in ways that mechanical figures can only allegorize. Before returning to Emerson, it is worth taking the time to think about how Coleridge’s idea of symbolism works in CMT terms, and thus understand Romantic symbolism anew. We can begin with the part is the whole schema. A number of critics have noted the importance of synecdoche in Coleridge’s theory of symbolism.5 Synecdoche, according to CMT, is a subdivision of metaphor, where the target domain is the ‘whole’ of which the source domain is a ‘part,’ or vice versa (WFDT, 77, 79). However, CMT also tells us that the the part is the whole schema is reversible, and the whole is the part can also function conceptually; it has what CMT calls a dual figure/ground relationship (PF, 198ff). That is, the part (the figure) could be the focus of the metaphor and the whole (the ground) against which it sits, or the whole could be the focus, and the part the background. For example, we use figure/ground duals in categorizing ‘types’ (WFDT, 203). It is essential to everyday living that we make generalizations. As such, an individual can define a whole group, just as a whole group can define an individual.

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Understanding Coleridge’s symbolism through CMT, then, any part of nature works as a symbol when it conceptualizes its relationship to all of nature, and in a CMT dual sense, all of nature is present in each part. As such, using CMT, we can see that Coleridgean symbolism is a composite of two conceptual metaphors: the part is the whole (and its dual) and the spiritual is the material. The spiritual is the material, of course, depends on the great chain metaphor to conceptualize a hierarchy in which the whole of material nature is also symbolic of ‘the higher life of reason.’ According to Coleridge, both the inspired Hebrew poets of the Bible and the secular poetic tradition use such part/whole and spirit/matter metaphors, which we can see in the Bible if we put Coleridge’s silent quotation in the above passage from Corinthians 12:23, ‘in more abundant honor,’ back into its context: “And those members of the body, which we think to be less honourable, upon these we bestow more abundant honour; and our uncomely parts have more abundant comeliness.” In his chapter, Saint Paul uses a range of the part is the whole metaphors (‘For the body is all one and has many members . . . ,’ ‘For by the spirit we are all baptised into one member . . . ,’ and ‘but now they are many members yet one body’), to figure each individual’s relationship to the Church. Metaphorically, because the ‘whole’ is always in play, this divine inclusion necessarily extends to those parts of the body that ‘we think to be less honourable,’ raising them up to the divine by their unity. Because the book of revelation and the book of nature have the same cognitive topology, what is true of Scripture is also true of nature. The recognition that nature does not contain, according to Coleridge, the principal of its own creation and continuance, is a ‘natural symbol’ for the necessary existence of divine unity. Nature, as Coleridge puts it, ‘is a problem of which God is the only solution, God the one before all, and of all, and through all!” (Coleridge 1816, xvii). A symbol, then, in Coleridge’s sense, is a composite metaphor that puts together the synecdochic or metonymic the part is the whole conceptual metaphor with the underlying metaphor of the doctrine of correspondence, the spiritual is the material. These conceptual metaphors combine such that the ‘whole of nature’ maps onto ‘God as a whole,’ and the ‘whole of God’ maps onto ‘each part of nature’ and provide the basic cognitive structure that gives Coleridge—and after him, Emerson—access to God in nature. Something similar is at work, albeit in a nascent way, in a journal entry that Emerson wrote in April 1834, when his study of Coleridge was in full flood. How gloomy is the day & upon yonder shining pond what melancholy light if you bereave me of the Deity. I cannot keep the sun in heaven if you take away the Spirit that animates him. The ball is indeed there but his power to cheer, his power to illuminate the heart, as well as the atmosphere, is gone forever. Do you

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not see that wherever the wise man goes, light springs up in his path—he carries meaning to every dead symbol; the creator is in his heart, & illustrates & affects his world, through the hands of his servant. But the evil man, that is, the Atheist, goes up & down & all is dark & pernicious. (JMN4, 281)

Emerson’s passage is not an explicitly theoretical piece of writing; it is the record of a feeling that relies on symbolic reasoning in the terms we are just beginning to understand. Firstly, Emerson needs to recognize the spiritual in the material, the animating God in the sun. Secondly, Emerson sees this as a hermeneutic process: the ‘wise man . . . carries meaning to every dead symbol,’ which becomes a metaphorical process when we recall that the etymology of metaphor is ‘to carry over.’ Furthermore, there is an interesting confusion in Emerson’s use of the possessive pronoun ‘his’ that blends the human and God, part and whole, together: ‘the creator is in his heart, & illustrates & affects his world, through the hands of his servant.’ The first ‘his’ refers to the wise man; the second ‘his’ is ambiguous—it could be the wise man’s world; it could be God’s—but the final ‘his’ definitely refers to God. Emerson’s ambiguity is intriguing. Does God ‘illustrate & affect his world’ through the servant or does the servant ‘illustrate & affect his world’ because of the divine presence in his heart. Either way, the ambiguity presents Emerson’s move from part to whole, where, symbolically, they become interchangeable. That God is in humanity because humanity is part of God is Emerson’s turn of the screw on Coleridgean symbolism. God, though, is not just in humanity, as we can see in a subsequent paragraph of the same entry: ‘I saw a hawk today wheeling up to heaven in a spiral flight & every circle becoming less to the eye till he vanished into the atmosphere. What could be more in unison with all pure & brilliant images? Yet is the creature an unclean greedy eater & all his geography from that grand observatory was a watching of barn yards, or an inspection of moles & field mice. So with the pelican crane & the tribes of sea-fowl—disgusting gluttons all’ (JMN4, 281). The initial image is a clear and singular vision without any symbolic meaning (though it may recall the ascension of the Great Chain of Being). Emerson immediately attempts to make it part of something bigger by relating it to all ‘pure & brilliant images.’ But the problem is, if the part is a whole, then as an ‘unclean’ part, that whole is also unclean. Emerson needs to rework his metaphors to avoid symbolizing an unclean God (as in the Corinthians quotation above). In a passage that falls between this one and the one about ‘dead symbols’ we just looked at, Emerson briefly reflects on a contemporary atheist minister, Abner Kneeland, and President Andrew Jackson, whom he tries not to despise. As he writes: ‘In the great cycle they find their place & like the insect that fertilizes the soil with worm casts or the scavenger bustard that removes carrion they perform a

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benefice they know not of, & cannot hinder if they would’ (JMN4, 281). Here it is the whole that gives the part its place—the ‘great cycle.’ This whole is the meaning which the ‘wise man’ imposes upon the particulars of an atheist, a bad president, an insect, or a bird of prey. Symbolically, as Emerson puts it at the end of the journal entry, ‘in nature all these disagreeable individuals integrate themselves into a cleanly & pleasing whole’ (JMN2, 281). The conceptual metaphor the part is the whole, which should turn the whole corrupt because of the corruption of the part, turns the part into an aspect of the divine plan. Emerson’s metaphor works because the part is the whole is, as we have seen, a dual metaphor and the whole is the part is also true. God, then, is in every part of material nature and any part of material nature can symbolize the divine. Thus, Emerson will read the presence of God in even the most unlikely places. ‘What is there of divine is a load of bricks?’ he asks. ‘What is there of the divine in a barber’s shop or a privy? Much. All’ (JMN4, 307). All of God, then, metaphorically conceptualised, exists in all of nature and in each of its parts. Having established that Coleridge’s idea of ‘symbolism’ is a composite conceptual metaphor, made up of the part is the whole (and its dual), and the spiritual is the material, we now need to examine Coleridge’s own definition of metaphor. In his Aids to Reflection, Coleridge distinguishes metaphor from analogy, symbol, and allegory in the context of the language of the Gospels. ‘Language is analogous,’ he writes, ‘whenever a thing, power, or principle in a higher dignity is expressed by the same thing, power, or principle in a lower but more known form’ (Coleridge 2006, 136). In such a hierarchical relationship, material things are apt to express spiritual things, which is another expression of the conceptual metaphor that underlies the Doctrine of Correspondence: the spiritual is the material. Coleridge’s example is John 3:6: ‘That which is born of flesh is flesh; that which is born of the Spirit is Spirit.’ The first half asserts something easily known; the second half ‘contains the analogous fact by which it is rendered intelligible’ (136). Other such analogies are ‘divine Justice,’ ‘born again,’ and ‘spiritual life.’ These, Coleridge says, may look like metaphors, but they are analogical, not merely figurative. That is, they use known facts, such as human justice, human birth, and life, to make something more difficult to know, such as divine justice, a second birth, and a spiritual existence intelligible. Analogies, Coleridge remarks, are also the material for the higher form of the symbol, as the fact used ‘expresses the same subject but with a difference’ (136; Coleridge’s emphasis). That is, the analogy ‘spiritual life’ uses ‘life’ as its subject, but a spiritual life is wholly different from a material life. As such, the analogy itself can symbolically disclose the divine Unity that is the cause of all life.

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A metaphor, on the other hand, expresses ‘a different subject but with a resemblance’ (136; Coleridge’s emphasis). Unfortunately, Coleridge does not give an example, but if we take the standard ‘Achilles is a lion,’ then we would say that the two subjects, Achilles and the lion, are different, but they share a resemblance, such as nobility or fierceness. Coleridge’s explanation of metaphor in Aids to Reflection, based on cause and effect, is complex even by his convoluted standards. A free gloss might run as follows. We begin with a known relationship between cause and effect, say, the sun warming the earth and enabling growth. If we used this known causal relationship as a figure for Divine love, we would be using a metaphor because the actual cause of the warming of the earth and enabling growth, namely radiant heat, is nothing like the way God would warm the earth, say, through love. To confuse the two, Coleridge argues, would be to mistake metaphor for analogy. Such a mistake may even become literalized and lead to the superstition of sun-worship (as with the Neo-Platonists). The argument from design, as explained above, would be another example. Metaphors, then, for Coleridge, are ‘illustrative’ only, whereas analogies aid ‘conviction’ (136–7). People, he argues, typically read nature and Scripture allegorically or metaphorically, but those figurative interpretations miss the essential analogic and symbolic value. As he concludes: ‘True natural philosophy is comprised in the study of the science and language of symbols. The power delegated to nature is all in every part: and by a symbol I mean, not a metaphor or allegory or any other figure of speech or form of fancy, but an actual and essential part of that, the whole of which it represents’ (Coleridge 1816, xix). For Coleridge, only analogy and symbolism connect nature and Scripture to God through what CMT identifies as the part is the whole and the spiritual is the material metaphors; all other figures are misunderstandings. Emerson, as we shall see, accepts the conceptual underpinning, but rejects the differentiation of terms. THE GARMENT OF THOUGHT While Emerson read and reread Coleridge as he was developing his ideas on language, he had an active role in publishing the work of Thomas Carlyle in the United States, including his 1834 book Sartor Resartus, which discusses symbolism and metaphor at length. While little that Carlyle said about either concept would have been new to Emerson by 1834, it confirmed or extended his thinking. Sartor Resartus is a fictionalized account of the life and writings of one Professor Diogenes Teufelsdröckh (or ‘God-born Devil’s-Dung’), a contemporary German philosopher whose interest is the curious philosophy of clothes: ‘sartor resartus’ means ‘the tailor re-tailored.’ Woven into this pseudo-biography is a satirical synthesis of Carlyle’s extensive reading in

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the German philosophy of the previous half century, from Immanuel Kant’s critical turn, through to the transcendental idealism of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, spiced with Carlyle’s firsthand knowledge of the Romantic idioms of Novalis, John Paul, and the brothers Schlegel. Emerson was broadly aware of the intellectual context through his reading of Carlyle’s earlier essays, though unable to judge it academically; and, while not fully cognizant of Sartor’s satiric nature, he would have taken it not unreasonably, as he did Cudworth’s True Intellectual System, as a sourcebook of European philosophy. One of Sartor’s main themes is the now-familiar visible versus invisible trope, an expression of the spiritual is the material and understanding is seeing conceptual metaphors. As Carlyle puts it, in Teufelsdröckh’s voice, ‘All visible things are emblems; what thou seest is not there on its own; strictly taken, is not there at all: Matter exists only spiritually, and to represent some Idea and body it forth’ (Carlyle 2000, 55). Matter, then, as for Reed and Oegger, is an ‘emblem’ of spirit; it gives a ‘body’ to the ‘Ideas’ of spirit—that is, its concepts. The visibility of spirit is a function of, in particular, clothes— hence the Professor’s interest in them. Clothes becomes the presiding metaphor for matter as something that reveals the spirit, as clothes reveal the shape of an underlying body. As Teufelsdröckh continues: ‘all Emblematic things are properly Clothes, thought-woven or hand-woven: must not the Imagination weave Garments, visible Bodies, wherein the else invisible creations and inspirations of our Reason are, like Spirits, revealed’ (55–6). Bodies, then, become the clothing of spirit, and they reveal something of that spirit in the same way that that clothing reveals something of the wearer, even while concealing it. Carlyle’s Professor takes his clothing metaphor further, not only recognizing that he is using a metaphor, but also using that metaphor to understand metaphor itself: Language is called the Garment of Thought: however, it should rather be, Language is the Flesh-Garment, the Body, of Thought. I said that Imagination wove this Flesh-Garment; and does not she? Metaphors are her stuff: examine Language; what, if you except some few primitive elements (of natural sound), what is it all but Metaphors, recognized as such, or no longer recognized; still fluid and florid, or now solid-grown and colorless? If those same primitive elements are the osseous fixtures in the Flesh-Garment, Language,—then are Metaphors its muscles and tissues and living integuments. (56)

Carlyle goes much further than Coleridge here: language is not merely superficially metaphorical; nor is metaphor just a means to spiritual knowledge. The very substance of language is metaphor. Metaphor is not something thought wears, as though it could go naked and still be itself; or be even more

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itself without that ornament. Metaphor is essential to language. Metaphors may no longer be ‘recognized as such’ (like Emerson’s fossils, they may appear ‘solid-grown’), but even so metaphors are not dead: they are ‘fluid and florid,’ language’s ‘tissues and living integuments.’ His example is a so-called dead metaphor: ‘is not your very Attention a stretching-to?’ (11), the Latin etymology reminding us of how bodily activity, stretching toward something, acts as a schema for conceptualizing an aspect of consciousness. Carlyle’s editors trace his interest in metaphor back to an 1829 journal entry: ‘All language but that concerning sensual objects is or has been figurative. Prodigious influence of metaphors! Never saw into it till lately. A truly useful and philosophical work would be a good Essay on Metaphors. Some day I will write one.’ Carlyle’s editors go on to remind us that he never did write that essay, but they also claim that this short passage was ‘the impetus if not the genesis, for Sartor Resartus’ (299). The clothing metaphor, then, is a kind of archetype for metaphor in general. Indeed, Carlyle’s ‘clothing’ metaphor turns out to be a common one. As early as 1822, when thinking about poetry, Emerson writes, ‘there seems to be a tendency in the passions to clothe fanciful views of objects in beautiful language. It seems to consist in the pleasure of finding out a connection between a material image and a moral sentiment’ (JMN1, 35–4). The clothing metaphor seems natural, even conventional, for the matter/spirit relationship. It is likely that Emerson is remembering his reading of Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric. Blair wrote: ‘for it is, in truth, the sentiment of passion, which lies under the figured expression that give it any merit. The figure is only the dress, the Sentiment is the body and the substance’ (Blair 1787, 349–50). Emerson moralises Blair and anticipates Carlyle. Swedenborg also uses a clothing metaphor to illustrate the relation between matter and spirit at the point of death: ‘The organical body with which the soul clothes itself also puts off the body, and casts it away as old clothes, (exuviae) when it emigrates by means of death from the natural world to its own spiritual world’ (Cameron 1945, 1:236). Carlyle’s editors note two other occurrences of the metaphor: Samuel Wesley’s ‘Style is the dress of thought’ (1700), and Samuel Johnson’s ‘Language is the Dress of thought’ (1779–1781) (Carlyle 2000, 299). Of these, though, only Carlyle’s version claims that metaphor and the language it supports is more than mere rhetoric or an inessential aspect of thought; in Sartor, to cast off the clothing is to leave nothing behind, and Teufelsdröckh’s claim that metaphor is ‘Thought’s-Body’ seems unique, at least until CMT. For Carlyle’s Professor, a symbol is different from a metaphor, and his definition has much in common with Coleridge’s: ‘In the Symbol proper, what we can call a Symbol, there is ever, more or less distinctly and directly, some embodiment and revelation of the Infinite; the Infinite is made to blend

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itself with the Finite, to stand visible, and as it were, attainable there’ (162). Like metaphor, the symbol is a visible embodiment of an invisible thing, but it is more specific. As for Coleridge, the symbol uses a part (something finite) to stand for a whole (the infinite), in such a way that the latter blends with and is revealed through the former. As composite metaphors, symbols are in part always synecdoches or metonymies. Teufelsdröckh’s example, though, unlike Coleridge’s, is not religious or even natural. Flags, ‘heraldic coats and banners’ are symbols, but they have what the Professor calls ‘extrinsic’ value only (163). That is, they may become rallying points, and the uniting function they perform may reveal something of the mystic unities of the divine, or of duty, but they are nothing more. Even ‘the Cross itself’ has only extrinsic meaning for Teufelsdröckh. Christ’s life, however, has what the Professor calls ‘intrinsic meaning’ (164–5). That is, it manifests God to the senses, which is something that true works of art can achieve, as can Death, giving a ‘gleam’ of eternity (165). Carlyle, then, like Coleridge, has forged an idea of symbolism out of the same underlying conceptual metaphors: the part is the whole and the spiritual is the material. ‘MAN IS THE DWARF OF HIMSELF’ After Coleridge and Carlyle, we can understand the Romantic symbol in CMT terms as a composite conceptual metaphor that unites a natural or material source domain with a synecdochic part/whole schema to conceptualize the presence of divine unity in all individual things. Though the two British Romantic thinkers call this composite metaphor a ‘symbol’ and distinguish it to a greater or lesser extent from other figurative forms, Emerson will call it, by turns, a metaphor, an allegory, an analogy, a trope, an emblem, or a symbol (among other things), as he sees fit. Where for the empiricists only analogy could reason from the known to the unknown, albeit in a limited manner, for Emerson all figures can do this without favor. Whereas for Coleridge allegory, metaphor and simile are just figures of fancy and merely illustrative, and only symbols, based on analogies, reveal the connection between all things and the divine, for Emerson all figurative forms have that capacity. What we have seen in the foregoing is that the basic conceptual structure of all these tropes, despite the personal and philosophical discriminations of poets and philosophers, is metaphorical—the mapping of a source domain onto a target domain to provide conceptual structure for something that is not experienceable. The choices they make between tropes are efforts to create a specious hierarchy to constrain the role of metaphor in thinking. In fundamental terms, two conceptual metaphors, the part is the whole and the material is the spiritual, form the underlying conceptual crux upon which

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Emerson’s theory of figurative language sits. Emerson’s theory may relate closely to what Coleridge and Carlyle call symbolism, but it is, structurally and cognitively, based on metaphor. We can see Emerson’s theory of symbolism at work in CMT terms if we take a close look at a dozen or so pages from his journal from June to July 1836, written as he was drafting his first major work, Nature, which he would publish later that year. These pages give some indication of the way that the ideas I have been discussing so far were coalescing at this extraordinarily productive period of Emerson’s intellectual life. We can begin with Emerson’s quasi-empirical account of the relationship between part and whole, seeing how it develops into an encompassing theological and philosophical vision. ‘The εν και παν [one and all] is the reason why our education can be carried on & perfected any where & with any bias whatsoever. If I study an ant hill & neglect all business, all history, all conversation yet shall that ant hill humbly & lovingly & unceasingly explored furnish me with a parallel experience & the same conclusions to me which business, history, & conversation would have brought me’ (JMN5, 176). Here we see the conceptual metaphor the part is the whole written into everyday experience: the concerted, even passionate, study of any single aspect of nature will reveal the same conclusions as the study of any and all other aspects of nature. The Greek phrase, εν και παν, which Emerson probably picked up from Cudworth, but that he would also have found alluded to in Goethe, means ‘one and all,’ and stands as a shorthand for the metaphor at work in this passage (Greenham 2012, 169–73, 205n). In the following entries, Emerson develops the theme. A ‘carpenter thinks the world is made of wood,’ for a mason it is ‘brick and line’ and for a farmer ‘grass & potatoes.’ But these singular visions are not narrow. They are adequate to a knowledge of the ‘all.’ As Emerson puts it, ‘Each in turn puts his stamp upon the hour. This also shows how transparent all things are & show God through every angle’ (JMN5, 176). God, then, is visible (understanding is seeing) no matter what perspective you take on life (the part is the whole). Of course, there is a catch. As Emerson says above, our vision needs to be ‘humble,’ ‘loving,’ and ‘unceasing’; there are wrong ways and right ways to look at nature through the lens of your vocation. If seen rightly, however, as he puts it with a further part/whole metaphor, ‘they no doubt are points in this curve of the great circle’ (JMN5, 176). Emerson picks up his idea of a ‘great circle,’ using the circumference slot as a border that unites parts and wholes a few pages later in the following extended metaphor: ‘A fact we said was the terminus of spirit. A man, I, am the remote circumference, the skirt, the thin suburb or frontier post of God but go inward & I find the ocean; I lose my individuality in its waves. God is Unity, but always works in variety. I go inward until I find Unity universal, that Is before the World was; I come outward to this body a point of variety’

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(JMN5, 177). The principal underlying schema here is the container, with its cognitive topology of inside, outside, and the border between them, which Emerson uses to structure a complex and mobile symbolic relationship between humankind and God, focusing on a series of interactions at the container’s border. When looking at the first sentence, we need to recall that Terminus was the Greek god of boundaries. His name derives from the ancient Greek root terma, meaning a boundary or limit. The ‘terminus,’ or boundary slot, of the container is used to map ‘a fact,’ an Emersonian synonym for anything material. In this instance, the boundary contains ‘spirit.’ Emerson then parallels the ‘fact’ with himself as a ‘man,’ a single fact among many, and the ‘terminus’ with a ‘circumference,’ ‘skirt,’ ‘thin suburb,’ or ‘frontier post.’ Each different term registering the same boundary slot of the container schema. He uses the ‘inside’ slot of the schema’s cognitive topology to think about the contained substance by moving ‘inward’ from an edge to a center. What he locates at that central point is God. God is immediately figured as an ocean (the spiritual is the material), which is a strange elaboration, as the cognitive topology of an ocean would imply unboundedness. The resulting composite metaphor is, of course, the point. Even though for Emerson God is inside the container, he cannot therefore be bound by it as that would limit the concept of God that target domain override would reject. Hence the mixed—or catachrestic—metaphor of a contained ocean. Then, drawing the change of state is change of location metaphor, Emerson’s ‘I’ moves from the border to the inside of the container and changes thereby, losing his ‘factual’ individuality amidst the waves of the ocean. He becomes, through this movement, something other—a part of a whole, rather than a single fact or point of variety. What we are seeing here is the result of a full shift in Emerson’s thought. A dozen years earlier, in 1824, metaphorical thinking was merely progressive— it would never reach the ideas it wants to figure. Now, after working through the conclusions of the Empiricists, and reading Cudworth, Swedenborg, Coleridge, and Carlyle, Emerson recognizes that the immaterial things philosophy is reaching for—mind, Being, essence, God—only come exist for us because of, indeed as, metaphors. His metaphorical philosophy continues in the final lines of the extract, where there is a further shift of metaphors and of concepts. Unity is figured in terms of time as ‘that Is before the world was.’ Here we see an inference from the Neo-Platonic causes are forces metaphor at work, namely that the cause, in this case God, is temporally prior to the effect, in this case variety. But, because of the part/whole dual, Emerson’s self is necessarily already present in that moment of creation. The basic causes are forces, states are locations and container metaphors work together in Emerson’s conclusion: ‘I come outward to this body a point of variety.’

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That is, Emerson moves (causes are forces), from a state of unity to a point of variety (change of state is change of location) across the boundary of the divine (container) and into his own unique being, which is still a part of the whole (the part is the whole). We can now see that Emerson, using four conceptual metaphors, has begun to redefine what it is to be human. The human cannot be distant from a God that is everywhere and in everything. The human must always be, as Emerson will famously put it in Nature ‘part or particle of God’ (CW1, 10). The ‘part or particle’ metaphor from the ‘transparent eyeball’ epiphany, which I will examine in detail in the next chapter, is itself a development of the part is the whole and scale metaphors that Emerson was playing with over the summer of 1836. Take the following, its emendations showing how Emerson’s linguistic expressions are working with his underlying conceptual metaphors: ‘The drop is a small ocean[,] the ocean a large drop. A leaf is a miniature of Nature Nature a variety of the leaf. simplified world[] the world a manifold compound leaf’ (JMN5, 178; Emerson’s emendations). The first sentence is a perfect figure/ground dual, where part and whole correspond to each other exactly. The second sentence, with its revisions, repeats the metaphorical structure, amending ‘Nature’ to ‘world,’ ‘miniature’ to ‘simple,’ and ‘variety’ to ‘compound,’ moving Emerson from a romantic to a scientific language, while importing the conclusions of the former into the latter, so that science becomes Romantic—as we shall see in Chapter 4, poetry’s corrections of science are essential. Even so, Emerson’s use of a scientific source domain is important, as it reframes the part whole schema in terms of scale. A few weeks earlier, Emerson had used the first sentence about the ocean and the drop in an explicitly scientific context. A conclusion Emerson had drawn from his scientific reading was that ‘in the immensity of matter, there is no great & no small’ (JMN5, 169), or as he would rephrase it, ‘Magnitude is nothing to science’ (JMN5, 177). Such knowledge bolsters Emerson’s the part is the whole metaphor by questioning, in CMT terms, the scale schema that inevitably underlies it. One of the issues of the part/ whole schema is scale—i.e., as the whole is inevitably bigger than the part, they cannot be strictly equal. Emerson’s scientific insight removes the problem. There is no sense of scale in science: part and whole, small and large, drop and ocean, are all one, and as such, each can represent the other. Emerson is putting together the metaphors that will underlie his first great essay, Nature. Indeed, that essay will repeat, almost verbatim, the following extract, which further develops Emerson’s idea of the scalar, part/whole relationship between humanity and God:    

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↑Man is the dwarf of himself.↓ Is it not true that spirit in us is dwarfed by clay? that once Man was permeated & dissolved by spirit? He filled Nature with his overflowing currents. Out of him sprang the sun & and moon [;] from man the sun[,] from woman the moon. The laws of his mind[,] the periods of his deeds externised themselves into day & night [,] into the year & seasons. But having made for himself this vast shell the waters retired, he no longer fills its veins & veinlets, he is shrunk into a drop. He sees it still fits him but fits him colossally. He adores timidly his own work. Say rather once it fitted him[;] now it corresponds to him from far & from on high. (JMN5, 179–80; editors’ marks and interpolations)

There are several familiar conceptual metaphors at work in this complex figurative passage. The first sentence is a scale metaphor, that inverts the spirit-matter opposition of the great chain. Where, typically, spirit would be higher up the scale, in Emerson’s elaboration matter figured as biblical clay dwarfs spirit. The next sentence takes us back in time, to a point when clay and matter were ‘permeated & dissolved by spirit’ and the normal hierarchy of the great chain held. The inference is that we are solid and material now, but we were once fluid and spiritual—like language itself. Emerson then expands upon our former spiritual condition, drawing on composite container metaphors. There are two containers, nature and the human; the second sits inside the first. However, in Emerson’s image, the inner ‘man’ container overflows and fills the outer ‘nature’ container. His expanded concept of self is our primary condition, a state in which, Emerson continues, we created nature—the sun and the moon. The second container, then, nature itself, is an emanation of humankind. As we have seen previously, Emerson’s elaborates the Neo-Platonist and Swedenborgian Doctrine of Correspondence, where humankind rather than God is the principle creative force and sits in the ‘origin’ slot. Emerson compresses the underlying causes are forces metaphor typical of the Doctrine into the work ‘sprang.’ In the second half of the passage, Emerson uses the container metaphor to figure a diminution. Nature becomes a ‘vast shell’ from which human creative, oceanic plenitude has ‘retired.’ Echoing an earlier metaphor, the human has shrunk from an ocean to a drop, but without the requisite vision to see the identity between drop and ocean. He then brings back the opening scale schema, this time using a Carlylean clothing metaphor which registers a Fall. Nature fits us still, but if fits us colossally. That is, nature carries a record of the shape we gave it, the record of human creation, but it now seems so vast that we are ‘timid’ before it and can only recognize a dim correspondence that places nature above humankind, its original creator. Emerson’s complex of metaphors explains a later interpolation into the passage’s first line: ‘Man is

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the dwarf of himself.’ We are now but a part of the whole that we once were when Humanity and God, the drop and the ocean, were one. In Emersonian terms, the ability to return to that full-scale world is always a consequence of metaphorical thinking as we have come to understand it. He most often figures his insight into metaphor as a kind of vision (understanding is seeing). Essential to this vision are the conceptual metaphors the spiritual is the material and the part is the whole. These metaphors, learned primarily from Swedenborg and Coleridge, answer the questions raised by empiricism by rejecting its conclusions. Metaphor is not a problem for thought, it is not something that Emerson needs to limit to a carefully defined heuristic such as analogy. Rather, metaphor allows thinking to happen, and through these two key metaphors, it structures the relationship between humankind, nature, and God. To recognize this fundamental conceptual power of metaphor is, for Emerson, to take part in a creative revolution. To enable others to recognize the same metaphorical vision, that matter represents spirit and that we are all part of a divine whole, is, as I shall show in the next chapter, the task of Emerson’s first published work, Nature. NOTES 1. CMT has engaged with the relationship between metaphor and philosophy, including analytic philosophy, in several places. See, for example, Mark Johnson 1981. See also PF, 74–93, 440–69. 2. As I put in it elsewhere: ‘Despite the arguments of Feidelson and Bercovitch it is actually quite hard even to assert a line of continuity with the Puritanism of Jonathan Edwards. In the ten volumes of the Collected Works and the three volumes of Early Lectures there is not one mention of his name. In the sixteen volumes of the Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks, references to Edwards can be counted on your fingers, whereas the citations from and direct allusions to Goethe, Shakespeare, Milton and Coleridge are far too numerous to count. What is evident is that Emerson, the mythical father of American literature, is, despite any claims to the contrary, a transatlantic figure’ (Greenham 2016a, 263). 3. For a CMT interpretation of ‘fire’ metaphors in Zoroastrianism, see CharterisBlack, 2017, 91–104. 4. See Greenham, 2012, 35–47 and passim. 5. See Rahme 1969, 622, on ‘synecdoche’ in Coleridge.

Chapter Three

‘Leaving Me My Eyes’ Nature’s Embodied Theory of Metaphor

In the last two chapters, I have shown that what was a problem for Emerson in the 1820s, a limit on theological and philosophical speculation, transforms by the 1830s, and Emerson is able to accept the work of metaphor. We can see his acceptance in the 1835 ‘Introductory’ lecture to a series on English Literature: ‘objects without [man] are more than commodities. Whilst they minister to the senses’ sensual gratification, they minister to the mind as vehicles and symbols of thought. All language is the naming of invisible and spiritual things from visible things. The use of the outer creation is to give us language for the beings and changes of inward creation’ (EL1, 220). Here, side by side, sits the influence of the New Church, the Neo-Platonists, the Romantics, and the Empiricists. Emerson’s lecture also foreshadows, by one hundred and fifty years, CMT’s conclusion that ‘we generally use the language of the external world to apply to the internal mental world, which is metaphorically structured as parallel to that external world’ (BM, 51). By the mid-1830s, Emerson had learned from a range of different and even hostile traditions that the language of inner life is only possible because of ‘our experience in the material world.’ Indeed, metaphor creates the entire conceptual vocabulary of mental experience. ‘BORROWED FROM SENSE’ One phrase from the above quotation, ‘the senses’ sensual gratification,’ takes us toward the last—and perhaps most important—theoretical insight from conceptual metaphor theory that we may have already noticed operating in empiricism, the Doctrine of Correspondence, and Romanticism—namely, that our conceptual life is only possible because of the source domains provided by our embodied experience of the world; what Emerson calls ‘our 81

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experience in the material world.’ As George Lakoff puts it, setting out some of CMT’s primary conclusions: Reason is not disembodied, as the tradition has largely held, but arises from the nature of our brains, bodies, and bodily experience. This is not just the innocuous and obvious claim that we need a body to reason; rather, it is the striking claim that the very structure of reason itself comes from the details of our embodiment. The same neural and cognitive mechanisms that allow us to perceive and move around also create our conceptual systems and modes of reason. [R]eason is not, in any way, a transcendent feature of the universe or of disembodied mind. Instead, it is shaped crucially by the peculiarities of our human bodies, by the remarkable details of the neural structure of our brains, and by the specifics of our everyday functioning in the world. (PF, 4)

This passage is a translation into CMT terms of Emerson’s sense of the relationship between mind and world, which, as we have seen, is underpinned by the basic conceptual metaphor the spiritual is the material. For both CMT and Emerson, the material world provides the source domains for spiritual target domains, including the mind and its cognates. We have also seen that these material source domains, through their gestalt structures and cognitive topologies, provide the structure for our understanding of spiritual target domains. Lakoff’s claim, though, reduces this conceptual mapping to a finer point by focusing on embodiment. My contention is that Emerson’s recourse to the ‘senses’ and the ‘sensual’ suggests that his theory of metaphor is, at least in part, embodied—as was Carlyle’s, for whom ‘Language is the Flesh-Garment, the Body, of Thought.’ It may not be a happy situation for Emerson, but the body is always present in the way that he expresses his own ideas—even in his most famous metaphor, ‘the transparent eye-ball’ (CW1, 10), to which I shall turn at the end of the chapter. As Lakoff suggests, concepts of the mind such as reason may appear to be transcendent and disembodied, but the way human body interacts with the world shapes their very nature, and these embodied interactions provide the gestalt structures for the basic-level schemas that I have been working with so far. We can begin a more purposeful examination of basic-level embodiment by looking more closely at one of Emerson’s key conceptual metaphors, the part is the whole. For Emerson, part/whole metaphors enable him to conceive a grand unity between humankind and nature; but, more crucially, a unity between God and humanity. God’s whole is in the human part; the human is a part of the divine whole. This unity may seem rather cosmic for an embodied metaphor, but we have seen in Coleridge’s reference to Saint Paul’s letters to the Corinthians that embodied part/whole metaphors can conceptualize the spiritual relationship between the individual and the church.

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For CMT, the body as a basic-level schema is an exemplary occasion of part/ whole structures, both in itself and in its relationship with the world: We are whole beings with parts that we can manipulate. Our entire lives are spent with an awareness of both our wholeness and our parts. We experience our bodies as wholes with parts. In order to get around in the world, we have to be aware of the part-whole structure of other objects. In fact, we have evolved so that our basic-level perception can distinguish the fundamental part-whole structure that we need in order to function in our physical environment. (WFDT, 273)

That humans are simultaneously parts and wholes is fundamental for CMT. We are single beings, but we have hands, eyes, lungs, brains, feet, skin, etc. As we experience ourselves, we experience these parts working both independently and together at different times and in different ways. Sometimes, as Emerson says in 1833, the eye and the hand work together: ‘The eye is a miracle; the hand is another. A third is their mutual adjustment’ (EL1, 40). At the same time, he notes, the eye and the voice work together: ‘fix the eye upon a person in the remote corner of the house, for, by so doing, the voice naturally elevates itself to such a pitch that that person can hear’ (40–1). But what really matters is ‘the perfect inter-accommodation of all these senses’ (40); that is, that the parts of the body work together as a whole. CMT also tells us that not only are our bodies part/whole structures, but our bodies also make us ‘aware of the part-whole structures of other objects.’ To manipulate objects, we need to be aware that their wholes have parts—insides and outsides, tops and bottoms, handles and lids, and so on. At the basic level, CMT argues, we organize objects of experience according to their relationship to our bodies. Things are not, in themselves, large or small—only so in relation to our body (we have seen Emerson equate the drop with the ocean, humankind with God). Things, in themselves, do not have fronts and backs or tops and bottoms, but only in relation to our embodied experience of them; even a handle is only a handle because humans have hands. Also, the way in which we split wholes into basic level parts is based on embodied experience. Objects are all but infinitely indivisible, but we split them up, for the most part, at the level of our bodily interaction with them. As Lakoff puts it: Perhaps the best way of thinking about basic-level categories is that they are ‘human-sized.’ They depend not on objects themselves, independent of people, but on the way people interact with objects: the way they perceive them, image them, organize information about them, and behave toward them with their bodies. The relevant properties clustering together to define such categories are not inherent to the objects, but are interactional properties, having to do with the way people interact with objects. (WFDT, 51)

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It is these human-sized part-whole structures that form our basic-level metaphors. So, when we are considering embodied metaphors, we are not just thinking about metaphors based on a bodily source domain (which I will discuss in more detail in the next chapter), but also those based on bodily interactions, and those that derive from a human-scale perspective. It is these basic-level metaphors, which are material by their very nature, that form the source domains for Emerson’s the spiritual is the material metaphor. The great chain is a clear example. A chain (or a ladder) exists on a human scale; it can be manipulated by the hand; its use relates body to world (lifting, pulling, climbing); its verticality is relative to human posture. We can say the same about the link and the scale, which combine to make the great chain: they are fundamentally human-scale schemas. The cosmic hierarchy the great chain maps has few of these qualities—much of it is intangible and disembodied (the spiritual); little of it inherently relates to the human. Yet metaphors drawn from our embodied and interactive experience make give order to that cosmic complexity. Embodied metaphor works on these terms in the following quotation from Emerson’s 1835 ‘Introductory’ lecture, a passage that appears almost untouched in Nature the next year: Every word which is used to express a moral or intellectual fact, if traced to its root, is found to be borrowed from some corporeal or animal fact. Right originally means straight; wrong means twisted. Spirit primarily means wind. Transgression means the crossing a line. Supercilious, the raising of the eyebrow. Light and heat in all languages are used as metaphors of wisdom and love. We say heart to express emotion; the head to denote thought: and ‘thought’ and ‘emotion’ are in their turn mere words borrowed from sense, that have become appropriated to spiritual nature. (EL1, 220; Emerson’s emphases)

Emerson’s access to the embodied origin of spiritual terms—here he uses the cognates ‘moral’ and ‘intellectual’—is through etymology. The OED largely confirms Emerson’s embodied etymologies. ‘Right’ is derived from straight, which itself comes from stretch or stretched out—a bodily act. It relates to the Latin ‘rectus,’ which also means straight, but also gives us our word ‘right.’ The concept of the right, then, is to follow a line; again, deriving from bodily movement. Wrong is related to wring, or twist; but also, to early words for sour, each of which arise from bodily interactions with material things. Together these provide source domains for the conventional metaphors morality is straightness and immorality is crookedness. To ‘transgress,’ which Emerson glosses as ‘the crossing of a line,’ may seem to be based on the same conceptual metaphor as right, which also suggests a linear schema. But it is more likely a container metaphor, which maps appropriate behavior

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to the inside and inappropriate behavior to the outside. The addition of the change of state is change of location metaphor creates the ‘transgress’ composite. Crossing a boundary is a physical movement, and thus embodied. ‘Supercilious, the raising of the eyebrow’ is self-evidently ‘corporeal.’ ‘Light’ as a metaphor for wisdom is based on understanding is seeing; ‘heat’ to figure ‘love’ is a linguistic expression of the conventional affection is warmth metaphor. Both derive from embodied experience. Using ‘heart to express emotion’ and ‘head to denote thought’ is to use the body even more straightforwardly to figure mental states. ‘Spirit,’ which Emerson derives from ‘wind,’ may not seem embodied at first. We can, though, discover a bodily origin for even this metaphor if we look at a possible source text for Emerson’s embodied etymologies: the beginning of Book 3 of Locke’s Essay, ‘Of Words.’ Locke writes: It may also lead us a little towards the original of all our notions and knowledge, if we remark how great a dependence our words have on common sensible ideas; and how those which are made use of to stand for actions and notions quite removed from sense, have their rise from thence, and from obvious sensible ideas are transferred to more abstruse significations, and made to stand for ideas that come not under the cognizance of our senses; v.g. to imagine, apprehend, comprehend, adhere, conceive, instil, disgust, disturbance, tranquillity, &c., are all words taken from the operations of sensible things, and applied to certain modes of thinking. Spirit, in its primary signification, is breath; angel, a messenger: and I doubt not but, if we could trace them to their sources, we should find, in all languages, the names which stand for things that fall not under our senses to have had their first rise from sensible ideas. (Locke 2004, 362; Locke’s emphases)

Locke begins and ends the passage by acknowledging that our ‘words’ derive from what he calls ‘sensible ideas.’ For the Empiricist, ‘sensible’ means of the senses, and thus, of the body. He then gives a series of examples, and we can see straightaway that Emerson’s ‘spirit primarily means wind’ echoes Locke’s ‘spirit in its primary signification, is breath.’ The OED favors Locke’s etymology. ‘Spirit’ is the root of respire, inspire, conspire, etc., each of which relates to breathing. Locke provides the embodied root for Emerson’s metaphor. The breath is a complex and unusual source domain. Its gestalt schema is, strictly speaking, invisible, and thus all the more apt for a spiritual target domain. We only sense breath by its effects, such as coolness in the nose, the movement of the chest, the feel of it against our skin, its scent, or its movement against another object. It is also, and perhaps more importantly, present in many living beings and absent in dead beings. As such, breath’s slots mark a difference between the living and the dead, which, along with breath’s invisibility, serves as a complex source domain to cross-map an ‘invisible’ target

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domain of an inner life, which has a limited preconceptual or literal structure. It is also worth recalling that several other terms for the unique, disembodied inner ‘life’ of humans, such as psyche, anima, and pneuma, also stem from words for ‘breath.’ Finally, the binary value of breath, that it divides life from death, makes it easy to locate it in middle of the great chain, with the entailment that breath belongs to the chain’s upper half, where the immortal spirits dwell. Locke’s other examples are Latinate, and as such lend themselves to etymology. To ‘apprehend’ is Latin for to ‘seize hold of,’ which relates to ideas are objects and understanding is grasping. ‘Conceive’ is from the Latin concipere, to take in, and relates to the word ‘capture.’ It applies to thinking as ‘capturing’ an idea (as with ‘apprehend’), but also to pregnancy (taking in or capturing seed). ‘Tranquillity’ relates to the Latin for ‘quiet,’ tranquillus, another corporeal experience. Locke, then, like Emerson, is very much aware of the embodied origin of our language for spiritual and intellectual concepts. However, as we shall see, what this origin means is very different for each of them. ‘AND THIS IS LITERATURE’ For Locke, the origin of expressions for the inner life in ‘sensible ideas’ reconfirms the empiricist position that there is ‘nothing in in the intellect that was not first in the senses.’1 The words used by these originators, Locke contends, were quite arbitrary, invented for their immediate pragmatic context, then reinforced by social agreement (Locke 2004, 366). Adam, as the originator of language, was not special; he was only the first. As Locke concludes: ‘The same liberty [ . . . ] that Adam had of affixing any new name to any idea, the same has any one still, (especially the beginners of languages, if we can imagine any such); but only with this difference, that, in places where men in society have already established a language amongst them, the significations of words are very warily and sparingly to be altered’ (419–20). Adam’s language is not divine, and his words have no inherent or innate connection with substances or ideas. ‘Adamic’ language, just like any other, is arbitrary; its continuance is through a social compact—we agree, albeit unconsciously, that certain words drawn from material experiences refer to certain concepts. Language can begin all over again, deriving from equally arbitrary terms, hence the different languages observable in the world. Nevertheless, languages old and new originate in embodied—‘sensible’—experience, becoming a language of reflection and reason through a metaphorical process that Locke traces through etymology. Whereas for Locke, etymology is evidence of arbitrary origins, for Emerson it recalls an embodied relationship with material nature. One of

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the consequences for Emerson of Locke’s social compact theory is that language’s connection to nature (and the body) is forgotten, and what was once a creative act has, through a lost process, become merely arbitrary and conventional. Emerson cites Oegger: ‘The passage from the language of nature to the language of convention was made by such insensible degrees that they who made it never thought of tracing the latter back to its source’ (JMN5, 67). One of Emerson’s ways to remind his listener of this source is, as we have seen, etymology (see Aarsleff 1961, 31–4, 41; West 2000, 39–40). Emerson’s task, as he sees it, is to instruct his audience that language is not merely arbitrary and dead, but it derives from a creative correspondence with nature. This creative moment is not something that only happened once, long ago; it is an experience that can happen again and again. Emerson’s interest in etymology, then, is not historical; it is practical. Emerson wants to put Locke’s claim that a new language is possible but unlikely to the test, not by inventing new words or grammar, but by questioning language’s conventional and thus forgotten metaphorical bases and, if possible, by discovering wholly new metaphors. Literature in its earliest forms provides Emerson with his evidence of previous creative origins and a possible way out of the dead language, dead metaphor trap. Emerson theorizes this creative potential in a series of lectures on literature given in 1835: In the writers in the morning of each nation such as Homer, Froissart, and Chaucer every word is a picture. As we go back in history, language becomes more picturesque, until its infancy, when it is all poetry; or, all spiritual facts are represented by natural symbols. The eldest remains of the ancient nations are poems and fables. And even now, in our artificial state of society, the moment our discourse rises above the ordinary tone of facts, and is inflamed with passion, or exalted by thought, it immediately clothes itself in images. Indeed, if any man will watch himself in conversation, I believe he will find he has always a material image more or less luminous arising in his mind contemporaneous with every thought, [which] furnishes the garment of the thought. (EL1, 221; editors’ interpolation)

Read against a background of correspondence theory, symbolism, empiricist accounts of language, and Emerson’s own earlier writings, this passage appears like a collage. We have the history of language as etymology, we have spirit represented by natural symbols, we have the rhetoric of passionate expression, we have (twice) the familiar clothing metaphor, and we have the simultaneity of thought and image. Emerson’s addition here is the explicit context of literature. As he states at the outset, it is the very earliest writers who gave shape to language and thus to what can be thought. It is, however, not language itself, a mere naming of things, that allows for the richness of

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complex thought. Rather it is ‘natural symbols,’ ‘word pictures,’ and ‘material images’; that is, what we have come to know as metaphors. Because, for Emerson, only the poets have fully understood the possibilities granted by humankind’s location on the great chain, and literature is a unique record of the relationship between matter and spirit as understood by each original poet and recorded in their metaphors. As he continues: Now, man standing on the point betwixt spirit and matter and native of both elements, only knows in general that one re-presents the other; that the world is the mirror of the soul; and that it is his office to show this beautiful relation, to utter the oracles of the mind in appropriate images from nature. And this is Literature. In a limited sense Literature, so far as it is pictures of thought, and excluding records of facts, is the clothing of things of the mind in the things of matter. (EL1, 224–5)

Man ‘stands,’ an embodied metaphor that draws on states are locations, at the point of reflection (‘mirror’) between the two realms of spirit and matter. The latter, as the spiritual is the material tells us, gives the language for the former. It is humanity’s ‘office’ to ‘show this beautiful relation’ by a literature that is not the recording of mere ‘facts’ but of those facts turned into thought, matter turned into mind. Thus, we might now say, literature is a record of conceptual metaphor. A central aim of Emerson’s 1835 lectures on literature, as they move through the great poets of the English renaissance from Chaucer to Milton, is to attempt to understand how an original literature, and thus a way of thinking, was achieved in England, and thus to provide a model for America.2 First, he outlines what he calls ‘the power of the poet’ in recognizable terms: The power of the Poet depends on the fact that the material world is a symbol or expression of the human mind and part for part. Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact. Light and darkness are our familiar expression for knowledge and ignorance and heat for love. 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. (EL1, 289)

Again, the otherwise unavailable target domains of inner life, its feelings, which are seeking expression, come to language through the various source domains of objects of sensation: light, dark, heat, a river, a spreading circle. The poet’s job, according to Emerson, is this metaphorical conversion, which CMT calls cross-domain mapping, of matter into spirit: ‘He converts the solid globe, the land, the sea, the air, the sun, into symbols of thought. He makes the outward creation subordinate and merely a convenient alphabet to express

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thoughts and emotions’ (291). Thereby the poet gives us the lexicon for the human mind built up out of the resources of nature and thus defines (and, hopefully, redefines) what it is to be human. Nevertheless, this ‘natural’ resource, though available to all, is not availed of in Emerson’s New England. Rather: it is ‘the habit of men [ . . . ] to rest in the objects immediately around them, to go along with the tide, and take their impulse from external things’ (226). At first glance, Emerson’s position may appear inconsistent because taking an impulse from external things is precisely what the poet is supposed to do; but the idea is that the external world, nature, should be subordinate to the poet; not that the poet should be subordinate to it—an issue I will return to in Chapter 6. In Emerson’s English tradition, Shakespeare is the exemplary poet: ‘Shakespeare possesses the power of subordinating nature for the purposes of expression beyond all poets. His imperial muse tosses the creation like a bauble from hand to hand to embody any capricious shade of thought that is uppermost in his mind’ (293). Shakespeare’s gift is exemplary. He is the model who, for Emerson, opens language and unfixes thought; a process enabled not just by his technical mastery of metaphor, but by demonstrating that thought is fundamentally metaphorical in nature. The great soliloquies are object lessons—Hamlet’s ‘To sleep, perchance to dream,’ Brutus’ ‘the state of man,/Like to a little kingdom, suffers then/ The nature of an insurrection,’ and Othello’s ‘Put out the light, and then put out the light’ are all examples of metaphorical thinking.3 But they are not, as perhaps is often thought, thereby original. That is not Shakespeare’s primary skill. Each of these metaphors is a novel version of a conventional metaphor. Hamlet, as mentioned in a previous chapter, is using the conventional death is sleep, but he is, in CMT terms, ‘extending’ it by utilizing a typically unused slot—the dream to figure an afterlife. Brutus, who is arguing with himself, uses the conventional metaphor argument is war. But, unusually, Brutus, again in CMT terms, ‘elaborates’ the metaphor by making an argument with the self a civil war. Finally, Othello is using the conventional life is light metaphor as he works himself up to Desdemona’s murder, but he makes it more powerful by drawing attention to it as a metaphor, by what CMT calls ‘questioning.’ In comparing a literal light with its figurative concept, the life is light metaphor is questioned, as there is clearly no similarity at all between extinguishing a candle and killing a person, and the tragic nature of Othello’s act is heightened. Each of these Shakespearean heroes makes progress in thinking by seeing one thing in terms of another, a target domain in terms of a source domain. None of their metaphors are original, yet each is brought to life, according to CMT, by elaboration, extension, or questioning (CR, 67–72).

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In his lecture, Emerson offers several further examples of Shakespeare’s metaphorical thinking, though without offering any interpretations. Take, for example, Emerson’s citation from Act 2, Scene 2 of Measure for Measure: Not she tempts me not, but tis I Who lying by the violet in the sun Do as the carrion does not as the flower Corrupt with virtuous season. (EL1, 292)

Here Shakespeare uses the material image of rotten meat to figure Angelo’s self-recognized spiritual corruption. The juxtaposition of the violet’s implied purity intensifies the metaphor. The meat and the flower are both attractive, but in very different ways. The underlying conceptual metaphor is a composite of spiritual corruption is material corruption and its inverse, spiritual purity is material purity. These underlying metaphors do much of the conceptual work for our ideas of corruption and purity. We can even see them as a legacy of the great chain metaphor, which yields the initial hierarchical binarism that places spoilt meats below fresh flowers. Angelo’s figure would, of course, have appealed to Emerson as an illustration of the spiritual is the material conceptual metaphor. Emerson cites a more complex example from The Tempest in which the mind is directly figured by material symbols: The charm dissolves apace, And as the morning steals upon the night Melting the darkness so their rising senses Begin to chase the ignorant fumes that mantle Their clearer reason. . . . Their understanding Begins to swell and the approaching tide Will shortly fill the reasonable shores That now lie foul and muddy. (EL1, 293; Emerson’s abridgement)

Here, as Emerson puts it, Prospero ‘soothes the frenzy of Alonzo and his companions with music’ (EL1, 292) after the chaos of Ariel’s masque-like ‘charm.’ Again, the underlying understanding is seeing metaphor is entirely conventional. What attracts Emerson is the ways in which Shakespeare elaborates the metaphor, filling the slots in unusual ways. Understanding is seeing is an embodied conceptual metaphor that has a topology that, as we have already frequently seen, maps light onto understanding and darkness onto lack of understanding. At the outset, Shakespeare elaborates the metaphor by using the conventional darkness of night turning to morning; but ‘ignorant’ darkness is also an obscuring ‘fume’ that can be ‘chase[d]’ away to leave

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‘clearer reason.’ He presents us with a composite of elaborated understanding is seeing metaphors. In the second section, Shakespeare elaborates the metaphor in an even stranger way, figuring the darkness slot with a muddy seashore of ‘reason’ that that an incoming tide will clear. Underlying all this, and forming an innovative composite, is a causes are forces metaphor. It is the spellbound individual’s ‘senses’ that ‘rise’ and their ‘understanding’ that ‘swell[s]’ forcing the darkness away and letting clarity in. The entailment is that Ariel’s spell was an imposition on some native force of reason, and once Prospero removes that force reason will return under its own power. The originality of Shakespeare’s metaphors, then, lies in the process of elaboration and composition that brings dead concepts to life. Considering the conventionality of Shakespeare’s metaphors, it may seem strange that throughout Emerson’s career, Shakespeare is the foremost example of the ‘liberating Gods’ of the later essay ‘The Poet’ (something to which I’ll return in detail in the final chapter). What Shakespeare and all great poets liberate us from, Emerson argues, is ‘custom,’ the enemy in many of Emerson’s major works, including ‘Nature,’ ‘The American Scholar,’ ‘The Divinity School Address,’ ‘Self-Reliance,’ and ‘Circles.’ ‘Custom,’ Emerson writes, ‘is the defacer of beauty, and the concealer of truth. Custom represents every thing as immovably fixed. But the first effort of thought is to lift things from their feet and make all objects of sense appear fluent. Even a small alteration in our position breaks the spell and removes the curtain of Custom’ (EL1, 226). If we find ourselves—and for Emerson, we nearly always do—caught up in the narrow circuit of custom (states are locations), the world appears successfully fixed into position and thus immovable—we are, to allude to the later fossil poetry metaphor, dead. It is metaphorical ‘thought’ that allows for a reordering and a glimpse of beauty, truth, and life. Such a glimpse reorders ‘objects of sense,’ rendering them fluid. The fluid/fixed binarism, the tension between spirit as a solvent and matter as what needs to be dissolved, parallels the living/dead binarism in Emerson’s thought. The dissolution or fluency of matter is the consequence of poetic metaphor. Such metaphors may not be original in the pure sense, but through the processes of elaboration, extension, questioning, and composition, poetic metaphor transforms our relationship to what can be known of the world. This poetic act liberates both the world and humankind from custom. It reacquaints us with the primary creativity of metaphor—the turning of the material world into something spiritual and alive. Emerson’s term for the result of a poetic act is ‘beauty.’ In the early lectures, he phrases it as follows: ‘To break the chains of custom, to see everything as it absolutely exists, and so to clothe everything ordinary and even sordid with beauty is the aim of the Thinker’ (228). As new thoughts come from new metaphors, the thinker is necessarily a poet. The poet’s task is to

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‘clothe’ all subjects—no matter how quotidian and no matter how sordid (a line added to excuse both Chaucer and Shakespeare)—with beauty. The poet gives us an original access to what exists. Poetry may not be able to change what exists at the most fundamental level, but in changing the way we see what exists (understanding is seeing), in making it alive for us (the spiritual is the material), and by connecting each part to a whole (the part is the whole), the poet liberates us—not in the arbitrary sense of Locke’s empiricism, but in an embodied sense where our freedom ‘coincides’ with a revitalised experience of the world as metaphorical possibility. This post-Lockean romantic liberty, where embodied experience provides an animating ground for the world of the mind, provides the basis for Emerson’s theory of language as set out in his 1836 Nature—a theory of language that is really a theory of metaphor. ‘THE PRIMITIVE SENSE OF THINGS’ We can see the metaphoric struggle between life and death, liberty and custom, in Nature’s famous opening paragraph: ‘Our age is retrospective. It builds on the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we also have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?’ (CW1, 7). There are several important ideas contained in Emerson’s metaphors. The first, again a version of understanding is seeing—which we should now recognize as an embodied metaphor—sits within the etymology of the word ‘retrospective’—retrospicere, Latin, ‘to look back.’ This metaphor works as a composite with another familiar and often overlooked conceptual metaphor time is a landscape we move through. Thinking of time using embodied spatial metaphors is so common it is almost impossible to think of it in any other way. Time as a landscape we move through gives us the future in front of us, the past behind us, and the now being just where we are. As such, if we look behind us, retrospectively, we are looking into the past. According to Emerson, that is the temperament of his age. The next sentence, ‘It builds on the sepulchres of the fathers,’ extends the point, again using a composite metaphor that figures the past not as a landscape, but as a tomb or burial place, a ‘sepulchre,’ which forms the foundations for the age. Emerson’s tomb image is an elaboration of the conventional ideas are buildings metaphor, which again derives from our embodied experience, placing the sepulchre in the familiar slot for the ‘foundations’ of ideas, which give them their strength. The ideas of Emerson’s age, it follows, are built upon the

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dead, and as death gives them their strength, they are themselves dead. The age’s favorite genres bear that out—biography, history, criticism: writings about the past. In the next sentence, Emerson again uses the understanding is seeing metaphor to think through the relationship between his age and the past. Perhaps surprisingly, there is no criticism of history here. On the contrary, the past ‘beheld God and nature face to face.’ Emerson’s criticism is of the now, where ‘we [see] through their eyes.’ Taking on the entailments of the underlying conceptual metaphor, if we see through their eyes, we can only understand what they understood. Thus, we cannot see or understand for ourselves, and we are trapped in custom, tradition, history. We need to recover the past’s ‘original relationship to the universe’ to come to ‘enjoy’ our own such relationship. The year before, the poets of the English Renaissance provided just such a model of liberty. Now Emerson opens this possibility up—and Emerson again draws on understanding is seeing—requiring of his own age a ‘poetry and philosophy of insight.’ It is poetry and philosophy, understanding both as we now should to be based on metaphorical thinking, which will liberate us from the past and renew us in the present. Emerson’s Nature is his first published effort to express this possibility of renewal, providing a theory of language that, as I shall show, is really, a theory of metaphor4; a theory of metaphor that is, in many ways, homologous with what will come to be conceptual metaphor theory. Indeed, we can already see the parallels. Firstly, embodied experience provides source domains for mental and spiritual target domains. Secondly, the material structures or topologies of those source domains provide the structures of the mental and spiritual concepts they enable. Thirdly, Emerson uses metaphor to think and to shape and reshape ideas. Though Emerson does not use the language of Conceptual Metaphor Theory, he is clearly aware of these three aspects: cross-mapping, cognitive topology, and metaphorical reasoning. Emerson is, I think, also aware of some of the more provocative and subtle distinctions of CMT, such as the embodied nature of metaphor, the conventional character of metaphor and the ways its conventionality constrains thought, and conversely the ways innovation in metaphor can challenge accepted ways of thinking. Emerson seems to understand the figure/ground relationship that enables dual metaphors to function. He is also aware of some of the evidence that CMT draws on, such as etymology. Like CMT, Emerson is also cognizant of the ways in which metaphor underlies philosophy, often providing its foundations and organizing its questions. He also knows that metaphors are necessarily human-scale and human-centered. Most importantly, though, Emerson appreciates that our most fundamental ideas of self, world, and God are not ontological givens for us to discover but are predicated on metaphors.

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For Emerson, metaphors are epistemic forms that allow us to know ourselves, and, vitally, to renew ourselves, by utilizing the resources provided by nature. Toward the beginning of the ‘Language’ chapter in Nature, Emerson writes: Nature is the vehicle of thought, and in a simple, double, and three fold degree: 1. Words are the signs of natural facts. 2. Particular facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts. 3. Nature is the symbol of spirit. (CW1, 17)

Emerson’s framing clause—‘Nature is the vehicle of thought’—recalls the etymology of the word metaphor itself, which comes from the Greek ‘to carry over.’ A vehicle, in one of its principal senses, is a conveyor or carrier. Nature, used metaphorically, is the vehicle that carries thought. Emerson then says that this ‘vehicle’ works in three different ‘degrees’ and presents these as three propositions. I’ll take them one at a time. Emerson’s first proposition—‘Words are the signs of natural facts’—is an uncontroversial expression that Locke, Reid, and Oegger would have agreed with. As signs of facts, words could be arbitrary and artificial, or they could be natural or even correspondent. Emerson’s gloss on this statement begins with a familiar sentence drawn from his ‘Introductory’ lecture to his Literature series and anticipates CMT: ‘The use of outer creation is to give us language for the beings and changes of inner creation’ (CW1, 18). Emerson used the same sentence, as we saw earlier, just before he outlined the metaphorical etymologies of right, wrong, spirit, etc. These embodied material etymologies, framed in a ‘remote time’ that is ‘hidden from us’ (18), provided the conceptual structures for these ideas, that is, their cognitive topologies of morality and even life and death. He repeats the lecture passage almost unchanged in Nature. Indeed, the ‘Language’ and ‘Idealism’ sections of the essay, which outline and provide examples of the theory of metaphor, are largely reiterations of passages from the ‘Literature’ lectures given the previous year. Emerson’s first proposition remains open to all sides of the debate as Emerson would have understood it, even while its gloss confirms his foreshadowing of CMT. Emerson’s second proposition—‘Particular facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts’—is also representation of an idea from an earlier lecture that I cited above and echoes the doctrine of correspondence even while it presents the cross-domain mapping at the heart of CMT. Here, Emerson is using the word symbol as a straight synonym for metaphor, not yet considering it as a romantic symbol as outlined in the last chapter; as such, to symbolize is

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merely to use material source domains to figure mental or spiritual concepts that allows our idea of self to come into being. As he puts it in his gloss: Every appearance in nature corresponds to some state of the mind, and that state of the mind can only be described by presenting that natural appearance as its picture. An enraged man is a lion, a cunning man is a fox, a firm man is a rock, a learned man is a torch. A lamb is innocence; a snake is subtle spite; flowers express to us the delicate affections. Light and darkness are our familiar expression for knowledge and ignorance; and heat for love. Visible distance behind and before us, is respectively our image of memory and hope. (CW1, 18)

What Emerson describes here may look like correspondence, but it is a cross-domain mapping that uses the cognitive topologies of animals and objects to express human feelings. The conventional concept of the fox includes cunning, therefore it is an apt figure for human cunning; light and darkness are, as we know, slots in the understanding is seeing metaphor that map onto knowledge and ignorance (which also gives us the metaphorical expression ‘a learned man is a torch’). That hope and memory map onto ‘before’ and ‘behind’ is based on the metaphor that opened the essay, time is a landscape we move through, with the past behind us, and the future in front. Hope is one aspect of the future, memory one aspect of the past. These are embodied experiences, namely sight and physical movement. But even the use of objects, or ‘things’ (CW1, 18), such as rocks or foxes, still draws on embodied experience, as these are human-scale source domains. Emerson’s second stage does not map ‘natural facts’ onto spirit in its broadest sense, but onto ‘spiritual facts.’ The conceptual metaphor the spiritual is the material holds, but not the part is the whole. His mapping of spirit onto matter does, though, begin to open a larger question of unity, because when used as metaphors aspects of nature inevitably enable progress in metaphysics. As CMT argues, we think and reason using metaphors. Emerson writes: 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. (CW1, 18–19)

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What matters here is that the ‘natural fact’ leads Emerson to the metaphysical or spiritual aspect that it represents—the spiritual fact. Rivers in relation to a human observer provide a huge range of slots for metaphorical speculation. A river’s flow and change provide metaphors for flow and change in the world more generally (‘flux’). The underlying conceptual metaphor is change of state is change of location. Emerson makes further metaphysical inferences about the world from the source domain of the river. Drawing on the causes are forces schema, the ripples from a stone thrown into the passing stream push each other outward. The schema’s cognitive topology implies a source of all movement (an embodied stone thrower), inferring a causal origin slot that encourages Emerson to speculate on the ultimate ‘influence’ of humankind: his own cause. The river source domain takes Emerson from the human centred to cosmic, and then Emerson’s epistemic metaphors come almost too thick and fast. Using the container metaphor, he first puts the cause, or ‘universal soul,’ ‘within’ himself. Immediately, the pressure of the composite with causes are forces, puts that cause ‘behind him.’ Behind and within become blended; the cause is both outside and inside. The creation of this composite is a crucial move for Emerson and aligns with the metaphorical thought sketched in the journals that we looked at in the last chapter. He figures the cause, in Neo-Platonic fashion, as a ‘firmament’ in which the stars of ‘justice,’ ‘truth,’ ‘love,’ and ‘freedom’ ‘shine.’ Now Emerson own metaphors lead him to begin to speculate upon the whole that lies behind the parts and possesses them—the ‘universal soul,’ which he calls ‘Reason.’ Emerson then uses the part is the whole to consider how the different elements of that firmament come together as a source domain for divine perfection, a spiritual element. Neo-Platonism then returns, and the ‘earth,’ as a lower form, ‘is buried’ (catachrestically, but in one sense literally) within the ‘blue sky.’ Emerson finishes with the conventional causation is progeneration metaphor, as God, ultimate spirit, is called ‘the Father.’ Spirit is that which ‘hath life in itself’; it is animate, and we can only be so by partaking of it. As these metaphors demonstrate, to consider nature, for Emerson, is inevitably to consider the divine, through a process of conceptual metaphor provoked by the source domains of nature itself. Such thoughts are not arbitrary or accidental; ‘they are constant, and pervade nature’ (CW1, 19). Thought is enabled by these ‘analogies,’ as Emerson calls them (though metaphors or emblems would be just as apt). They are a part of the human condition, as ‘man is an analogist and studies relations in all objects’ (19). By relations, Emerson is referring to gestalts, to structures and topologies that enable metaphors to work as source domains for conceptual metaphors. As he continues: ‘[Man] is placed in the centre of beings, and a ray of relation passes from every other being to him. And neither can man be understood without these objects, nor these objects without man’ (19). I

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will investigate the circle schema fully in Chapter 5, but here humankind is seen as the center of a circle, and there is a reciprocal relation of mutual understanding, a correspondence, between them and all the objects that make up their circumference. Objects as diverse as seeds, the motion of the planets, the change of the seasons, the behavior of an ant, convert ‘into a type of somewhat in human life’ (20). Our understanding of ourselves and our world is human-centered and based on our embodied locations and interactions with the world of which we are a part. Indeed, taking Emerson’s anthropocentrism even further, ‘All the facts in natural history taken by themselves, have no value, but are barren like a single sex. But marry it to human history, and it is full of life’ (19). For Emerson, nature is meaningless without humankind; but also, humankind is meaningless without nature. For Emerson, nature was created with this purpose: to give humans a language to understand themselves. The problem, though—and it is a problem that he identified in his lectures the year before—is that we have ceased to renew our language. The consequence is that ‘duplicity and falsehood take the place of simplicity and truth, the power of nature as an interpreter of will, is in a degree lost; new imagery ceases to be created; and old words are perverted to stand for things which are not; a paper currency is employed when there is no bullion in the vaults’ (20). That is, in CMT terms, metaphors become conventionalized and are assumed to be dead; thought becomes fixed. As such, these conventional metaphors, Emerson continues, have a ‘perverted’ power over us. Not because these metaphors are dead, but because they are conceptual—that is, they give a shape to our thoughts, but it is someone else’s shape. Extant metaphors originated, again drawing on the early lectures, from the ‘writers . . . in every long-civilized nation’; these writers had an insight for a short time through their primary ‘hold on nature.’ When their metaphors are repeated ‘unconsciously’ by subsequent generations, they cannot serve their purpose, but only hold them trapped. Emerson, though, remains optimistic: But wise men pierce this rotten diction and fasten words again to visible things; so that picturesque language is at once a commanding certificate that he who employs it, is a man in alliance with truth and God. The moment our discourse rises above the ground line of familiar facts, and is inflamed with passion or exalted by thought, it clothes itself in images. A man conversing in earnest, if he watch his intellectual processes, will find that always a material image, more or less luminous, arises in his mind, cotemporaneous with every thought, which furnishes the vestment of the thought. Hence, good writing and brilliant discourse are perpetual allegories. This imagery is spontaneous. It is the blending of experience with the present action of the mind. It is proper creation. (CW1, 20–21)

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This passage from Nature is again made up of several quotations from Emerson’s journals and lectures that we have already seen. We know Emerson learned from Blair that ‘passion’ and ‘thought’ can set language free, can raise it above the quotidian. But Emerson goes further than Blair, for whom such elevation is mere rhetoric. To renew language is to connect words to ‘visible things,’ to make language ‘picturesque,’ returning it to an embodied living moment: the transference of meaning from a source domain to a target domain. Thus, Nature confirms Emerson’s insight, presented as part of a conversation with his brother Charles back in 1835, that thought and mental imagery are ‘contemporaneous.’ Novel mental imagery is generated by ‘the blending of experience with the present action of the mind.’ To achieve this blend we need, according to Emerson, to remove ourselves from our everyday round, ‘the ground line of facts,’ and get out into nature. ‘It is this,’ Emerson writes, ‘which gives that piquancy to the conversation of a strong-natured farmer or back-woodsman, which all men relish’ (CW1, 20). Nature will provide the source domains for new thoughts, just as it provided the source domains for the old thoughts we have now. Metaphorical renewal, Emerson tells us, is ‘proper creation.’ There is a tension here between metaphoric creativity and constraint that raises a question that will be fundamental to this book. Emerson is claiming that if we can find new source domains from nature then we can liberate our concepts from the constraints of custom. However, CMT tells us that there is always some structure, however minimal, in the target domain that constrains the types of source domains that can be used, and the ways in which those source domains create inferential structure. According to Lakoff and Johnson, however vague it may be, the structure of the target domain constrains a metaphor’s conceptual range, preventing our understanding of a target domain from being either merely arbitrary or totally free. Lakoff calls this limitation the ‘invariance principle,’ noting that ‘Metaphorical mappings preserve the cognitive topology (that is, the image-schema structure) of the source domain, in a way consistent with the inherent structure of the target domain’ (Lakoff, 215). It is certainly the case if we think of the more is up schema, where there is inherent structure in the target domain (typically quantity) that can be mapped consistently—that is, invariantly—onto the cognitive topology of the source domain (verticality). The limitations imposed by the target domain result in ‘target domain override,’ which Lakoff explains as follows: ‘A corollary of the Invariance Principle is that image-schema structure inherent in the target domain cannot be violated, and that inherent target domain structure limits the possibilities for mappings automatically’ (Lakoff, 216). Many basic metaphors work like this. For example, the path-goal schema, which underlies the life is a journey metaphor. ‘Literal’ moments in life will invariably be mapped onto certain slots in the path: birth onto

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beginnings, and death to endings; choices onto cross-roads and struggles onto blockages. It would make no sense to map birth onto a dead end, or death onto a beginning (it may make sense with other target domains—say, for example, when using the path goal schema to conceptualize the afterlife). All these moments are literal experiences, but without the metaphor, they will not hang together as aspects of a unified concept—life as a journey. As Lakoff puts it, “without metaphor, such concepts are relatively impoverished and have only a minimal, ‘skeletal’ structure” (PF, 58). It is the metaphor that gives the concept of a purposeful life its structure. Crucially, Lakoff argues, the Invariance Principle and target domain override tell us that metaphorical structure is not merely arbitrary. The literal skeletal structure of experience (the target domain) plays an essential role in constraining the way the path goal schema (the source domain) is cross-mapped. As such, metaphorical mappings from any particular source domain are limited by the target domain they are being used to express. All kinds of things can be used as metaphors for life, but their schemas must have some preconceptual structural substrate in common—they must be ‘isomorphic,’ as Johnson puts it, with what they are conceptualizing (BM, 116). So, source domains, like a book or a game or a trial, can all be used to figure the target domain of life because their schemas have beginnings and endings and have apt mappable linear structures—chapters, consecutive moves on a board, etc. But other mappings would be inappropriate, such as ‘life is a pair of glasses’ or ‘life is a drink of water’ or ‘life is a piano.’ The structure of these objects or experiences is not isomorphic with the target domain, and thus no mental correspondence would occur under normal circumstances— which is not to say we could not imagine specialized contexts in which these metaphors might briefly hold—and, indeed, as we shall see, Emerson does make use of non-isomorphic, or what are often called ‘catachrestic,’ metaphors to significant effect. However, in the case of metaphysical or speculative metaphors, such as, to return to a familiar example, the Great Chain of Being, a different problem arises. It is not clear that the target domain of the great chain metaphor— that is, all of creation and its Creator—has an ‘inherent structure.’ Unlike life is a journey, there is no discernible beginning or end that can constrain source domain mappings. Unlike more is up, there is nothing inherently scalable. Unlike the part is the whole, there is no human scale gestalt. There is just everything. That said, the experience of everything is not undifferentiated. The manifold of experience as discovered by the senses is, rather, highly differentiated from an embodied human perspective—things are bigger or smaller than us, more or less mobile than us, live for a longer or shorter time span than us, or appear variously intelligent compared to us. Relative differentiation is a fundamental part of our human experience and provides

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a literal skeletal structure upon which the great chain must go to work. But crucially, that differentiation has no complex meaning in and of itself. Difference is not a rich concept. This is where metaphor comes in. As Lakoff puts it, ‘In domains where there is no clearly discernible preconceptual structure to our experience, we import such structure via metaphor’ (WFDT, 303; cf. BM 163). In the case of the great chain metaphor, four basic metaphors supply that structure: link, scale, states are locations, and the part is the whole. Thus, while things in nature may appear contiguous, either spatially, physically, or temporally, the meaning of that link, namely that all things are connected, is not inherent in nature. While things in nature maybe different sizes, different weights, and of different orders of complexity or intelligence, there is no inherent hierarchy in nature. While everything in nature is located, that location is wholly relative and has no rich meaning. While nature is everything, and all things are a part of it, there is no fundamental reason why one aspect should represent everything, or vice versa. As we saw in the first chapter, all these concepts are inferred from the gestalt structures of the four source domain schemas that make up the composite of the great chain. The three things that the great chain primarily conceptualizes—nature, humankind, and God—only get their meaning relative to each other through the implications of the great chain conceptual metaphor, namely, that the human is linearly greater than material nature, and God is linearly greater than the human. There is no ‘literal’ truth to this hierarchy, and nothing in the cosmos itself—as a target domain—that can necessarily override the work metaphors can do. Crucially, then, when metaphors are used to create and to conceptualise metaphysical or theological concepts, there are few or maybe no ‘literal’ aspects of the target domain that can limit the possible meanings of the source domain. Limits are not, as CMT suggests, imposed by the target domain, but, on the contrary, by the source domain. The idea of God, for example, is constrained only by the kinds of source domains that are used to conceptualize the divine—source domains like the great chain, with God at the farthest point. Other concepts of God that we have just seen fit this model. Emerson draws on the patriarchal family schema, where all creation is the offspring and God is the Father; and the Neo-Platonic cosmos, where God is the sun and creation is the planet it warms, etc. The sun, the Father, and the head of the chain can all be mapped onto each other to provide an even richer composite. The concept of divinity itself is constructed by and constrained within the limits of these source domains. Rather than a target domain override, for metaphysical concepts there is more typically a source domain override. As such, recalling Emerson’s early anxieties about the work of metaphor, metaphysical concepts as structured by metaphors have a much greater

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freedom. Indeed, freedom becomes key for Emerson: any source domain at all can represent the divine—from the sun, to a river, to a barber’s shop or privy. Typically, and because of convention, it would not make sense to map God onto the bottom of the chain of being, or onto the earth the sun warms, or onto the father’s son (the latter, of course, has caused Christian theologians much labor), and so we assume there is some literal skeletal structure underlying God’s metaphors. But Emerson wants to move beyond these constraints and use what I am calling source-domain override to challenge any and all conceptualizations of God. Emerson’s metaphors, then, refute the isomorphism that has conventionalized the idea of God in favor of what we might call better call catachresis, which is licensed by his ‘symbolism’ as we have come to understand it here, where any part can represent the whole, and spirit is figured by nature. The only danger for the Emerson of ‘Nature’ and the mature essays lies in fixing the idea of God to one part, which would be to give up symbolic creativity to the constraints of tradition and custom. As we can see, then, Emerson’s understanding of metaphor maps onto CMT to a considerable extent, but—and this is a key insight that my use of CMT discloses—he also wants to theorise and practice a kind of liberty that would push beyond the constraints of the invariance principle and target domain override, particularly when it comes to liberating metaphysical concepts, such as humankind, nature, and God. Through looking at the way Emerson uses metaphor, we can begin to see that certain concepts are not limited by the inherent literal structure of the target domain, but rather by the limits of what can act as source domain. Emerson’s concern is that we too readily accept a set of proscribed source domains—especially in the cases of humanity, God, and nature—and thus fail to recognize the full possibilities of what those concepts could be. As he will write a few years later in his journal: The Metamorphosis of nature shows itself in nothing more than this that there is no word in our language that cannot become typical to us of nature by giving it emphasis. The world is a Dancer; it is a Rosary; it is a Torrent; it is a Boat; a mist; a Spider’s Snare; it is what you will; and the metaphor will hold, & it will give the imagination keen pleasure. Swifter than light the World converts itself into that thing you name & all things find their right place under this new & capricious classification. There is no thing small or mean to the soul. It derives as grand a joy from symbolizing the Godhead or his Universe under the form of a moth or a gnat as of a Lord of Hosts. (JMN8, 23; cf. EL3, 353)

Every word, as a ‘natural fact,’ can represent all of nature, as a part to its whole, fully realizing the very process of conceptual metaphor. The ‘world’ could be a ‘Dancer’; then the target domain of ‘world’ takes its shape from the slots available, say, a tension between rhythmic beauty and liberation,

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intimacy and formality, individuality and partnership, the dancer and the dance—the part and the whole. Even this level of detail will not exhaust the word’s potential and thus its power to re-angle vision. Shifting the source domain to a Rosary opens a new sense of the target domain, and the Puritan and the Catholic will come to very different conclusions about the ‘world.’ A boat, a mist, a torrent, or a web will provide a further range of possible conceptualizations of the world, all of them plausible, and all of them offering an ever-changing perspective. Any metaphor applied in this way—assuming it has the energy of novelty—will metamorphose nature ‘Swifter than light.’ Such a process is, as Emerson notes, capricious, but even so things find their ‘right place’ within the classification because that is how metaphor works, with the gestalt structure of the source domain supplying the inferential structure for the target domain (see also Greenham 2016, ‘Apposite Metaphors’). Thus, a mere ‘moth or gnat’ can figure the ‘Godhead’ itself as effectively as a ‘Lord of Hosts’—perhaps the moth’s attraction to light, or the gnat’s stinging ubiquity. However, tempering Emerson’s claims in CMT terms, we should notice that the slots that I am picking out here, arguably correspond in some way to the conventional target domains of Nature and God—the binary part-whole relationship of the dancer and the dance in nature, or divine light and ubiquity in the idea of God. So it may be that the concepts of Nature and God can widen through the selection of catachrestic source domains, but I’m not sure, here at least, that these novel metaphors have thereby transformed them. Target domain override still appears to be in place, albeit unsettled. Emerson proposes this process of rethinking the world, recategorizing its possible meanings through metaphor, in the third and final proposition from the ‘Language’ section of Nature, ‘Nature is the symbol of spirit.’ Emerson’s gloss begins with a rejection of the primary value of his second proposition: ‘We are thus assisted by natural objects in the expression of particular meanings. But how great a language to convey such pepper-corn informations! Did it need such noble races of creatures, this profusion of forms, this host of orbs in heaven, to furnish man with the dictionary and grammar of his municipal speech?’ (CW1, 21). The creation of the world may serve humanity as a source for their language and their thought; but it must be more than that, or it provides nothing better than the arbitrary vocabulary and dead metaphors of the empiricists. We need to recall the definition of ‘symbol’ from the last chapter: a symbol is a composite conceptual metaphor made up of the spiritual is the material and the part is the whole. Both need to be in play if nature is to be the symbol of spirit. If the first only, then we are just using nature to figure mind and to construct analogies, in the Coleridgean sense, which may have metaphysical entailments, but which are dead; without the unity of the second metaphor, our thoughts are not part of the divine creation.

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The aim of the remainder of Emerson’s gloss on his third proposition is to undertake a final step, and show how metaphor, or correspondence, connects humanity to God. As he puts it, ‘the relation between mind and matter is not fancied by some poet, but stands in the will of God’ (22). It is, then, God’s will that conceptual metaphors work. The metaphors, as such, are far from arbitrary, nor are they limited to the expression of the human mind, but are rather revelatory of God’s mind, because the things that we use for metaphors, the source domains of matter and our embodied experience of it, are themselves creations of the divine. As such, and as we began to see at the end of Chapter 1, their use as metaphors is a route back to God. As Emerson writes, ‘There seems to be a necessity in spirit to manifest itself in material form, and day, night, river, storm, beast, bird, acid and alkali preëxist in necessary ideas in the mind of God and are what they are by virtue of previous affections in the world of spirit’ (22). If the objects of the world are emanations of the divine spirit, a corollary of causes are forces, they can be returned to spirit by the spiritual is the material metaphor, which converts matter back to spirit, and they can be returned to God through the part is the whole, which makes each material thing an aspect of the divine. As causes are forces always has the effect as intent at the point of origin, where first and final causes are necessarily the same, then the process of metaphorical thinking has the power to return Emerson to the source, to the cause. This circular logic of metaphor is contained in a quotation from George Fox, which Emerson uses at that point: ‘Every scripture is to be interpreted by the same spirit which gave it forth’ (23), and which Emerson calls ‘fundamental law of criticism’ (23). But, crucially, for Emerson the text is not just the Bible. He follows Coleridge and Swedenborg and recognizes all nature as a text that, through metaphorical appropriation, will return to God. ‘A life in harmony with nature, the love of truth and of virtue, will purge the eyes to understand her text. By degrees we may come to know the primitive sense of the permanent objects of nature, so that the world shall be to us an open book, and every form significant of its hidden life and final cause’ (23). A proper interpretation of nature sees it, metaphorically, as a ‘text,’ as the original work of literature, with God in the author slot. However, as spirit turned into matter, nature is the inverse of human literature, which, for Emerson is the metaphorical process which turns matter to spirit. These two acts of creation form, in CMT terms, a dual metaphor: the material is the spiritual and the spiritual is the material. The spirit/matter dual parallels the part is the whole and the whole is the part dual. As such, in Nature, Emerson is telling us the creative act moves forward and backward. The human creative act mimics the divine act in reverse: ‘It is the working of the Original Cause through the instruments he has already made’ (21). Thus, the proper interpretation of nature will enable a return to the ‘primitive sense’ of things: nature’s origin in

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and as God, the ‘final cause.’ Metaphor, then is an inverse replication of the process of divine creation. It inverts emanation and takes the material scoriae of creation back to their spiritual source in the divine. THE ‘TRANSPARENT EYE-BALL’ Having spent much of the first three chapters in the creative ferment of Emerson’s journals and early lectures, exploring the origins of his ideas and their metaphorical structures, I now want to turn to perhaps the most famous single image in his published works, the ‘transparent eye-ball,’ using it as a case study to examine Emerson’s theory of metaphor. The metaphor appears in the ‘Nature’ chapter of Emerson’s Nature, toward the end of a passage describing an evening walk: Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. Almost I fear to think how glad I am. In the woods, too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years. 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. (CW1, 10)

A familiar concept, states are locations, underlies the opening sentences, ‘where every hour and change corresponds to and authorizes a different state of mind’ (CW1, 9). Interestingly, Emerson tells us both location and state rather than leaving the reader to infer the state from the location alone. He makes this unusual move because his location is atypical. If Emerson just gave the source domain of his ‘twilight’ walk—a ‘bare common . . . under a cloudy sky’—his reader would infer from the bland and dreary landscape a bland and dreary Emerson. An exhilarated Emerson who ‘almost fear[s] to think how glad’ he is requires explanation. His unanticipated twist of mood attunes the reader to novelty, to questioning, and to reading against the grain, challenging the expected relationship between source domains and target domains in his subsequent sentences. From the bare common Emerson moves to the woods, a linking ‘too’ suggesting the woods and the common share locative qualities. The state

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produced by the woods is ‘perpetual youth’ and the rejuvenation of the sloughing ‘snake,’ which connects to something Emerson wrote earlier in the same paragraph as the epiphany: ‘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 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; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood’ (9). Youth, then, is a way of seeing. But Emerson is really using the understanding is seeing conceptual metaphor to register a way of knowing unique to the child as primary ‘lover of nature.’ The adult, and the metaphor is Platonic, only sees ‘superficial[ly].’ Emerson then uses the container schema: the sun shines ‘into’ the child’s material body (‘the eye and the heart’) and that light (understanding is seeing) is ‘retained’ by the adult ‘lover of nature,’ and this retention is figured as a balance between ‘inward and outward,’ between spirit and matter. The woods enable a return to youth and to proper vision (I return to the relationship between childhood and nature in Chapter 5). The woods also connect to God, they are his ‘plantations,’ and as such they are spaces of divine work, not human work—a source of metaphors. Emerson’s divine location figures a human condition of youthful joy and insight. When his reader gets to the paradoxically decorous ‘perennial festival’ he is prepared to allow almost anything of nature, and now that he has triggered this natural source domain, Emerson’s real work begins. Scholars of Emerson have long been familiar with Christopher Cranch’s unintentional contemporary satire of the image of the ‘transparent eye-ball’ (Sealts 1969, 9). In Cranch’s sketch a gigantic hat wearing eyeball with a short optic nerve trailing behind sits high upon a tailcoat through the arms of which emerge absurdly long legs that stand tall in an open landscape of hills and trees. It is a ridiculous image on many levels, adverting the catachrestic nature of Emerson’s metaphor. Indeed, the ‘transparent eye-ball,’ quickly became problematic for Emerson’s admirers and grist to the mill of his detractors (Cranch was an admirer). Francis Bowen, a more ambivalent early critic of ‘Nature,’ thought the phrase lacked ‘taste’ and was an example of Emerson’s tendency to be ‘coarse and blunt’ (cited in Sealts 1969, 81). An honest defect in Bowen’s judgment, but a defect all the same. More than a century later, in 1964, Jonathan Bishop referred to the ‘transparent eye-ball’ as one of Emerson’s ‘silliest’ remarks (Bishop 1964, 140); observing that it was ‘the best known sentence of Emerson’s among readers who wish to make fun of him’ (140). Critics often show Cranch’s image at this point to underline the ludicrousness of the picture the metaphor creates. Twenty years after Bishop, David Van Leer repeated the judgment that the word ‘eye-ball’ was ‘silly’; immediately adding: ‘Worse than unreal or embarrassing, the

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image is intellectually incoherent’ (Van Leer 1986, 22): the figure’s transparency contradicting its claims to power. In 2003, Laura Dassow Walls echoes Van Leer, contending that ‘a truly transparent eyeball cannot see, just as light intersected by no particular object will fall away into vacancy’ (Walls 2003, 100). For Walls and Van Leer, the ‘transparent eye-ball’ is an embarrassingly catachrestic metaphor. Lawrence Buell takes us some way toward tracking down the source of these readers’ discomfort. As he notes, Emerson predicates his philosophic animus on a ‘disregard for the body’ (Buell 2003, 92). The body is only used by Emerson, Buell argues, as ‘a way of underscoring mental or spiritual vigor[;] his real interest is invigoration of the mind’ (94). In reaching for transcendence, Emerson is supposed to have left the body behind, but the visceral word ‘eye-ball’ brings the material body back in at the very moment it is supposed to have disappeared creating a tension between transcendence and corporeality. As Michelle Kohler explains: ‘For all the effort he puts into disembodying the eyeball, it is a transparent eyeball; the figure inevitably calls attention to the physicality of sight and the presence of the body’ (Kohler 2014, 24; Kohler’s emphasis). An insight from Branka Arsić points to the underlying paradox. For her the ‘transparent eye-ball’ figures ‘the moment when the material tissue of the eye becomes transparent and transparency is embodied’ (Arsić 2010, 56). The paradox of embodying transparency—as a metaphor for transcendence—is, CMT tells us, exactly what should happen. As Emerson also knows, we only have material and embodied metaphors for figuring spiritual or transcendent states so that paradox is inevitable. So, as we should expect, Emerson’s ‘transparent eye-ball’ is a decisively embodied figure, and what leads up to it makes it clear. Emerson says that ‘nothing can befall [him] in life,’ which ‘nature cannot repair,’ accepting the loss of his ‘eyes.’ There is a biographical resonance here, as in the mid-1820s, Emerson had nearly lost his sight while a student at Harvard’s Divinity School. Here it is a firm reminder of the importance of the body, after all, the apprehension of the world that is the basis of metaphor requires a body, which Emerson confirms with the verb standing and his focus on the position of the ‘uplifted’ head. Cranch’s bizarre sketch is a failed effort to distract from this embodiment by turning the whole head into an eye; the unexpected consequence is that he exaggerates the body, making it even more present, and thus absurd. Emerson attempts to transcend the body in a different way. He draws on the verticality of the scale schema, with the head ‘bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space.’ The vertical schema aligns with the great chain; the ‘bare ground’ below and ‘infinite space’ above respectively mapping matter and spirit. At this point the ‘mean’ aspects of the self ‘vanish.’ The material becomes the spiritual as Emerson’s sentences enact the spiritual is the material concept. However, the body, the scoria

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of creation, makes a catachrestic return at the very moment of its supposed transcendence: ‘I become a transparent eye-ball.’ The tension, then, as Arsić pointed out, is between transparency and embodiment. However, when the eye is thought of in a properly embodied way, I would argue that any such tension disappears. When Bowen, Bishop, Van Leer, Walls, and Kohler are troubled by the eye-ball they have Cranch’s idea of an eye-ball in mind: an anatomical structure with an iris, a lens, a sclera, with lids, nerves, and a retina. Hence for Van Leer and the Walls the metaphor is incoherent. How can all that physical matter be the source domain for a metaphor of transparency; how can we agree with Arsić that it simply does. But embodied vision does not work that way. In our embodied experience of vision, the eye as a physical object does not exist for us. What exists is the act of seeing, and in the act of seeing the eye-ball is transparent, or, to use the language of Drew Leder, the eye ‘lapse[s] into invisibility’ (Leder 1990, 12). This embodied experience is the source domain that Emerson draws on, and, as we shall see, Emerson’s eyeball is not a clumsy catachresis. To consider what slots are at stake in embodied vision as a lived experience, rather than an anatomical eye-ball, we can turn to the phenomenologist Hans Jonas, who writes: Sight is par excellence the sense of the simultaneous or the coordinated, and thereby of the extensive. A view comprehends many things juxtaposed, as co-existent parts of one field of vision. It does so in an instant: as in a flash one glance, an opening of the eyes, discloses a world of co-present qualities spread out in space, ranged in depth, continuing into indefinite distance, suggesting, if any direction in their static order, then by their perspective, a direction away from the subject rather than toward it. (Jonas 2001, 136)

There are four aspects of Jonas’s account of embodied seeing that are important for an understanding of Emerson’s metaphor: vision as instantaneous; vision as a coordinated whole made up of discrete parts; vision as extending to an indefinite distance; vision as a moving away from rather than towards the seeing subject. Together these four aspects make up a vision schema, and thus provide a cognitive topology. In this context, the embodied vision schema is the source domain for a specific target domain: the self. It is the ‘I’ that becomes the ‘transparent eyeball,’ which we can see by working through the cross-mapping, moving from matter to spirit. Firstly, embodied seeing happens in an instant, a single moment, which maps the epiphany when transcendent vision occurs: the co-presence of self and world. Secondly, constructed in this moment of vision, and mapped onto the target domain of humankind, is a coordinated visual whole that figures a self that is not isolated, but that is made up of all visible parts. Thirdly, and in the same

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moment, the seeing expands into the depths and so does the self, stretching to an ‘indefinite distance.’ The fourth aspect of embodied seeing is movement away from the seeing self; a mobile self, transcending the part and becoming an ever-growing whole. What Emerson’s ‘I’ becomes, cross-mapped from the vision schema, is a vast, expanding integrated whole, instantaneously aware of its ecstatic condition. His concept of the ‘I’ does not derive from any literal skeletal sense of the ‘human,’ in CMT terms, or an anatomical concept of the eyeball in Van Leer’s and Walls’s terms. Rather, Emerson’s metaphor derives its power from the schematic possibilities of the ‘transparent eye-ball.’ His source domain is the embodied act of seeing, not the thing we see with. This vision schema derives from the literal skeletal human experience of embodied vision as Jonas described it. Putting that schema to work, Emerson’s metaphors transform what the ‘I’ can become. While the unique image schema of the ‘transparent eye-ball’ stands out because of its strangeness, there are a range of other more familiar conceptual metaphors at work, functioning as part of a complex composite. Most obviously the spiritual is the material provides the foundation for the vision schema to cross-map an embodied experience of seeing onto a metaphysical concept of humankind. the part is the whole works to integrate the manifold of the landscape into a single vision. As these two conceptual metaphors are working together, the ‘transparent eye-ball’ is a symbol par excellence. Also, states are locations continues to operate, and the whole of the natural landscape encapsulated in the vision becomes a source domain reconfiguring the state of humanity. The great chain is at work too, with humankind at the mid-point of emanated creation, where matter meets spirits and spirit returns to itself through material metaphors. The consequences of Emerson’s vision also draw again on understanding is seeing, to ensure that the eye-ball metaphor is intellectual not sensual. Finally, Emerson combines these metaphors with the cognitive topology of the container, and a limited ‘I’ uses the expansive nature of vision to expand ecstatically to the horizon, with the mobile sense of perspective promising an extension of self beyond that horizon, into indefinite space. Even this composite, though, is only a prolegomenon to Emerson’s final intention, which is to use the work of metaphor to extend the concept of the human as far as he can. The passage continues: ‘I am nothing. I see all. The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.’ The first sentence is a consolidation of the work just done, which is to say a full movement from matter to its opposite, nothing, which drawing on the entailments of the great chain necessarily figures spirit. The next sentence is a composite of the vision schema with understanding is seeing and the container, so that Emerson expands to an infinite and intelligent ‘all’: to ‘see all’ is to know all as well as to be all precisely by being ‘nothing’

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material. The final sentence delivers Emerson’s coup de grace, drawing directly on a series of metaphors that Emerson had been toying with in his 1836 journals and that we saw at the end of the last chapter, where he figured the human as a drop in God’s ocean. Now Emerson uses the part is the whole dual, the whole is the part, to locate God in humankind, utilising the ‘current’ slot of the ocean source domain to have ‘the Universal Being,’ God, ‘circulate through’ him. As such, Emerson, at the moment of vision, is ‘part and particle’ of the divine. In recognizing in his theory of metaphor that he can restructure metaphysical concepts using the cognitive topologies of embodied metaphors that bypass the constraints of target domain override, Emerson’s Nature redefines the human. Across the final sentences of the epiphany the embodied human scale metaphor of vision becomes a source domain that expands the target domain of the concept of the human to such an extent that Emerson’s claim hardly seems hubristic. The vision schema, in all its rich complexity, allows Emerson to expand outwards indefinitely until he becomes a nothing that is everything, and then to return inward on divine currents as an aspect, a ‘part or particle,’ of God, using the part/whole dual to bring that whole into the self. Emerson’s finite material ‘I,’ a mere part of nature, has become, through a process of metaphorical reconceptualization and recirculation, an aspect of God. NOTES 1. This peripatetic maxim is attributed to Aristotle. See Aarsleff 1982, 25–8, 58–9, 61–6, 282–3. Also Gura 1981, 5, and Warren 1999, 31–2. 2. For a different angle on Emerson’s use of the English Renaissance in his quest for originality, see Greenham, 2016a. 3. Greenblatt, 1997, Norton Shakespeare: Hamlet 3.1.66; Julius Caesar, 2.1.67– 69 Othello, 5.2.7. 4. There are many discussion of Emerson’s theory of language; two that locate Emerson most firmly in his intellectual context are Gura 1981, 94–7; Warren 1999, 38ff.

PART 2

Emerson’s Practice of Metaphor

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Emerson’s theory of metaphor generates a liberative discursive practice of symbolism that brings together the human, the natural, and the divine through mutual conceptualization—they are unified because he uses the same tropes to think each of them. In the second half of Emerson’s Metaphors, I shall explore this interpenetration further, looking in turn at the metaphors that underpin and transform Emerson’s concepts of nature, man, and God, moving from his theory to his practice. In this chapter, I engage with Emerson’s concept of nature. As Emerson put it in 1848: ‘if an age that is to come would know the history of this it will seek certainly to know what idea we attached to the word Nature’ (JMN10, 169). Following Emerson’s advice, I shall begin with his emergent interest in natural history, then show how he shifts toward an aesthetics of nature that will become determinate for his metaphorical practice. Finally, I shall consider the ‘meaning’ of nature for Emerson. I begin, though, with a short case study of Emerson’s practice of metaphor in the context of natural history. THE PARALLAX For Emerson, the study of natural history is an aid to self-discovery rather than an end in itself; a distinction he signals early on, deploying an astronomical metaphor in 1822 that he would revisit throughout his life—a metaphor that directly relates to the act of discovery. The metaphor comes in a passage where Emerson is attempting to overcome his ‘native narrowness and feebleness of mind,’ limited by ‘sense’ and unable ‘to walk with God’ (JMN1, 149; emphasis in original): The astronomer who by reason of the littleness of the earth would be able to learn next to nothing of the distances and magnitudes of the heavenly bodies, can yet take advantage of its revolutions around the Sun, and thus move his 113

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instruments about the universe, across the vast orbit of his planet; so the lapse of ages may sometimes enable the devout philosopher to trace the design of Providence, otherwise above his comprehension, by reducing to a miniature view, a magnificent course of events. (149)

Emerson is referring to the ‘parallax,’ a technique by which astronomers since at least the seventeenth century had used the diameter of the earth’s orbit around the sun as a base from which to measure the displacement of the stars and thus calculate cosmic distances. In the slightly simplified form Emerson uses here, the source domain has three slots: the two distant observation points that derive from the breadth of the earth’s orbit; the third point of the star to be located; and the astronomer whose calculations create knowledge of that previously unknown third point. Emerson maps this astronomical source domain onto a theological target domain, where the astronomer becomes the philosopher, the observation points of the orbit become the religious texts of history, and the third point of the star becomes God’s divine plan. Thus, for Emerson’s the virtue of the parallax is not to discover the shape and scale of the cosmos, but to act as a source domain that will help him to think through his relationship with God, establishing early the terms of what will become Emerson’s real interest in science. The parallax metaphor remains useful to Emerson because enables him to conceptualize the unknown from the known through triangulation, and using the same slots Emerson can locate different types of unknown things. In 1832, Emerson explicitly names the parallax in a further conceptual development of his earlier example: ‘There is a great parallax in human nature ascertained by observing it from different states of mind. If I look at an action from the low ground of the effect upon the immediate actors & neighbors, it appears important. If I look at it from the high ground of the relation of the actors to the Universe & the Eternal generation of Beings it is too insignificant for thought. Yet each of those views is perfectly just’ (JMN4, 22; emphasis in original). In this example, the fixed points of the parallax, that is the diameter of the earth’s orbit from which the astronomer makes their observations, are those of the given moment of an action and that of eternity (itself discovered by Emerson’s earlier parallax metaphor). The first of these, the moment of action, in line with vertical great chain is a ‘low ground,’ corresponding to its immanent material nature as mere ‘effect.’ The other observation point of the parallax is ‘high ground,’ corresponding to its spiritual association with the Cause or, as Emerson puts it, ‘the Eternal generation of Beings.’ These two grounds, low and high, create the span of the parallax against which Emerson can measure human nature, which is in the distant star slot. However, there appears to be an element of catachresis in the metaphor, as that single point is not a point of convergence, but rather of difference,

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as both modes of looking at human nature are ‘perfectly’ just: the mundane earthly moment is important to the actors involved, whereas, set against the eternal, all such individual moments are equally insignificant. We can avoid the catachresis if we recognise that in addition to the spiritual is the material, Emerson’s parallax is also drawing on another schema that will come to define his theory of symbolism as outlined above, the part is the whole. Putting these together, any single thing, no matter how mundane, can figure everything else; that is, at the single point slot of the parallax metaphor, the ordinary partial world of the individual act and the total world of the divine cause become one. The high and the low, the spiritual and the material, the part and the whole, all meet at the same point: the human. Through triangulation, the parallax metaphor enables Emerson to unite differences at a point, which we can see again just a few months later in 1832, when he reuses the metaphor in a smaller-scale form: the surveyor ‘taking his positions to serve as the point of his angles’ and thus fix the ‘place of the mountain’ becomes a model of the philosopher ‘look[ing] on his subject from difference sides’ to ‘obtain an accurate expression of the truth’ (JMN4, 52). A similar version of the metaphor appears in the 1836 Nature, where a ‘a small alteration in our local position apprizes us of dualism [and] the least change in our point of view, gives the whole world a pictorial air’ (CW1, 30–31). Things may be diverse, Emerson’s metaphors tell us, but they also meet at a single point, namely the self, and that self-point gives a meaning to the whole. In 1856, Emerson returns to the parallax, in a similar form to 1832: ‘A man, to get the advantage of the ideal man, runs himself into several men, by using his eyes today, when he is loving; and tomorrow, when he is spiteful [ . . . ] as the astronomer uses the earth as a cart to carry him to the two ends of its orbit, to find the parallax of a star’ (JMN14, 139). We can, Emerson’s metaphor tells us, use the extreme versions of ourselves to triangulate the ‘ideal’ self that will unify us with all men. However, perhaps the most intriguing use of the parallax metaphor is when it fails to create meaning at a point, which can happen in two ways in Emerson’s restlessly metaphorical thought process. In 1841, for example, we have the following challenging passage: ‘in the infinite disparity between the soul & any one incarnation of it, though holiest and grandest, all differences between one & another disappear—they have no parallax in distances so vast’ (JMN7, 453). Here Emerson uses the parallax properly for the first time, bringing into play its fourth slot, the background of fixed stars that are so far away that even given the span of the earth’s orbit, they do not appear to move. It is against this fixed background that the astronomer measures the movement of the stars whose distance they want to determine and thus derive the necessary angles for their calculations. In Emerson’s metaphor, the diameter of the parallax should figure the distance between the soul in the

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most general sense, namely God, and an individual incarnation of that soul in a human being, confirming their unity. Here though, no matter how holy and grand the human being, the distance between them and God remains infinite, and the parallax will not triangulate to a unifying point. Here Emerson undoes the work of the metaphor from twenty years earlier where it was precisely the power of the astronomer to locate that point of unity between the finite and the infinite. The parallax metaphor provides a different meaning, then, when the stars in the unifying point slot are so far away from the observer that they do not appear to move in relation to the diameter of the earth’s orbit. That is, the parallax becomes a metaphor for what cannot be located rather than what can be located, a point to which Emerson returns in 1841, ‘only a few [ . . . ] fixed stars which have no parallax, or none for us; Plato & Jesus & Shakespeare’ (JMN8, 127; see CW1, 171): the reputations of these few individuals do not change as Emerson himself moves through time. Thirty years later, in the early 1870s, we come across Emerson’s final use of the metaphor, which is closely related to the previous example: ‘Parallax, as you know, is the apparent displacement of an object from two points of view;—less & less of the heavenly bodies because of their remoteness,—& of the fixed stars, none at all. Well, it is thus that we have found Shakespeare to be a fixed star. Because all sorts of men in three centuries have found him to be unapproachable’ (JMN16, 271). Here in the last days of his intellectual life, Emerson is using the same scientific figure that he drew on fifty years earlier to conceptualise his thoughts. At the last, Shakespeare, occupying the slot of the fixed star, is beyond the reach of humankind. For the metaphor’s most challenging use I will turn to Emerson’s great essay ‘Self-Reliance,’ also published in 1841: ‘The magnetism which all original action exerts is explained when we inquire the reason of self-trust. Who is the Trustee? What is the aboriginal Self on which a universal reliance may be grounded? What is the nature and power of that science-baffling star, without parallax, without calculable elements, which shoots a ray of beauty into trivial and impure actions, if the least mark of independence appears?’ (CW2, 37). There are so many metaphors here—magnetism, original action, trust, aboriginal, grounded, calculable elements, shoots, ray, trivial, impure, and so on—that the ‘science-baffling start, without parallax’ is almost lost. If we bring it into focus, we have a negative version of the parallax metaphor, that is, what the parallax points to, the ‘who,’ the ‘what,’ the ‘which,’ is unlocatable. The absence is crucial as it figures the very thing the self is supposed to rely on, which Emerson calls an ‘aboriginal Self’ or a ‘Trustee.’ The implication of the catachrestic parallax metaphor in in ‘Self-Reliance’ is that there is a ‘Self’ prior to the self, we can see its light (‘shoots a ray’), but we cannot calculate its position relative to us and thus, through the work of the metaphor, come to know it. Emerson’s catachresis points to a limit of

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what scientific metaphors can conceptualise. Instead, we must rely on other indicators, such as beauty. And, indeed, though the ‘elements’ of this source of the self are ‘incalculable,’ they have an aesthetic aspect, a ‘ray of beauty,’ which transforms the everyday if ‘independence appears.’ So, ironically, for the self to discover what it relies on it must be independent—the implication being self-dependence. Moreover, Emerson’s scientific metaphors begin to blend with aesthetic metaphors, which, as we shall see, is crucial to the development of his practice of metaphor. The parallax, then, is a productive metaphor irrespective of whether it locates any of its targets. Such catachrestic tropes are a crucial way that Emerson attempts to conceptualize things that are beyond experience. To understand the way metaphor works to give a shape and form to that which seems to escape knowing will be the work of the rest of this chapter. NATURAL HISTORY, METAPHOR, AND ANALOGY The parallax is an example of a general pattern in Emerson’s thought: the use of the emerging discourse of the natural sciences to provide novel metaphors for the human and the divine, predicated on his theory of symbolism in which the spiritual is the material and the part is the whole. The term science had not settled into its modern meaning when Emerson was a young man. In the 1820s and ’30s, the area of study that focused on discovering and codifying the laws of the physical world was more often called ‘natural history’ or ‘natural philosophy.’ As Emerson put it in 1821, while deliberately defining his terms, ‘Nat. Phil. [occupies itself] in discovering the laws which regulate the different properties of matter’ (JMN1, 300). These laws of nature only come alive for Emerson when his underlying metaphorical practice puts them to work to conceptualize the laws of spirit. Emerson critics have long understood that the primary purpose of science for Emerson was figurative, even if they did not grasp the wider ramifications for Emerson’s ways of thinking. In 1931, Harry Hayden Clark wrote the first extended essay on ‘Emerson and Science,’ and at the outset he cautioned his reader that Emerson ‘prizes science not so much for its mere description of phenomena or for its advancement of our well-being as for its ethical symbolism’ (Clark 193, 226). Similarly, Carl F. Strauch, writing in 1958, gave a neo-Platonic reading of ‘Emerson’s Sacred Science,’ where material facts provide ‘serviceable analogies’ for spiritual truths (Strauch 1958, 237). Gay Wilson Allen’s 1975 ‘A New Look at Emerson and Science’ had full access to Emerson’s early lectures. As such, Allen gets very close to the truth of Emerson’s theory of metaphor, or ‘theory of nature as a language.’ Emerson’s theory was, as he puts it:

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first, a means of communicating to the human mind the nature of nature and how it operates; and, second, the power of expression itself, enabling men to share with each other their thoughts and feelings in words. Without words men could not themselves understand their own experiences, and of course not communicate to other men. Words symbolize aspects of the external world, and metaphors (which embody the very origin of human language) are images of the material world[.] (Allen 1975, 437)

According to Allen’s reading, Emerson’s understanding of ‘nature as nature,’ or nature in itself, provides, the ‘power of expression’ both externally to others and internally to the self, which chimes with the view I presented in the first half of this book. However, Allen does not pursue the metaphorical nature of language. Rather, nature loses its metaphorical status and becomes ‘the language that God speaks to men, and natural scientists learn the syntax of the language’ (438). Nature, then, is ultimately a language that the natural scientist interprets as a path to God, rather than, as he had earlier intimated, a language that humans use to discover themselves through metaphor and symbolism. Leonard Neufeldt, in 1977, shifts the focus to science as the force behind technological advancement, and notes that ‘man’s progress in the mechanical provides a provocative source of metaphors for Emerson’s exploration of how the mind works’ (Neufeldt 1977, 336). Progress in science and the technological advances it supports are, again, not primarily ends in themselves, but ways to better understand the self. In 1982, in another essay that takes off from the early lectures, David Robinson also observes that Emerson’s primary interest in science was part of his ‘developing moral philosophy’ (Robinson 1980, 71), and he cites Emerson’s claim in his first lecture that ‘the greatest office of natural science (and one that has only begun to be discharged) is to explain man to himself’ (81; cf. EL1 23). Robinson is also cognizant of the importance of correspondence, and he picks it up a dozen years later when he writes: ‘Emerson’s engagement with science centred upon his development of the implications of his analogy between nature and the soul’ (Robinson 1992, 96). All these critics are aware at some level of the importance of natural science in Emerson’s understanding of the relationship between world and mind. However, none of them take this insight far enough and Emerson’s metaphorical thinking does not become a main theme of their work. Barbara Packer offers a more nuanced approach to Emerson’s scientific metaphors in her essential 1982 Emerson’s Fall. Packer gives an exemplary reading of a single example: Emerson’s ‘axis of vision’ metaphor from the ‘Prospects’ section of ‘Nature’: “The ruin or the blank that we see when we look at nature, is in our own eye. The axis of vision is not coincident with the axis of things, and so they appear not transparent but opake [sic.]” (CW1,

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43). Packer traces Emerson’s ‘axis of vision’ metaphor to a likely source: a chapter of David Brewster’s 1831 Life of Newton that explains Newton’s theory of light (Packer 1982, 72–82). In brief, Brewster explains that light rays have polarity, and depending on that polarity at the point of contact of a ray of light on the surface of something that appears to be transparent, say the surface of a bubble, part of it will reflect from and part of it will refract through the bubble’s surface. Thus, the bubble will appear partially transparent and partially opaque. Brewster’s description, Packer explains, gave Emerson some key concepts: axis, transparency, and opacity, which, she continues, come together with some language from Coleridge about the ‘coincidence’ of the subject with the object creating, in her words, a ‘complex symbolic system’ (Packer 1982, 75). In CMT terms, we have a composite metaphor that we can more fully understand with the simple addition of the great chain with its poles of spirit and matter and understanding is seeing. When Emerson aligns his ‘axis’ he can see through matter to spirit; if he cannot align his axis, then he is not ‘coincident,’ and thus remains fallen. Newton’s light, as a metonym of seeing, becomes the metaphorical equivalent of direct understanding; what in 1836 Emerson will call ‘the eye of Reason’ (JMN5, 123). Emerson then uses the cognitive topology of the metaphor to relegate the mere ‘Understanding’ to the reflected ray. The ‘axis of vision’ composite metaphor, as Packer interprets it, is a different kind of metaphor than the vision schema that underlies the transparent eye-ball. There what mattered was the embodied act of seeing itself, in which the eye disappears. In the ‘axis of vision’ the physical eye makes a return, and here the anatomical lens has a direct bearing on the metaphor, as a surface that Reason may or may not penetrate. Eric Wilson takes Emerson’s use of science much further in his 1999 monograph Emerson’s Sublime Science. Wilson is even more attuned to Emerson’s metaphorical understanding of science, tracing it back through the poet-scientist Michael Faraday to the Romantic poets Coleridge and Goethe. Wilson is useful genealogist of many of Emerson’s natural science metaphors, especially those that use electricity and magnetism as source domains (Wilson 1999, 44ff, 78–97), and how they ‘shock readers into an awareness of the relationship between matter and spirit’ (15). Wilson calls this practice ‘troping,’ by which he means Emerson’s condensation of ‘several traditional tropes, like metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, into the same sentence, sometime the same word [expressing] a linguistic vigor akin to an electrical storm, a sublime science’ (111). For Wilson, though, Emerson’s use of metaphor is a rhetorical rather than a cognitive practice, the compressed trope ‘overcoming auditors and readers with semantic force, requiring them to counter by calling their own minds to action’ (113). Wilson, then, understands very well the effect of Emerson’s natural history metaphors, to turn matter into spirit,

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but not the underlying cognitive and conceptual work that underpins his metaphors. Just a few years later, in 2003, Laura Dassow Walls published her remarkable book Emerson’s Life in Science: The Culture of Truth, in which she proves herself one of the very best readers of Emerson’s scientific metaphors, fully aware of their operation in Emerson’s thinking, even if, as we saw in the Introduction, she is sceptical of CMT as a methodology. Walls begins by recognizing that ‘the creative method of science, by showing how to incorporate mind and nature into a new whole, gave Emerson the key to the universe; it was a fundamental insight that he never tired of repeating’ (Walls 2003, 2). As Walls goes on to say, this relationship between nature and mind was a ‘marriage’ that ‘permeated [Emerson’s] thought and writing at every level, from its deepest structure to his most casual analogies’ (4). As we have learned, the ‘deepest structure’ of Emerson’s thought is metaphorical. Though not going so far, Walls does acknowledge that by ‘metaphoric transference, the key concepts of nineteenth-century science [ . . . ] became so much a part of Emerson’s familiar, accepted and unquestioned working vocabulary that they dropped out of view’ (5). In dropping out of view, of course, scientific concepts do not cease to matter; rather, they become fundamental, connecting ‘outer to inner’ (5), or, as I would put it, matter to spirit. For Walls, Emerson’s metaphors have a particular purpose, which we can see if we return to the passage of hers that I cited in my Introduction: ‘Few writers were more densely metaphoric that Emerson, yet the paradox is that Emerson himself fought against the metaphoricity of language. What he sought was not linguistic play, but truth, the single reality beyond language’ (22). For Walls, scientific metaphor points beyond language to ‘truth.’ Interestingly, Walls then takes an etymological approach to the word ‘truth,’ echoing Emerson and CMT. Walls notes that the ‘root meaning’ of truth derives from the Old English “trēow, ‘tree’” (22). The concept of ‘truth,’ she then contends, borrows from the source domain: it is ‘firm, solid, steadfast’ and it will “‘endure’ over time” (22). She sums up truth’s debt to its source domain as follows: ‘Truth is an arboreal construction, a tree well-rooted in the material world. Tested by time, it rears its crown toward the eternal heavens, lighted by the sun of reason and warmed by the springs of knowledge’ (22). The tree, then, is itself structured by the great chain, with its vertical hierarchy of matter leading up to spirit; and like the human (Emerson says in ‘Compensation’ that the naturalist regards ‘a tree as a rooted man’; CW2, 59), it sits in the middle, figuring truth. So, it may seem strange that Walls deflects conceptual metaphor theory, characterizing it as linguistic play, rather than recognising it as stabilized by embodied experience. She turns to the anthropologist Noelle Quinn, who writes that ‘metaphors, far from constituting our understanding, are ordinarily

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selected to fit a preexisting and cultural shared model’ (cited in Walls 2003, 23). It is, though, as Walls herself indirectly acknowledges, hard to find culturally shared ground that is not itself shaped by metaphor—as exemplified by Walls’s own metaphorical derivation of truth. Other ‘cultural’ metaphors that Walls uses are ‘culture’ itself, which she calls ‘a broad metaphor [ . . . ] loaded with allusions to soil, growth, nutrition, and fertility’ (18), as well as metaphors that we are already familiar with, such as the Great Chain of Being and the Argument from Design (cf. 85–87, 46–9). Quinn’s preexisting models, it would seem, are always already conceptual metaphors, drawing on source domains to provide apt and sharable knowledge of their target domains. Walls herself seems aware of this complexity, writing: ‘The point of Emerson’s turn to science was precisely to get beyond the mere succession of apposite metaphors, beyond the perishable language of men and things, and enter directly the mind of God. Hence his endless metaphorical play. Emerson unceasingly poured the universe through bits of itself, until the point was clearly to arrive at no one triumphant solvent metaphor, but at the metaphorical relationship itself’ (25; Walls’s emphasis). Here Walls seems to argue herself out of her own point. We do not get beyond or behind or underneath metaphors (all, of course, states are locations metaphors) to some kind of reality or truth; but rather into the ‘metaphorical relationship itself’—which is the ‘play’ of metaphor as the ‘play’ of thought—something akin to what I referred to in the last chapter as source domain override. There is, I would argue based on the evidence provided so far, nothing rich or interesting, or even usefully human, beyond this highly serious ‘play’ when attempting to conceptualize a metaphysical world. On the contrary, Emerson can only grasp his ideas of truth, or God, through apt metaphor—that is, how he will become like truth, or God, as unity between humankind and God, as we have seen and as we will continue to see, is itself a metaphorical concept, which, ultimately, is something that Walls’s book triumphantly shows. Her keen attention throughout to Emerson’s scientific metaphors never serves any intention to get beyond those metaphors; it is a celebration of their work in his writings and in his thoughts. Walls understands that what science offers to Emerson is a way of becoming one with nature and God through and as metaphor, for it is metaphor that both enables and acts as that relationship. What Walls does not show, as it would go beyond the purview of her book, is that it is not only scientific metaphors that enable Emerson to relate to nature and to God, but through the part is the whole and the spiritual is the material, anything can take up that symbolic weight. However, Walls, along with Wilson, Robinson, and critics as far back as Clark and Strauch, recognize that science has an unusually important place in Emerson’s thought, and that he uses its metaphors to liberate himself from the sterility of his New

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England worldview—a process we can easily trace as we continue to pursue Emerson’s writings. ‘AN EYE IN AN EGGSHELL’ For Emerson, to know nature through natural history is always to know something else. That is natural history’s power as a metaphor. He exemplifies the cross-mapping power of natural history in a series of journal entries composed in 1832, a time when his theological doubts would cause him to leave the ministry: Indeed is truth stranger than fiction. For what has imagination created to compare with the science of Astronomy? What is there in Paradise Lost to elevate & astonish like Herschel or Sommerville? The contrast between the magnitude & duration of the things observed & the animalcule observer. It seems a mere eye sailing about space in an eggshell & for him to undertake to weigh the formidable masses, to measure the secular periods & settle the theory of things so vast & long, & out of the little cock-boat of a planet to aim an impertinent telescope at every nebula & pry into the plan and state of every white speck that shines the inconceivable depths. Not a white spot but is a lump of Suns[,] the roe[,] the milt of light and life[.] Who can be a Calvinist or who an Atheist[?] God has opened this knowledge to us to correct our theology & educate the mind. (JMN4, 24; Editors’ interpolations)

Emerson, beginning with an allusion to Canto 14 of Byron’s 1823 Don Juan (‘’Tis strange,—but true; for truth is always strange/Stranger than fiction’; Byron 1973, 496), tells himself to turn to the ‘strange’ truth of science if he is to ‘correct’ the theological ‘imagination.’ Even the rigorous Puritan ‘fiction’ of Paradise Lost, cannot reach the heights of a genuinely sublime natural science, figured in terms of sheer scale: the vastness of the cosmos contrasted with the smallness of the astronomer: ‘a mere eye sailing about space in an eggshell.’ Emerson’s metaphor appears to be a true catachrestic original. The eye, in this instance, is both a metonym for the ‘whole’ of the eighteenth-century astronomer William Herschel and for his telescope, which come together at that point. It is also an example of understanding is seeing, condensing an entire field of knowledge into the visual organwherewhere. That the eye is travelling through space in an ‘eggshell’ is initially harder to fathom. This apparently novel image came to Emerson from a couple of lines from Ben Jonson’s incomplete 1641 play, The Sad Shepherd, which he had cited in his journal the previous month: ‘You had better begin small, sail in an eggshell, make a straw your mast, a cobweb all your cloth’ (JMN4, 13).

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In Emerson’s heightened and frankly surreal usage, placing an ‘eye’ in the eggshell (maybe he could also hear Herschel in eggshell?) enables the metaphor to conceptualize knowledge through the sharp contrast of human fragility and cosmic scale, a contrast further enhanced when the earth becomes a ‘cock-boat’ (a dinghy that trails after a larger vessel). Herschel’s ‘impertinent’ telescope, though, collapses scale, transporting that eggshell eye across the intervening space, transforming nebulae into suns, themselves understood, through further sexual metaphors—causation is progeneration—of ‘roe’ and ‘milt,’ as the origins of all ‘light & life.’ His astronomical knowledge of causes leaves no room for either strict Calvinism or a godless Atheism. As Emerson goes on to quote from James Drummond, author of Letters to a Young Naturalist, published that same year, ‘A good naturalist cannot be a bad man’ (25), implying that Calvinists and Atheists may well not be good men. Rather, it is the study of Natural History that will make a person good, and Emerson hopes that ‘the time will come when there will be a telescope in every street’ (25) for all to take advantage of an essential corrective to God’s revelation, and for them to set off as questing eyes in their own eggshells. A few days later, Emerson returns to his astronomical theme, at least in part as preparation for a sermon he would deliver shortly afterward. Now the difference in scale between humankind and the vast reaches of space is less easy to collapse: ‘Do you believe that there is boundless space? Just dwell on that gigantic thought. Does not idealism seem more probable than a space upon whose area what is, the family of being, is a mere dot, & the thought of men or angels can never fathom more than its verge. All is lost in the bosom of its great night’ (JMN4, 26). If astronomy reveals a ‘boundless space’ that shrinks all that dwell therein to a ‘mere dot,’ then our ideas of God become ridiculous. We have always, Emerson continues, imagined that God must be something like us. But this is a mistaken projection, or, as CMT would see it, cross-mapping. He borrows Montesquieu’s quip: ‘If the triangles had a God they would paint him with three sides’ (26). That is, we have made God in our own image. The simple scale of the universe as discovered by science gives that reasoning the lie. Just as there is likely to be alien life ‘of entirely different structure from man’ (26), then, because of source domain override, any such structure will become a source domain for a different God. The sum of such projections is that God can be none of these things; indeed, God can be nothing like we imagine him at all in scriptural revelation. Indeed, in his journal he is content to sweep away ‘St Paul’s epistles’ and ‘the Jewish Christianity,’ even while retaining ‘The Sermon on the Mount’ as true ‘throughout space.’ However, Emerson’s subsequent sermon, delivered in May 1832, is more cautious, and begins with a quotation from Saint Luke’s Acts, a passage that for Emerson ‘shows that the Scriptures claim to be from the same Being

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that made the heavens and the earth; that the God of nature and the God of the Bible are affirmed to be the same’ (CS4, 154). Scriptural revelation, though, as he continues in the sermon, must be supplemented and extended by ‘all the facts which every year science is bringing to light’ (377), with the consequence that ‘the science of astronomy has had an irresistible effect in modifying and enlarging the doctrines of theology’ (154). As such, his journal concludes, ‘Astronomy proves theism but disproves dogmatic theology’ (JMN4, 26). Even so, Emerson remains torn. At this period, the late spring of 1832, his son Edward will later contend that Emerson was undergoing a crisis in his ministry (27: n71). Emerson would no longer admit that one of the key forms of the Unitarian church service, holy communion, was a permanent sacrament; it had become an empty symbol, failing to map matter onto spirit and the part onto the whole; it was merely the repetition of an historic event, given meanings it does not merit. As Emerson writes amidst a ‘moral excitement’ less than a week after his thoughts on astronomy, ‘I have sometimes thought that in order to be a good minister it was necessary to leave the ministry’ (27). Soon after, Emerson left Boston to spend some time in the White Mountains of New Hampshire and work out his future: ‘Here above the mountains the pinions of thought should be strong and one should see the errors of men from a calmer height of love and wisdom. What is the message that is given to me to communicate next Sunday? Religion in the mind is not credulity & the practice is not form. It is a life’ (27). After a summer of contemplation, which sees him engage with Fox and Swedenborg in the ways we have seen in earlier chapters (cf. JMN4 31, 33, 37), Emerson resigned from his ministry in September and left for Europe on Christmas Day 1832, on a tour that would, famously, inspire him to become a ‘naturalist’—a word that takes on a very personal meaning in Emerson’s hands. THE CABINET IN THE GARDEN For Emerson, science figured a connection between matter and spirit in which he could find himself even as he was no longer comfortable in the religious forms of the Unitarian church. We can see this feeling in Emerson’s musings in the weeks before he sent his eye around the cosmos in Jonson’s eggshell: “Sir James Mackintosh said well, that every picture, statue, and poem was an experiment upon the human mind. I hunt in Charles’s dish of shells each new form of beauty & new tint, & seem, as Fontanelle said, ‘to recognise the thing the first time I see it.’ Every knot of every cockle has expression, that is, is the material symbol of some thought” (JMN4, 14; Emerson’s emphasis). Emerson is referring to Mackintosh’s recently published General View of the Progress of Ethical Philosophy, in which he had written that

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‘works of genius in every department of ingenious art and polite literature’ can be a ‘repository of ethical facts’ (Mackintosh 1832, 42–3). Mackintosh’s ‘experiment[s] on the mind,’ as Emerson put it, derive from the Arts, which Mackintosh sees as ‘closer to human feeling than science can ever be’ (43). When Emerson turns to his brother Charles’s dish of shells, however, he inverts Mackintosh’s point. For Emerson, drawing also from Fontanelle, it is natural forms, the shells, rather than works of art, that are instantly recognizable. Emerson had noted down the Fontanelle quote years earlier in 1826 in an explicit reference to Shakespeare that anticipated Mackintosh’s focus on art (JMN3, 55). In 1832, however, as Emerson’s editors note, he has changed the quotation. In the original, it is a ‘truth’ that is instantly recognizable; now it is a ‘thing,’ the change reflecting the move from an abstract literary to a concrete natural history context. This early evocation to the spiritual is the material conceptual metaphor indicates that it is in nature rather than art that Emerson will look for Mackintosh’s ‘ethical facts.’ Interestingly, the passage’s focus on the expressive power of natural forms to act as ‘the material symbol of some thought’ emerged only a few days after Emerson had written of ‘Jeffrey’s true theory [of analogy]—the effect produced by making everything outward only a sign something inward’ (JMN4, 11), which I looked at in Chapter 1. Jeffrey, like Mackintosh, was thinking of art. Emerson, for now at least, is thinking of science. His shift becomes clear when he picks up the point a week later, giving it an explicit turn toward natural history: ‘I suppose an entire cabinet of shells would be an expression of the whole human mind; Flora of the whole globe would be so likewise; or a history of beasts; or a painting of all the aspects of the clouds. Every thing is significant’ (JMN4, 14). The so-called cabinets of natural history to which Emerson refers emerged in the Enlightenment. In their simplest form, such cabinets displayed natural specimens in a series of drawers or glass-paneled boxes, their arrangement suggesting emerging taxonomic principles that helped to organize the abundant discoveries of the period. For Emerson, a natural history cabinet was like his brother’s bowl of shells in a more expansive and ordered form, and he did not limit it to the speculative categorization of nature; rather it ‘was an expression of the whole human mind.’ Knowing that for Emerson the purpose of nature is to enable the articulation of mental life through metaphor, his take on the cabinet of natural history is entirely typical. Indeed, the cabinet, as Elizabeth Dant observes, acts ‘as an ordering principle for Emerson’s thought and writing’ and as a ‘coherent representational and epistemological model’ (Dant 1999, 19, 22). Using CMT, we can understand Dant’s ‘epistemological model’ as a process of metaphorical mapping between a particular way of presenting nature and inner life. If a single shell in Charles’s bowl is the material symbol of a single thought, then, drawing on the part is the whole, a ‘cabinet’ of

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shells can figure a ‘whole human mind.’ Furthermore, the cabinet metaphor suggests a particular kind of whole. As Dant’s ‘coherent’ suggests, the cabinet is the source domain of an ‘ordered’ world that Emerson can apply to the target domain of the mind, entailing an ordered mind. It is the ordering function of the cabinet that appeals to Emerson as he searches for apt metaphors. Indeed, returning to Emerson’s journal extract, we can see that any so ordered catalog of nature can operate in the same way, be it the ‘Flora of the whole globe’ or a ‘painting of all the aspects of clouds.’ The metaphorical entailment is that just as any individual natural form can represent a thought, then any comprehensive collection of such natural forms, understood as an ordered whole, can conceptualize a whole and ordered mind. Through metaphor, then, mind and nature are structurally homologous, as microcosm and macrocosm, as part to whole. Importantly, though, this structure is complicated by Emerson’s next example in the journal extract: the ‘history of beasts.’ The idea of history adds a temporal element to the ordered catalog, and thus to the concept of the mind the metaphor entails. As Emerson will put it a fortnight later, ‘Every form is a history of the thing. The comparative anatomist can tell at sight whether a skeleton belonged to a carnivore or herbivorous animal. A climber, a jumper, a runner, a digger, a builder’ (JMN4, 25). Any element of an animal’s anatomy, then, is a snapshot of its historical development and its purpose. The metaphorical implication, as we shall see, is that the mind is also developing toward a particular endpoint. We can see the ordering of nature at work if we turn to Denis Diderot’s canonical entry on Cabinets of Natural History in the second volume of his vast Encyclopédie (1750–1765), where he notes that ‘to form a cabinet of natural History, it is not enough to assemble without choice, and to cram without order, and without taste, all the natural history objects that one comes across; it is necessary to distinguish that which merits keeping from that which must be rejected, and to give to each choice a suitable arrangement. The order of a cabinet cannot be that of order of nature; nature affects everywhere a sublime disorder’ (Diderot 1758, 415).1 The purpose of a cabinet, then, is to select and discriminate, and thereby abstract an order from the ‘sublime disorder’ of nature. In Diderot’s Enclycopédie entry, however, the Cabinets of Natural History he has in mind are not those that could fit in a bowl or even into the corner of a gentleman’s study. They are the spectacular gardens and museums that were emerging to house the royal collections in France in the eighteenth century, which were, indeed, attempts to catalog the ‘Flora of the whole globe’ and the ‘history of beasts.’ Diderot’s exemplar is the Jardin de Roi, and in particular, the approach to its design put forward by the naturalist Louis Jean-Marie D’Aubenton, who became the keeper of its collections in 1744. Diderot cites D’Aubenton’s description of his arrangement of the Jardin in ways that reinforce how the cabinet could work as a source domain:

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The most favourable arrangement, said M. D’Aubenton, for the study of natural History, would be the methodical order which distributes things it includes into class and genus, and into species; thus animals, plants and minerals would be precisely separated from each other; each kingdom would have its own section. The same order would subsist between the genus and species; one would place individuals from the same species together, without allowing any separation. One would see the species in their genus, and the genus in their class. Such is the arrangement indicated by the principles that have been devised to facilitate the study of natural history; such is the order which alone can realize them. In effect, everything must become instructive; at each glance, not only does one take real cognisance of the object one considers, but one further discovers the relationships that it can have with those that surround it. (Diderot 1748, 415)

D’Aubenton’s Jardin is a series of containers—kingdom contains genus, genus contains species—which constructs and displays clear category differences between the elements of nature. Also, in D’Aubenton’s Jardin, each specimen is visually associated by physical proximity to those specimens considered most closely related to it through biology, a methodical schema that radiates out across the Jardin to imply an order that the spectator can take in ‘at each glance.’ The Jardin de Roi, then, is ripe for metaphorical repurposing, its ordering principles close related to two key schemas the container and the part is the whole, as well as to the great chain metaphor and understanding is seeing. These figures, however, will only come to life for Emerson when they become tropes for self-expression, that is, when he uses the material world of natural history to figure the spiritual world of his own mind. It was on Emerson’s 1833 Grand Tour of Europe, which followed his resignation from the church, that, bored of Paris after the delights of Italy, he came to the Jardin de Plantes, which in pre-Revolutionary times had been D’Aubenton’s Jardin de Roi. Reestablished in 1793, as Lee Rust Brown tells us in his essential account, the Jardin de Plantes had been reorganized according to the latest classificatory models of René-Just Haüy, Georges Cuvier, Etienne Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, and Antoine-Laurent Jussieu (Brown 1997, 59–86). Their layout of the Jardin remained a heuristic spectacle of natural history where “a visitor such as Emerson could ‘see’ families, orders and classes” (76). Emerson took it as such, though he came to a predictably different conclusion than that intended by the great French classifiers. Indeed, after being rendered ‘pensive’ by a ‘cabinet of shells,’ admiring the ‘fancy coloured vests’ of the exotic birds, seeing the vulture as an ‘executioner,’ imagining the skeleton of a whale as the ‘frame of a schooner turned upside down,’ contrasted with ‘musquitoes’ in amber and ‘native gold in all its forms of crystallization & combination’ (JMN4, 405), Emerson comprehended the Jardin not only as a demonstration of nature’s variety and

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the power or natural history to find the order within it, he also saw the Jardin as a source domain that enabled him to conceive an order within himself. Emerson recorded his visit in a pithy journal entry written on the same July day. It was a moment that he already felt was slipping from him, as he wrote, ‘le moment où je parle est deja loin de moi’ (JMN4, 406)—a quotation from the seventeenth-century French poet and critic, Nicolas Boileau: ‘the moment of which I speak is already far from me.’ He would revise and expand on his experience several times over the next decade, but the first version reads as follows: You are impressed with the inexhaustible gigantic riches of nature. The Universe is a more amazing puzzle than ever, as you look along this bewildering series of animated forms [–] the hazy butterflies, the carved shells, the birds, beasts, insects, fishes, snakes, & the upheaving principle of life every where incipient in the very rock aping organized forms. Not a form so grotesque, so savage, nor so beautiful, but is an expression of some thing in man the observer. An occult relation between the very scorpions & man. I am moved by strange sympathies. I say continually, ‘I will be a naturalist.’ (406; editors’ interpolation)

The spectacle of Jardin realizes Emerson’s earlier reflections on shells, clouds, flora, and the history of beasts, presenting ‘the inexhaustible gigantic riches of nature’ as one vast cabinet of natural history, and as such his experience may not be quite the novel epiphany that the critical tradition has suggested (e.g., Robinson 1980, 69–70; Richardson 1995, 141–2; Branch and Mohs 2017, Introduction). Rather, the Jardin metaphor works in the same way as Emerson’s earlier cabinet metaphors: the order of nature presented by the Cabinet is a source domain for an ordered self. Even so, scaled up from Charles’s bowl of shell to the size of the Jardin, we can better see the work undertaken by the complex of metaphors that the cabinet combines. Emerson begins as a puzzled spectator of nature’s ‘inexhaustible richness.’ Indeed, his bewilderment suggests his first impression of the ‘amazing puzzle’ that surrounds him is more appropriate for a ‘sublime disorder’ than the organised experience that a cabinet should generate. However, Emerson does not enter the Jardin without a conceptual apparatus based in metaphor that he can quickly put to work. The first glimpse of this conceptual metaphor is implied by the word animation, which Emerson uses in the phrase ‘series of animated forms.’ Animation stems from the ancient Greek word anemos, or wind, and like spiritus and psyche, it relates to the breath that distinguishes the living from the dead—an etymology with which Emerson will later play, as we have seen, in his early lectures and in ‘Nature.’ In the context of the Jardin episode, animation is a strange word, as what he is looking at are preserved specimens in a succession of cabinets. Emerson’s metaphor first

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returns these specimens to living nature through metaphorical entailment as matter becomes spirit, and they become part of a continuum with the living gardens beyond. The real work of metaphor gets done when animation begins to imply order, where even typically inanimate rocks are ‘incipient’ with an ‘upheaving principle of life.’ ‘Incipient’ means to begin, from the Latin incipěre. The implication of his metaphor is that the rocks are already on the way, ‘upheaving,’ toward life, and the vertical dimension of ‘upheaving’ implies the ascending vector of the Emerson’s central organizing metaphor the great chain, and again, matter is moving toward spirit. The more obvious metaphor, ‘aping,’ reinforces this transformation by implying that rock imitates life, showing an underlying principle of organization: even rock is on the way to becoming organic, which in turn is on the way to the spirit, which is finally realized in the spectator himself. As such, Emerson is not impressed by animated nature for its own sake, and certainly not by the classificatory principles of Jussieu and his colleagues the Jardin seeks to demonstrate. Just as for Emerson a ‘cabinet of shells is an expression of the whole mind,’ so the Jardin’s Cabinet of Natural History ‘is an expression of some thing in man the observer.’ Whether ‘grotesque,’ ‘savage,’ or ‘beautiful,’ nature expresses some human thing. Nature is, once again, a metaphorical resource for the understanding of the self: ‘some thing’ that is in us. The entailment of Emerson’s metaphor is that that this ‘some thing’ in us is likewise grotesque, savage, and beautiful. As such, the Jardin metaphor constructs an identity (‘sympathy’) between humanity and nature, where an ‘occult,’ or hidden, relationship becomes visible to ‘man the observer,’ drawing on the familiar understanding is seeing metaphor. To see nature, in all its progressive order laid out by the French naturalists, from rocks on the way to life to the savage beast on the way the human, is to see the self as the culmination of ordered spiritual becoming; and, moreover, as a being that through metaphorical entailment contains all that went before. Emerson’s celebrated vocational outcry, ‘I will be a naturalist,’ then, is not a move toward science, except insofar as science enables a new route toward self-discovery. As he will put it more directly four years later in ‘The American Scholar’: “So much of nature as he is ignorant of, so much of his own mind does he not yet possess. And, in fine, the ancient precept, ‘Know thyself,’ and the modern precept, ‘Study nature,’ become at last one maxim” (CW1, 55). Soon after Emerson took down his sketch of the Jardin episode in his journal, he revised and significantly expanded it for his more formal ‘Italy and France’ journal. Whereas Emerson’s initial presentation of the Jardin is fragmentary and paratactic, the second version is set out as a coherent experience, that begins with him buying his ticket, and it ends with him leaving the gates (JMN4 199, 200). In between, Emerson is very much Diderot’s

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ideal spectator, walking through the exhibitions of natural forms, the birds, the insects, the shells, the reptiles, the minerals, the skeletons, the plants, and so on. In addition to his more considered narrative, the second version contains two significant revisions to the ‘epiphany’ sequence. The first is that the grotesque, savage, and beautiful forms of nature are now ‘an expression of some property inherent in man the observer’ (JMN4, 200; emphasis added). Replacing the vague ‘thing’ with the more Lockean ‘property’ raises the philosophical stakes; the collocation with ‘inherent’ takes this further. To ‘inhere,’ as the OED reminds us, means to be ‘fixed, situated, or contained in something in a physical sense,’ from the Latin ‘inhaerēre to stick in or to.’ The OED, in line with the work of the spiritual is the material metaphor, further tells us that a ‘physically’ inherent characteristic typically becomes a spiritual ‘attribute or quality’ (OED). As matter tropes spirit, Emerson already contains the nature that he sees. His use of the container schema more firmly asserts the presence of the cabinet’s animals within him in the second addition to the epiphany: ‘I feel the centipede in me—cayman, carp, eagle & fox’ (JMN4, 200; emphasis added). Because of the circulation of spirit and matter in Emerson’s metaphorical epistemology, these animals do not just represent some aspect of what it is to be human, as they would for Swedenborg. Rather, it is as though the human is a concentration of the totality of nature at one point. Which is, of course, precisely the entailment of Emerson’s cabinet metaphor, where the inner life is necessarily on the same scale as the outer life, because the spirit corresponds to all of nature. The Jardin episode was revised a third time as part of Emerson’s first public lecture, ‘The Uses of Natural History,’ which he delivered in November 1833, and which we have had cause to look at already, as it put forward the first statements of Emerson’s mature theory of metaphor. The trip to the Jardin is the centerpiece of the lecture’s first section, underlining Emerson’s right to speak on the topic of natural history and augmenting his sparse sources with lived experience. Perhaps surprisingly considering the formal nature of the lecture, this version is closer to the original journal sketch than to the ‘Italy and France’ version, suggesting that Emerson went back to the source. Like the first version, it begins with the direct ‘You are’ rather than the more roundabout ‘Here we are,’ directly engaging his audience with his experience. The opening sentence reinstates the ‘inexhaustible gigantic riches of nature’; and the animals are ‘an expression of something in man the observer,’ rather than ‘some property inherent in,’ perhaps pulling back on the philosophical language for a general audience. The lecture version omits the line where he ‘feels’ the Jardin’s animals in him, which was perhaps too revealing for a public lecture (EL1, 10; JMN4, 406, 199–200). He also inserts a line that came earlier in the first journal version and harks back to his quotation from Byron the previous year, when, as we saw above, astronomy

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trumped the imagination: ‘The limits of the possible are enlarged, and the real is stranger than the imaginary’ (EL1, 10). Byron’s emphasis on the ‘real’ is more important than it might seem. If we are to conceptualize our inner life using outward nature, then the more remarkable outward nature is, and the more the ‘real’ exceeds what has been ‘imagined,’ then there the greater the opportunity for the inner life to be thought anew, to be transformed by source-domain override. Such a reimagining of the inner life is a vital entailment of the cabinet metaphor. Continuing to think about the suitability of his rhetoric for a public paying audience, Emerson locates himself more securely at the scene of the Jardin experience: ‘Whilst I stand there I am impressed with a singular conviction that not a form so grotesque’ (10), before drawing in his auditors by moving from the standing ‘I’ to a ‘We’ that ‘feel[s] that there is an occult relation between the very worm, the crawling scorpions, and man’ (10). His rhetorical revision makes a direct connection to the listener, whom Emerson then himself becomes, adding a final twist to the revision: ‘I am moved by strange sympathies. I say I will listen to this invitation. I will be a naturalist’ (10; emphasis added). In the lecture version, Emerson is metaphorically addressed by the personified spectacle of the Jardin, invited by it to take up his vocation, now publicly declared to the Natural History Society at the Masonic Temple Hall on November 4, 1833. Emerson returned to his Jardin experience one more time, offering a lightly revised version for Edward L. Cary’s The Gift: A Christmas and New Year’s Present, in 1844, an annual anthology of the period that carried short stories by Poe, Longfellow, Irving, and Sedgwick, as well as poems by Emerson. The Gift version appears to be based on the 1833 lecture version, but his minor revisions are significant. For instance, the Jardin’s cabinet now presents a ‘stark series of once animated forms’ (CW10, 331; emphases added), to the spectator. In The Gift version, reversing all the earlier versions, Emerson’s ‘once animated,’ defines animals on display as objectively (starkly) dead specimens. In all the early versions, Emerson’s ‘animated’ metaphor turned the cabinet’s objectively dead specimens into a living series. Only the 1844 version emphasizes their mortal status. Even so, in 1844, the ‘upheaving principle of life’ is still ‘everywhere incipient’ (331), and dead matter is inevitably progressing up the great chain toward animation. Now, though, the ‘upheaving principle’ is understood systematically. As he continues: ‘Whilst I stood there, I yielded to a singular conviction, that in all these rich groups of natural productions which surrounded me, and in all that vast system which they represented, not a form so grotesque, so savage, so beautiful, but is an expression of some property in man the observer’ (331; emphases added). Now Emerson ‘yields’ to his conviction rather than being ‘impressed’ by it. To ‘yield’ is to give something up to someone, and, by metaphorical extension, to surrender. To be ‘impressed’ is to receive something that, to recover

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the work of the original metaphor, presses itself into your form. Both states are passive, but whereas Emerson was initially ‘impressed’ upon by ‘grotesque’ forms on nature, what he yields to in 1844 is a cabinet much more on the terms of its Enlightenment creators exemplified by Diderot, as representing a ‘vast system’ of ‘natural productions.’ Thus, it is the system, rather than the exaggerated ugliness of nature, that Emerson’s metaphor reflects into his sense of self, and through yielding or giving himself up to it, the system catachrestically becomes a ‘property,’ of Emerson as ‘man the observer.’ Finally, the implication is that the system always was his property, as he changes the tense of the epiphany’s culminating sentence: ‘I said, I will listen to this invitation; I also am a naturalist’ (331). In his final version, written over ten years after the original experience, Emerson is already the naturalist he was earlier invited to become. Even so, all four versions of the Jardin episode tell us that to be a naturalist is not just to be a scientist. To be a naturalist, for Emerson, as we shall see when we look at the lecture with that name later in this chapter, is to be someone who interprets nature in order to understand, or to reconceptualize, what it is to be human, and so enable the material world in all its variety to become a mirror for the self. Emerson’s metaphorical epistemology of self becomes clearer and more well-developed as he embarks on his short life as a public naturalist in his first four lectures. ‘IT IS ALL DESIGN!’ ‘It seems to be designed, if anything was, that men should be students of Natural History’ (EL1, 6). This at first blush hesitant sentence occurs toward the beginning of Emerson’s 1833 lecture, ‘The Uses of Natural History’—the first of his four natural history lectures. However, Emerson’s ‘if anything was’ must be taken as an intensifier rather than a note of doubt: as he will write at the end of his second lecture, ‘On the Relation of Man to the Globe,’ ‘Design! It is all design! It is all beauty. It is all astonishment’ (EL1, 49). Thus, Emerson can only mean that men ‘should’ indeed be ‘students of Natural History.’ The designer has designed them to be such; not, as we have seen, for science’s sake, or for nature’s sake, but for their own sake. The nature of the implied designer and of what they have designed, along with the conceptual metaphors that underly them, will emerge in what follows. In his first lecture, Emerson uses ‘Natural History’ in two senses, each with its own purpose—in the full sense of that word. In the first instance, our knowledge of natural history derives from the everyday experience that ‘compel[s us] to pick up [ . . . ] a considerable knowledge of natural philosophy,—as, an acquaintance with the properties of water, of wood, of stone, of light, of heat, and the Natural History of many insects, birds and

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beasts’ (EL1, 6). Just being and acting in the world, making use of nature for our own ends, entails knowledge of natural history. Hence, we are all, necessarily, its students. Further study of natural history, in its second scientific sense, enhances this fundamental knowledge, rendering nature even more significant and ‘Every fact that is disclosed to us in Natural History removes one scale more from the eye; makes the face of nature around us so much more significant’ (15). The significance of science is that it confirms Emerson’s understanding that nature is there for us, and, moreover, that we are its end point, its telos—its purpose. He continues: ‘To the naturalist belongs all that keen gratification which arises from the observation of the singular provision for human wants that in some instances requiring ages for its completion, was begun ages before the use of it was shown’ (15). What the naturalist finds in nature, through ‘observation’ (understanding is seeing), is that the world has gradually been preparing for the arrival, comfort, and sustenance of humanity. Geology, for example, tells Emerson ‘that very considerable changes have taken place upon the planet’ (15), and he immediately asserts that this is for our benefit. His example is coal, so vital to the Industrial Revolution that is waxing as he speaks. Coal, Emerson argues, is a natural phenomenon, now understood by science as ‘the relic of forests which existed in an unknown antiquity before the era of the creation of mankind’ (16) that has been subsequently buried ‘by the overflowing of the sea and other changes of the surface’ (16). These distant geological changes, though, only find their significance in humankind. As Emerson writes: ‘these vast beds of fuel so essential to man’s comfort and civilization, which would have been covered by the crust of the globe from his knowledge and use, are thus brought up within the reach of his hands’ (15–16). The great ructions of the earth itself imply a purposive design leading to the advancement of humanity. Emerson’s idea that the purpose of the entire ‘Natural History’ of the planet, its design, is to make it fit for human habitation becomes the main theme of his second lecture, ‘The Relation of Man to the Globe,’ delivered in December 1833, the month after his first lecture. He begins the lecture by rejecting several conceptual metaphors that could, and often do, define humankind’s relation to the globe: ‘it is not a mere farm out of which we can raise corn to eat; not a battlefield on which the strongest arm can rob his neighbours or their property; not a market where men set up their various talents for sale; nor a mere abiding place which has no other interest than the action and suffering of which it is the scene’ (EL1, 28–9; emphases added). Any of these conceptual metaphors would entail that the world is merely a backdrop to our activity, be it farming, fighting, selling, or waiting and suffering. For Emerson, these grounding metaphors alienate us from a world that is, as we have seen, fundamentally there for us. Emerson proposes an apt

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counter metaphor. The world is there ‘to serve the noblest purposes of the intellect’ (29; emphasis added); namely, the world is a servant. The entailments of such a devastating metaphor are clear. The world exists to please us, to do our bidding, to know its place; likewise, the Human is nature’s master; which is, of course, merely a figurative restatement of the Adamic covenant that humans would have ‘dominion’ (Gen 1:26) over all the creatures of the earth. Here, though, Emerson’s metaphor focuses nature’s servitude toward ‘the noblest purposes of the intellect’; that, as we have seen time and again, the ultimate purpose of the earth is to provide metaphors for, and thus give shape and dimension to, the inner human life. The earth is not a backdrop to our endeavor; rather, it provides the language for it, ‘inscribed in its history in gigantic letters, but hidden such that only the most diligent observer,’ namely the natural historian, ‘can read them’ (EL1, 29). Natural history not only enables us to better understand how the world works for us, but through that understanding, we also discover a language for ourselves. What each natural historian sees, according to Emerson, using his ‘instructed’ (17) or ‘informed eye’ is nature’s fitness: ‘It only needs to have the eye informed, to make everything we see, every plant, every spider, every moss, every patch of mould upon the bark of a tree, give us the idea of fitness, as much as the order and accommodation of the most ingeniously packed dressing box’ (17). Emerson’s metaphor is telling: the newly cosmopolitan gentleman traveler’s ‘dressing box,’ designed to contain and order all the instruments for his toillete. The metaphor is strictly analogous to the Cabinet of Natural History but entails an even clearer sense of a designer, making things ‘fit’ for human comfort. Here Emerson recalls a point he made earlier, that ‘every form is a history of the thing’ (17), and that history is a consequence of that thing’s place in nature, that is, the way it ‘fits’ into its niche in nature’s whole. Natural forms that Emerson may find awkward or ugly, such as a lobster, which ‘is monstrous to the eye,’ when located in its environment ‘fits exactly to some habitat and condition of the creature; he then seems as perfect and suitable to his seahouse, as a glove to a hand’ (17). Emerson’s metaphor is, again, fitting. The lobster’s environmental fit explains his merely apparent ugliness, and ‘his’ form is a history of his relationship to a specific environment. There is, necessarily for Emerson, a spiritual lesson to such an insight, for ‘Nothing is indifferent to the wise. If a man should study the economy of a spire of grass—how it sucks up sap, how it imbibes light, how it resists cold, how it repels excess moisture, it would show him a design in the form, in the color, in the smell, in the very posture of the blade as it bends before the wind’ (17). What the cabinet or ‘dressing box’ of nature, the history of the lobster’s shell, and the spire of grass show Emerson, then, is design. Natural history, as a corrective to theology, is a means of spiritual revelation,

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which is ‘the noblest purpose of the intellect.’ That is why it is ‘fit’ that we become natural historians. As we will see, the conceptual metaphors provided by natural history take Emerson from the designed to the designer, and they do not neglect humankind’s place in that metaphorical relationship. The earth’s purpose, Emerson’s metaphors tell us, is to serve human intellect to the end of a revelation that will correct theology. Such a revelation is the outcome of ages; a purpose discovered and interpreted anew by the revelation of natural history. As Emerson writes: By the study of the globe in very recent times we have become acquainted with a fact the most surprizing—I may say the most sublime, to wit, that 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, (as physiologists say,) to produce him; the meaner creatures, the primeval sauri, containing the elements of his structure and pointing at in 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. (29)

In an anthropocentric turn entirely typical of Emerson, the great age of the earth revealed by early nineteenth-century natural history, which shows humanity’s comparatively late arrival, does not diminish humanity’s importance. Rather, the whole history of the earth, back beyond even the dinosaurs, was a ‘progressive preparation’ for humanity. Emerson then, fully in line with the implications of the progressive great chain metaphor that we saw in Chapter 1 and which was reiterated in the Jardin experience, runs through this preparation, in which the first rocks, which were too hard for people, were ground over time to create a soil in which the first life, the ‘zoophytes,’ (30) can exist, crossing ‘a sort of boundary where the animate and inanimate seem to strive for mastery’ (30). Once the progress of nature breaks that crucial barrier, the movements of earth and water further change the surface of globe, destroying species in order ‘to make the earth habitable for a finer and more complex creation [ . . . ] resembling man’ (31). Breathable air, the temperature of the planet, the ‘texture and magnitude of the earth,’ the coal and iron brought near its surface, the ‘flavoured fruits’ it grows, are all there for humankind (32–3). And only when these conditions align, when the earth is perfectly ‘adapted’ for humans (32, 34), which, for Emerson, echoing biblical scholarship, was about ‘four or six thousand years’ ago (32), is the final stage reached, and the great chain moves from matter to spirit. As such, the final stage is not an incremental step; it is a leap: Man is made;—the creature who seems a refinement on the form of all who went before him, and made perfect in the image of the Maker by a gift of moral

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nature; but his limbs are only a more exquisite organization,—say rather—the finish of the rudimental forms that have been sweeping the sea and creeping in the mud; the brother of his hand is even now cleaving the Artic sea in the fin of the whale, and, innumerable ages since, was pawing the marsh in the flipper of the saurus. (32)

Man’s body is a gradual ‘refinement’ of all the creatures that have gone before, and though more exquisitely organized, it is still merely a material improvement of the creeping and wallowing creatures of past ages. The ‘gift of a moral nature’ is something altogether different and as such our ‘perfect[ion]’ is not bodily: it is intellectual. We should not understate the metaphorical work of the ‘gift’ of morality. It is not a gradual achievement; it is a sudden spiritual endowment that transcends the material chain, figuring an instantaneous addition of spirit to matter, and the imago dei is not to be found reflected in our physical perfection, but in our moral sense. Likewise, the purpose of nature revealed by natural history is not our physical creation; it is to provide a space for us to exercise our ‘moral nature.’ Again, Emerson’s understanding of natural history echoes the Adamic covenant. Indeed, Emerson’s metaphors in his first lectures on natural history confirm rather than challenge humanity’s familiar place in the great chain, locating humankind above nature and as the end of nature, while affirming his moral and spiritual difference from nature. What we see is that target domain override restricts Emerson’s early lectures, only reinforcing a concept of humankind as above nature but below his Maker, that is, below God. Emerson’s metaphors are not yet radical enough to bring these two concepts together. While I will look at Emerson’s idea of God in more detail in the final chapter of this book, it is worth reflecting briefly now on Emerson’s use of the term Maker in his idea of ‘design,’ and the metaphors that underlie it. He closes his second lecture with a recapitulation of his contention that the earth’s natural history is a ‘preparation’ (EL1, 48) for humankind, and finishes with a celebration of design: [T]he residence of man is the world. It was given him to possess it. I conclude further, that the snail is not more accurately adjusted to his shell than man to the globe he inhabits; that not only a perfect symmetry is discoverable in his limbs and senses between the head and the foot, between the hand and the eye, the heart and lungs,—but an equal symmetry and proportion is discoverable between him and the air, the mountains, the tides, the moon and the sun. I am not impressed by solitary marks of designing wisdom; I am thrilled with delight by the choral harmony of the whole. Design! It is all design. It is all beauty. It is all astonishment. (48–9)

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An implied idea of God bookends Emerson’s rhetorical burst. The world ‘was given’ to humans and there are ‘marks of designing wisdom’ in the fit and symmetry of all the parts of nature that make up its whole. The implication is that something gives, and something designs. As we saw in Chapter 2, Emerson was initially skeptical of the Argument from Design—it begged the question, as the clockwork in the analogy still relied on divine laws it was supposed to explain. He did, though, following Bishop Butler, gradually come to accept the view that a weight of natural historical evidence could point toward a designing God. This accretive position clearly holds at the end of Emerson’s second lecture, where ‘symmetry’ is discoverable between the various parts of the body as well as between the body and nature itself, evidencing design. By symmetry, Emerson does not mean a kind of reflected repetition, but, using the term metaphorically, he means the ‘fit’ of a well-built home—the shape of the world fits the shape of humankind, as the snail’s shell fits the snail. They are symmetrical. The world, then, is a ‘residence,’ or home, to humanity. Emerson’s metaphor here is the world is a home, but a further entailment is something built the home for the householder, that is, for humankind. The perfection of the proportion between human and world indicates purposive design; that there is intent rather than accident. As such, Emerson’s Argument from Design, as again noted in Chapter 2, is a variation on the tripartite causes are forces metaphor. The three parts of the causes are forces schema are firstly intent, secondly a willed action (where will is a ‘force’), and thirdly a satisfaction or completion of the initial intent. The world as a home for humanity is a consequence of an original divine act that had that end in mind from the outset. The natural history of the world is the gradual preparation of that home. The purpose of natural history as a scientific endeavor is to reveal God through that design–as a Builder, a Maker, an Architect. Emerson’s God, as such, is a metaphorical entailment of causes are forces. THE DIVINE ARTIST Perhaps Emerson’s most considered—and as we shall see, most long-standing—ways of understanding God as a designer is the ‘divine artist’ elaboration of the causes are forces metaphor, the entailment of which is that nature becomes a perfect work of art. His fourth and final Natural History lecture, ‘The Naturalist,’ given in May 1834 points the way, shifting Emerson’s metaphors from the scientific to the aesthetic, and in doing employing the metaphor of the artist to bring humankind and God together, challenging the target domain override that until then had limited his concept

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of the human. At first the lecture reinforces human limitations, contrasting them with the perfection of God’s design: Whatever theology of philosophy we rest in, or labour after, the students of Nature have all agreed that in Nature nothing is false or unsuccessful. That which is aimed at is attained, and by means most elegant and irresistible. The whole force of Creation is concentrated upon every point. What agencies of electricity, gravity, light, affinity, combine to make every plant what it is, and in a manner so quiet that the presence of these tremendous powers is not ordinarily suspected. Woven in their loom every plant every animal, is finished and perfect as the world. A willow or an apple is a perfect being; so is a bee or a thrush. The best poem or picture is not. (EL1, 72)

Emerson’s metaphors attempt to conceptualize the perfection of a designed nature at every point in space and time, drawing on the most fundamental schemas and the latest scientific knowledge. The path-goal schema underlies ‘aimed’ and ‘attained,’ with nature’s achievements as targets. ‘Irresistible’ stems from the causes are forces metaphor, where nature’s ends are the consequence of ‘the whole force of Creation,’ which, deploying the part is the whole and its dual, the whole is the part, is ‘concentrated at every point.’ Three of the most basic schemas, then, path-goal, causes are forces, and the part is the whole, are at work in Emerson’s attempt to relate all aspects of completed and perfect nature to a singular creative force. Emerson then shifts from this general language to the terms of natural history, and the forces of creation become ‘electricity, gravity, light, affinity.’ These ‘agencies’ are the silent (‘quiet’) and invisible (‘unsuspected’) active forces that ‘combine’ to make all natural forms. Emerson does not here expand on the metaphorical resonances of these physical forces, and they seem more an illustrative echo of the spiritual is the material as they become lost in the general metaphysical flurry of Emerson’s figurative conceptions. Rather, through the familiar maker and the made version of the causes are forces metaphor that we saw above, these ‘woven’ natural forces become the warp and weft of creation. As a necessary entailment of causes are forces, Emerson brings in creative purpose, and nature’s perfection in each specimen (willow, apple, bee, thrush) as in the whole (the world) is the outcome of divine intent. Emerson’s metaphors, then, entail a creative purpose realised in every element of nature. However, as the passage closes, Emerson contrasts perfection with the creative intent of humankind. Nature’s products are perfect beings; human products, ‘poem or picture,’ are not. In the next section of the lecture, Emerson further contrasts the creative powers of God with man, the underlying irony being that the conceptualization of God’s creative powers emerges through analogy with the acts of

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human creation that he finds wanting in the source domain. Emerson initially draws on a metaphor of the divine artist that he finds in Goethe. The Goethe passage is worth quoting in full, as it forms a crux in Emerson’s thinking about the purpose of natural history: The smallest production of nature [ . . . ] has the circle of completeness within itself and I have only need of eyes to see with, in order to discover the relative proportions. I am perfectly sure that within this circle however narrow, an entirely genuine existence is enclosed. A work of art, on the other hand, has its completeness outside of itself. The Best lies in the idea of the artist which he seldom or never reaches: all the rest lies in certain conventional rules which are indeed derived from the nature of art and the mechanical processes but still are not so easy to decipher as the laws of living nature. In works of art there is much that is traditional; the works of nature are ever a freshly uttered Word of God. (Goethe, cited in EL1, 72)

There are two innovatively interrelated metaphorical source domains at work in Goethe’s train of thought, both of which Emerson will also use: the circle and the artist. From the circle, Goethe gets a scalable schema, and no matter how small or how large it is, the circle retains its formal relationships within itself, such as ratio of diameter and circumference, radius and area, its continuity of outline, etc. As such, the circle is an ideal metaphor for perfection as integrity of form. The circle also acts as a container. All its properties exist within it; again no matter how big or how small the circle is, it is complete in itself. The circle for Goethe is an apt metaphor for natural forms, which are self-contained and perfect in themselves, no matter their size, from seed to tree. Goethe uses the container to contrast the work of nature with the work of art, the latter having ‘its completeness outside of itself.’ The work of art is not self-contained but needs the supplement of the ‘idea of the artist,’ which the work itself does not realize, to complete it. Goethe’s metaphorical speculation moves, then, from nature to art. In a variation on the maker/ made metaphor, Goethe takes the source domain of the artist and the artwork to map the target domain of God and creation, and through the combination with the circle and container conceptualises a divine artist. The divine artist, his metaphors tell us, is in each created thing, giving it that completion or perfection which the human artist, who exists outside his or her work, cannot achieve. The human artist must use tradition and convention to realise all he can of his ideal; these traditions and conventions are analogous to the laws of nature and equally hard to fathom; but whereas traditions limit the possibilities of art, the laws of nature enable works that are ‘ever a freshly uttered Word of God,’ as, in a familiar turn, the artist becomes the author of nature’s book. Goethe’s metaphorical conception of creation, then, is pantheistic,

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with God’s ‘idea’ in every part of nature (the part is the whole), giving it an internal completion that the human artist, who is outside their work, can ‘seldom or never’ reach. Emerson, however, takes the entailments of Goethe’s metaphors in a different direction. He begins with a telling shift away from natural history or science as the preeminent way of viewing nature and toward art. As he writes: ‘It is fit that man should look upon Nature with the eye of the Artist, to learn from the great Artist whose blood beats in our veins, whose taste is upspringing in our own perception of beauty, the laws by which our hands should work that we may build St Peter’ses or paint Transfigurations or sing Iliads in worthy continuation of the architecture of the Andes, [of] the colors of the sky and the poem of life’ (EL1, 73; editors’ interpolation). The idea of ‘fitness’ is one we have seen before, the metaphor coming from how things relate to each other, or ‘fit’ together, in a metaphorically entailed divine plan. Just as in that earlier lecture, it was ‘fit’ that all men should be natural historians, now, just a few months later, Emerson is urging his audience to change their perspective and ‘it is fit that man should look upon Nature with the eye of the Artist.’ Emerson’s metaphorical underpinnings have moved from science to art. Of course, he is exhorting his audience to do more than just ‘look’; the understanding is seeing metaphor is clearly implicit. If we look in a certain way, we will understand things in a certain way. It is here that Emerson begins to nudge Goethe’s metaphors into a different shape to the advancement of humankind. Goethe construed the difference between the human artist and the Divine artist through the entailments of the container and circle metaphor: God was in every circle that he creates, the human was outside the circles he creates. Emerson, though, locates God in man—‘the great Artist whose blood beats in our veins.’ This viscerally defined divinity is in us. As such, God’s creative power comes out through us, both as perceiving connoisseurs and, much more importantly, as creators working with the divine laws that Goethe limited to God. Emerson’s artist, as a divine container, is not merely a victim of tradition as he was for Goethe, and the works he creates are not merely conventional. The works of which Emerson speaks, Michelangelo’s St Peters, Raphael’s Transfiguration and Homer’s Iliad, are ‘continuation[s]’ of nature and ‘the architecture of the Andes, the colors of the sky and the poem of life.’ The human artist works with divine laws, enabled by Emerson figuring nature itself figured as a series of aesthetic objects. As such Emerson’s move from science to aesthetics enables a subtle shift in his thinking metaphors, and his use of the divine source domain of God’s creativity affects the target domain of the concept of humankind itself. The divine laws upon which the human artist draws, Emerson makes plain, are not the abstract laws of nature—electricity, gravity, light, affinity—they

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are the artistic laws of composition. Furthermore, artistic laws come to underpin nature’s laws. As Emerson writes: Nothing strikes me more in Nature than the effect of Composition, the contrast between the simplicity of the means and the gorgeousness of the result. Nature is particularly skilled in the rule of arithmetic called Permutation and Combination. Sometimes it is so amusing as to remind us of the French cook who could make forty dishes out of macaroni. A very few elements has Nature converted into the countless variety of substances that fill the earth. Look at the grandeur of the prospect from a mountain top. It is composed of not many materials continually repeated in new unions. (EL1, 73)

Emerson takes what he has learned from natural history, namely that there are a small number of forces, laws, elements (he cites Fontanelle’s ‘What! Is this all?’ EL1, 74), and adds what he has learned from art, that it is the relationship between things that creates variety. The underlying conceptual metaphors are the part is the whole schema along with understanding is seeing. Now the eye of the artist, rather than of the naturalist, provides the right perspective—the ‘prospect from the mountain top’—that unites the diverse elements and relates parts to wholes. In combination with the artist elaboration of the causes are forces schema, these metaphors enable Emerson to conceptualize the divine cause in the variety of created nature: it is a single composition. Emerson puts his insight together with a seminal childhood experience that first appeared in his journals in 1834, and becomes a motif over the following years, repeated in two lectures, referenced in his poem ‘Each and All,’ and finally becoming a theme in the 1836 Nature: Every artist knows that beyond its own beauty the object has an additional grace from relation to surrounding objects. The most elegant shell in your cabinet does not produce such an effect on the eye as the contrast and combination of a group of ordinary sea shells lying together wet upon the beach. I remember when I was a boy going upon the shore and being charmed with the colors and forms of the shells. I gathered up many and put them in my pocket. When I got home I could find nothing that I gathered, nothing but some dry, ugly mussels and snails. Thence I learned that Composition was more important than the beauty of individual forms to effect. On the shore they lay wet and social by the sea and under the sky. (EL1, 73–4; Cf. JMN4, 291; EL1, 317; CW9, 14–15)

Goethe’s ‘productions of nature’ were individual, their perfection contained within their circle. Emerson rejects Goethe’s metaphor of contained circular integrity in favor of a relational metaphor of composition—shells, beach, sea, and sky: a complete picture. As he will put it in Nature, ‘Nothing is quite beautiful alone: nothing but is beautiful in the whole’ (CW1, 17). Any element

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once removed from its context loses its charm—that is, it ceases to serve. Emerson then recalls the ‘cabinet’ of natural history, contrasting the shells it contains with the shells on the beach. Where only a year earlier, the cabinet was a metaphor for the ordered inner life, a systematic whole revealed by the parts of Natural History, now the cabinet loses by contrast to the shell as part of an aesthetic whole revealed by the eye of the artist. Natural history, as the cabinet evidenced and Diderot’s Encylopédie made clear, advances through ‘discrimination’ and ‘perpetual division and subdivision’ (EL1, 75). Such an approach does not advance toward the complete meaning of nature. Natural history can only provide facts, and just as Emerson used the metaphors of the emerging sciences discourse to correct his theology, now he uses metaphors drawn from aesthetic experience to correct science and bring his concept of humankind closer to the divine. Indeed, Emerson’s divine artist is as much human as God. The entailment of Emerson’s perspectival understanding is seeing metaphor, with man atop the mountain ordering the ‘few elements’ of nature into a sublime ‘prospect,’ is that he stands above the spectacle, at the single quasi-divine point where the composition comes together, the point where nature becomes meaningful through an active aesthetic ordering of experience. ‘NATURE MEANS SOMETHING’ Aesthetic experience was always a motivating factor for Emerson’s interest in natural history. As he wrote in his first lecture back in November 1833: ‘The beauty of the world is a perpetual invitation to the study of the world,’ which he follows with a prose poem to ‘Sunrise and sunset,’ the ‘airy inaccessible mountains’ and the ‘glaring colours of the soil of the volcano’; but here any ‘pleasure we obtain [ . . . ] is trifling, compared with their natural information’ (EL1, 6). The original Jardin episode is exemplary of an aesthetic ‘invitation,’ where the principal value of ‘natural information’ is not ‘pleasure,’ but the shape it can give to the inner self through the ordering structure of the cabinet. In his second lecture, given a month later in December aesthetic experience and science begin to diverge, as he writes, ‘There is more beauty in the morning cloud than the prism can render account of’ (24). The implication is that aesthetic experience exceeds science. Drawing on understanding is seeing metaphor, this more expansive aesthetic vision, as we just saw with Emerson’s ideas of composition and perspective, can enable a wider concept the self, and in his final natural history lecture, ‘The Naturalist,’ Emerson brings aesthetic and the scientific ways of seeing together, enabling them work more fully in the interests of self-discovery.

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Emerson begins his unification of poetry and science by going back to their common origin in the long history of humanity’s search for meaning: We are possessed with a conviction that Nature means something, that the flower, the animals, the sea, the rock have some relation to us not understood which if known would make them more significant. As men have been fingering the characters that are carved on the Egyptian remains these thousand years, sure that they mean something if we could only find out the cipher, so for a much longer period men have been groping at the hieroglyphics of Nature to find out the cipher, assured that they mean something, assured that we shall understand ourselves better for what we shall read in the sea and the land and the sky. (78)

For Emerson, as always, the ‘meaning’ of nature is its ‘relation to us,’ that is, to humankind. Only by understanding this relationship will nature’s elusive significance become known. Emerson’s extended metaphor for our attempts to grasp that significance is Egyptian hieroglyphs, the slots of which entail the length of time that we have been struggling with the problem and the fact that we may be near a solution, because, after Champollion’s recent work on the Rosetta stone, hieroglyphs were becoming understandable by the 1830s. A further implication of the hieroglyph metaphor, itself an elaboration of the book of nature, is that we need a ‘cipher’ or key to ‘the sea, the land, and the sky.’ Importantly, that cipher would not be a key to nature itself, but a key to understanding how nature can help us ‘to understand ourselves better.’ In ‘The Naturalist’ lecture, ‘Natural History’ provides one key and aesthetic experience another, but, as we shall see, neither will unlock nature’s meaning on their own. As Emerson continues, the achievement of natural history ‘seeks directly to provide this key or dictionary by observing and recording the properties of every individual and determining its place in the Universe by its properties’ (79). Natural history, as we learned from the cabinet, establishes part-whole relationships, understanding individual natural facts by locating them in their place in the universe. But, as Emerson goes on, the scientist loses ‘sight of the end of his inquiries’ and becomes an ‘apothecary, a pedant’ (79). The ‘end’ of the natural historian’s ‘inquiries’ ought to be the first cause, but that end has become less interesting to the scientist than the uses of nature and the taxonomy of its particulars. In natural history, as Emerson sees it, the part-whole relationship is present, but the causes are forces schema, which should lead back to ‘the causa causans, the supernatural force’ (80), has become lost. Emerson then contrasts natural history with a longer poetic tradition of inquiry into nature’s meaning that extends from Pythagoras to Swedenborg and Goethe. These figures are the poets because they have sought to understand nature by directly relating it to humankind through its use as a metaphor, such as Swedenborg’s teaching ‘that certain

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affections clothe themselves in certain forms, as cunning in the fox, innocence in the lamb, cruelty in the laughing hyena’ (79). But the poetic lineage has not been more successful than the natural historian at revealing the full meaning of nature, and the poets’ ‘opinions have failed to persuade men of their truth’ (79), because the ‘poet loses himself in imaginations and for want of accuracy becomes a mere fabulist’ (79). The poet is not adequately engaged with nature; he is too engaged with his inner life to let the novel metaphors of the outside in. Neither the natural historian nor the poet have the keys to the cipher of nature alone, for the former ‘are apt to be unpoetic, the poets to be unscientific’ (417). Together, though, there may be a way forward. As Emerson puts it: ‘I fully believe in both, in the poetry and the dissection’ (79). Bringing together the poet and the natural historian, Emerson presents his idea of the naturalist, who is both wedded to natural facts as presented by the developments of science, but also sees through these facts to their cause, finally relating both to ‘him[self] as it were at the heart of Creation.’ (81) As Emerson continues: It seems the duty of the Naturalist to study in faith and in love, never to lose sight of the simplest questions, ‘Why?’ and ‘Whence?’ and ‘What of that?’, to be a poet in his severest analysis; rather I should say, to make the Naturalist subordinate to the Man. He only can derive all the advantage from intimate knowledge who forces the magnified object back into their true perspective, who after he has searched the proximate atoms integrates them again as in nature they are integrated and keeps his mind open to their beauty and to the moral imperative which it is their highest office to convey. (81)

The natural historian, Emerson implies, forgets the basic questions of ‘Why?’ and ‘Whence?’ that would draw him to the cause. The poet, on the other hand, needs the ‘severest analysis’ of the naturalistic method to curb his fabulism. Together they can overcome their limits by becoming a ‘Naturalist,’ who has learned from both science and poetry. The ‘Naturalist,’ as Emerson puts it, must be ‘subordinate to the Man.’ What I think he means here, is that whatever we learn of nature through science or aesthetic experience only finds its value and purpose in relation to the human. As such, Emerson locates his ‘Naturalist’ at the central point of nature, as one who can both distinguish and integrate, dissect and compose, bringing together part and whole to generate spirit from matter and see the cause in the effect. Through metaphor, the naturalist brings the outside in, using the material to create the spiritual, articulating the moral sense of nature by relating nature to its first cause. Emerson’s naturalist, is, on his own terms, a symbolist. As we saw in Chapter 2 above, Emerson proposed his theory of symbolism, based on the basic metaphors the part is the whole and the spiritual

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is the material, in his second lecture on natural history, refining it in the following year’s lectures on English literature and in his first essay, Nature. What I omitted in my analysis of this theory was the importance of the ‘moral’ dimension to Emerson, which emerged alongside his engagement with natural history. In his second lecture, Emerson, as you will recall, used etymology to unearth the ‘correspondence of the outward world to the inward world of thoughts’ (EL1, 24), generalizing Swedenborg’s doctrine of correspondence into an open and ever-changing theory of inner life, where, ultimately, ‘the whole of Nature is a metaphor of the human Mind’ (24). In the lecture, he then goes on to state that ‘The laws of moral nature answer to those of matter as face to face in a glass’ (24). Here Emerson’s figure, ‘face to face in a glass,’ personifies the material and moral, giving them a shared embodied human quality. After all, as we know with Emerson, neither material nor moral law would have any value if they were distinct from the human. A further entailment of the mirror figure’s underlying understanding is seeing schema is that in looking at nature, we come to understand our moral and spiritual selves, just as looking in a mirror we see ourselves. Emerson’s examples are almost too pat: ‘The axioms of physics translate the laws of ethics: the whole is greater than the part; reaction is equal to action; the smallest weight may by make to lift the greatest, the difference of weight being compensated by time; and the like, which have an ethical as well as a physical sense’ (290; cf. CW1, 25). Initially, Emerson is quoting Germain De Staël’s ‘The axioms of physics translate the laws of ethics’ (cf. CW1, 21, JMN3, 255). But De Staël has a precursor in Francis Bacon, the great Renaissance innovator and pioneer of the empirical method, and of what he called ‘first philosophy’ or ‘prima philosophia,’ by which Bacon meant, as Emerson puts it, ‘the great principles that are true of all sciences, in morals & in mechanics’ (JMN3, 360). Bacon’s examples in his 1605 Advancement of Learning are: ‘if equals are added to unequals the wholes will be unequal’— which is ‘an axiom of justice as well as of the mathematics’; also ‘Things that are equal to the same are equal to each other,’ which is derived from mathematics, but underlies logical syllogisms; and ‘all things change but nothing is lost,’ which, Bacon contends, is a philosophical and a theological truth about eternal nature (Bacon 1824, 1:95). As such axioms suggest, first philosophy is not so much prior in time as it is prior in generality, and it applies across a wide range of areas: mathematics, morality, philosophy, and theology. Prima philosophia becomes, and Emerson quotes from the Advancement, ‘a receptacle for all such profitable observations & axioms as fall not within the compass of the special parts of philosophy or Sciences but are more common & of a higher stage’ (JMN3, 260). For Bacon we lose a primary connection between the branches of knowledge as disciplines emerge, but that connection remains at work all the same. For Emerson, prima philosophia is the work of

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metaphor and it underlies the connection between the axioms of physics and the facts of nature that, in his lecture, ‘become symbolical of moral truths’ (EL1, 25); indeed, ‘it will probably be found to hold of all the facts of chemistry or astronomy that they have the same harmony with the human mind’ (25). This harmony, or ‘undersong’ (25) as Emerson calls it, becomes clearer as we study nature; it is the analogy of matter and spirit, which is ‘felt to be deeper and more universal for every law that Davy or Cuvier or Laplace has revealed’ (25). The purpose of scientific discovery, then, remains to enable analogies of self-understanding. So, far from being an end in itself, CMT tells us that natural history serves one purpose for Emerson, a purpose it serves throughout his mature intellectual life: to provide the symbols—based on the part is the whole and the spiritual is the material—for that intellectual life. In 1833, as he prepares for his first lecture, we can see this symbolism emerging: ‘Nat. science’ is good as far as it is ‘an explanation of moral truth’ and ‘shells’ are already ‘symbols’ rather than specimens (JMN4, 415). A year later, in 1834, the same metaphors become activated in a specific case, and Emerson writes, ‘Shall I say the use of Natural Science seems merely ancillary to Moral? I would learn the law of diffraction of a ray because when I understand it, it will illustrate, perhaps, suggest, a new truth in ethics’ (322)—as, indeed, it will in Nature, where moral analogies subsume scientific value in the ‘axis of vision’ metaphor. Emerson makes the same point again in 1837: ‘it would be easy to show the great analogical value of most or our natural science. The chemical production of a new substance by the combination of the old’ (JMN5, 384; emphasis in the original). A favorite example of the spiritual is the material crops up in his 1837 ‘Introductory’ lecture to a series on Human Culture: ‘There is a celebrated property of fluids which is called the hydrostatic paradox, by reason of which a column of water of the diameter of a needle, is able to balance the ocean. This fact is a symbol of the relation between one man and all men’ (EL2, 219). Here Emerson’s addition of the part is the whole makes the ‘hydrostatic paradox’ a clear ‘symbol.’ A decade later, returning to the subject in a lecture called ‘The Relation of Intellect to Natural Science,’ Emerson tells his audience that ‘all the secrets of natural laws are repeated in mental experience. Or, the like analogies might be shown between the chemical action of bodies and the intellectual chemistry’ (LL1, 158). His examples are crystalization, the turning of the many into the one, and electricity, as a primordial cause. Another nine years later, commenting on a lecture by Faraday in 1857, Emerson writes that ‘Faraday is an excellent writer, and a wise man. And whilst I read him, I think, that, if natural philosophy is faithfully written, moral philosophy need not be, for it will find itself expressed in these theses to a perceptive soul. That is, which shall read off the Commandments & Gospels in Chemistry—without the need

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of translation’ (JMN14, 158). Here science once again becomes the book of nature, replacing traditional Scripture with its virtue as a source domain for symbols, now with no need of a key or a cipher. In Emerson’s late essay ‘Poetry and Imagination,’ published in 1875, though collated from earlier works, Emerson once again promotes the idea that there is ‘perfect parallelism between the laws of Nature and the laws of thought’ (CW8, 4), and that, drawing on a journal entry from 1865, ‘The primary use of a fact is low: the secondary use, as it is a figure or illustration of my thought, is the real worth. (JMN15, 67; CW8, 5). For Emerson, once again, the virtue of natural history is in the provision of symbols to enable him to think and rethink what he is. In Emerson’s posthumously published lecture series, ‘The Natural History of Intellect,’ originally delivered at Harvard in 1870–1871, natural history and thought come together in the very title. Early in the lecture series, he repeats his main theme: ‘I believe in the existence of the material world as the expression of the spiritual or the real’ and ‘Every object in nature is a word to signify some fact in the mind’ (Emerson 1893, 5). These lectures derive from Emerson’s lectures on the ‘Natural Method of Mental Philosophy,’ which he gave in 1858, where: as man and men, man and animals, man and planet, are analogous, so, the same laws which these obey and express run up into the invisible world of the mind, namely, chemistry, polarity, undulation, gravity, centrifugence, periodicity, and that hereby we acquire a key to these sublimities which skulk and hide in the caverns of human consciousness; namely; by the solar microscope of Analogy. ’Tis the key that opens the Universe. (LL2, 89; Emerson’s emphasis)

In Emerson’s later thought, the parallels between matter and spirit run true, and what can be known of nature through empirical method, figured here by the ‘solar microscope,’ can likewise be known of the mind. But more importantly, as the metaphor of consciousness as hidden in a cavern suggests, the light of the solar microscope which finds new things in nature will likewise, by analogy, find new things in the mind. This process of discovery remains at work in a late journal entry, written in 1873 or 1874: All the new facts of science are not only interesting for themselves but their best value is the rare effect on the mind, the electric shock; each new law of nature speaks to a related fact in our thought; for every law of Chemistry has /some/ its analagon in the soul, & however skilful the chemist may be, & how much soever he may push & multiply his researches, he is a superficial trifler in the presence of the student who sees the strict analogy of the experiment to the laws of thoughts & morals. (JMN16, 296)

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As we can see, even in his declining years, the purpose of the natural sciences remains the same to Emerson as it was when he first deployed the parallax metaphor in 1822. Though of interest in themselves, the novelties of science are there to serve self-discovery, to provide the ‘rare effect’ and ‘electric shock’ that will enable the mind to see itself anew through conceptual metaphor. Once again, every ‘law of Chemistry’ has ‘its analagon in the soul,’ and the research of the chemist is ‘superficial’ compared to the truths of the analogies their research will throw up between the laws of nature and those of ‘thought and morals.’ Natural history’s insights into the material world only offer a complete meaning of nature when they become the symbols that enable a renewed understanding of the self, that is, of humankind. Note 1. Translations of Diderot are the author’s.

Chapter Five

Humankind

Emerson’s thinking metaphors consistently locates the human at the central point of the cosmos: the golden link that unites matter and spirit, nature and God; or he figures humanity as the final purpose of God’s plan: the point at which created nature returns to its Creator in and as creation itself. But, as Emerson’s metaphors also tell us, humans are fallen: they do not see nature how they should, they do not recognize the God that exists within them and whose creation they complete, and they are held to earth by their material body. In this chapter, I want to explore to what extent Emerson’s profound ambivalence is a necessary corollary of his metaphorical practice. In the first part of the chapter, I will focus on the problem of the body and Emerson’s divided self; then I will look at the challenge of dualism for Emerson’s concept of the human, before considering two ways of measuring humanity’s Fall and its potential for ascent using metaphors drawn from childhood and nature. Then I shall move on to Emerson’s sustained effort to unite the concepts of humankind and the divine through metaphor in his essays ‘Circles’ and ‘Fate.’ EMERSON’S BODY Emerson reinforces the duality of spirit and matter at the outset of Nature: ‘Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul. Strictly speaking, therefore, all that is separate from us, all which Philosophy distinguishes as the not me, that is, both nature and art, all other men and my own body, must be ranked under this name, Nature’ (CW1, 8; Emerson’s emphasis). Emerson’s idea of ‘nature,’ or the not me, is capacious. Nature is not just the natural world, or ‘essences unchanged by man’; it is also art, or those ‘essences’ mixed with human ‘will.’ The not me even includes Emerson’s own ‘body’ (8). CMT tells us that we should not be surprised by this inclusion. Lakoff and Johnson note the near universality of a divided conceptualization of self, which they call the ‘Subject-Self distinction’ (PF, 149

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268). They detail many varieties of this fundamental metaphorical structure, which all entail an idea of a self divided between a ‘Subject,’ as the “locus of consciousness, subjective experience, reason, will and our ‘essence,’ everything that makes us uniquely what we are” and a ‘Self’ that ‘consist[s] of everything else about us—our bodies, our social roles, and our histories, and so on’ (268). In Nature, Emerson’s me conforms to the ‘Subject’ and the not-me as body maps on to the ‘Self.’1 This division emerges in Emerson’s earliest writings. In October 1822, he wrote that ‘our bodies were designed only to be vehicles for our minds’ (JMN2, 28), a view he would repeat fifteen years later in a lecture: ‘Our bodies we were put into as fire is put into a pan to be carried about’ (EL2, 363; cf. ‘The Poet’ CW3, 3). In these container versions of the Subject-Self schema, there is a distinction between the contained and the container, with the ‘container’ reduced to a medium for carrying something of an implied higher value—the ‘mind’ or a Self, figured quasi-immaterially, as a ‘fire.’ In March 1823, Emerson develops the idea of the body as a container for the soul even while he seems to narrow the divide between them as he dilates upon the ‘great wonder’ that is the ‘mixture of body & soul’ (JMN2, 96). His metaphors begin in division, figuring the body as the ‘passages & conduits of thought’ or the ‘streams of intellect,’ and the division is sharpened as the body’s ‘gross appetites’ clog up the passages of spirit, which are ‘fallen to ruin.’ Ultimately, the body, rather than acting as a channel for the free activity of the mind, corrupts the mind itself, which becomes ‘the caterer & pander of the sense’ (96–7). In his extended metaphor, the body and the mind, though still separate Self and Subject, interact in a way impossible in the previous container metaphors, where they are quite distinct. Indeed, in 1823, Emerson gives the body a kind of moral purpose, rejecting the ways of ‘Ascetic mortification’ that in attempting to suppress the body withdraws the man from the world while creating an ‘inflamed’ pride that equally checks ‘the current of thought’ (97–8). Aged twenty, Emerson is ‘persuaded that [ . . . ] the perfection of man’s nature consist in a fixed equilibrium of body & mind’ that does not deny the senses, but puts them to work in the interests of a wider moral good (100). Emerson, then, in his earliest thought, figures the body as a vessel (Self) of the soul (Subject) and as a necessary though troublesome partner in human moral development—a position that Emerson will return to when he recognises the metaphorical value of the body (see also Buell 2003, 91–98). However, the metaphors that shape Emerson’s maturing thought tend to the rejection of the body, as following the logic of the great chain, anything that ties us to the body removes us from God. In April 1831 he finds reinforcement in the Greek Neo-Platonist philosopher Plotinus, quoting in both Latin and Greek lines that translate as ‘Plotinus appeared to be affected with a

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certain shame because his soul was in a body’ (JMN3, 251). The Neo-Platonic theory of emanation would inevitably place the body below the soul, as we have seen in earlier chapters, and again Plotinus reduces the body to a container. Over the coming years, Emerson increasingly supresses the body as he elevates the soul. In the same 1832 journal entry in which he suggested that ‘an entire cabinet of shells would be an expression of the whole human mind,’ he also wrote: ‘Reduce the body to the soul. Make the body the instrument thro’ which that thought is uttered’ (JMN4, 15). Emerson’s body becomes a vehicle to utter its own extinction, as its matter is (analogously to those shells) harvested for the spirit. Emerson’s disgust in the body peaks a couple of years later in December 1834, when he reports on a lecture of the previous evening: ‘Loathsome lecture last eve. on precocity, & the dissection of the brain, & the distortion of the body, & genius, &c. a grim philosophy compost of blood & mud. Blessed, thought I, were those who, lost in their pursuits, never knew that they had a body or a mind’ (362; cf. JMN12, 60). Emerson is now unable to recognize that the materiality of the body, mere ‘blood and mud’ could be a source domain for the spirit, even though the lecture appeared to be arguing for a direct connection between the physical brain and the precocity and genius of humanity. Interestingly, though, Emerson’s final point is not merely to deny the body, but to lament the division, as the ‘blessed’ are those who ‘never new that they had a body or a mind.’ Emerson’s discomfort, then, arises from the duality of spirit and matter that the anatomical lecture emphasized, a dualism that reflects the Subject-Self division. The dualistic consequence of these metaphors of the me and the not me is that the true self as Subject is not in matter but only in spirit. In September 1836, about the same time as he publishes Nature, Emerson writes: ‘How we live on the outside of the world! Open the Skin, the flesh, & enter the Skeleton, touch the heart, liver, or brain of the Man and you have come no nearer to the man that when you were still outside’ (JMN5, 193). The physical world and the physical body, the places where we ‘live,’ are always on the ‘outside,’ and, catachrestically, the container has no inside. The implication of this impossible version of the Subject-Self container schema is that the Subject is elsewhere than the body (Self), and of a different order, though, as we shall continue to see, inevitably shaped by embodied experience. When Emerson reuses these lines in his 1838 lecture, ‘Home,’ he reaffirms that the human is a ‘stranger in his own body’ (EL3, 32). Similarly, in his 1837 lecture, ‘The Individual,’ Emerson writes, ‘Science is ever teaching us to separate between the body and the principle of life, and not with the vulgar, to identify this trunk with myself. What phantoms, what palpitations has not he escaped who has learned only this, who has learned to treat his body as an instrument of singular excellence and use but in whose perfection he is not perfected and

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in whose fracture he is not hurt’ (EL2, 183). Again, the body is a tool (‘instrument’), but its ‘perfection’ or ‘fracture’ has no effect on a soul that, as Subject, is elsewhere. It is, then, ironic that though we should not identify our ‘trunk’ with our self as Subject, it is our very embodied ‘palpitations’ (as well as less material ‘phantoms’) that such a knowledge would avert. Though Emerson may want to use his metaphors to divide the soul from the body, the metaphors the body enables remain essential for the soul’s realization of its alignment with the divine—hence the return of the body as metaphor indicated above. As Emerson remarked a few pages earlier, he has learned from ‘the Philosophy of History’ (the title of his lecture series) that ‘there is One Soul incarnated in each individual under the condition of a new bias; that it is related to the external world; every object thereout unlocking some faculty therein’ (181). Each individual body incarnates (or makes flesh), an aspect of the One, and through that flesh’s contact with the world, it unlocks its own inner faculties through the power of metaphor. Indeed, in his next lecture series on ‘Human Culture,’ delivered from December 1837 to February 1838, Emerson deployed the body as a primary trope, with lectures entitled ‘The Doctrine of Hands,’ ‘The Head,’ ‘The Eye and the Ear,’ and ‘The Heart.’ In each of these, the title is a metaphor for an aspect of ‘Human Culture.’ In ‘The Doctrine of the Hands,’ the hand figures manual labor, and ‘man in the view of political economy is a pair of hands’ that are ‘quick to grasp, strong to pull, cunning to contrive’ (EL2, 230). The metonymy is a familiar one, with the actions of the hands as a source domain for a target domain of labor that remakes the world. Emerson takes a further important lesson from manual labor, which is about language and metaphor itself. How a person uses their hands ‘affects [their] speech’ and gives them a powerful connection to the metaphorical possibilities of language. A carpenter, a farmer, a blacksmith do not choose their words and correct their sentences; their attention is so fastened to the thing that their speech is very simple and very strong. Scholars are found to make very shabby sentences out of the weakest words because of exclusive attention to the word. A man always borrows imagery to express his meaning out the natural objects familiar to his eye. We can know that a sailor can very well express the face which any part of life offers to his mind by the use of nautical terms. We know the farmer can do the same from the field. The mechanic finds a parallel phraseology borrowed from the processes of his own workshop. The steamboat is observed to have added many phrases to common speech. (231–2)

The hands bring the workman closer to the ‘natural objects’ of the world, and that manual intimacy lends him a facility with those objects’ potential use as source domains to figure his meanings. Emerson figures this kind of

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‘attention’ as a direct connection of body and world, and the workman is ‘fastened to the thing.’ Each kind of manual job, sailor, farmer, mechanic, steamboat operator, to which Emerson adds the ‘miller [who] draws all his similes from the bolting the bran or the toll, the glover from his kid skin, and the weaver from the bleaching field or the shuttle’ (232), add their ‘phrases to common speech.’ Scholars, contrastingly, restrict themselves to language as it already is, as, to follow Emerson’s metaphor of the hands, it is the established language that is within their reach in the books that they read. Because of their ‘exclusive attention to the word,’ scholars’ sentences are ‘shabby’ and their words ‘the weakest.’ Creative writers, distinguished here from scholars, make use of the new language of the hands: Walter Scott draws metaphors from cloth manufacture, and in ‘Shakspear’ you will find ‘striking examples’ (232) from all kinds of labor. Emerson does not provide those ‘examples,’ but a quick look at the index of Spurgeon’s Shakespeare’s Imagery suggests dozens of references to archery, bird snaring, building, butchery, carpentry, cookery, coursing, falconry, fishing, gardening, hunting, needlework, riding, sailing, tools, and woodcraft (Spurgeon 1935, 385–408), which certainly makes the point. Emerson’s lecture continues: ‘Let a man under the excitement of a lively emotion, whether grief, love, fear, pride, go into the fields and pick berries, he shall observe presently a wonderful fitness in the petty turns of his operation to express in pretty parables the facts that occupy his mind’ (EL2, 232). The simple action of picking a berry—a ‘petty operation’—can, Emerson proposes, provide a ‘pretty parable’ that expresses the most extreme emotions. A walk along the seashore would also provide language for emotion, but ‘Still more striking would be the effect of manual labour,’ and if after such labor, he should ‘attempt then to write out his thoughts he would find himself wonderfully assisted by the natural objects he had just seen and that he owed to the mechanical operation he had busied himself with the luckiest expression that exactly hit the thought in his mind’ (232). Emerson is recognizing the embodied nature of conceptual metaphor, namely that the activity of the hand in the world (‘the mechanical operation’) enables inner expression (‘the thought in his mind’). Emerson follows his insight into the relationship between embodiment, memory, and imagery, with a recasting of the theory of metaphor from his earlier lectures and from Nature, now pushed through an embodied ‘doctrine of hands.’ See how much use has been made in all the writings of all nations of the common operations of sowing and reaping, of spinning and weaving, of drawing water, of felling trees to express moral sentiments. It is by the properties of light and fire chiefly that all nations have described their idea of God. It is chiefly

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from the gardener’s bulb that they have described the growth of the mind. It is from the work of the smith, the mason, and the joiner that they have drawn the proverbs of prudence and the words for the laws of life. (232–3)

Manual labor provides the grounding metaphors for the sacred texts of all nations; it gives them the language for their morals, their idea of God, their idea of the mind, and their ethical laws. The relationship between labor and the ‘laws of life’ is not by chance. It is, as Emerson continues, because of the ‘radical agreement and correspondence between these properties of matter and the properties of the soul’ (233); that is, matter and spirit. The ‘ethical philosopher,’ the ‘poet or a moralist,’ needs to engage directly with some ‘handicraft’ if he is to find the fit language for his subject. Similarly, then, to the natural history we saw in the last chapter, manual labor ‘in brass, in iron, in clay, in wood, in earth’ (232) engages us directly in the world of natural objects, which, through embodied metaphor, becomes the apt expression of our inner life. Emerson’s next three lectures in the ‘Human Culture’ series take advantage of this embodied experience, but they are by no means as explicit, taking metaphorical correspondence for granted. In the ‘The Head,’ for example, the head is just a simple figure for ‘reason,’ or ‘The Culture of the Intellect’ (EL2, 246). ‘The Eye and Ear’ figure ‘taste,’ and become apparently disembodied, as Emerson redeploys the fire in the pan metaphor that we saw above, reducing the body to a vessel (albeit manually carried). In ‘The Heart,’ Emerson uses the organ purely as a metaphor for affections or social relations and makes no attempt to consider it as of the body. However, in that same lecture, the body does make an unexpected return: One of the most wonderful things in nature, where all is wonderful, is, the glance or the meeting of the eyes; this speedy and perfect communication which transcends speech and action also and is in the greatest part not subject to the control of the will. It is the bodily symbol of identity of nature. Here is the whole miracle of our being, made sensible,—the radical unity, the superficial diversity. Strange that any body who ever met another person’s eyes, should doubt that all men have one soul. (283)

Emerson’s fascination with the ‘oeillade,’ as he calls the ‘glance’ in the August 1837 journal fragment that he draws on in here (JMN5, 363–4), is the kind of meeting between two body parts (the eyes) that would appeal as it eschews direct material contact. Even so, for Emerson the glance is clearly an embodied experience, and as such, ‘not subject to the control of the will.’ As we should expect, though, Emerson immediately reaches for the symbolic affordances of the glance, exactly in the sense of symbolism that my use of CMT suggests, calling it ‘the bodily symbol of identity of nature.’ In so

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doing, he transforms the embodied connection between the eyes into a spiritual connection between people, each of whom is part of larger whole, their bodily ‘diversity’ showing a ‘radical unity.’ Emerson does more with this embodied metaphor than transcend the eyes. In the August 1837 journal, he recalls a digression on the glance from January 1835. There, the glance became explicitly associated with sexual attraction, as Emerson imagines (or remembers) a scene of two young lovers (a ‘youth’ and a ‘maid’). Initially, their sharing of looks is innocent enough: ‘The youth gazed with great delight upon the beautiful face until he caught the maiden’s eye. She presently became aware of his attention & something like correspondence immediately takes place’ (JMN5, 8). The glance registers an act of communication between bodies. Emerson then notes some coy byplay where the maid looks away all the better for the youth to look at her, and then ‘their eyes met in a full front, searching, not to be mistaken for a glance’ (8). The glance has become a ‘gaze,’ and immediately something changes as ‘the glance is strangely baulked. The beautiful face was strangely transformed. He felt the stirring of owls, & bats, & horned hoofs within him,’ the maiden’s face is ‘usurped by a low devil,’ and as they part, ‘her form & feet had the strangest resemblance to those of some brute animal’ (8). The glance, as embodied communication (understanding is seeing), becomes a sexualized and animalized gaze. The structural homology of Emerson’s imagined scene of a sexualized Fall with his earlier Jardin epiphany is intriguing. In the Jardin he felt ‘the centipede in me—cayman, carp, eagle & fox,’ and he profoundly welcomed the identity with nature it connoted, precisely because of how unsettling it was. In the glance/gaze sequence, it is the creatures of the night, the bat and the owl, and the horned hoofs that haunted the Puritan wilderness of Emerson’s grandparents, which enter him. Consequently, the maiden herself transforms, as he puts it, into ‘a new form of [her] own to the mind of the beholder’ (8). There is, of course, something of the great chain in Emerson’s metaphors here. The body, associated with the lower part of the chain, can, through the part is the whole, metonymically be symbolized by any of the ‘lower’ animals; analogously, sexuality as a material encounter promised by the glance lies toward the bottom of the chain, figured by nocturnal beasts. It is key, then, that when he revisits the glance in 1837, he finds a way to translate any bestial similarities between the youth and the maid onto the spiritual upper half of the great chain, the material figuring the spiritual. Thus, the oeillade is now ‘the body’s perception of difference based on radical unity’ (364), or, as he puts it in the subsequent lecture, the glance is the ‘the bodily symbol of identity of nature.’ Sex may figure one kind of unity; but it now figures ‘the one soul’ that we all share. However, even in the lecture, Emerson, who has read back through his journals, recalls the ‘owls and bats and horned hoofs’

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(EL2, 283) and makes explicit the Puritan ambivalence: ‘Every man meets glances in the course of his life that may interpret for him much of what he has read of witchcraft and enchantment; and also that which shall illustrate for him all that the hath heard of the terrors and beauty of the Cherubim’ (284). Whether the glance communicates a dangerous sexuality or an inner spirituality, there are hazards on both sides. If we are one with nature, then the bat, the owl, the horned hoof, along with the cayman and the scorpion, are within us, revealed, as Emerson suggests, at the eye, which he conventionally figures as ‘the windows of the house’ (283), visible to any passerby who would care to glance inward. The status of the body in Emerson’s thinking, then, is profoundly ambivalent. On the one hand, it is the not me, a vessel for the soul or me and distinct from it in every way: corporeal form is mere compost, so far removed from the spirit that no analysis of its materiality could even reveal evidence of humanity’s true divine essence. On the other hand, the body, through its interaction with nature in human work, is essential to the revitalization of language. Embodiment is the source of our creativity, the power of metaphor through which language moves from matter to spirit. The creativity afforded by such metaphoric transformation aligns humankind with the divine, as, through metaphor, matter returns to spirit, and the human becomes part of God. But Emerson’s ambivalence remains. Metaphor may transform matter into spirit, but that transformation is never complete—the body disappears in the glance, but the horned hoof remains visible in the eye. The structural dualism that is essential to metaphorical thought means that something of matter always remains in the concepts that derive from it, revealing a kind of source domain override which the catalysis of metaphor cannot dissolve, and which brings matter back into spirit. As we shall see later in this chapter and the next, Emerson attempts to find increasingly rarefied source domains to limit any material residue. Now, though, I want to take a closer look at Emerson’s dualism and the metaphors that continue to constrain his thoughts. ‘WICKED MANICHEE!’ The problem of dualism lies at the heart of Emerson’s metaphorical thinking, most obviously as the split between matter and spirit, but also between unity and variety.2 In this section, I will examine some of the ways that Emerson’s metaphorical practice conceptualize duality, consider what is at stake in that conceptualization, and work through the ways in which Emerson strives to use metaphors, often presented as epiphanic insights, to heal the dualist breach. A passage from his journal of May 26, 1837, exemplifies his problem.

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Here we find Emerson’s tropes trying to hold together the ‘One Universal Mind,’ straining to transfer his ‘Me out of the flimsy and unclean precincts of [his] body,’ while questioning with horror how his thoughts ‘murderously inclined ever to traverse and kill the divine life’ (JMN5, 336, 337). He figures murder as ‘parricide’ and himself, unable to hold on to the One, as a ‘wicked Manichee!’ (337), the dualist archetype. Emerson then summarizes the challenge of dualism: ‘A believer in Unity, a seer of Unity, I yet behold two’ (337). The difference is between two corollaries of understanding is seeing, the ‘seer’ whose transcendent sight witnesses the One, and the beholder, whose material vision sees an essential division. Emerson occupies both perspectives and in his moment of doubt he cannot find the tropes to connect his meagre individuality to the ‘Me of Me,’ which is God: the ‘Cause of Causes’ (337). Emerson’s faith in unity is marred by the inevitable dualism of matter and spirit, body, and mind. He conceptualizes this division with the container metaphor ‘precincts,’ figuring his not-me ‘body’ as surrounding environment for his ‘Me,’ which separates him from God, from the ‘Cause of Causes,’ which should also be also his ‘Me of Me.’ Emerson’s body divides himself as Subject from himself as Self. Unity, then, is the target domain of Emerson’s metaphors, but his source domains, drawn as they inevitably are, from a divided and various world, destabilize any achieved unification. There is never just a ‘One.’ In the same set of journal passages, Emerson traces this back to the creation itself: ‘I behold; I bask in beauty; I await; I wonder; Where is my Godhead now? This is the Male & Female principle in Nature. One Man, male & female created he him. Hard as it is to describe God, it is harder to describe the Individual’ (JMN5, 337). An origin of dualism can be found the language of the Bible, where the One, the divine Godhead that Emerson beholds in beauty and seeks to join, is always already Two. There is no individual, no one, that is not defined through division. Of course, metaphors are at work in Emerson’s sense of division, where the source domain of male and female, one species in two forms, conceptualizes a cosmic division. Attempting a resolution, Emerson’s journal passage turns to another familiar metaphor: light. He writes: ‘A certain wandering light comes to me which I instantly perceive to the Cause of Causes. It transcends all proving. It is itself the ground of being; and I see that it is not one & I another, but this is the life of my life. That is one fact, then; that in certain moments I have known that I existed directly from God, and am, as it were, his organ. And in my ultimate consciousness Am He’ (JMN5, 337). As Emerson himself put it in Nature, light is a conventional figure for knowledge (understanding is seeing), and, as he noted in the lecture ‘The Hand,’ light is also a common figure for God. Here, Emerson brings these two target domains together, and light is a metaphor for the immediate knowledge of a divine unity, the ‘Cause of Causes,’ and a direct

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insight that bypasses argument. The bearer of this instantaneous knowledge, light, then, catachrestically, becomes ‘ground,’ a stable base for Emerson’s thought to rest. Working up from that base, Emerson denies any duality (‘not one & I another’), rhetorically constructing a unity between himself and the light/ground through repetition ‘the life of my life.’ Now Emerson is drawing on the part is the whole schema and Emerson’s life is a part of God’s life. For Emerson, such metaphorical insights are epiphanies, ‘certain moments’ (337) when he can conceptualize himself as an ‘organ’ (337) of God, that is, both a part of the divine whole, and an instrument through which the divine works. He continues, paratactically, ‘And in my ultimate consciousness Am He’ (337). Unity is again figured by bringing the divine into the self, which Emerson reinforces by omitting the grammatical ‘I’ from his conclusion, enacting a dissolution of self, his being, into God. But, as Emerson’s ‘moments’ suggest, epiphanies are unsustainable, and the passage immediately continues: ‘Then, secondly, the contradictory fact is familiar, that I am a surprised spectator & learner of all my life. This is the habitual posture of the mind,—beholding. But whenever the day dawns[,] the great day of truth on the soul, it comes with awful invitation to accept it, to blend with its aurora’ (337; editors’ interpolations). Emerson’s moment of doubt is figured by a shift in the understanding is seeing metaphor back from the ‘seer’ to the ‘beholder.’ Instead of bringing immediate insight, where seeing and knowledge are synonymous, now Emerson is merely a ‘spectator’ and knowledge is a process of lifelong learning. Epiphanic moments will continue to come even so, and light, as the ‘dawn,’ is once again the trope for sudden knowledge, and just as a ‘wandering light’ drew Emerson to the Cause of Causes, now the dawn ‘invites’ him to ‘blend with its aurora,’ that is, for the beholder to become part of what he beholds, the seer becomes the seen, as the understanding is seeing metaphor does its full work, and beholding becomes ultimate ‘truth’ in unity. But even here, Emerson’s doubts return, and he asks himself, ‘Cannot I conceive the Universe without contradiction[?]’ (337; editors’ interpolation). His answer appears to be yes, and at least for one more moment, his cognitive metaphors respond to his dualist doubts: ‘To behold the great in the small, the law in the one fact, the vegetation of all the forest on the globe in the sprouting of one acorn, this is the vision of genius’ (338). The right metaphor redeems him, and the part is the whole and its dual enable Emerson to connect his individuality, his Me with the causes of causes without contradiction. Even so, the journal entry’s last line, which appears to be a rare Emersonian joke, rebounds against his profound conclusion: ‘To run after one’s hat is ludicrous’ (338). Where, Emerson is asking, is God, the cause of causes, in such an absurd scene. He is wise enough not to attempt an answer.

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Two years later, in 1839, Emerson summarizes his epiphanic creed, using metaphor to conceptualize unity in variety, overcoming their duality: ‘I believe not only in Omnipresence but in Eternity. And these are not words but things. I believe in the omnipresence; that is; that All is in each particle; that entire Nature reappears in every leaf & moss. I believe in Eternity; that is I can find Greece & Palestine & Italy & England and the Islands,—the genius & creative principle of each & all eras in my own mind’ (JMN7, 186). This passage focuses years of metaphorical thought, where, because of the work of the part is the whole schema, which, with its dual, operates in two directions, time and space can retain their vast size even as Emerson simultaneously reduces them to an atomic moment: a here and a now that are everywhere and forever. Moreover, the vastness of space and time contains the ‘creative principle’ of all human activity, from the classical period to the present day. In his efforts to thwart the threat of a binarism that will separate him from God, Emerson uses the part is the whole to relocate the universal creative principle into ‘own mind.’ It is, as we have seen elsewhere and we will see again, the ability of Emerson’s metaphors to align divine and human creativity that can most effectively unify humankind and God. As such, we might even see this creative principle as the act of metaphor itself. However, the next month, Emerson’s friend Frederic Henry Hedge, Unitarian minister and scholar of German philosophy, would express his doubts about Emerson’s metaphorical alliance of dualism and unity. Emerson reports the following in his journal: ‘If as Hedge thinks I overlook great facts in stating the absolute laws of the soul; if as he seems to represent it the world is not a dualism, is not a bipolar Unity, but is two, is Me and It, then is there the Alien, the Unknown, and all we have believed & chanted out of our deep instinctive hope is a petty dream’ (JMN7, 200; Emerson’s emphasis). Hedge denies the work of Emerson’s the part is the whole metaphor to unify humans with God. For Hedge, as Emerson understands him, each aspect of the universe retains its identity, and the part is just a part, and so the self is set against things that are irremediably other to it. Moreover, without unity, Emerson loses hope of a connection to God. If his metaphors cannot sublate Hedge’s atomism, then his self remains isolated. Emerson must find another apt metaphor to recover himself, and his figure is ‘bipolar unity,’ which he sets against Hedge’s absolute binarism. Emerson’s metaphor of ‘bipolar unity’ is worth taking a moment to examine. Poles may seem to be separate or even opposing, as positive and negative and north or south, which we can see in such typical figurative expressions as ‘poles apart’ or ‘polar opposites.’ But Emerson’s understanding of polarity draws on early nineteenth-century natural history for his own cognitive ends. In 1833, while still on his European tour, Emerson notes: ‘Elementary forms of bodies revealed by polarization of light[.] Elective affinities Polarity of

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matter. light. electricity. galvanism. magnetism’ (JMN4, 416). Emerson is not yet using the concept of polarity as a metaphor; he is still collating its terms. But as we know, natural history only matters to Emerson when it can create moral or spiritual insights. What polarity tells him is that there is a unity underlying nature’s apparent variety, that the law of polarity underlies ‘natural facts’ as apparently different as matter, light, electricity, and magnetism. Thus, when Emerson uses ‘polarity’ as a source domain for the unity of humankind and God in answer to Hedge’s doubts, it is not catachrestic, because polarity is a gestalt whole that figures unity between opposites. It is a remarkably apt metaphor because it undoes the binarism that is essential to its structure, finding unity where one would least expect it. As Emerson wrote in 1837, ‘Polarity is the law of all being’ (JMN5, 304).3 Laura Dassow Walls recognizes polarity as ‘one of the most power metaphors of modern science’ (Walls 2003, 128), and by tracing its natural historical origins and its Romantic philosophical influence, she demonstrates its use across Emerson’s writings, rightly understanding it as a concept that unifies duality, reconciles antagonism, and balances opposites (127–65). The metaphor is present in Emerson’s 1841 essay ‘Compensation’: ‘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 [ . . . ] 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’ (CW2, 57; cf. Walls 148–9). A bipolar duality exists in every part of nature, its binary structure deriving directly from the most basic metaphorical schemas of matter and spirit, in and out, up and down, and gender. But for Emerson, dualism is not a binarism that divides because ‘the universe is represented in every one of its particles. Every thing in nature contains all the powers of nature. Every thing is made of one hidden stuff; as the naturalist sees one type running under every metamorphosis [. . . . ] The true doctrine of omnipresence is, that God re-appears with all his parts in every moss and cobweb’ (59–60). Just as each part suggests its apparent opposite to make a whole, that whole, here God, is present in each part—be it moss or the web that Emerson had earlier called the ‘spider’s snare.’ Through the metaphor of polarity, dualism and unity dissolve into each other, sharing a fundamental identity. As Emerson makes clear in the essay ‘Intellect,’ also quoting from his journal passage, ‘the index or mercury of intellectual proficiency is the perception of identity’ (201). In the 1844 Essays: Second Series, Emerson returns to the theme of identity in dual systems in ‘The Poet’: ‘there is no fact in nature which does not carry the whole sense of nature; and the distinctions which we make in events, and in affairs, of low and high, honest and base, disappear when nature is used as

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a symbol’ (CW3, 10–11). So, bipolar duality, once again, ‘disappears’ into a larger symbolic bipolar unity. Finding the right metaphor or symbol to avoid binarism is far from merely an intellectual or theological exercise. The right metaphor will express Emerson’s feeling that he and nature, he and God, are unified. The wrong metaphor will separate him from nature and God. In ‘Experience,’ the essay that follows ‘The Poet’ in the Second Series, Emerson explores the consequences of his metaphorical concepts of unity and duality in an unusually personal way as he reflects on the death of his son, Waldo, two years earlier. Out of his grief, he writes unexpectedly, ‘this calamity: it does not touch me: something that I always fancied was a part of me, which could not be torn away without tearing me, nor enlarged without enriching me, falls from me and leaves no scar’ (29). Emerson had understood Waldo as a part of his whole; but when Emerson lost that part, he remained whole, without even a scar. The logic of the part-whole schema underlies Emerson’s sense of continued completion—his part can only remain the everything it always was. It was an illusion that it could ever have been larger or smaller. Such illusions and their rejection are everywhere in ‘Experience,’ from the child disappointed with the diminishing returns of a story, who was ‘born to a whole, [when] this story is a particular’ (33), to Emerson’s need for ‘the whole of society, to give the symmetry we seek’ (34), to ‘finding the journey’s end in every step of the road’ (35), to the ‘coetaneous growth of the parts: [that] will one day be members, and obey one will’ (41), to Emerson’s claim that ‘Life will be imaged, but cannot be divided or doubled. Any invasion of its unity would be chaos’ (45). In ‘Experience,’ everything is individual, but every individual is everything. The ‘paltry empiricism’ (48) of our experiences, the scientific understanding that fails to recognize part-whole symbolism, may make unity hard to grasp, but this lack is only a consequence of the fall into division a division that, like Hedge’s, fails to see a supervening unity. It is also in ‘Experience’ that Emerson again grapples with Hedge’s challenge of an absolute division between subject and object, between the self that knows and the self that is known. It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped, the discovery we have made, that we exist. That discovery is called the Fall of Man. Ever afterwards, we suspect our instruments. We have learned that we do not see directly, but mediately, and that we have no means of correcting these coloured and distorting lenses which we are, or of computing the amount of their errors. Perhaps these subject lenses have a creative power; perhaps there are no objects. Once we lived in what we saw; now the rapaciousness of this new power, which threatens to absorb all things, engages us. Nature, art, persons, letters, religions,—objects, successively tumble in, and God is but one of its ideas. (43–4)

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The ‘discovery’ of our own existence presupposes a dualism between a discoverer and the discovered. Rather than being one thing, Emerson’s discovery metaphor entails that we are necessarily two—the Fall into Self and Subject. Even worse, Emerson cannot trust the discovering Self as, in a novel elaboration of understanding is seeing, its instruments are ‘coloured distorting lenses,’ and the Subject we want to discover is on one side of these lenses. Further exacerbating this epistemic crisis, and in an anatomical inversion of the embodied epiphany of the transparent eyeball, Emerson reduces the discovering Self to those same distorting lenses. Not only can we not, as Emerson’s metaphors tell us, use scientific knowledge to calculate the level of distortion and puzzle out the errors; the lenses that, as Emerson puts it ‘we are’ (the whole is the part), may even have created the discovered Self and its world, rendering the self as Subject wholly inaccessible. But once again, amidst his doubts, Emerson’s metaphors rally, and he recalls the prior unity that the transparent eyeball figures, for there can be no Fall without something to fall from. He combines a container metaphor with understanding is seeing, and ‘Once we lived in what we saw.’ Even so, any respite is brief and bitter, for our fallen state is a ‘new power,’ greedily absorbing ‘all things’ successively into its individuality, which is not here a Unity, but a mere part that does not know itself to be the very God it reduces to one idea among others. The threat of the absolute separation of humanity and God is always at stake in Emerson’s metaphorical thought. It could be, as we have just seen, the Fall into the body and its fleshly concerns, where matter disregards spirit; it could be creation itself which begins with division of the maker and the made, and where the made further subdivides itself into male and female; it could be the Fall into Hedge’s ‘Me and It,’ or subject and object; it could be the Fall from life into death, the separation of father and child; or, finally, the Fall into a Self that can no longer be trusted to see what is really there as the body returns as an obstacle to the Subject’s complete vision. But at each turn, from the midst of his doubts, Emerson finds a metaphor that transcends division: the part is the whole puts spirit into matter and likewise conquers death; polarity unites subject and object when they are the very furthest things apart; understanding is seeing returns Emerson to the light of God and the complete vision of the child. Yet despite their comforting presence, these epiphanic metaphors can never completely settle the problem of humankind’s separation from God for Emerson, perhaps because that separation exists in the structure of conceptual metaphor itself.

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‘THE EYE AND THE HEART OF A CHILD’ What my CMT analysis tells us is that Emerson’s concept of the Human is always in motion, falling only to rise, and rising only to fall again, in a wavelike pattern that Emerson’s metaphors cannot resolve.4 In the last section, we saw that the human could pass through this cycle in just a few sentences. Here and in the next section, I want to look at these waveforms of rise and fall as Emerson’s metaphors measure them against two fixed points: the child, and nature. Indeed, for Emerson the change from child to adult necessitates a movement down the chain, losing sight of nature and thus the work of the Creator God, which should be his own work. As he writes in Nature: ‘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 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; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood’ (9). In order to distinguish the aspects of the human at stake here, the child and the adult, Emerson uses two familiar conceptual metaphors: understanding is seeing and the container. By ‘few adult persons can see nature,’ Emerson means that few adults can understand nature; that is, know what nature means in the sense outlined at the end of the last chapter. The ‘not me’ needs to penetrate the container of the self, the material body, for understanding—namely the transformation of matter into spirit—to take place. Emerson, conventionally elaborating the understanding is seeing and the container metaphors, uses sunlight as the penetrative force and the eye as the penetrated container, mapping this onto the two different stages of being, the ‘man’ and the ‘child.’ The metaphoric light of the sun, figuring understanding, merely reflects off the surface of the eye of the adult, illuminating it without penetrating it (for the underlying scientific metaphors, we can return to Packer’s analysis of ‘axis of vision’ trope in the last chapter). The quality of childhood is that light can ‘shine’ into the eye, and, working with a parallel container metaphor, it also penetrates the heart. The eye and the heart conventionally figure intellect (understanding is seeing) and emotion (emotion as heart). If the adult can ‘retain’ (contain) that ‘spirit of infancy,’ then he or she will see, that is, understand, nature, and inside and outside, me and not me, will be in balance. The child has the integrative eye of the poet, turning matter into spirit. Indeed, bringing these two ideas together, there is an underlying metaphor that belongs to the Romantic tradition, identified with Wordsworth—the poet is a child (see Keane 2005, 105–10). The payoffs for a childlike vision are the integrative episodes of the Jardin or the transparent eye-ball. Adults, though, do not typically see nature in a childlike way. They see nature as a

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tool; they divide it up as property; they dissect it to count and name its parts. That is, in Lakoff and Johnson’s terms, adults live as a Self, not as a Subject. In his lecture ‘The Head,’ given a year after Nature, Emerson takes a different approach to the metaphorical affordances of child and adult. He uses the great chain to locate the child above the animals in the order of being: ‘In a higher sphere of rational life dwells the infant man. God is the soul of infants also but they draw nearer influence. The child is pervaded by the element of reason but does not in his first years individualize more that the brutes. He does not yet say I. 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’ (EL2, 247; Emerson’s emphasis). The child is, and Emerson draws on container metaphors, a vessel of reason, pervaded by God’s high mind. Though God’s presence elevates ‘the infant man’ above the animals, like them he is not yet individualized: ‘he does not yet say I.’ Even so, Emerson recognizes something divine in the child, figured by purity, and reverences it. Children, however, do not remain children, and the lecture continues: ‘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’ (247–8; Emerson’s emphases). Emerson again deploys a container metaphor, which renders the child, intriguingly but necessarily, passive. It is the oceanic divine force that bursts through into the child, and then, overwhelmed by the Cause, the child, now a man, can say I am. For Emerson, as his metaphors entail, to say ‘I am’ is to be a cause and as such to become active, a divine gift that we saw above, aligns God with humankind through metaphor. Recalling the causes are forces schema, this alignment makes sense as the principal force in that schema is the will that acts on an intention to create an effect. It is the will, then, that is enabled by the divine bursting into the child, and human will, their very being, is an effect of God’s intent. However, humanity’s elevation, their place in the chain, is a precarious one: But with infinite good comes its shadow, infinite ill. As soon as the youth of the universe has felt and uttered the great fact of being, he transfers this me from that which it really is, from pure Truth and pure Love, to the frontier region of effects in which he dwells, to his body and its appurtenances, to house and land, to name and place and time, to the fugitive and fleeting effects which have no real being when once that divine wave of Truth which they have has ebbed. (248; Emerson’s emphasis)

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Emerson again figures the Fall as a movement from the Subject to the Self at the point the human changes from a child to an adult. At the very moment when a human being should be able to claim unity with the cause, they Fall from a ‘me’ that relates to the ‘great fact of being’ to a not me located at the ‘frontier region of effects’ such as ‘the body,’ or ‘house and land.’ At work here are several familiar metaphors in addition to the Subject-Self schema. The movement from Subject to Self deploys the states are locations with the Self figured as distant from the Subject, on a ‘frontier.’ To bring about a ‘transfer’ the Subject surrenders their divine will, figured by a movement from the interior to the exterior, from cause to effect. Underlying this transition is Emerson’s sense of what should be the permanent state of things, ‘pure Truth and Love,’ which, through the transfer, become ‘fugitive and fleeting and have no real being.’ The metaphor Emerson uses is another familiar one, the oceanic sense of ‘the divine wave’ that, in the Fallen person, has ‘ebbed.’ The ocean is a figure for the whole which as ‘Truth’ should exist in every part, that is, in every human. But the human, as they mature, exist only in their parts. The prior innocence of their infant state now appears above them, hence Emerson’s reverence for it. What Emerson’s metaphors of the Fall tells us is the story of a continuum up and down which humankind moves. First, they ascend the chain, moving from child to adult, buoyed up by divine will into the ‘I am’; but they also descend the chain at the moment of mature independence, surrendering their true self and, through the entailments of the bipolar dualist Subject-Self schema, the Fall relocates the human in and as a body with its attendant worldly connections, reducing humankind to a not me which is only an effect. ‘STRANGERS IN NATURE’ The not me, though always an effect for Emerson, is more than just the human body, and it can play a very different role in the metaphorical conceptualization of the Fall, because as Emerson conceptualizes it, nature, just like the child, can act as a fixed point, becoming a scale against which to measure humanity’s descent. As he puts it in the ‘Spirit’ chapter of Nature: 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.

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We do not understand the notes of birds. The fox and the deer run away from us; the bear and tiger rend us. (CW1, 38–9)

Emerson’s opening Neo-Platonic metaphor draws on the great chain to locate the body and the world at a distance from God, but also the causes are forces metaphor to ensure that both body and world are effects of God’s will. Thus, the world is ‘remoter and inferior,’ and even though he calls the world an ‘incarnation,’ using a metaphor of the flesh, the incarnated world is below even the body. Emerson’s Neo-Platonic metaphors entail an essential difference in the not me: the natural world is different from the human body; its ‘serene order,’ established by the great chain is, unlike the body, unaffected by human will (the ‘I am’), and as such is ‘unconscious.’ The result is that nature, the world, remains a constant—‘a fixed point’ that cannot move of itself—that we can use to measure our rise and fall. Emerson then shifts metaphorical register, working out from the states are locations metaphor to conceptualize another dualism between humankind and nature. We should be at home in nature, which as we saw in the last chapter is the house that God intended to serve us, but as we ‘degenerate’ we fall to a lower point on the chain, and we are no longer at home; we are strangers in nature, and therefore ‘aliens from God.’ Emerson’s conclusion is a familiar entailment of the great chain, for if we descend the chain, realizing Hedge’s binarism, we find ourselves separated from God. Emerson’s idea of nature as a measure for the human (who is supposed to be the measure of all things) recurs in his works, becoming a key aspect of his concept of nature’s service to man. In the 1841 lecture ‘The Method of Nature,’ we see a familiar pattern of figures: In the divine order, intellect is primary: nature secondary; it is the memory of the mind. That which once existed in intellect as pure law, has now taken body as Nature. It existed always in the mind in solution; now, it has been precipitated, and the bright sediment is the world. We can never be quite strangers or inferiors in nature. We are parties to its existence; it is flesh of our flesh, and bone of our bone. But we no longer hold it by the hand: we have lost our miraculous power: our arm is no more strong as the frost, nor our will equivalent to gravity and the elective attractions. Yet we can use nature as a convenient standard, and the meter of our rise and fall. It has this advantage as a witness—it will not lie—it cannot be debauched. When man curses, nature still testifies to truth and love. We may therefore safely study the mind in nature, because we cannot gaze steadily on it in mind; as we explore the face of the sun in a pool, which our eyes cannot brook his direct splendours. (CW1, 123)

Neo-Platonic emanation is conceptualised by ‘memory,’ entailing that matter can recall spirit; that the order of nature has not forgotten the order of

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God. Emerson figures that divine order as ‘pure law,’ implying that the laws of nature, as necessarily different, are impure. Then, with reference to the concept of ‘pure law,’ Emerson comes up with one of his most arresting metaphorical phrases: ‘it always existed in the mind in solution; now, it has been precipitated, and the bright sediment is the world.’ Emerson is putting to work his knowledge of the discoveries of natural history, in this case the chemical reaction whereby solids emerge from solution (the invisible becoming visible), figuring the creation of matter out of mind. Humankind, of course, is necessarily part of that created world, sharing flesh and bone, and, again, they should not be strangers in it, or inferiors to it. Humanity’s physical strength should match the law that created and sustains nature’s physical strength, the frost that cracks stone, the gravity that holds the planets together; but it does not. Emerson’s metaphors work a neat sleight of hand here. Because of the constant efforts of the spiritual is the material metaphor, as well as the implausibility that humans could be as strong as gravity or the frost, due to target domain override, we know that Emerson is referring to a spiritual weakness (spiritual weakness is physical weakness) rather than a bodily weakness that places us below nature’s ‘convenient standard.’ Lastly, Emerson’s metaphors remind us that even in our fallen state, we are part of a bipolar dualism rather than an absolute binarism, and nature is a mirror of mind—of our mind (microcosm) and of the divine mind (macrocosm). Like the sun, the Neo-Platonic metaphor par-excellence, we cannot look at the divine ‘mind’ directly, but we can look at its reflection in and as nature. Nature, then, is a ‘meter of our rise and fall’; if we do not feel ourselves equal to it, if we do not feel ourselves at home in it, it marks our fall, but we still belong to its cause as part of a continuum. That said, according to the entailments of Emerson’s metaphors, to be at home in nature qua material nature would necessarily be to be above it, not one with it, for even to be one with it, would already to be fallen. Rather, we need to be one with the divine mind we can see reflected in nature. He rehearses the point in ‘Self-Reliance’ that same year: “Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say ‘I think,’ ‘I am,’ but quotes some saint or sage. He is ashamed before the blade of grass or the blowing rose. These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God to-day” (CW2, 38). Recalling Goethe’s point from in the last chapter, natural beings are perfect in themselves, and Emerson’s rose is complete and constant in itself; it reflects divine law in every moment of its being—as, by implication, does the humble blade of grass. The human, however, like Goethe’s artist, lives out of themself, in a world of quotation which is a world of shame. The will imparted into him by the divine, the ability to say, ‘I am’ and ‘I think,’ that is, to be a cause rather than an effect, to be ‘upright’ (recalling the vertical

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schema of the great chain) is forgotten. Instead, man’s timidity and shame mark his fallen state, and he has not merely fallen into nature, he has fallen below it. As he puts it in the 1844 essay, ‘Nature,’ in Essays: Second Series: Man is fallen; nature is erect, and serves as a differential thermometer, detecting the presence or absence of the divine sentiment in man. By fault of our dulness [sic] and selfishness, we are looking up to nature, but when we are convalescent, nature will look up to us. We see the foaming brook with compunction: if our life flowed with the right energy, we could shame the brook. The stream of zeal sparkles with real fire, and not with reflex rays of sun and moon. (CW3, 104)

Here our fallen state is a given and again nature is the measure, drawing on the natural history trope of the ‘differential thermometer’ that can measure two temperatures at once, in this case ‘the presence of absence of the divine’ in humanity and nature. The divine presence in nature, which does not have a will of its own, is constant; it is what sustains it. But, as we saw above, man’s surrender of his will to the body can lower him, and from his fallen state, he necessarily looks up to nature. Emerson figures this fall as sickness and guilt. But when we are ‘convalescent,’ we will have regained our placed in the great chain, looking on nature (understanding is seeing) without ‘compunction,’ and our light, which as the metaphor tells us is a ‘real fire’ and no mere ‘reflex,’ will outdazzle the light of nature. Emerson’s metaphorical thinking, by using the source domains of light and fire, typically associated with God, for the target domain of the human, recovers humankind from the Fall. What would it be to be convalescent, upright, without guilt or shame, to flow once more ‘with the right energy’ and to give off rather than reflect light? How can we regain our place above nature by recognising that it emanates from the mind of God, who is the cause of, and one with, our minds? To work his way toward this end, Emerson must shift his conceptualization of nature as a source domain from something that is a fixed measure, to something that, as already suggested, is a flowing resource for our ascension. As we saw in Chapter 1 with the idea of the progressive great chain, nature needs to be reconceived through new metaphors derived from the source domain of its constant metamorphosis, something we can glimpse in Emerson 1841 lecture, ‘The Method of Nature’: The method of nature: who could ever analyze it? That rushing stream will not stop to be observed. We can never surprise nature in a corner; never find the end of a thread; never tell where to set the first stone. The bird hastens to lay her egg: the egg hastens to be a bird. The wholeness we admire in the order of the world, is the result of infinite distribution. Its smoothness is the smoothness of the pitch of the cataract. Its permanence is a perpetual inchoation. (CW1, 124)

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‘Method,’ as Emerson would have learned from Coleridge’s 1818 Treatise on Method, means ‘a way, or path, of transit’ (Coleridge 1924, 2; cf. Walls 2003, 60–1). The ‘method’ of nature, then is to be understood as a metaphor, providing a source domain for purposive movement or progression. Emerson’s metaphor for method is the ‘rushing stream that will not stop to be observed.’ The mere ‘methodologies’ of natural history that classify nature in cabinets and dissect its dead forms fall short of the analysis of this constantly moving process. The ‘method’ of nature is also without a discoverable beginning or end. Emerson’s metaphor of endings is from weaving (‘never find the end of the thread’) and of beginning from architecture (‘never tell where to set the first stone’). Human processes of making are used negatively to figure the undiscoverable limits of the method of nature, implying the typical three-part causes are forces schema in its maker/made formation. Those hidden limits, the work of an implied creator, are then fused together in a cycle of bird and egg. Together, this vast cycle gives the illusion of stasis, but that sense of ‘wholeness we admire in the order of the world’ only appears to be fixed, an illusion created by a vastness of scale that evens everything out (‘infinite distribution’), or by the roar of a waterfall that disguises each sounding drop. What appears as fixed is conceptualized as infinite movement, which Emerson calls ‘perpetual inchoation’; that is, the method of nature is always beginning and thus always new. ‘The Method of Nature’ continues with familiar Neo-Platonic metaphors that further define this constant surge of natural renewal: ‘Every natural fact is an emanation, and that from which it emanates is an emanation also, and from every emanation is a new emanation. If anything could stand still, it would be crushed and dissipated by the torrent it resisted, and if it were a mind, would be crazed; as insane persons are those who hold fast to one thought, and do not flow with the course of nature’ (CW1, 124). Natural facts, as we know from Nature, are ‘symbols of particular spiritual facts’ (17). Recollecting symbolism reveals the purpose of nature as a ‘torrent’ of novelty: new emanations provide new facts, and nature’s flux provides the novelty essential for the new symbols of our self-discovery (‘spiritual facts’) and, more importantly, self-renewal. If we stand still, we become insane; that is, we become wedded to ‘one thought’ and deny the rush of nature by which we can be redefined through metaphor. As Emerson put it a few years earlier, ‘A man thinks. He not only thinks, but he lives on thoughts; he is the prisoner of thoughts; his ideas, which in words he rejects, tyrannize over him and dictate or modify every word of his mouth, every act of his hand. There are no walls like the invisible ones of an idea’ (EL1, 218). This thought prison is another description of the Fall, to be tyrannized by one way of thinking when the cosmos is constant change; we are static when the world is rushing on.

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Swedenborg, though much admired by Emerson, becomes exemplary: ‘He fastens each natural object to a theologic notion; a horse signifies carnal understanding; a tree, perception; the moon, faith; a cat this; an ostrich that’; but, in line with the ‘method’ of nature, ‘The slippery Proteus is not so easily caught. In nature, each individual symbol plays innumerable parts, as each particle of matter circulates through every system. The central identity enables any one symbol to express successively all the qualities and shades of real being’ (CW4, 68). Swedenborg’s doctrine of correspondence fixes meaning against the onrush of a symbolism of natural facts in which any part can figure the whole. By contrast, nature’s constant novelty, its ‘perpetual inchoation,’ by framing creation as am ongoing activity rather than something that took place once in the distant past puts the cause in every effect. The human is one such effect, and through the logic of Emerson’s symbolism, where the part is the whole (each particle of matter circulates through every system) and the spiritual is the material (‘the shades of real being’), humankind is also a cause (causes are forces). The source domains of the human and God are, through Emersonian symbolism, coming into alignment, elevating his concept of humankind. CIRCLES Arguably Emerson’s most compact—and successful—attempt to conceptualize the homology of humanity and God in a single symbol is his 1841 essay, ‘Circles,’ which, as which shall see, begins with the human, then moves through nature, to encompass the divine, while never leaving that initial human point. The first metaphor in the essay is: ‘The eye is the first circle; the horizon it forms is the second’ (CW2, 179). Emerson’s figure derives from a conventional schema, the slots of which are the various elements that we associate with a circle, such as center, circumference, radius, diameter, area, tangent, chord, and arc, as well as movements like revolutions and orbits. The slots in play in Emerson’s initial image are center, circumference, and area. The first circle, the ‘eye,’ is a conventional use of the whole is the part, and the circle’s center is not merely the ‘eye,’ but rather a self, the ‘I.’ If the horizon in the image figures the limit of an eye’s vision, and we know that the ‘eye’ means the ‘I,’ then we infer that this horizon creates the limit of the self. We have a geometrical metaphor where the self is metaphorically represented by the area of a circle. Though apparently idiosyncratic, Emerson’s complex circle figure belongs to a fairly common idea of the circle metaphorically providing aspects of the self’s limits, e.g., a circle or sphere of influence, or a rounded personality. Overall, then, Emerson’s first metaphor tells us that

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the self (the center) is what it sees (the area) and what it sees has a limit (the horizon), from which we infer that the self has a limit. The next circular metaphor in ‘Circles’ is remarkably complex, the more so when we locate its origin: ‘St. Augustine described the nature of God as a circle whose centre was everywhere, and its circumference nowhere’ (179). Surprisingly, considering the confidence of Emerson’s sentence, this phrase is not in Augustine’s works (253–54). It appears to derive from a fragmentary misquotation that Emerson took down in his journal in July 1835 that begins, abruptly: ‘Can never go out of the sphere of truth whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere’ (JMN5, 57). These words come from a book by the seventeenth-century Cambridge Neo-Platonist John Norris, in which Norris had quoted Augustine. However, they are not by the saint, but by Norris, and they form part of an answer to an imaginary situation figuring someone who seeks a personified ‘truth.’ Norris’s full sentence runs: ‘And that if he takes the Wings of the Morning, and remain in the uttermost parts of the Sea, even there also he shall meet with her, and can never go out of her Sphere, whose Center is every where, and whose Circumference is no where’ (Norris 1701, 389). On the same journal page, Emerson had copied down some quotations from Augustine that appeared in Norris’s book, and when he used them for his essay five years later, he appears to have conflated the two. However, more important than his misattribution, in the original quotation from Norris it is ‘truth,’ not ‘God,’ that has its center everywhere and its circumference nowhere. An important consequence of Emerson’s substitution will become clear shortly.5 In the context of ‘Circles,’ the idea of the ‘nature of God as a circle whose centre was everywhere, and its circumference nowhere,’ works by way of contrast with the first metaphor, ‘The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second.’ Emerson’s initial concept of the human, structured by the circle image-schema, is limited by the relationship between center and circumference (center-periphery) that yields the area. That area contains the sum of its being. This limitation exemplifies the ‘invariance principle,’ which, as we saw in Chapter 3, explains the mapping between domains and, particularly, the ways in which the target domain replicates the cognitive topology of the source image. In the first metaphor in ‘Circles,’ humans are finite, so the metaphor structures itself accordingly, and the circle’s limit establishes the human’s limit. In the second metaphor, the target domain shifts from the human to the divine, and thus the ‘cognitive topology’ shifts, allowing for a radical redistribution of the source domain’s slots: the center is not one point but an infinite number of points, and thus its circumference is without limit, and its area is also infinite. From a definition of humankind, we have moved to a definition of God based on the same image-schema. The

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metaphors appear very similar, but they are not the same because of their differing target-domains, one finite and one infinite. The Emersonian work begins in the next metaphor from the essay’s opening paragraph: ‘Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another can be drawn’ (CW2, 179). In this new version of the image-schema, the circle is now ‘drawn’ by an implied draftsperson who can always redraw another circle outside the second circle (the eye/I, still being the first circle and thus the center of the subsequent circles). Every circle, then, can grow; and, using the same slots as before (center, circumference, and area), the self, too, can grow. From a human who was presented as a static entity, we now have a reconceptualization of the human on its way, albeit slowly, to the divine—from the finite to the infinite. This reconceptualization offers a suggestive explanation for Emerson’s substitution—deliberate or not—of the word ‘God’ for Norris’s ‘truth.’ It also points the reader toward the key work of Emerson’s metaphors in his essay: to correlate the human and the divine. Additionally, Emerson’s image has provided a new slot for the schema: the draftsperson who draws the concentric circles. This extension, drawing on an unused slot in the schema uses metonymy, or contiguous association, and it significantly changes the nature of the circle. Initially, the circle was the eye itself, or was the horizon formed by the eye; it was a finite space. Now, the circle is drawn by something apparently outside the circle, the hand of the draftsperson, which appears to be a conventional maker/made synecdoche for a designing God. But though we may make such an assumption, Emerson does not explicitly tell his reader who draws the circle; rather, he lets his metaphors escalate. In the following passage, Emerson works his theme into ever more complex shapes: 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 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. (180–81)

I shall restrict my interpretation of this highly wrought section of the essay to the ways in which it metaphorically develops the circle image-schema. The first sentence restates Emerson’s earlier position with a significant addition: ‘self-evolving.’ Through this addition, the hand that draws the outer

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circles becomes clearer—it represents a self that draws itself, ever-widening its own circumference and thus its own area. In the draftsperson slot where we might have been led to expect a designer God, Emerson’s elaboration gives us a human. Extending the idea of the divine artist that we saw at the end of Chapter 4, we can see Emerson’s animus: to unify humanity with God. Crucially, though, the implication of God in the metaphorical extension remains, and the human by sharing that metaphorical space, assumes the role of divine self-creator. The whole image arises from a series of elaborations of the initial circle schema where the slots of plane geometry have turned into something quite different. The circle’s center point is now the cause of spreading water ripples; the horizon is just one such ripple that has become solidified, and the drawn concentric circles are now freshly created ripples that have the potential to burst over that ridge which Emerson calls ‘a circular wave of circumstance.’ In this new image, the ripple’s cause still maps onto the self (for Emerson, as we have seen, the cause and the ‘I am’ are coincident), but the horizon and the lines drawn around it have now been elaborated into two quite distinct types of circles: the spreading ripples caused by the self and the ridge of inertia. There are two familiar underpinning conceptual metaphors: the container and causes are forces.6 In the first instance the self, perceived as something limited, hemmed in or bounded, is conceived as a container. However, the image-schema of the container is not limited to what is inside. As Johnson observes, the center-periphery schema is foundational for this conventional metaphor suggests that, as we have seen before, ‘we experience the center as inner and define the outer relative to it’ (BM, 125). Inferences that we make about the outside are thus equally important to the metaphor’s cognitive topology, which are now about a movement between inside and outside. Movement relates to the underlying schema causes are forces, here figured by the movement of water. In Emerson’s elaborated and extended metaphor, the ‘soul,’ as the divine ‘I am,’ originates the movement, the rippling wave figures the expanding self, the ridge represents the self’s inertia as its energy lapses, and the overflowing wave is the ‘true’ soul that spreads out again. Provocatively, Emerson adds something that goes beyond the immediate self in his metaphor. The ‘inert’ ridge could be an individual’s own inertia, but it could also be the consequence of another’s inertia, which has brought about a wider cultural limitation: ‘an empire, rules of an art, a local usage, a religious rite.’ In Emerson’s view, such forms—or customs—inevitably result from the solidification of individual inspiration. Exemplifying this calcification, his 1837 lecture, ‘The American Scholar,’ contends that ‘the English dramatic poets have Shakspearized [sic] now for two hundred years.’ A perspective reiterated in the 1838 ‘Divinity School Address,’ where the cultural

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form of what Emerson calls ‘Historical Christianity’ is a ‘mythus’ fixated on its originator, and so ‘seems to totter to its fall, almost all life extinct’ (CW1, 57, 81, 84). These forms or rituals based on the influence of specific historical figures—in these examples, Shakespeare and Christ, respectively—create the ridges that an individual needs to overrun. The metaphors Emerson uses in ‘Circles’ make this flood seem inevitable, even natural, echoing the language of ‘The Method of Nature’: ‘There are no fixtures in nature. The universe is fluid and volatile. Permanence is but a word of degrees. Our globe seen by God, is a transparent law, not a mass of facts. The law dissolves the fact and holds it fluid. Our culture is the predominance of an idea which draws after it this train of cities and institutions. Let us rise into another idea: they will disappear’ (CW2, 179). Here, he again creates a binary opposition between the metaphorical states of fluidity, which he associates with nature and the Divine, and rigidity, which he associates with culture. To raise culture to the level of nature and humankind to the level of God marks Emerson’s ambition; once this elevation is achieved, all will be unfixed and uncontained. Emerson’s metaphorical originality reveals itself here when he takes the law, which in most cultural contexts appears as metaphorically fixed (e.g., iron laws; laws of nature), and turns it into a fluid solvent. Facts dissolve and solidities become transparent. Fluidity is necessary to overflow the ridges of cultural inertia and, as such, all these metaphors combine to do the work of the essay. Later in ‘Circles,’ Emerson uses a new metaphor, drawn from the source domain of classical history, to further his inferences about cultural change based on the circle image-schema: ‘Literature is a point outside of our hodiernal circle, through which a new one may be described. The use of literature is to afford us a platform whence we may command a view of our present life, a purchase by which we may move it’ (185). The source-domain for Emerson’s metaphor is the story of Archimedes, the Greek mathematician, who claimed that if someone gave him a point in space on which to stand, and a long enough lever, he could move the earth. The cross-domain mapping works as follows: the Archimedean point is literature; the world to be moved is the ‘hodiernal circle,’ or repetitive daily round in which we find ourselves trapped (drawing on the conventional cycle schema; BM, 119–21); Archimedes at the lever is the reader; the lever is that change of perspective that reading generates and that alters our world. Two circles, then, compose the metaphor: the world itself and the daily cycle. The first is not something to be transcended, it is something to be moved, and if moved, then the cycle of habit will be destroyed. Reading, Emerson continues, ‘breaks up my whole chain of habits, and I open my eye on my own possibilities’ (CW2, 185). The link schema underpins the ‘chain of habits’ metaphor. Emerson construes his temporal continuity and consistency as a series of connected

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behaviors or habits. Linking disparate things together is so fundamental to human experience that, Johnson contends, ‘the metaphorical elaboration of the link schema is one of the primary ways in which we are able to establish connectedness in our understanding’ (BM, 119). However, Emerson wants to break the chain. He does so by bringing different metaphors into collision. Here, he connects the link schema to the ongoing circle schema by using the ‘eye,’ again, as a synecdoche for the self in the second part of the sentence, evoking a self that, through literature, can see (understanding is seeing) beyond its initial horizon and into its ‘possibilities.’ These possibilities, returning to the container schema, are outside our normal self’s limits. Seeing the world anew through metaphor enables us to move from ‘the centre to the verge of our orbit’ and, more importantly, to ‘make the verge of to-day the new centre’ (CW2, 186–87). Emerson’s extension of the circle imageschema derives from the conventional metaphor, change of state is change of location. The extension remains, though, in keeping with the eye/horizon metaphor as he figures himself as both the central star and orbiting planet, the first becoming the second. Emerson’s Archimedean metaphor deploys a dual center-periphery schema to create this movement, where what is ‘figure’ or ‘foreground’ at one moment may become ‘background’ at another, as ‘we move perceptually through our world’ (BM, 124). In Emerson’s metaphor, as the center swaps with a point on the periphery, the figure and ground change places, a movement that, Johnson observes, typifies the center-periphery schema: ‘We may move in one direction toward the horizon, thus opening up new perceptual territory, but this only establishes new horizons presently beyond our grasp’ (124). This process, of course, implies the very cyclicity that Emerson strives to avoid, and as such, he takes it a crucial step further. In doing so, he completes his intentions in the essay: ‘there is no outside, no inclosing wall, no circumference to us’ (CW2, 181). If we can move the center of our circles and thus create new ones, and if we have no circumference—no limits to the circles we can draw—rather than creating a cycle of new vistas, we will instead approach ever more closely the definition of God that Emerson derived from his creative misattribution of Augustine: ‘a circle whose centre was everywhere, and its circumference nowhere.’ As we saw in Chapter 3, Emerson has again overcome the invariance principle’s ‘target domain override,’ whereby a target domain limits the ways we can construe a metaphor (Lakoff, 216). Initially, target domain override placed a restriction on the application of Emerson’s metaphors to finite human beings. As we progress through the essay, connecting its tropes, the very concept of the human changes through the metaphors that liberate each individual from his or her limits. As Emerson puts it: ‘The only sin is limitation’ (CW2, 182). The removal of sin permits yet another step toward the divine. In ‘Circles,’

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Emerson’s metaphors have transformed the very idea of the ‘target domain’ of human being. Emerson, then, appears to have avoided the pitfalls of the underlying the spiritual is the material schema and the alignment of God and humanity does not fall back into binarism. His success may hang on the choice of the ‘circle’ metaphor. The perfect ‘circle’ does not exist in nature or in matter. It is a geometric abstraction. As such, the circle source domain is quasi-immaterial and can serve as an apt metaphor for the unity of God and humankind, escaping the Fall. Nevertheless, Emerson rather spoils his own achievement in the final part of his essay, and his metaphors begin to undo his work when he observes that there is a paradox in his conception of the outward moving of ever-spreading circles that enables humankind and God to map onto each other. As with humanity’s Fall, movement is only movement when there is a static point to measure it from. As he puts it: ‘Yet this incessant movement and progression which all things partake could never become sensible to us but by contrast to some principle of fixture or stability in the soul. Whilst the eternal generation of circles proceeds, the eternal generator abides. That central life is somewhat superior to creation, superior to knowledge and thought, and contains all its circles’ (188). Emerson here has given us another remarkable series of metaphorical elaborations and extensions. If we recall the image-schema of the circle, with its various slots, such as center, circumference, area, radius, etc., and then add to that Emerson’s elaborations and extensions—the circles drawn around circles, the draftsperson, the ripples and ridges, the movements from center to circumference—then he suggests that something must abide in stillness—some ‘principle of fixture or stability in the soul.’ Emerson does not go so far as to call this ‘principle’ God, but his reference fairly clearly attempts to find another metaphorical expression for the divine. The ‘eternal generator’ figures a fixed point from which the familiar Neo-Platonic ‘eternal generation of circles’ proceeds, which would suggest that it is the self, the ‘I/eye’, or the point from which the drop falls, that spills into ripples (causes are forces). However, this fixture is also ‘superior’ to all such generated circles and ‘contains’ them. The eternal generator, within his composite dual metaphor, exists both inside and outside, figures both center and circumference, the contained and the container. The cognitive topology of this metaphor reasserts the target domain override of the divine as something distinct from the human, thus it separates humankind from God as it separates God from creation, and Emerson’s metaphors fall back into a binarized dualism.

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‘A STUPENDOUS ANTAGONISM’ As we are coming to see, Emerson’s Fall is an unavoidable consequence of his metaphorical thinking, for even if the whole exists in every part, the tension within any part-whole metaphor means that those parts can never settle into the One that they aim to represent. Matter may give shape and structure to spirit, but some residue of materiality remains in the opposing concept. Even progressive metaphors like ‘bipolar dualism’ and the ‘circle’ conceptualize one thing (i.e., the spiritual) in terms of another (i.e., the material), however abstract or apt the source domain proves to be. The tension between matter and spirit, part and whole, does not just result in humanity’s fallen state; it is fundamental to Emerson’s understanding of Western thought. We can see this in his 1850 ‘Plato’ essay, based on lectures first given in the early 1840s, where Emerson outlines a philosophical origin of unity and dualism once again underwritten by the the part is the whole schema: Philosophy is the account which the human mind gives to itself of the constitution of the world. Two cardinal facts lie forever at the base; the One; and the two. 1. Unity or Identity; and, 2. Variety. We unite all things by perceiving the law which pervades them, by perceiving the superficial differences, and the profound resemblances. But every mental act,—this very perception of identity or oneness, recognizes the difference of things. Oneness and Otherness. It is impossible to speak, or to think without embracing both. (CW4, 27–8)

Unity and duality as ‘cardinal facts’ structure the way the mind takes hold of the world by finding resemblances amidst differences and differences amidst resemblances, which, as we have seen, is the basis of metaphor itself, and thus of complex thought. The familiar part is the whole schema, and its dual, are the ordering principles of thinking, they lie ‘at the base’ and are part of ‘every mental act.’ Though a tension between unity and duality is ubiquitous, Emerson’s brief philosophical history does address broad tendencies in the ways that different cultures prioritise one or the other. He traces a focus on unity to the East, especially the Hindu Vedas (28–9), whereas the Western eye trains upon difference (20–30). Plato is the ‘balanced soul’ (31) that unites these poles, because, as we have seen with the successful naturalist, Plato, as bipolar, in Emerson’s terms, is a poet as well as a thinker: ‘Thought seeks to know unity in unity; poetry to show it by variety, that is, always by an object or symbol. Plato keeps the two vases, one of æther and one of pigment, at his side, and invariably uses both’ (32). If Plato were only a philosopher, he would follow the oriental line and dwell on unity for its own sake, producing an abstract knowledge of law. As he is a poet, too, his whole is in every part, and with a Western focus on particulars, he ‘draw[s] all his illustrations [ . . . ]

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from mares and puppies, from pitchers and soupladles, from cooks and criers, the shops of potters, horsedoctors, butchers, and fishmongers’ (31). Unity, then, is always at work amidst Plato’s variety, his variety always signifies unity, and his pen will draw from the well of æther, or spirit, as well as the well of pigment, or matter. Plato’s bipolar philosophy balances the claims of both poles, and it is perhaps unsurprising that as a the ‘representative’ philosopher, Plato exemplifies the schema of symbolism that are the basis of Emerson’s practice of metaphor, the part is the whole and the spiritual is the material. The ambition to find the metaphors that would reconcile duality and unity and reverse the Fall marks Emerson’s later thought as much as it does his earlier. In the 1860 essay, ‘Fate,’ the dualism is between human freedom and fate, where the part maps freedom and the whole maps fate. Emerson’s metaphor is apt metaphor because as the the part is the whole schema is reversible, so are its terms, and freedom and fate, by a metaphorical sleight of hand, can appear to swap places. Thus, Emerson, using metaphors familiar from ‘The Method of Nature,’ implores us ‘to see how far fate slides into freedom, and freedom into fate, observe how far the roots of every creature run, or find, if you can, a point where there is no thread or connection. Our life is consentaneous and far-related. This knot of nature is so well tied, that nobody was ever cunning enough to find the two ends. Nature is intricate, overlapped, interweaved and endless’ (CW6, 20). All that seems free, Emerson’s metaphors tell us, has its roots interwoven into a complex whole, which appears determined, and conversely, fate’s apparent unity expresses itself as endless variety, which seems to be free. Humankind exemplifies this entanglement: Man is not order of nature, sack and sack, belly and members, link in a chain, nor any ignominious baggage, but a stupendous antagonism, a dragging together of the poles of the Universe. He betrays his relation to what is below him,— thick-skulled, small-brained, fishy, quadrumanous,—quadruped ill-disguised, hardly escaped into biped, and has paid for the new powers by loss of some of the old ones. But the lightning which explodes and fashions planets, maker of planets and suns, is in him. (12)

Emerson’s metaphors are startling here. He begins by rejecting the body, ‘sack, belly and members,’ and taking the human out of the ‘order of nature’ by taking them out of the Great Chain of Being, denying they are a ‘link in a chain.’ Humankind, then, is no mere part. Rather, the human is a ‘stupendous antagonism, a dragging together of the poles,’ deploying bipolar dualism to figure a tense unity of differences. These metaphors are telling. Humankind is no longer in the middle (states are locations), the first chapter’s golden link, rather it is figured by the extremes or ‘poles.’ Humankind’s fated

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body—‘quadruped ill-disguised’—barely human, forms one pole, but the other is ‘the lightning which explodes and fashions planets, maker of planets and suns,’ namely, the creative power of God. There is no gradual ascension of the great chain here, but a sudden apotheosis, as Emerson elaborates the maker/made version of the causes are forces with the effect of unifying humanity and God as creators, and the divine whole is ‘in him.’ The human remains dual: body and intellect, matter and spirit, fate and freedom; but any implied binarism is overcome by the dual nature of the part/whole schema, which conceptualizes the simultaneous existence of freedom and fate without paradox. The essay’s conclusion reinforces this bipolar dualism: ‘Law rules throughout existence, a Law which is not intelligent but intelligence,—not personal or impersonal,—it disdains words and passes understanding; it dissolves persons; it vivifies nature; yet solicits the pure in heart to draw on all its omnipotence’ (27). The One, here familiarly figured as ‘Law,’ is everywhere, and what appears individually intelligent, what Emerson earlier called the ‘I am,’ is the effect of an abstract causal intelligence, or divine will. Persons dissolve even while nature comes to life through this omnipresent law. To be free in any sense that denied the authority of the One would be anathema to Emerson; as he writes: ‘If we thought men were free in the sense, that, in a single exception one fantastical will could prevail over the law of things, it were all one as if a child’s hand could pull down the sun’ (26). Our freedom is the creative activity of the Cause of causes, a point to which I shall return in the next chapter. In ‘Fate,’ Emerson calls the subtle unity of freedom and fate that defines humankind a ‘Beautiful Necessity’ (26, 27). And, to finish this chapter by echoing the last, we can see that essay’s call for purehearted action, where the dualism of freedom and necessity collapse into each other, most clearly in the artist. As Emerson puts it in his late 1870 essay, ‘Art’: Arising out of eternal Reason, one and perfect, whatever is beautiful rests on the foundation of the necessary. [ . . . ] We feel, in seeing a noble building, which rhymes well, as we do in hearing a perfect song, that it is spiritually organic, that is, had a necessity in nature, for being one of the possible forms of the Divine mind, and is only discovered and executed by the artist, not arbitrarily composed by him’ (CW7, 26–7). The artist’s work, then, is not categorically distinct from the rest of nature; it is a product of a divine cause; a part of a whole, a beautiful necessity; and the artist is a conduit rather than an independent creator. Art, like natural history, is for Emerson a process of discovery, and both are only of value when they celebrate and reveal their underlying cause. But, once more, Emerson’s metaphors for the artist as the ideal human cannot escape their own duality. He draws his figures for Divine creativity from aesthetics, by definition the most sensual of disciplines, and from architecture, which inevitably reflects the human form, as well as from song, the sound

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of the body in air and ear. In each of his attempts to conceptualize an idea of humankind that can be one with God through metaphor, even when he approaches success with the circle of bipolar unity, Emerson never resolves once and for all the dualism that his symbolism based on spirit and matter, part and whole, exemplifies. Nevertheless, he will always strain his metaphors to the point of catachresis in the attempt to achieve that elusive unity. For Emerson believes that the failure to realize oneself anew through metaphors drawn from nature’s infinite and ever-changing stock is the Fall that traps humanity in nature as mere matter, ossified by dead metaphor. The task of Emerson’s ongoing quest for living metaphors is to transform that matter into spirit, to enable any aspect of nature to realize the mind of God whose end is humankind. However, the dualistic epistemic structure of metaphor itself will always create the conditions for a new Fall. NOTES 1. For a provocative reading of Emerson and embodiment in the context of slavery and gender, see Sorioso 2002, 104–42. 2. Perhaps the first critic to recognise the centrality of dualism to Emerson’s thought was Stephen Whicher, who argued that there is an essential split in the Emersonian self between the subject and object, which he later understands as the basis for key Emersonian distinctions, such as those between reason and understanding, the sublime and the everyday, permeance and importance, transcendentalism and empiricism, and ultimately, freedom and fate (Whicher 1953, 23–4, 29–32, 69–71, 94ff, 139–40). 3. Whicher knowingly plays with Emerson’s polar metaphors in Freedom and Fate, when he calls ‘Self-Reliance’ a ‘northwest idea,’ then suggests that ‘the moral law lies northeast’ and that “‘exaggeration,’ is southwest in quality; the idea of fate, perhaps, southeast” (Whicher 1953, 57–8). 4. For a more literalistic account of Emerson and the Fall, see Porte 1979, 168–78. 5. For a useful account of circular metaphors used in cosmic and theological contexts, see Lovejoy 1964, 99ff. 6. I am grateful to Zoltán Kövecses for making this observation about containers in an early version of this chapter delivered at the ‘Advances in Metaphor Studies Conference,’ Genoa, May 2016.

Chapter Six

God

Emerson’s embodied experience of nature’s everchanging variety provides an endlessly open series of source domains for his conceptualization and reconceptualization of humankind as he attempts to recover the Fall. As we have learned, these source domains also furnish the tropes for Emerson’s novel ideas of God—they are, after all, all that he has to draw upon. The difference, as my final chapter will further explore, is not between source domains, but between the target domains of the human and the divine that Emerson attempts to bring into alignment. Because of the structure of metaphor revealed by my CMT analysis so far, in conceptualizing God, and God’s relationship to nature and humanity, we will see Emerson struggling with same problems as he did with his concept of the human. He wants unity, but his metaphors inevitably derive from variety; he wants pure spirit, but his source domains are material. In this chapter, I shall examine Emerson’s metaphorical practice, demonstrating the issues it raises as well as his attempts to resolve them, especially those of God’s relationship to nature, the question of Pantheism, the idea of Christ as a symbolic unity of humankind and God, and Emerson’s attempts to find metaphors that will unify humanity and God in his great essays ‘The Over-Soul’ and ‘The Poet.’ As I hope Emerson’s Metaphors has shown so far, an understanding of Emerson’s concept of God as it derives from his metaphorical thinking is the essential capstone to understanding Emerson’s thought. ‘THE DOCTRINE OF PANTHEISM’ Emerson’s 1837 lament about his separation from nature: ‘A believer in Unity, a Seer of Unity, I yet behold two,’ which I examined in the last chapter, equally addresses his relationship with God. Earlier in the same journal entry, Emerson had written: ‘I behold with awe and delight many illustrations of the One Universal Mind. I see my being imbedded in it. As a plant in the earth, 181

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so I grow in God. I am only a form of him. He is the soul of Me. I can even with a mountainous aspiring say, I am God, by transferring my Me out of the flimsy precincts of my own body, my fortunes, my private will, & meekly retiring upon the holy austerities of the Just & the Loving—upon the secret fountains of Nature’ (JMN5, 336; Emerson’s emphases). This densely woven series of metaphors shapes Emerson’s thinking on humankind, nature, and God, and CMT will once again point us toward the structures that shape his thoughts. He begins with the conventional understanding is seeing metaphor, and the ‘illustrations’ of ‘One Universal Mind’ that he ‘sees’ comprise the identity among difference that refutes the idea of the ‘Individual.’ He uses himself as one such illustration, deploying a container metaphor, that imbeds him in that One Universal Mind. He then shifts to another familiar conventional metaphor people are plants (late bloomer, going to seed, budding author), elaborating a slot that is less typically drawn upon, the soil in which the plant is grown (though Mark’s ‘Parable of the Sower’ is an obvious precursor—Mark 4:2–9). The nurturing, sustaining, and supporting qualities of that soil become the qualities of God. The next two short sentences are more challenging: ‘I am only a form of him. He is the Soul of Me.’ The structural parallelism between these sentences suggests a paired thought. Emerson’s ‘form’ could mean ‘type,’ so Emerson is a version of God; or it could mean a Platonic ‘form,’ and Emerson is an ideal that exist in God.1 The word form, like type, stems from ‘to strike,’ here the action of creating an indented impression in a softer material, suggesting that Emerson’s has been struck from the prior form of God. The ‘soul’ is even more intriguing. Typically, as we saw in the last chapter, we understand the soul in terms of ‘containers,’ that is, we have an inner self (Subject: soul, spirit, mind, etc.) that exists inside a container (Self: head, brain, body, etc.). Here, Emerson’s metaphor implies that God is his ‘soul,’ and that, as such, God is in him. But as we have already seen with the people are plants metaphor, Emerson is in God, and Emerson’s container metaphors create a typical Emersonian paradox: Emerson is in God even while God is in Emerson. Emerson’s next metaphor, ‘mountainous aspiring,’ uses a composite of the scale and good is up metaphors to partially resolve his problem. He can, as he puts it, ‘say, I am God, by transferring my Me out of the flimsy precincts of my own body.’ It appears that Emerson recognizes the paradox of his metaphors, and to overcome it, he removes the container, that is, the body, so that the God without and the God within can merge. Emerson needs, then, to get rid of what makes him an individual Self, namely his physical form, his ‘fortune,’ and his ‘private will.’ Even at the last, though, we have metaphors of spatial contiguity rather than complete merging. All the soul can do is ‘retire upon the holy austerities of the Just and Loving—upon the secret fountains of Nature.’ Emerson’s ascetic self-denial does not result in a convincing Unity

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of the Human and God—hence his ultimate disappointment: ‘A believer in Unity, a seer of Unity, I yet behold two.’ In his effort to conceptualize his relationship with God, Emerson’s metaphors locate Emerson in God, and God in Emerson. Emerson’s metaphors are attempting to deal with a very familiar problem: pantheism, the question becoming to what extent are man, nature, and God one, and to what extent are they distinct.2 In an 1841 journal passage, Emerson records a fictional dream in which he is spoken to by ‘Osman,’ the name he sometimes gave to his own spirit of speculation or genius—his ‘Subject’ self in CMT terms. Osman raises the ‘doctrine of Pantheism or the Omnipresence of God’ (JMN7, 450). A passage from the Osman entry that, slightly amended, made it into ‘The Method of Nature,’ as we saw in the last chapter, runs ‘as the river flows, & the plant flows (or emits odours), and the sun flows (or radiates), & the mind is a stream of thoughts, so was the universe an emanation of God. Every thing is an emanation, & from every emanation is a new emanation, & that from which it emanates in an emanation also” (449). In that last chapter, I looked at emanation as a source of metaphor. Here I want to look at it in terms of Emerson’s concept of the divine, his place in nature, and his relationship with humanity. In the passage, Emerson’s basic metaphors for God, the familiar the Neo-Platonic combination of causes are forces and the part is the whole, are extended to cover everything in creation. The source domains Emerson draws on for causes are forces are the homologous ways in which nature ‘flows’ as water, scent and light, the flow entailing, through conceptual metaphor, a causal point or ‘source’ from which all ‘emanates’ (what he referred to in the 1837 passage above as ‘secret fountains of Nature’). Furthermore, drawing on the part is the whole schema, this causal point exists in every aspect of nature, the One source ‘flowing’ through and as more and more emanations. The work of Emerson’s metaphor is significant. If God is the prime emanator, and his intent, will, and effect an entailment of the tripartite causes are forces schema, then each subsequent emanation is structurally analogous, with the implication that God’s emanative power, his intent, will, and effect, exist in all the elements of creation. The human, ‘whose mind is a stream of thoughts,’ is necessarily a part of this ever-expanding emanative process, and Emerson’s Osman continues: ‘Let a man not resist the law of his mind & he will be filled with the divinity which flows through all things. He must emanate; he must give all he takes, not desire to appropriate and stand still’ (JMN7, 450). The human is a container to be filled by the same divinity that ‘flows through all things’; it then becomes himself an emanating force, a cause, assuming he can submit to the ‘law of his mind’—an in important point to which I will return—and recognize that his will is but one part of the whole that is the Universal Mind.

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At this point, Osman raises the ‘doctrine of Pantheism,’ namely the identity of God and Nature, including man, that would be a consequence of his ‘omnipresence.’ Emerson, of course, had always thought that God must be in the world directly, and had resisted the theism that would imply a creator entirely separate from creation, or the deism that would leave the created world abandoned. In 1822, for example, God, ‘by his attributes of omnipresence and omnipotence, acts, at all moments, throughout the Universe’ (JMN2, 25). God, for the young Emerson, is always at work everywhere—something we saw in his rejection of an Argument from Design that leaves physical laws to operate without the divine presence that keeps them at work. A dozen years later, in 1834, Emerson imagines the consequences of the loss of God from the world: ‘To be without God in the world—who devised that pregnant expression [–] to wander all the day in the sunlight among the tribes of animals unrelated to anything better; to see the horse & cow & bird, & to foresee an equal and rapid approaching limit to himself and them’ (JMN4, 280; editors’ interpolation). The necessity of God’s place in the world is made clear through the consequences for Emerson of his omission. As with the great chain, God links all aspect of nature together, creating a unity of parts. An entailment of his metaphor is that God enables a more expansive sense of self, and both humankind and nature can break through their limits by sharing in the Divine One. Without God Emerson is isolated, left in a ‘terrible solitude’ (280); with God Emerson shares the ‘bold and perfect flight’ of the bird, is in sympathy with ‘the beggar’ and is cheered by ‘the glorious affections that made a sky over all he knew’ (280). God, then, is contained in every part of the Universe—a point Emerson takes to extremes, as we saw back in Chapter 2: ‘What is there of the divine in a load of bricks? What is there of the divine in a barber’s shop or a privy? Much. All’ (307). If the whole is in every part, then we cannot be too squeamish about those parts. A few days later, he takes his concerns about God’s presence along a line that will lead to the rejection of formal religion in the ‘Divinity School Address’: Is not the meeting-house dedicated because men are not? Is not the Church opened & filled with worshippers on Sunday because the commandments are not kept by worshippers on Monday? But when he who worships there, speaks the truth, follows the truth, is the truth’s; when he awakes by actual Communion to the faith that God’s in him, will he need any temple[,] any prayer? The very fact of worship declares that God is not at one with himself, that there are two gods. (313; editors’ interpolations)

The formal religion of prayer and church attendance is a response to God’s absence in humankind and a consequence their solitude. Emerson’s

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recognition that man contains the divine makes forms of religion, such as Holy Communion, which had caused his split with the church two years earlier, unnecessary. Just what Emerson means by ‘the fact of worship’ dividing God into ‘two gods’ (small ‘g’) is hard to interpret. But, following the metaphorical structures that underlie Emerson’s thought, in particular the container, it could be that the act of formal worship denies an internal god while favoring an external god; Emerson would have his faith in One God within. Thus, when we pray in a church, we look outward when we should look inward. As he continues: ‘If the doctrine that God is in man were faithfully taught and received, if I lived to speak the truth & enact it, if I pursued every generous sentiment as one enamoured, if the majesty of goodness were reverenced: would not such a principle serve me by way of police at least as well as a Connecticutt [sic] Sunday?’ (JMN4, 312). Emerson’s truth, then, comes from within because God is there. There is no need to seek the divine in a Sunday church when he is already inside the searcher, just as he is in the brick and the privy. We can, then, Emerson’s metaphors argue, just as well police ourselves from within. Not only formal religion takes God out of humankind. In Nature, criticizing a phenomenalist ‘idealism’ that renders the world an illusion of the mind and, as such, ‘leaves God out of me’ (CW1, 37), Emerson again takes a stand on the ‘truth’ provided by the ‘recesses of consciousness,’ that is, to the God within, delivering what was seen at the time as a manifesto of pantheism.3 We learn that the highest is present to the soul of man, that the dread universal essence, which is not wisdom, or love, or beauty, or power, but all in one, and each entirely, is that for which all things exist, and that by which they are; that spirit creates; that behind nature, throughout nature, spirit is present; 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. (38)

We can listen to ourselves because the divine is ‘present to’ our soul, our inner Subject self; that is, God’s vast whole, or ‘dread universal essence’ is directly available and needs no intercessor. Emerson then draws on a series of the part is the whole metaphors to suggest the range of God’s attributes, which are not merely ‘wisdom, or love, or beauty, or power, but all in one, and each entirely.’ God’s attributes, which are clearly human attributes, are unified even as each one is held to its fullest extent. God, then, through the metaphors that attempt to grasp him, is a kind of exponentially realized human. God also operates at both poles of the causes are forces metaphor,

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being that by which things exist (their cause—his will) and for which they exist (their purpose—intent and effect). Emerson’s Neo-Platonism is retained in the ‘spirit creates’ metaphor, with its embodied root in breath. Emerson then aims to locate that sprit: it is both ‘behind’ and ‘throughout’ nature. That God is ‘behind’ nature is an entailment of the causes are forces schema, which gives a temporal priority to the cause as intent, and the time is movement through a landscape metaphor, which puts the past behind us. That God is also ‘throughout nature’ derives from a container metaphor, with the divine spirit filling all of nature, but also a the whole is the part metaphor, with spirit in each individual thing—nature as a whole is a container for God, but so is each individual part. Emerson then, perhaps to avoid emerging dualisms dividing God into something piecemeal, challenges some of his own metaphorical entailments. Firstly, spirit becomes ‘one and not compound,’ which is an attempt to negate the dualistic pressure of the part is the whole schema by rejecting the idea of a God in parts; that is, God still needs to be one, even though he exists in each of his parts. Secondly, he now contends that spirit ‘does not act upon us from without,’ refuting his earlier claim that that spirit is ‘behind’ us. Behind is merely a spatial concept and spirit does not work ‘in space and time,’ which are ‘idealist’ projections. Rather, Emerson repeats, spirit works ‘through ourselves’ and ‘does not build up nature around us but puts it forth through us.’ Spirit, then, is not merely in us; its creative work is done ‘through’ us, as us, and nature is not external (a not-me), it is our own creative activity so far as we are one with spirit as we saw with the emanative metaphors above. There is little doubt that Emerson’s metaphors can work against each other in their efforts to define the Supreme Being and its relationship to the human and nature. Emerson is, as I will explore further later, running up against the limits of what is possible in conceptual metaphor. Emerson wants his metaphors to conceptualize an absolute Unity, but, as we saw in the last chapter, all his terms are ultimately binary: spirit/matter, unity/variety, whole/part, cause/caused, creator/created, outside/inside. Even his denials at the end of the foregoing passage inevitably imply what they deny, and Emerson cannot wholly contain the idea of spirit, the divine, the Supreme Being, in nature or in the human. Rather, the first terms of the foregoing binaries, always entail something prior to, or external to, both humankind and nature. Emerson, then, through metaphorical necessity, is not straightforwardly a pantheist, where God and nature are one and the same, with no excess, but rather a panentheist. Panenthiesm is a term Emerson was unlikely to be familiar with, and I have not found it in his printed works. It was coined by the German theologian Karl Krause in 1821 and did not become commonly used until much later in the nineteenth century. According to John Culp, “‘Panentheism’ is a constructed

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word composed of the English equivalents of the Greek terms ‘pan,’ meaning all, ‘en,’ meaning in, and ‘theism,’ derived from the Greek ‘theos’ meaning God. Panentheism considers God and the world to be inter-related with the world being in God and God being in the world” (Culp 2021, np; emphases added). We have, then, a series of container metaphors. The world is in God, and God is in the world. But, unlike in pantheism, where God and the world are identical, the panentheist idea that the world is in God implies that God is also outside of the world—the divine spirit is both immanent and transcendent. This is the situation arrived at by Emerson’s metaphors—and perhaps by all efforts to describe God metaphorically using container and causal schemas. Emerson’s creator/created binarism, for example, based as it is on causes are forces, entails an intent that is prior to the act of creation (will) or to the creation itself (effect), an intent necessarily outside of creation. We can see such an entailment at work in Emerson’s final metaphor for unified creation in the above passage from Nature, ‘the life of the tree puts forth new branches and leaves through the pores of the old’. Here the tree cannot figure a totality; its growth relies on externals—water, air, nutrients, etc. The tree is a whole made up of parts and relations, it very growth implies time, thus as a metaphor for Unity it falls back into parts and succession. Emerson’s material metaphors, then, render him a panentheist, even though as a ‘seer of Unity,’ he has more often been understood as a pantheist. We can see further panentheist metaphorical efforts to locate divinity within nature and, ultimately, in the human throughout Emerson’s works. One of the most intriguing—and controversial—of these is Emerson’s 1838 ‘Divinity School Address.’ Above we saw Emerson working toward that famous lecture with his rejection of formal religion, locating truth in humankind rather than in Scripture. In the ‘Address’ Emerson brings human and scriptural truth together in a singular example: Jesus Christ. The vital point of the address is not that Christ is uniquely divine, but rather that he uniquely understood that divinity was in all men. As Emerson writes: Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets. He saw with open eye the mystery of the soul. Drawn by its severe harmony, ravished by its beauty, he lived in it, and had his being there. Alone in all history, he estimated the greatness of man. One man was true to what is in you and me. He saw that God incarnates himself in man, and evermore goes forth anew to take possession of his world. He said, in this jubilee of sublime emotion, ‘I am divine. Through me, God acts; through me, speaks. Would you see God, see me; or, see thee, when thou also thinkest as I now think.’ (CW1, 81)

Emerson’s metaphors are again familiar. He begins with understanding is seeing, as Jesus’ ‘open eye’ sees the ‘mystery of the soul.’ The soul then

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becomes a container in which Jesus lives and has his being, clearly echoing the panentheist container metaphors of St Paul’s God: ‘For in him we live, and move, and have our being’ (Acts 17:28). In a now-typical move, Emerson then reverses the figure and ground of the container so that the ‘soul’ that contained Jesus now lives in him—and in all of us (‘in you and me’). Using the the spiritual is the material metaphor, ‘God incarnates himself in Man,’ acting through us, as we have seen above, to creatively ‘take possession of his world.’ Emerson’s Jesus understood what Emerson’s basic metaphors allow him to conceptualize—that God is in all of us, and through us he creates the world ‘anew.’ Crucially, Jesus’ divinity is representative of the divinity of all men—it derives from, using understanding is seeing, a point of perspective rather than anything metaphysical. Finally, the adverbial trope ‘through’ in Emerson’s last sentence suggests that the divine uses humankind to pass from one side of something to another. The entailment is that the human does not wholly contain God, and Emerson’s Jesus in ‘The Divinity School Address’ becomes a panentheist symbol of the divine as it acts, sees, speaks, thinks, and creates through humanity. It was Jesus’ recognition of these truths about man, rather than any insight into God, that inspired his own metaphors, which as parables became the Scriptures of Christianity. Ironically, then, in the ‘Address,’ it is Jesus’ metaphors that have become fixed: ‘The idioms of his language, and the figures of his rhetoric, have usurped the place of his truth; and churches are not built on his principles, but on his tropes’ (CW1, 81). Jesus’ metaphors were new ways of conceiving humankind, God, and nature, and for Emerson they only function when understood as living tropes that transform those concepts. As Scripture their authority is merely demonstrative—they show what all can use metaphor to do, that is to transform, and Emerson asks his audience to leave Jesus’ figures behind. As he put it a year later, in 1839, ‘we have nothing to do with Jesus in our progress, nothing to do with any past soul. The only way in which the life of Jesus or other holy person helps us is this[,] that as we advance without reference to persons on a new, unknown, sublime path, we at each new ascent, verify the experience of Jesus & such souls as have obeyed God before’ (JMN7, 255; editors’ interpolation). Emerson’s metaphors shift to life is a journey, where the past is behind us and the future ahead. Jesus’ example is not a destination, something to attain, because our future is ‘a new, unknown, sublime path.’ Such ascents as Jesus or other prophets of God in Humankind have made are behind us, they demonstrate heights reached before, but our own ascent must match and thus verify their experiences. Emerson, returning to the ‘Address,’ does not need the forms of religion, he needs but to heed himself—which is to heed God directly: ‘Obey thyself. That which shows God in me, fortifies me. That which shows God out of me, makes me a wart and a wen’ (CW1, 82–3). Once again, Emerson

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can obey his self, because it is God, whereas to obey the externalized God found in Scripture reduces Emerson to an excrescence, a ‘wart and a wen,’ a superficial growth upon something else. Rather, with God contained in the self, the self as Subject is necessarily everything (the part is the whole); what Jesus’s faith showed is ‘the infinitude of man’ (CW1, 89). Emerson’s container metaphors are at work throughout the ‘Divinity School Address,’ and God is in the human and the human is in God, figuring a future directed and fiercely creative panentheist entanglement. In subsequent writings, Emerson cycles through further panentheistic metaphors. In his 1841 ‘Compensation,’ he rehearses the part is the whole, and the ‘true doctrine of omnipresence is, that God re-appears with all his parts in every moss and cobweb’ (CW2, 60), the ‘re-appearance’ of God implying his priority. In ‘The Over-Soul,’ it is the maker/made version of causes are forces that implies God’s excess over his creation, and ‘the Maker of all things and all persons, stands behind us, and casts his dread omniscience through us and over things’ (CW2, 166). In his lecture ‘The Poet’ given later that year, the part is the whole connotes God’s superfluity: ‘Each of us is a part of eternity and immensity, a god walking in flesh, and the wildest fable that was every invented, is less strange than this reality’ (EL3, 365). In 1842 he recalls a conversation with Sampson Reed, who tried to counter him with ‘the other world.’ ‘Other world?’ replied Emerson, ‘there is no other world; here or nowhere is the whole fact; all the Universe over, there is but one thing—this old double, Creator-creature, mind-matter, right wrong’ (JMN8, 142). The One is—because of Emerson’s metaphors—necessarily two, and the Creator preexists creation even while it exists as that creation. As late as 1861, Emerson recalls the same point: ‘Other world! there is no other world. The God goes with you,—is here in Presence. What is here, what is there. & it is by his only strength that you lift your hand’ (JMN15, 93). This late metaphor takes Emerson back to 1822 and the divine omnipresence that supported creation, and the entailment of borrowed strength is the priority of the divine. In another entry in 1847, Emerson uses the container and the part is the whole: ‘Nature is saturated with Deity, the particle is saturated with the elixir of the Universe’ (JMN10, 36). Emerson’s natural history metaphor of ‘saturation’ implies, aptly, that God is both in and surrounding all that is. In a later 1866 essay, ‘Character,’ Emerson confirms ‘the presence of the Eternal in each perishing man,’ and he cannot conceive divine attributes of Reason, Truth, and Virtue ‘as lodged in your soul and lodged in my soul, but that you and I are and all souls are lodged in that.’ Here the divine virtues do not reside in us, but we in them; and in the same essay he writes that ‘the soul of God is poured into the world through the thoughts of men’ (CW10 450). Men are, then, conduits of the divine, and we are returned to the passages in Nature and the ‘The Method of Nature’ from thirty years earlier.

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Emerson’s metaphors in their attempt to account for the relationship between God, nature and humankind consistently deploy the same set of panentheist conceptual metaphors. THE OVER-SOUL Perhaps Emerson’s most famous metaphor for God is the Over-Soul, locating the divine above and within humanity. Toward the beginning of the 1841 ‘Over-Soul’ essay, Emerson presents the following panentheist complex: ‘The philosophy of six thousand years has not searched the chambers and magazines of the soul. In its experiments there has always remained, in the last analysis, a residuum it could not resolve. Man is a stream whose source is hidden. Our being is descending into us from we know not whence’ (CW2, 159). Emerson figures the soul as series of containers (‘chambers and magazines’); the history of philosophy has not fully searched these containers because something, an unresolvable ‘residuum,’ eludes it. Emerson then makes his inside-out move, as he did with the anatomical body, and that residuum is relocated outside the self as a hidden ‘source’ that ‘descend[s] into us,’ drawing on familiar Neo-Platonic causes are forces flow metaphors, and now the soul is something exterior and above us that the flows into us (container). This is the Over-Soul: the hidden cause of that which we are, but which philosophy cannot discover or account for; it is ‘incalculable’ and of a ‘higher origin’ (159) than our experience can access, hence Emerson’s need for metaphors to give it shape, structure, and conceptual richness. The metaphors Emerson uses for the Over-Soul draw from across his typical range and are not only those of height and depth, inside and out. It is worth quoting Emerson’s principal passage on the Over-Soul at length as it is an object lesson in the use of metaphor to attempt to provide language for that which passes the embodied experience metaphors necessarily draw upon: The Supreme Critic on the errors of the past and the present, and the only prophet of that which must be, is that great nature in which we rest, as the earth lies in the soft arms of the atmosphere; that Unity, that Over-Soul, within which every man’s particular being is contained and made one with all other; that common heart, of which all sincere conversation is the worship, to which all right action is submission; that overpowering reality which confutes our tricks and talents, and constrains every one to pass for what he is, and to speak from his character and not from his tongue, and which evermore tends and aims to pass into our thought and hand, and become wisdom, and virtue, and power, and beauty. We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. 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

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power in which we exist, and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but in the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one. (160)

Emerson’s attempt to conceptualize the divine as the Over-Soul is a compendium of conventional tropes composed in a manner unique to his ways of thinking. In line with the vertical hierarchy of the Over-Soul, he begins with the ‘Supreme,’ that is highest, ‘Critic,’ a judge of our implied lower status. Emerson identifies the Supreme with ‘that great nature in which we rest.’ ‘Nature’ is ambiguous here. It could mean the nature that, as we saw earlier, is a measure of our fall. Or it could mean the ‘nature’ or ‘essence’ of the divine, echoing the Pauline idea of a surrounding container God that we also saw above. In Emerson’s panentheist conceptualization, the two would necessarily overlap, but as he here uses a cosmic metaphor to define our relation to nature (‘as the earth lies in the soft arms of the atmosphere’), it seems more likely that his target domain is divine. Certainly, the container schema works throughout: we ‘rest in’ nature, our ‘particular being is contained’ in the ‘Over-Soul.’ Working in tandem with the container is the part is the whole and its dual. Through this composite, the Over-Soul is conceptualised as a ‘Unity’ that brings all ‘particular beings’ together as one ‘common heart.’ As his panentheist passage continues, it is unity, the presence of God in us as we are in God, that makes us what we really are, ‘confut[ing] our tricks and talents’ and enabling us to speak from our ‘character,’ that is, in CMT terms, our Subject rather than our Self. We share, then, through our metaphorically construed relationship to the Over-Soul the divine qualities (which are, inevitably, human qualities) of ‘wisdom, and virtue, and power, and beauty.’ The Over-Soul resolves our particularity into One, no longer living ‘in succession, in division, in parts, in particle,’ but in that whole ‘to which every part and particle is equally related.’ This ‘Eternal One,’ bringing together all space and all time, enables that blend of inside and outside which for Emerson is always the mark of an epiphanic understanding, drawing on understanding is seeing where ‘the seer and spectacle, the subject and the object, are one,’ as we have seen in the Jardin episode and in the figure of the transparent eyeball. There are other metaphors in the passage that I shall pass over for a moment, only to return to them in more depth shortly, such as submission, silence, and speech, cause and power. For now, though, I want to look at more of Emerson’s efforts to capture the Over-Soul in some of the essay’s other metaphors. We have seen Emerson use ‘light’ as a source domain before, combining understanding is seeing with a conventional figure for God. In ‘The Over-Soul,’ light works in even more complex ways to deliver Emerson’s panentheist concept of the divine. To take one example, Emerson

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writes: ‘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’ (CW1, 161). Here, light is homologous with the Over-Soul—it is inside, outside, and operates through us. The entailment of the light shining ‘through’ us is that we are transparent, an apt metaphor for our immaterial relationship with the divine, albeit ultimately still relying on metaphors from embodied vision. Another closely related quasi-immaterial source domain that Emerson uses to conceive the divine is fire (cf. Charteris-Black 2017, 66–125). As he puts it toward the end of the essay, ‘By the same fire, vital, consecrating, celestial, which burns until it shall dissolve all things into the waves and surges of an ocean of light, we see and know each other, and what spirit each is of’ (CW2, 169). Here, catachrestically, fire becomes water becomes light. The ascension is enabled by fire’s purifying effect, and the implied residuum of our materiality dissolves into the vastness of the ocean, a figure for the divine, which itself is not an ocean of water but of light. By this light we may not know (understanding is seeing) the Over-Soul itself, perhaps, but through our own transparency—and those of others—we will understand that part of God that is in each of us now that the corporeal is, metaphorically, burned away. What must burn, shifting metaphors, is the personality that makes us individuals—CMT’s Self. Only then can we properly communicate Subject to Subject. As Emerson puts it: Persons are supplementary to the primary teaching of the soul. In youth we are mad for persons. Childhood and youth see all the world in them. But the larger experience of man discovers the identical nature appearing through them all. Persons themselves acquaint us with the impersonal. In all conversation between two persons, tacit reference is made to a third party, to a common nature. That third part or common nature is not social; it is impersonal; is God. (164)

Despite Emerson’s frequent valorization of the insights of youth (in the same essay, he says, ‘to the well-born child, all the virtues are natural’; 163–4), the child here is a figure for immaturity; unable to see past the attraction of persons and into the impersonal. Emerson’s metaphors tell us that individuality is a failure to understand the underlying unity which we share—the identity that we saw revealed by the embodied glance in an earlier chapter. Which is not to say that our Subject selves are all the same, but rather that they are all parts of something larger than themselves, something their individuality does not touch, but only masks (the part is the whole). What we share, Emerson makes clear, has none of the qualities of the personal; it is God as the ‘impersonal’ (see Cameron in Arsić and Wolf 2010, 3–40). Thus, Emerson writes, even in ‘trivial conversation with my neighbours, that some what higher in each of us overlooks this by-play, and Jove nots to Jove from behind each

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of us’ (165). The Over-Soul, then, once again exists in each individual, and, catachrestically, what is higher is also behind, but it is only accessible if we can see (understand) beyond the superficies of the Self. Emerson also borrows source domains from the ‘facts’ of natural history to conceptualize the progress of the soul as it acts in and as humanity: ‘The soul’s advances are not made by gradation, such as can be represented by motion in a straight line; but rather by ascension of state, such as can be represented by metamorphosis,—from the egg to the worm, from the worm to the fly’ (163). The Over-Soul works through leaps, from one ‘total’ (163) state to another, without passing through interim grades. The rejection of gradation allows the Over-Soul to transcend the limitations of the great chain, and ‘With each divine impulse the mind rends the thin rinds of the visible and finite, and comes out into eternity, and inspires and expires its air’ (163). The chrysalis broken open in Emerson’s natural history/container composite does not figure a material change, but rather uses the spiritual is material to conceive the absolute movement across that the ‘midpoint’ boundary that sits at the heart of the great chain, jumping from finite to infinite. Emerson then rehearses the metaphor he will use in ‘Circles’: ‘In ascending to this primary and aboriginal sentiment, we have come from our remote station on the circumference instantaneously to the centre of the world, where, as in the closet of God, we can see causes, and anticipate the Universe, which is but slow effect’ (164). The metaphor is an inversion of the centre-periphery schema in ‘Circles,’ where the self began in the centre and moved out and out, ever approaching the divine. In ‘The Over-Soul,’ the self begins at the circumference, entailing our distance from a central God, makes the leap from edge to center ‘instantaneously,’ attaining to a ‘primary and aboriginal’ beginning. In so doing, the human becomes one with God, and can ‘see,’ that is understand, the causes of which the universe is, in Emerson’s Neo-Platonic phrase, the ‘slow effect.’ THE CAUSE Causation is a key theme in ‘The Over-Soul,’ just as we have seen it arise throughout Emerson’s work. Indeed, as Joseph Urbas has brilliantly and thoroughly demonstrated in recent years, causation is arguably ‘the core principle of Emerson’s metaphysics’ (Urbas 2021, 7). Urbas’s work on causation demands closer examination, particularly as he is adamant that causation, for Emerson, is “‘conceptual’ in opposition to the different metaphor- or language-driven accounts of Emerson’s philosophy” (Urbas 2016, xix). For Urbas, Emersonian causation is ‘conceptual’ because it is his bedrock idea,

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all other ideas, such as identity and even truth, are ‘reducible to the causal first principle’ (xix). The cause is not metaphorical, Urbas argues, because for Emerson the cause lies behind and enables his metaphors. Here Urbas echoes a point made by one of Emerson’s earliest critics, Francis Bowen, who wrote in 1837 that ‘where others see only analogy, [Emerson] discerns a final cause’ (in Sealts and Ferguson 1979, 82). For Urbas, the cause is that point of absolute unity which ensures everything relates to everything else and thus allows metaphor to work, and as such any resemblance that Emerson finds between things is not arbitrary, it is actually in the nature of things because of their common origin (Urbas 2021, 171, 175). As such, Urbas contends that “In Emerson, figural language does not go ‘all the way down.’ It borrows power from the source of all power—the causal order of the world” (Urbas 2016, xix; Urbas’s emphasis). Urbas, of course, recognises that to think and write about such things as causes Emerson needs metaphor, but he makes a distinction between the epistemic nature of metaphor and the ontological nature of those first causes that metaphor is attempting to grasp (xxviii). For Urbas, Emerson’s metaphors reflect a unity between humankind and God (as first cause) that is metaphysically real; a point of absolute identity. Emerson’s metaphors are illustrative rather than conceptual, and what they illustrate is the priority of cause and effect, and those facts of cause and effect become points of identity that shape his metaphors. To work through Urbas’s challenge, I shall return to a passage cited at the beginning of this section: ‘Man is a stream whose source is hidden.’ Above I read this as a panentheist metaphor, locating God as an origin outside of (hidden from), but who also flows through, the human. Following Urbas, the ‘hidden’ here is what is most ontologically real about humankind—their source, that which identifies them with the cause and thus also identifies them with everything else that is an effect of that cause. Thus, the stream’s hidden source is an ‘extralinguistic metaphysical ground for being’ or a ‘terminus a quo’ (xxiv). CMT, however, would contend that the ground of that metaphor is not causality, but rather embodied experience—that we know how rivers work from living with them, by them, on them. That embodied knowledge is the ‘fact,’ and it is where the metaphysical realism of CMT situates itself. Moreover, a stream cannot act as figure of the first cause on its own. It requires an astonishing act of metaphorical imagination, combining the stream source-domain with the tripartite causes are forces schema. Without these metaphors that which is ‘hidden’ is not ontologically real; it is conceptually empty. With these metaphors the hidden source of the stream figures God’s intent. The flow, or the movement of a hidden source into visibility, figures God’s will as a creative act. The visible section of the river figures the human as effect. Furthermore, the metaphor also draws on the spiritual is the material in a novel way, using the hidden source to figure the spiritual

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cause, just as the stream itself figures that cause’s effect. The stream as a single fact of experience unites matter and spirit. For Urbas’s Emerson, this combination of metaphors is a consequence of a fundamental unity, which is a metaphysical reality, but CMT tells us that the identity between streams and causes, between human experience and divine origins, lies nowhere else but in the metaphorical imagination that allows for cross-domain mapping between the spiritual and the material. Taken all together, it seems to me that Urbas is right about what Emerson believes, namely that the imagination is an exemplification of a prior unity attributable to a shared cause; but this is to demonstrate rather than to refute the cognitive work of metaphor. As I have shown, Emerson fully understood there was no escaping the cognitive work of metaphor, instead Emerson celebrates metaphor as the source of our perpetual renewal, even when ceding his own imaginative authority to his metaphorically realized God. We can see this cognitive work in another panentheist example from ‘The Over-Soul’: ‘I am constrained every moment to acknowledge a higher origin for events than the will I call mine. As with events, so it is with thoughts. When I watch that flowing river, which, out of regions I see not, pours for a season its streams into me, I see that I am a pensioner; not a cause, but a surprised spectator of this ethereal water’ (CW2, 159–60). Again, it is Emerson’s knowledge of rivers—that they have a higher source—and the cognitive topology that supplies, that conceptualizes the cause as higher. Emerson as a ‘spectator’ of that river further along its course is, necessarily, lower and later. The metaphor also draws on the ways in which river water enables life by flowing into things. The causes are forces schema, as we have come to understand it, necessitates the slot of the will, which Emerson denies of himself to map it onto the cause, rendering himself passive. It is powerfully ironic that even though the human will is the ‘fact’ that becomes the source domain for the causes are forces schema, Emerson’s use of the schema regularly denies the power of his own will. Rather, through metaphor, Emerson projects and magnifies human will onto a divine cause that he is ‘constrained’ to acknowledge. In his attempt to conceptualize the divine, it is vital that Emerson negates as much as he can of the human and material source domains. A tactic we can see at the end of the foregoing passage, when Emerson attempts to evade the materiality of his experiential metaphor, referring to the river’s ‘ethereal water.’ Indeed, Emerson’s attempt to evade the duality of spirit and matter follows a pattern that we began to see earlier in this chapter with transparency and fire, where Emerson turns the material into the spiritual while quasi-negating the material through apt metaphorical choices. His negative metaphorical move is demonstrated again in a bravura passage just a couple of paragraphs later in ‘The Over-Soul’: ‘All goes to show that the soul in

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man is not an organ, but animates and exercises all the organs; is not a function, like the power of memory, of calculation, of comparison, but uses these as hands and feet; is not a faculty, but a light; is not the intellect or the will, but the master of the intellect and will; is the background of our being, in which they lie—an immensity not possessed and that cannot be possessed’ (161). Throughout the passage, Emerson is explicitly using embodied experience to figure something both disembodied and more primary than the body. ‘Animates’ is, of course, a key metaphor. As we have seen, it comes from anima, the Latin word for ‘breath’; here it implicitly combines with causes are forces, as something that ‘animates’ us, but which is not itself embodied—explicitly not an ‘organ.’ Further aspects of what it is to be human—memory, calculation, comparison, hands, feet, intellect, will—are all also, through metaphor, turned into source domains for a target domain that negates their materiality and thus their humanity. Emerson does this by simply using the word not, creating a series of negative metaphors, so that the Over-Soul is itself negatively defined, even while operationally it is conceptualised by the things that are denied of it: organ, memory, calculation, comparison, hands and feet, and so on. Emerson’s Over-Soul can only exist as a rich causal concept because of the material source domains that give it shape through their negation. OBEDIENCE Because of Emerson’s metaphorical negation of the Self, terms like submission, constraint, yielding, possession, and obedience become key metaphors in ‘The Over-Soul.’ These terms are necessary implications of the hierarchical metaphors of the great chain and causes are forces, which place the Over-Soul above, before, and behind the human, in a position of privilege, power, and authority (states are locations). These terms also further indicate Emerson’s ultimate rejection of his individuality. As Emerson puts it early in the essay: ‘The weakness of the will begins when the individual would be something of himself. All reform aims, in some one particular, to let the soul have its way through us in other words, to engage us to obey’ (161). The Over-Soul, then, demands a rejection of the self and a reliance on what above Emerson called the ‘impersonal,’ a sublime presence, as suggested by the following oceanic metaphors, that overwhelms and commands obedience: We distinguish the announcements of the soul, its manifestations of its own nature, by the term Revelation. They 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.

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Every distinct apprehension of this central commandment agitates men with awe and delight. A thrill passes through all men at the reception of a new truth, or at the performance of a great action, which comes out of the heart of nature. In these communications, the power to see is not separated from the will to do, but the insight proceeds from obedience, and the obedience proceeds from a joyful perception. (166–7; Emerson’s emphasis)

The Over-Soul announces itself through the ‘manifestations of its own nature,’ that is, through nature as a Neo-Platonic emanation of God. These manifestations become the natural facts that Emerson deploys as material source domains for the spirit. Emerson calls this process ‘Revelation,’ etymologically un-veiling, stemming from the understanding is seeing schema. God’s revelatory manifestations in nature affect Emerson emotionally through their ‘sublime’ nature. Here, the sublimity of these manifestations is entirely an entailment of metaphor, namely, that each individual part is an aspect of the divine whole, implying a kind of vertiginous sublime at the sudden shift in scale from the micro to the macro. The change in scale reverses when Divine mind flows into ours, the infinite becoming finite as our rivulet ebbs before the vastness of his sea. In these metaphors of sublimity, embodied human experience provides the source domains for the divine (mind, tide), emphasized by Emerson’s acknowledgment that we are agitated ‘with awe and delight’ and thrilled at the ‘reception of a new truth.’ A new truth is a new metaphorical conception based on the manifestation of nature’s ‘heart,’ another embodied part-whole metaphor. In his last sentence, Emerson blends understanding is seeing with the passive will that as we saw earlier in the essay derives from causes are forces, and our seeing becomes an understanding of our status as mere effect, and thus our ‘will to do’ is not our own: it has a prior cause. To act in such a way is, finally, to obey. Obedience is, in turn, a ‘joyful’ surrender of the self. Obedience is, then, in part a consequence of Emerson’s metaphors of scale that unite humanity and God through a process of subsumption: a ceding the self to the self, but, crucially, not on the self’s own terms. Rather, in the language of CMT, it is the ceding of the Self to the Subject, which, as an entailment of Emerson’s metaphors, is ceding the Self to the idea of God. However, once again, the irony is that if the concept of causation is a metaphorical projection of the embodied human experience, then Emerson is surrendering only to himself, as through metaphor he has reconstructed himself as the God he is delighted to obey. We can trace the metaphorical work of obedience in Emerson’s works at least back to the late 1820s, where in a journal passage, Emerson reflects on the ‘dominion of principles over men,’ considering in acts of honesty or generosity, the ‘child’ is acting from the same ‘feeling’ that ‘guides an archangel to his awful duties.’ Thus, Emerson continues, ‘in the humblest transaction in

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which we can engage we can introduce these stupendous laws which made the sovereignty of the Creation the character of God.’ God, then, as we have seen in Emerson’s panentheism, is at work in all our moral acts. As we would expect, following divine laws or principles causes a division in the idea of the self: ‘It seems to be in obeying them[,] in squaring my conduct by them I part with the weakness of humanity’ (JMN3, 130; editors’ interpolation). In obeying divine laws, Emerson can separate his moral Subject from the ‘weakness’ of his ‘humanity’ or Self, then, using the part is the whole and causes are forces, he can ‘exchange the rags of [his] nature for a portion of the majesty of his maker’ (130). However, Emerson’s metaphor does not allow God to enter him as a container; rather he presents his condition through a series of support metaphors, and he finds his strength in God’s strength: ‘I am backed by the Universe of beings. I lean on omnipotence’ (130). Emerson and God remain distinct entities, with only the former needing the latter. A point that he very quickly reinforces: ‘Do not suffer your self to entertain this overweening conceit. See how feeble & insufficient you are and do not think that God needs your strength’ (130). The divine is self-sufficient, and it does not require humanity, and certainly not Emerson. A few years later, in 1831, Emerson returns to the idea of obedience from a different angle. Here nature is a source domain for the divine, and again, obedience is a form of strength deriving from alliance with larger forces, which we can see in two contrasting but related Latin phrases that he writes into his journal within a few days of each other. The first is ‘Imparet parendo’ (JMN3, 268), or ‘command by obeying.’ Emerson’s editors’ trace this to a line from Publius Syrus, which they translate as ‘A virtuous wife rules her husband by obeying him’ (n268). Emerson’s gloss is ‘Obedience is the eye which reads the law of the Universe’ (268). Emerson, then, through the suggested parallelism, figures himself as the wife and the universe as the husband. Emerson commands the universe by obeying its rules. A few days later, Emerson recalls one of Francis Bacon’s aphorisms from the Novum Organum: ‘Natura non imperator nisi parendo’—which Emerson’s editors translate as ‘Nature is not commanded except by obeying [her]’ (269, n269; editors’ interpolation). Bacon’s quote reverses Publius Syrus’s genders, and now we command by obeying a feminized nature. Emerson offers no gloss, but in the following passage returns to the first quotation in the context of morality, and we are to obey our ‘heart’ rather than our ‘head,’ implying a familiar dualism between a Subject aligned with God, or the Universe, figured by the heart, and a Self that is misaligned, figured by the ‘head.’ In obeying the first, we obey God, but we can also put the universe to work for us, command it, in doing what is inevitably God’s will. Emerson develops this theme in his lectures. As we saw in Chapter 4, the natural historian, by design, learns key lessons from nature through their

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everyday embodied encounters, long before embarking on empirical research. Such lessons in obedience enable us to put nature to work in our work, as when we ‘bring the force of gravity, that is, the weight of the planet, to bear upon the spade or the axe we wield’ (EL2, 45). In obeying nature’s forces, her laws, we can command it, as the ‘elastic form of steam’ that drives the mill’s engine’ (45). Emerson relates the ‘essential condition of learning’ silently to Bacon’s point, and ‘The naturalist commands nature by obeying her’; by which Emerson means, in line with Bacon’s empiricism, that we can learn nothing of nature except through the patient observation of what nature can tell us. He picks this idea of obedient empiricism up with direct reference to Bacon in his lecture on him given at the end of 1835: “He proposed a new method, Novum Organon, namely a slow Induction which should begin by accumulating observations and experiments and should deduce a rule from many observations, what we should like children learn of nature and not dictate to her. His favourite maxim was ‘Command nature by obeying her’” (EL1, 330–1). The advantage of Bacon’s ‘new method’ of obedience for Emerson is its principle, which directly challenges tradition and inherited knowledge, replacing it with a sensitivity to what nature shows us. Bacon’s method, then, is a way of disobeying the Self, bound to tradition and its habits, in favor of obedience to the Subject, reconnected through patient observation to the dictates of nature and its divine lawgiver. The metaphor of obedience matters because it enables Emerson to conceptualize an idea of himself that aligns directly with the cause. He recognized his ideal in the Quaker Mary Rotch, with whom he spoke on a visit to New Bedford in 1834. Rotch told Emerson that, because of the social rejection on her non-conformism, she had become depressed, but, encouraged by a fellow Quaker ‘to dwell patiently with this dreariness and absence, in the confidence that it was necessary to the sweeping away of all tradition [she] finally attained a better state of mind’ (JMN4, 263). Rotch’s metaphors for this better state of mind, or herself as Subject, are intriguing, she said she was ‘driven inward, driven home, to find an anchor, until she learned to have no choice, to acquiesce without understanding the reason when she found an obstruction to any particular course of acting’ (263; Emerson’s emphasis). Rotch figures her Subject as the inside of a container, into which her depression has ‘driven her,’ but, unexpectedly, her container is a home, rather than, say, a prison (states are locations); and in that home she finds an additional stability, which she conceives as an anchor. Now, firmly fixed in her own environment, Rotch surrenders herself, giving up the power to choose, acting from within, from her point of stability, and in obeying she never felt ‘any importance that she should know now or at any time what its reasons were’ (264). Emerson immediately recognizes that Rotch’s antinomian stance, in so firmly giving up on the self, is far from mere selfishness, claiming rather the ‘assurance

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of higher direction’ (264). That the highest is within, as figured by Rotch, is something Emerson was unable to say in 1828, and it becomes, as we have seen, a key trope of Emerson’s, enabled by the part is the whole and its dual, locating the divine in the self and the self in the divine. Emerson further evidences his sense that, as part of something larger, his acts are not under his control, in a journal passage from June 1838: ‘What am I? What has my will done to make me that I am? Nothing. I have been floated into this thought, this hour, this connexion of events, by might & mind sublime & my little ingenuities & wilfulnesses have not thwarted, have not aided to an appreciable degree’ (JMN7, 16–17). Emerson verges on absolute determinism here, the effacing of his self, his ‘will,’ is all but total, as he can neither aid nor thwart his own becoming. The buried metaphor is, unsurprisingly, causes are forces in its familiar flowing river form. Emerson floats upon this river of causation, with its divine source, and his ‘I’ and his ‘will’ are subject to that of a divine ‘might & mind’ that he has no choice but to obey. Unlike Rotch, Emerson is in no position to cede his choice, or even to obey by letting himself go, rather the cause simply overwhelms him. However, when he reuses the journal passage in the essay ‘Intellect’ a few years later, he glosses it with a partial return to Rotch’s sense of self-surrender, and ‘We do not determine what we will think. We only open our senses, clear away, as we can, all obstruction from the fact, and suffer the intellect to see’ (CW2, 195). Here Emerson’s ambition is to metaphorically get out of his own way, to remove Self from the view of Subject, so that he can see the ‘fact’ unobstructed (understanding is seeing), analogous to Rotch, who would act without choice, acquiescing to an inner divine command when she found any obstructions in her way. As we saw at the end of the last chapter, acting without self-agency, that is, acting in obedience to some other inner and higher calling, is the source of the creativity that emerges in true artists. In giving up on their Self the artist forms a kind of ideal human, whose creative power derives directly from God through a metaphorical parallelism where humankind’s artistry acts as a source domain for divine creation. The implication is that the artist is not acting as an individual when they create art, rather they act in obedience to a prior cause. As Emerson put it in his 1836 lecture, ‘Art’: The artist, who is to produce a work which is to be admired not by his friends or his townspeople, or his contemporaries, but by all men; and which is to be more beautiful to the eye in proportion to its culture, must disindividualize himself, and be a man of no party, and no manner, and no age, but one through whom the soul of all men circulates, as the common air through his lungs. He 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

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think his own thoughts, but he to be an organ through which the universal mind acts. (EL2, 48–9)

The artist is a vehicle of the divine and can create universal works only to the extent that he can repress the values and persons of his own time, as well as his individual Self. Emerson’s central metaphors of air and the breath is entirely apt. The air can figure universality, the breath an individuality totally reliant on that universality. But more importantly, the material trope of breath can, as we have frequently seen, figure the spirit or soul. The breath is the soul of an individual; the air is the soul of all men. The artist does not speak with his own breath, but with that ‘common air,’ and the entailment of the metaphor is that he then speaks for (and to) all, but, vitally, not as himself, but as the ‘universal speaks.’ Emerson borrows a French term, ‘l’abandon,’ which describes the ‘self-surrender of the orator’ when he is more than the ‘tongue of the occasion and the hour and says what cannot but be said’ (49). Abandonment is the condition of the universal artist, who is no more than a conduit for divine creation. Escalating his idea of creativity, in his 1838 lecture, ‘Being and Seeming,’ Emerson transforms the artist’s ‘abandonment’ into the proper state for all men: ‘It is the character of all great and good action, speech, and thinking, that it proceeds from Necessity; that the doer feels it must be. It is done by such relinquishment of caprice and self-will, such abandonment to the promptings of nature and instinct, that the individual holds himself in no wise accountable. He followed a thread of divine leading and the world is guarantee to his deed’ (EL2 295). ‘Necessity’ is not here the arid determinism of the Enlightenment deists, but the promptings of the first Cause—Emerson’s ‘thread of the divine,’ which leads the heart to the good through the implied labyrinth of worldly endeavours—we must feel our actions to be right. To this end, Emerson requires us to abandon the promptings of ‘nature and instinct,’ as we relinquish ‘caprice and self-will,’ such that we know ourselves to be unaccountable for our actions. Ironically, then, we can lay no claim upon our best endeavors—they are not of our making, but the working of the divine. In a later lecture in the same series, Emerson calls abandonment ‘Holiness’ when he identifies that which he must obey as the ‘moral sentiment’: ‘The self-surrender to this moral sentiment, the acceptance of its dominion throughout our constitution as the beatitude of man, is Holiness’ (EL2, 346). Emerson’s concept of holiness emerges from the Subject-Self schema, and his metaphors of dominion and constitution are remarkable, for the Self as constituted must allow the Subject to dominate it if it is to align with God. Emerson follows this idea of beatitude as occupation with more familiar tropes: ‘It is the breath of the soul of the world and therefore as it passes through us, make us feel our unity with all other beings’ (346). The universal ‘breath’ connects

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the holy person with the Artist of the earlier lecture, and in the same way the breath unites the holy person with a whole for which, as a part, he is merely a conduit, his passivity entailed by his letting the world pass ‘through’ him. Another metaphorical implication is that both the artist and the holy man are empty, an ironic inversion of Christ’s kenosis, perhaps, where emptiness allows for God’s presence. It is obedience that assures Emerson that his part belongs to the whole, and that his activity is an effect of the first cause. Furthermore, obedience, as Emerson writes in ‘Spiritual Laws,’ in aligning him with the most basic and simple principles of the universe, refines him to a divine point: ‘A little consideration of what takes place around us every day would show us, that a higher law than that of our will regulates events; that our painful labors are unnecessary, and fruitless; that only in our easy, simple, spontaneous action are we strong, and by contenting ourselves with obedience we become divine’ (CW2, 81). Here, in submitting to a higher law for which our actions and choices are but an event to regulate, we can recognise the influence of the Quaker Mary Rotch. Life’s difficulties, Emerson asserts, only exist when we labor against that higher law, pitting what is ‘unnecessary’ against the agency of Necessity. To obey is to simplify, to act spontaneously without conscious thought, to enact only the will of God and thus become God—hence it is, as we saw above in the Divinity School Address, one of Christ’s lessons to ‘Obey thyself.’ SILENCE In whatever ways Emerson attempts to conceptualize the divine, he can only put to work metaphors provided by his own embodied experience or those schemas and tropes he has inherited from prior embodied experiences embedded in language. Emerson is conscious that embodiment places a limit on how he can conceptualize the divine, and he tries, through metaphor, to transcend these embodied tropes. In ‘The Over-Soul,’ he makes it clear at the outset that experience is not everything: There is a difference between one and another hour of life, in their authority and subsequent effect. Our faith comes in moments; our vice is habitual. Yet there is a depth in those brief moments, which constrains us to ascribe more reality to them that to all other experiences. For this reason, the argument which is always coming to silence those who conceive extraordinary hopes of man, namely the appeal to experience, is forever invalid and vain. (CW2, 159)

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Emerson draws a distinction between ‘moments’ of ‘faith,’ which have a peculiar ‘authority,’ and the habits of ‘vice,’ which dominate fallen humanity. These moments, despite—or more likely because of—their transiency, have a ‘depth’ that makes them feel more real that ‘all other experiences.’ The brevity of the moments that authorize faith sets them above the material habits of the everyday, and any appeal to experience as a guide to truth is ‘invalid and vain.’ Empiricism, then, does not touch the kind of reality to which Emerson’s faith aspires. Though Emerson is not explicitly making a point about the limits of metaphor to conceptualize the divine, he is providing part of the context for those limits: experience opposes the moments of ‘real’ faith that his metaphors strive to articulate. Clearly such limits do not prevent his attempts to define the spirit through metaphor, as his momentary epiphanies attest, but they explain the diversity of those efforts and perhaps predict their failure. This failure exists because of the limits of experience to express some deeper truths, such as those of God as the First Cause, which must exist beyond what Emerson can experience. However, in a neat rhetorical twist, the very failure of Emerson’s metaphors to capture the divine becomes, itself, one of the master metaphors of Emerson’s oeuvre. Early in ‘The Over-Soul,’ as we saw above, Emerson refers to a ‘wise silence.’ Silence is a conceptual metaphor that works as follows. Firstly, there is the implied metaphor the limits of language are the limits of the human, which is something Emerson has been telling us throughout his early lectures and Nature, where what we are—our inner life or Subject—is a consequence of the metaphors we can use, based in turn on natural ‘facts.’ An important buried entailment of his container metaphor is that language’s limits imply something beyond those limits where language does not operate and which, therefore, the human cannot limit: the conceptual metaphor the more than human is beyond language. Thus, silence, through metaphor, conceptualizes a place beyond the limits of language, and thus beyond the limits of metaphors drawn from experience. In ‘The Over-Soul,’ silence works like so many of Emerson’s metaphors, such as spirit, breath, aether, light, fire, the hidden, and transparency, as an all but insubstantial source domain that can deny its material and experiential origins even as it draws on them to create its spiritual meanings. As such, it is important to recognize that silence also is an embodied experience, predicated on the experience of hearing (we still have to ‘hear’ silence), albeit typically understood as negative, as an absence. Emerson uses the silence conceptual metaphor again a few pages further into the essay, in a passage that pithily rehearses the essay opening: ‘Of this pure nature every man is at some time sensible. Language cannot paint it with his colors. It is too subtle. It is undefinable, unmeasurable, but we know that it pervades and contains us’ (CW2, 161; cf. EL2, 85). ‘Pure’ nature is nature with its materiality metaphorically abstracted.

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Emerson’s metaphors negatively construe such nature, or spirit, as ‘indefinable, unmeasurable’; the ‘colors’ of language are too much of the world to express its subtlety—and again that last word, ‘subtle’ further reduces the materiality of the metaphors Emerson draws upon. Emerson’s the more than human is beyond language metaphor is not unique to ‘The Over-Soul.’ He had used it earlier in Nature, where he wrote, ‘Of that ineffable essence we call spirit, he that thinks most will say least. We can foresee God in the course and, as it were, distant phenomena of matter; but when we try to define and describe himself, both language and thought desert us, and we are helpless as fools and savages’ (CW1, 37). ‘Ineffable’ stems from the Latin ineffābilis or ‘unutterable’ (OED), entailing that the ‘essence we call spirit’ is beyond the speakable, and thus the thinkable, drawing attention to the failure of what we call spirit, based as it is on a material source domain, to operate aptly. Further entailments of his metaphors allow Emerson to create a binary hierarchy of thought (‘thinks most’) and speech (‘says least’), which parallels the hierarchy between spirit (‘God’) and the material (‘phenomena of matter’). Of God we can say nothing, even of what we think. Of course, Emerson is here attempting to deny one of the conclusions of CMT, namely that we cannot have complex thought without embodied metaphor. Indeed, if Emerson was truly able to locate God in a silent realm beyond speech and metaphor, it would leave the spiritual without conceptual structure: if it is ‘beyond’ language, it is hard to say what meaning it has. We can develop the consequences of Emerson’s problem with respect to the limits of metaphor to conceptualize the divine if we turn to a point made by Joseph Urbas about Emerson’s early poem ‘Γνωθι Σεαυτον’ (‘Know Thyself’), composed around 1831. Urbas focuses on the following stanza: Then take this fact unto thy soul— God dwells in thee.— It is no metaphor nor parable It is unknown to thousands & to thee Yet there is God. (JMN3, 290)

Urbas’s point, as we saw above, is that ‘facts’—the facts of Being, or divine presence—come before their metaphorical usage. As he puts it, ‘Recognizing the ontological priority of the natural fact in poetic expression is important if we would avoid the mistake of imagining that in Emerson everything is ultimately a fiction or a linguistic or rhetorical construct’ (Urbas 2021, 168). Thus, the ‘fact’ here is that God ‘dwells in thee,’ or as Urbas puts it, ‘the plain fact of God’s presence within us’ (169). At issue is to what extent Emerson needs the container metaphor before he can describe the ‘fact’ of God’s

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location in us. CMT would argue that our embodied experience, namely that we understand containers, there could be no such ‘fact’ of God being in us. Rather, that secondary ‘fact’ is necessarily consequent upon conceptual metaphor. And even though Emerson’s own point, which aligns with Urbas, is that God’s presence in us ‘is no metaphor nor parable,’ he can only make that very point because of the ‘priority’ of metaphor. Indeed, the ‘no metaphor no parable’ is homologous with the ‘limits of language’ metaphor that we saw above, namely the limits of metaphor are the limits of the human, the entailment of which is the more than human is beyond metaphor. The ‘fact’ of God in its irreducible complexity, even though it is constructed negatively by Emerson’s metaphors, always exists in and as metaphor. Indeed, as Emerson’s poem progresses, he uses several other metaphors to conceptualize divine ‘facts.’ For example, in the opening stanza, Emerson writes about the ‘Strong meat of simple truths’ and later in the poem, God ‘is the mighty Heart/From which life’s varied pulses part’ (JMN3, 290). For Urbas, “God’s presence ‘there’ is the central fact, the core reality that gives power and meaning to the metaphors of substance (‘meat’) and centrality (‘Heart’), and not the metaphors that create the reality” (Urbas 2021, 169; Urbas’s emphasis). Again, though, from a CMT perspective, ‘meat’ and ‘heart’ are the earlier embodied conceptions—the metaphysically real facts— that allow Emerson to conceptualize God. Without prior embodiment, the facticity of Emerson’s God is empty; merely a negative space—and such a negative space or absence, as we saw with silence or the hidden, acts as a metaphor. Indeed, such a move seems inevitable and immediately after figuring God as the heart and the pulse, Emerson moves God further into the body’s hidden spaces: ‘Clouded & Shrouded there does sit/The Infinite/Embosomed in a man’ (JMN3, 290–1). The fact of God, his presence in us (‘Embosomed’), is, again, only available to Emerson through metaphors. God, negatively figured as ‘the infinite,’ hides in us, ‘Clouded & Shrouded’ by our bodies. It is the primary facts of embodied experience that gives Emerson access to his concept of God. As the poem continues, Emerson extends his idea of the divine through the familiar part/whole schema: ‘bear thyself, o man! Up to the scale & compass of thy guest/Soul of thy soul,’ where the human, as part, needs to enlarge themself to the scale of the One within, the house to match its guest. The embodied part/whole gestalt of humans and houses is the metaphysical reality enabling Emerson’s conception, and though Urbas may claim that ‘figurative language does not go all the way down,’ the very idea that there is something ‘beneath’ figurative language is, itself, a figure, based on an embodied human-centred conception of the world from which ideas like above and below derive, and that afford the conceptual structure of such things as Gods. It is tropes that

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enable and empower Emerson’s thinking, and what lies beneath them, their ontological priority or metaphysical reality, is the embodied experience out of which Emerson builds them. Emerson’s metaphors reveal this embodied ground even when he aims to refute it. Returning one last time to ‘The Over-Soul,’ we can see how Emerson requires embodied metaphors to conceptualize the divine and its relationship with humankind: Ineffable is the union of man and God in every act of the soul. The simplest person, who in his integrity worships God, becomes God; yet forever and ever the influx of this better and universal self is new and unsearchable. It inspires awe and astonishment. How dear, how soothing to man, arises the idea of God, peopling the lonely place, effacing the scars of our mistakes and disappointments! When we have broken our god of tradition, and ceased from our god of rhetoric, then may God fire the heart with his presence. It is the doubling of the heart itself, nay the infinite enlargement of the heart with a power of growth to a new infinity on every side. (CW2, 172–3)

Emerson begins with the negative metaphor ‘ineffable,’ the entailment of which, as suggested above, is that ‘the union of man and God in every act of the soul’ is beyond language, and thus beyond the human or material domains. Once more Emerson avoids using overtly material metaphors to help him to evade dualistic thinking as demanded by the idea of ‘union,’ and God’s acts become (through obedience) humankind’s acts. Ineffable, however, though a negative metaphor, is as we have seen, not immaterial—the absence of noise is not nothing, it is an embodied experience that must be ‘heard.’ As always, the metaphysical reality of the material has priority. Emerson then moves to ‘worship,’ which is isomorphic to obedience, with the simplest Self overcome by the ‘influx’ of God, and thus becoming the divine Subject, acting as God. Emerson’s metaphors thus incarnate God in the human as a ‘better and universal self.’ But this Subject, as ‘new and unsearchable,’ negates whatever Self was there before. The emotional effects of the divine influx are polarised, both the sublime of ‘awe and astonishment’ and the ‘soothing’ of a new Self that heals the all-too-embodied ‘scars of our mistakes and disappointments.’ Then, once more, we must leave the God of language (‘rhetoric’) and tradition (the dead metaphors of ‘fossil poetry’) and turn to a God of the ‘heart.’ Heart, of course, is a conventional embodied source domain for love, but here it is far beyond the human, not simply doubled, but infinitely enlarged, and its enlargement is not merely more of the same, just more love, but infinitely new love, ever changing while ever growing ‘on every side.’ Emerson’s God of love is structurally homologous with Emerson’s ever expanding circular human being, who attains to the scope of God through their own ever

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widening horizon. Ultimately, for Emerson, God becomes a model for the human, a source domain that enables him to transform humankind into the divine through the distributed power of creation. Emerson’s God can work so effectively as a source domain for the conceptual transformation of the human because as a creator, an artist, a lover, a healer, a wise silence, a soul or spirit, a beginning and an end, a part and a whole, God is always already conceptualized by embodied experience, the schemas that it enables, and the endless metaphors that arise out of those fundamental figurative structures. Thus, as a source domain for the human, Emerson’s God is a projection of embodied experience, the metaphysical reality of humanity in nature, perfected through a metaphorical manipulation that allows the negation of all humankind’s finite attributes. Then, through Emerson’s metaphors, that perfection returns to the human as their own best possibility. It is this metaphorical cycle that moves from the human through nature to God and back from God through nature to the human that conceptualizes the identity between humankind, nature, and God, toward which Emerson’s metaphors aspire. LIBERATING GODS Despite the metaphorical work of silence, it is the power of words for Emerson, and metaphors in particular, that unify humanity and God through nature. We have also seen how the artist, when obedient, enacts the work of God’s creation. Words and divine creation come together in Emerson’s most valued artist: the poet. In his 1844 essay, ‘The Poet,’ which canonized Emerson’s theory of symbolism for American letters, he metaphorically identifies the poet with the cause: ‘let us, with new hope, observe how nature, by worthier impulses, has ensured the poet’s fidelity to his office of announcement and affirming, namely, by the beauty of things, which becomes a new and higher beauty, when expressed’ (CW3, 8). Nature is the cause, its ‘impulses’ (causes are forces) leading to the effect of ever novel ‘beauty’—and, as Emerson also states, ‘beauty is the creator of the universe’ (5)—beauty being the effect of composition, the full relationship between parts and whole, here on a cosmic scale. Nature’s beauty, though, is not an end itself. It can become ‘a new and higher beauty’ when it becomes a metaphor in the poet’s hands, another form of creative composition. The poet thus undertakes to complete the work of God, to create a higher beauty from that which God has created and fulfill divine intent. As Emerson continues: ‘Nature offers all her creatures to him as a picture-language. Being used as a type, as second wonderful value appears in the object, far better than its old value, as the carpenter’s stretched cord, if you hold your ear close enough, is musical in the breeze’ (9). This passage is an expression of the spiritual is the material metaphor, as material nature

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becomes a ‘picture-language’ for something beyond its mere materiality, here figured by a carpenter’s impromptu aeolian harp. With the addition of the part is the whole schema, nature becomes a symbol: ‘Things admit of being used as symbols, because nature is a symbol, in the whole and in every part’ (8). The symbol, ‘The Poet’ confirms, emerges from two underlying conceptual metaphors, the spiritual is the material and the part is the whole. Put these two together and, as Emerson concludes, ‘We stand before the secret of the world, there, where Being passes into Appearance, and Unity into Variety’ (9); and the poet, through metaphor, transforms appearance back into being, and variety into unity, returning them to the beauty that is their cause and their end. Emerson’s artist poet is his answer to the Fall. As he continues: ‘it is dislocation and detachment from the life of God, that makes things ugly, the poet, who re-attaches things to nature and the whole—reattaching even artificial things, and violations of nature to nature, by a deeper insight,—disposes very easily of the most disagreeable facts’ (11). The poet is an alembic whose metaphors transform difference into identity, who traces back all things to their cause, not by going backwards, but by tracing things forward. The divine cause is, as we have seen before, found in its ultimate effect or telos: the intent that, in the causes are forces schema must come before the will, and locates that divine thought in each fact of nature. The essay continues: [T]he poet turns the world to glass, and shows us all things in their right series and procession. For, through that better perception, he stands one step nearer to things, and sees the flowing or metamorphosis; perceives that thought is multiform; that within every creature is a force impelling it to ascend into a higher form; and, following with his eyes the life, uses the forms which express that life, and so his speech flows with the flowing of nature. All the facts of the animal economy,—sex, nutriment, gestation, birth, growth—are symbols of the passage of the world into the soul of man, to suffer there a change, and reappear a new and higher fact. (12–13)

Emerson figures the poet’s transformative act using variations of the understanding is seeing metaphor: glass, shows, perception, sees. The poet ‘turn[ing] the world to glass’ is, also, a the spiritual is material metaphor, where Emerson again attempts to attenuate matter through transparency to connote spirit more effectively. The understanding that the poet gains from his ‘seeing’ is not just the movement of nature, its constant ‘flowing or metamorphosis,’ rather, because of the implicit work of causes are forces and the great chain, the poet sees the thought or divine intent that is ‘impelling’ each aspect of nature ‘to ascend into a higher form’; that is, the poet enacts the thought of God, understood as and through conceptual metaphor. As such,

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the power of the poet’s metaphors is that they instantaneously bring about that elevation, moving the natural fact from matter to spirit. Here the poet’s troping is homologous to the initial shaping power, ‘the form,’ of the first cause revealed to him in the ‘flowing of nature,’ and thus the poet’s flow of speech is one with that flow. When nature passes into the ‘soul of man’ it re-joins with the Soul that created it, and the poet does the work of God in raising nature to a ‘new and higher fact,’ and as Emerson puts it, ‘we participate in the invention of nature’ (15). Emerson’s artist poet becomes an avatar of the divine, a namer and creator; but, as we have seen before, only by surrendering himself to the influx of the first cause: ‘The condition of true naming, on the poet’s part, is his resigning himself to the divine aura which breathes through forms, and accompanying that’ (15). Aura, as Emerson would have known, also meant breath or breeze to the ancient Greeks. The poet must let that divine wind, a metaphor based on causes are forces, carry him. Thus, the poet is not a force in himself, but only when he gives himself up. Emerson’s term for letting go, as we saw above, is abandonment: ‘It is a secret which every intellectual man quickly learns, that, beyond the energy of his possessed and conscious intellect, he is capable of a new energy (as of an intellect doubled on itself), by abandonment to the nature of things’ (15). Abandoning yourself to the ‘nature of things’ is to abandon yourself to the mind of God as cause. Thus, the intellect of God doubles the poet’s intellect. The energy he thereby gains brings about his liberation, through the authority of symbolism, turning matter into spirit and parts into whole. As Emerson puts it: ‘The use of symbols has a certain power of emancipation and exhilaration for all men. We seem to be touched by a wand, which makes us dance and run about happily, like children. We are like persons who have come out of a cave or cellar into the open air. This is the effect on us of tropes, fables, oracles, and all poetic forms. Poets are thus liberating Gods’ (17). Symbolism is liberation—seeing the world in a new light, as implied by the Platonic metaphors of cave and cellar. But, moreover, it is an alignment of the poet’s creativity with that of God, where poets become ‘liberating gods.’ In ‘The Poet,’ Emerson recognizes this liberation not just in poetry, but also in thought, as we should expect if metaphors are to have their full range of affect. His examples are Aristotle defining ‘space to be an immovable vessel, in which things are contained’ and Plato defining ‘a line to be flowing point’ (18; Emerson’s emphases). Conceptual metaphor, the simple yet constantly astonishing power of seeing one thing in terms of another, of using a source domain to structure a target domain, to create a new understanding of the world, liberates thought, creating a ‘joyful sense of freedom’ (18). Even here, though, Emerson recalls his reader to humanity’s fallen state:

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There is good reason why we should prize this liberation. The fact of the poor shepherd, who, blinded and lost in the snowstorm, perishes in a drift within a few feet of his cottage door, is an emblem of the state of man. On the brink of the waters of life and truth, we are miserably dying. The inaccessibleness of every thought but that we are in, is wonderful. What if you come near to it,—you are as remote, when you are nearest, as when you are farthest. Every thought is also a prison; every heaven is also a prison. Therefore we love the poet, the inventor, who in any form, whether in an ode, or in an action, or in looks and behaviour, has yielded us a new thought. He unlocks our chains, and admits us to a new scene. (19)

Once Emerson passes through the parable of the shepherd who cannot see his own home (understanding is seeing; states are locations), he moves on to a series of spatial metaphors and container schemas that show how we relate to our own thoughts. Our own thoughts limit us, create a boundary around us, that make all other thoughts inaccessible. Emerson calls this ‘wonderful,’ though I think his is wondering at it, rather than celebrating it. We cannot bring this inaccessible thought nearer to us, nor can we approach it. Our own thoughts imprison us—even if they be thoughts of heaven itself. However, elaborating the container schema, the poet can open us to new thoughts, that is, to the influx of the divine, which becomes available as and through metaphor. Such openness is liberation, and Emerson’s ‘liberating Gods’ takes on a double meaning as not only are the poets divine, but they also liberate the divine within every human being. Consequently, Emerson’s poet is not unique; rather ‘the poet is representative. He stands among partial men for the complete man, and apprises us not of his wealth but of the commonwealth’ (4). The poet, like Christ in Emerson’s ‘Divinity School Address,’ through his recourse to the transformative power of metaphor, a power to change the way the world is thought to be, and further, a power to see through the world, to see through metaphor, reveals the endless creative capacity, which Emerson conceives as divinity, that exists in all humankind, returning the part to the whole and transforming matter into spirit, human into God. NOTES 1. For a CMT interpretation of Plato’s doctrine of forms as emerging from our everyday concepts of types, see PF, 364–72. 2. As my focus here is on Emerson’s metaphors, I do not examine the so-called pantheism controversy that broke out in response to the Divinity School Address in the late 1830s. For an outline of the controversy, see Greenham 2012, 60–69. 3. See, for example, Richard Monckton Milnes’s contemporary review in Sealts 1969, 102–05.

Conclusion ‘The Maker Not the Made’

Emerson’s remarkable fifty-year literary and intellectual life, published in dozens of volumes of journals, notebooks, lectures, essays, sermons, and poems, is held together by a surprisingly small number of conceptual metaphors: the spiritual is the material, the part is the whole, causes are forces, understanding is seeing, states are locations, container, path-goal, subject-self, link, and scale. Even so, as I have shown, this modest list of less than a dozen basic tropes can combine to form an edifice of Western thought, like the Great Chain of Being, or can blend to generate an aesthetic principle like Romantic symbolism. CMT teaches us how these conceptual metaphors combine in and as thought, enabling Emerson to construct radically different ways of understanding the world and our place in it through metaphorical elaboration and extension. Using conceptual metaphor, Emerson can take a world that he directly experiences through his bodily interactions and use it to give structure and meaning to a world or worlds he cannot directly access. By means of creative cross-mapping, Emerson generates a concept of identity between nature, humankind, and God, conceptualizing each in terms of the other, in an ongoing restless metaphorical progression. Metaphorical identity is no mere rhetorical performance, but neither is it an ontological ground. The ground of Emerson’s thought—recognizing that ‘ground’ here is a metaphor—is his embodied relationship with nature, doubled by his relentless determination to challenge the tropes that would trap him in tradition, the dead metaphors bequeathed to him by a culture unconscious of the power and authority of metaphor. That embodied experience can give rise to a metaphysical picture of humans, nature, and God is an astonishing act of metaphorical imagination, a cross-mapping from a material to a spiritual world, from a world of lived structure to a world of imagined structure. My ambition here has never been to undermine that imaginative work, but rather to recognize its value as something created rather than 211

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something discovered—for it is in creation, as I have demonstrated time and time again, that Emerson comes closest to the concept of God that his own metaphors have brought into being, and thus comes closest to his own ideal of the human. Emerson’s Metaphors has shown that the creative act of imagination is not—indeed, cannot be—the work of one person. Emerson’s theory and practice of metaphor is an accretive addition to, and unexpected synthesis of, several often-opposed traditions: the empiricism of Locke, Reid, and Stewart, the belles lettres of Blair, the Neo-Platonism of Cudworth, the correspondence of Swedenborg and Oegger, and the Romantic idealism of Coleridge and Carlyle. As I have shown, each of these ways of thinking has one thing in common: a recognition that what we think of as the mind, the inner life, or the spirit, is only expressible through terms drawn from the embodied experience of nature. Not all these precursors would agree with CMT’s further conclusion that this experience provides essential structure to that cross-mapped concept of the inner life. But those who thought they saw danger in figurative language, like Locke, Stewart, and Blair, bear unwitting testimony to the disturbing power of metaphor. Furthermore, CMT has clarified in an innovative way how Coleridge’s efforts to disambiguate terms like analogy, metaphor, and symbolism helped Emerson toward his own era-defining theory of symbolism, combining perhaps the two most important conceptual metaphors that we have unearthed: the spiritual is the material (a key innovation of this book) and the part is the whole (the gestalt basis of metaphor itself). Emerson’s theory of symbolism is a familiar origin point for the release of intellectual and literary endeavor that was the American Renaissance. CMT gives us a fresh origin story for American literature in the manipulation of a figurative language that enables new ways not just of writing, but, more fundamentally, of thinking.1 What CMT offers to Emerson criticism—and literary criticism more widely—is just as important. A full understanding of the significance of metaphor to Emerson has confirmed and deepened the significance of natural history to his thought, establishing it as novel source domain for self-discovery. But CMT has also shown that natural history is just one source domain among many. Indeed, CMT has enabled me to recover the presence of Emerson’s body, recognizing not just the embodied nature of his metaphors but making his material body and its relation to the world central to the understanding of his work. In addition, Emerson’s Metaphors has provided an original interpretation of Emerson’s theory of language, demonstrating that it is arises from a theory of metaphor that emerged in his earliest journals, to be expressed in his first lectures and in Nature, and then held on to through into the 1870s. Perhaps more troublingly, my argument has shown the ways in which Emerson’s metaphorical thinking determines and reinforces the absoluteness

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of his anthropocentrism, his consistent belief that humanity is the center of meaning and the end point of creation.2 For Emerson, nature exists ‘literally’ to serve, as does the buried coal. In Emerson’s view, the divine spirit created material nature to provide the metaphors that humankind, the pinnacle of creation, can turn back into spirit, returning nature to God through creative activity. This conceptual cycle of creation and re-creation, which, as I have shown, is synthesized from a combination of the most basic metaphors, uses nature to bind humanity and God together. But nature is valueless and meaningless for Emerson except in so far as its use can return him to the First Cause. Emerson’s poet becomes the ultimate exemplar of this re-creative cycle exploiting the resources of nature, surpassing the natural historian, and even taking on the burden of Christ, to make a new—and ever to be renewed—revelation through symbolism, that is, through metaphor, which can liberate the human from the limitations of tradition and custom. Equally significantly, we must now see Emerson as a notable, but hitherto unrecognized, precursor of Conceptual Metaphor Theory itself. Emerson’s theory of metaphor and his conclusions about the structuring authority of embodied experience—or ‘natural facts’—anticipate CMT by over a century. His grasp of the evidence of etymology and his recognition of the cognitive limitations of ‘apposite metaphors’ also predict the later deductions of CMT. But, perhaps more importantly, Emerson’s Metaphors has shown that Emerson’s practice offers something new to CMT. This is most clearly the case with what I have called ‘source domain override,’ the ability to reconceptualize a target domain beyond the limits typically understood to supervene. The analysis of ‘Circles’ demonstrates how Emerson was able to use God as a source domain for humankind, overriding the finitude apparently inherent in the target domain. We have also seen how Emerson’s extensive use of catachrestic, or non-isomorphic metaphors, challenges and unsettles traditional tropes, turning God into a gnat and putting an eye in an eggshell. Perhaps we should also recognize the fundamental catachresis that ought to underly the spiritual is the material. The spiritual should never be isomorphic with the material, and the unquestionable fact that it is demonstrates the spiritual’s reliance on material source domains. A further significant innovation that Emerson’s Metaphors offers for CMT is Emerson’s use of what I have called negative metaphors, where Emerson generates his concept of spirit through quasi-immaterial source domains, like air or aether or light, or where he attempts to negate matter altogether by using source domains derived from the ambiguous edges of embodied experience, such as silence, which claims to operate beyond the limits of language and even metaphor itself but only does so by becoming another metaphor. CMT takes us back to the bodily origin of even the most negative and attenuated of these source domains. Emerson’s denial of matter always, at the last, derives from his

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embodied experience of that matter. Lastly, this book, as the first full-length study of the oeuvre of a major writer using CMT, demonstrates its efficacy as an innovative critical approach with the potential to unlock powerful new interpretations of canonical literary figures. One of the questions Emerson’s Metaphors has sought to answer is whether it is genuinely possible for Emerson to generate new concepts by using new metaphors, which is certainly his own contention. If humans cannot define themselves anew through metaphor, then they are merely an imitation of the past rather than an exemplum of divine potential, and the divine only exists in and as creation, as renewal—as the effect of its own cause. Because Emerson’s fundamental metaphors are the same as those that make up Western thought, we might see Emerson as inevitably failing in his attempt to renew the concept of humankind. Indeed, entirely original concepts may not be possible, and even a catachresis that crashes an unfamiliar source domain into an all-too-familiar target domain must still resolve into the conditions of possibility provided by embodied experience. However, I would argue that from his reserve of ‘natural facts,’ Emerson’s metaphors do achieve the authority of renewed self-definition. Perhaps the true meaning of Emersonian self-reliance is to conceive a self that is coming into being at every moment on its own terms. Emerson’s metaphorical self-conception is an act of creation that aligns him with his concept of the divine. As Emerson’s innovative metaphors tell us, it is only by abandoning the personal Self that the true Subject self can become the final effect of God’s first cause, and thus properly be itself. The concept of God in play here, in the last analysis, may not be what Emerson would like it to be. CMT tells us that Emerson’s concept of God is a projection of the embodied self into the emptiness that exists outside his experience, a place with no ‘literal’ skeleton beyond the questions he asks of it. Consequently, Emerson can only find there the embodied experience that he puts there, even when he attempts to negate that experience through the perfecting elaborations of the divine artist, or through negative metaphors that aim to attenuate matter into the spirit that they conceive. Ultimately, my CMT analysis tells us that Emerson’s metaphors reverse the emanative doctrine of Neo-Platonism: spirit comes from matter only to return to matter. It is because of this all-too-human imaginative creative cycle that Emerson literally, not metaphorically, can say, ‘I am of the maker not the made’ (JMN7, 428–9). NOTES 1. While it would be tempting at this point to offer up a few examples of conceptual metaphor in the later American Renaissance (Melville’s whiteness of the whale,

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Thoreau’s Walden Pond, Dickinson’s volcanoes, or Whitman’s leaves of grass), it is wiser to recognize that, as I have demonstrated for Emerson, only a full grasp of a writer’s oeuvre can enable a convincing understanding of the metaphorical structures that will uniquely underly these all-too-familiar images. The most complete work in this direction is Margaret H. Freeman’s recently published Emily Dickinson’s Poetic Art, which uses cognitive poetics to interpret Dickinson’s poems. Kohler (2014) has also acknowledged the epistemic nature of the Dickinson’s metaphors, though only offers a partial account. More provocatively, Branka Arsić’s 2016 book on Thoreau, Bird Relics: Grief and Vitalism in Thoreau, disavows metaphor altogether, adopting an approach that takes everything Thoreau says literally, cancelling both metaphors and (necessarily as this book has shown) concepts. 2. For this reason, I am wary of locating Emerson as a precursor of environmental writing. See, for example, the ‘green’ Emerson in Branch and Mohs (2017, Introduction).

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Index

abandonment, 201, 209 Allen, Gay Wilson, 117–18 analogy, 1, 10, 29–30, 47, 51–55, 58–61, 64–66, 70–71, 79, 96, 117– 18, 147–48 Arsić, Branka, 106 Bacon, Francis, 145–46, 198–99 Bercovitch, Sacvan, 62–63 Bishop, Jonathan, 5, 105 Black, Max, 3–4 Blair, Hugh, 56–58, 73 body, the, 21, 28, 58, 72–73, 106–9, 149–56. See also embodiment; matter Bowen, Francis, 105, 194 Brewster, David, 119 Brown, Lee Rust, 127–28 Buell, Lawrence, 106 Butler, Joseph (Bishop), 54–55 Carlyle, Thomas: metaphor and, 71–74; symbolism and, 73–74 catachresis, 99, 101, 105–9, 116–17, 180, 213–14. See also source domain override causation, 31–34, 35, 144, 157–58, 164, 173, 193–96, 207–8.

See also conceptual metaphors: causes are forces Chai, Leon, 29–30 Channing, William Ellery, 60 Christ, Jesus, 187–88 Clark, Harry Hadyen, 117 cognitive topology (CMT), 24, 33–34, 76, 93, 98–99, 107–8, 171, 173 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor: metaphor and 64–65, 70–71; analogy and 70–71; allegory and 64–65; symbolism and 64–68 composition, 141–42, 207; as CMT term, 26, 32, 68, 70, 74, 90–91, 96, 108, 119 conceptual metaphors; causes are forces, 31–34, 35–36, 41, 54–55, 76–77, 103, 96, 137–38, 173, 179, 183, 185–86, 194–96, 207–9; change of state is change of location, 32–33; container, 32–34, 35, 41–42, 75–78, 108, 127, 130, 139–40, 150–51, 163–64, 173, 182, 186–89, 191, 210; great chain, 19–28, 40, 42, 51–52, 99–100, 129; 223

224

Index

ideas are food, 25–26; life is a journey, 3–5, 7–8, 50; link, 19–20, 22; more is up, 19; part is the whole, the, 10, 23–24, 33, 37, 55, 64–71, 74–79, 82–84, 101–3, 107–9, 115, 125–27, 138, 141–42, 146, 158–62, 177–80, 183, 185–86, 189, 207–8; path–goal, 26, 98–99; scale, 19–20, 24, 77–78; spiritual is the material, the, 10, 29, 35, 39–45, 48–49, 63, 68–74, 79, 82, 84, 95, 102–3, 108, 146, 167, 176, 194–95, 207–8, 212; states are locations, 7, 8, 32–33; subject–self, 149–51, 165, 197– 98, 201–2; time is a landscape we move through, 92–93; understanding is seeing, 34, 36, 41, 90–91, 93, 105–9, 119, 129, 140, 163–64; whole is the part, the, 67–68, 71, 109 Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), 1, 2–5, 7–9, 19–20, 23–24, 39–40, 43–45, 50–51, 57, 66–67, 81–82, 89, 93, 98–102, 203–5, 209, 211–14 Correspondence, Doctrine of, 28–39, 41–42 Cranch, Christopher, 105–6 creativity, 1–2, 9, 35–36, 38–40, 78–79, 87, 91, 97–104, 140–41, 156, 159, 179–80, 186, 200–201, 208–10, 213–14 Cudworth, Ralph, 36 Dant, Elizabeth, 125–26 design: argument from, 53–55, 66; God and, 136–38, 172;

Natural History as evidence for, 132–37 Diderot, Denis, 126–27 dualism, 35, 59, 149–51, 156–62, 167, 176, 177–80, 186, 206. See also correspondence elaboration (CMT), 21, 89–91 Ellison, Julie, 5 embodiment, 81–86, 81, 92–99, 105–9, 151–56, 190–92, 194–97, 202–6, 211–14. See also body Emerson, Ralph Waldo: Essays: ‘The American Scholar’, 173; ‘Circles’, 170–76; ‘Compensation,’ 160; ‘The Divinity School Address’, 173–74, 186–89; ‘Experience’, 161–62; ‘Fate’, 178–80; ‘Intellect’, 160, 200; ‘The Method of Nature’, 166–67, 168–70; Nature, 28, 92–98, 102–9; ‘Nature’ (1844), 168; ‘The Over–Soul’, 190–93, 195– 97, 202–4; ‘Plato’, 177–78; ‘The Poet’, 1–2, 160–61, 207–10; ‘Poetry and Imagination’, 147; ‘Self–Reliance’, 116–17, 167–68; ‘Spiritual Laws’, 202; Lectures: ‘Art’, 200–201; ‘Being and Seeming’, 201; ‘The Doctrine of the Hands’, 152–54; ‘English Literature: Introductory’, 81, 84, 87; ‘The Head’, 164–65; ‘The Heart’, 154–56; ‘The Individual’, 151–52;

Index

‘The Natural History of Intellect’, 147; ‘The Natural Method of Mental Philosophy’, 147; ‘The Naturalist’, 137–44; ‘On the Relation of Man to the Globe’, 133–37; ‘The Relation of Intellect to the Natural Sciences’, 146; ‘Shakespeare [First Lecture]’, 87–92; ‘The Uses of Natural History’, 27, 38–40, 130–33, 142 Emerson, Waldo (death of), 161–62 empiricism, 48–61, 85–87 etymology, 1–2, 5, 39–40, 84–87, 120 extension (CMT), 26, 89 Fall, the, 161–70, 176, 177–80, 208 Feidelson, Charles, 61–63 Fox, George, 34 Gestalt. See conceptual metaphors: the part is the whole God, 34–37, 41, 53–55, 66–70, 75–77, 100–104, 113–16, 123–24, 214; as artist, 137–42, 172–73, 179–80; as Over–Soul, 191–93; humankind and, 21–28, 33, 41–43, 82, 108–9, 121, 157– 62, 164, 166, 171–76, 179–91, 193, 197–202, 204–10, 211–14. See also causation; design; pantheism Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 139– 40, 167 Great Chain of Being, The, 18–28, 36, 51–52. See also conceptual metaphors: the great chain Hedge, Frederic Henry, 159–60 holiness, 201–2

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humankind, 42, 75–79, 96–97, 102–4, 108–9, 129–30, 149–80, 197–98, 199–200; as end of nature, 133–35, 212–13; great chain of being and, 20–21, 24–28; nature and, 77–79, 165–70; Neo–Platonism and, 36–39; Swedenborg and, 32–35. See also body; conceptual metaphors: subject–self; God, obedience invariance principle (CMT), 99–101, 171 Jardin de Plantes, 126–37, 155 Jeffrey, Francis, 30, 63–64 Johnson, Mark, 4, 99, 173, 174 Jonas, Hans, 107 Kohler, Michelle, 106 Lakoff, George, 3–4, 8–9, 20, 32–33, 82–84, 98–100 language, 1–4, 18, 41–43, 56–61, 71–73, 81, 86–87, 92–98, 102, 117– 20, 152–54, 193–94, 202–7, 212. See also metaphor LaRocca, David, 6–7 Leder, Drew, 107 Locke, John, 48–52, 85–87 Lovejoy, Arthur O., 18–23, 27–28, 42 Mackintosh, James, 124–25 matter: mind and, 1, 21, 29–30, 39–42, 47, 58, 59, 72–74, 149–52. See also body; conceptual metaphors: the spiritual is the material, subject–self; correspondence; me/not–me, 149–50, 165–70 Meehan, Sean Ross, 12n–13n metaphor:

226

Index

Emerson critics on, 5–7; Emerson’s theory of, 1–2, 35, 38–45, 74–75, 87–88, 93–104, 152–54, 156, 186, 193–95, 203–207, 210–14; empiricism and, 48–61; philosophy and, 47; puritanism and, 61. See also analogy, catachresis; conceptual metaphor theory; correspondence; creativity; symbolism: metonymy, 12n–13n. See also conceptual metaphors: the part is the whole Milton, John, 25 Mind. See matter Natural History, 27, 77, 113, 117–42, 146–48, 159–60, 193; cabinet of, 124–32, 141; Emerson critics on, 117–22; morality and, 144–46; poetry and, 142–44; theology and, 123–24, 134–35. See also design naturalist, the, 129, 132, 144–48 nature: art and, 137–42; as measure of humankind, 163–70; metaphor and, 6, 20, 39–45, 52–55, 64, 66–71, 94–98, 101– 4, 125–32, 113–48, 207–10; not–me, 149–50, 165–70; meaning of, 36–39, 100, 133–34, 142–48. See also Emerson: Essays, Nature, ‘The Method of Nature’; matter; Natural History Neo–Platonism, 36–39, 41–42 Neufeldt, Leonard, 118 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 3–4

Norris, John, 171 obedience, 188–89, 196–202 Oegger, Guillaume, 41–43, 87 one and the many, the. See conceptual metaphors: the part is the whole Packer, Barbara, 118–19 pantheism, 139–40, 181–90 panentheism, 186–90 parallax, 113–17 part/whole. See conceptual metaphors: the part is the whole Plato, 48–49, 50 poetry, 88–92, 143–44, 201–10 polarity, 119, 159–61. See also dualism Puritanism, 61–63, 155–56 Quinn, Noelle, 120–21 race, 22–23 Reed, Sampson, 40–41 Reid, Thomas, 58–59 rhetoric, 7, 56–58 Richards, I. A., 3–4 Ricoeur, Paul, 3–4 Robinson, David, 118 romanticism, 63–72 Rotch, Mary, 199–200 schema (CMT), 4–5, 24 science. see Natural History sexual attraction, 154–56 Shakespeare, William, 89–92, 116 silence, 202–7 slavery. See race spirit, 26, 85–86. See also conceptual metaphors: the spiritual is the material; subject–self; matter Stewart, Dugald, 59–60 Strauch, Carl F., 117

Index

Swedenborg, Emmanuel, 30–37, 40, 73, 170. See also correspondence symbolism, 63–79, 94–95, 102–3, 108, 146–47, 207–8. See also conceptual metaphors: the part is the whole; the spiritual is the material synecdoche, 67–68. See also conceptual metaphors: the part is the whole source domain (CMT), 2, 20, 82 source domain override (CMT), 100– 101, 121, 131, 156 target domain (CMT), 1–2, 20, 82 target domain override (CMT), 98–101, 175–76

227

transparent eye–ball, the, 104–9; Emerson critics on, 105–6 Turner, Mark, 4–5, 8–9 typology, 61–62 Urbas, Joseph, 193–95, 204–5 Unity, 36, 43, 65–71, 75–77, 116, 154– 62, 177–87, 191, 194–95, 208; sex and, 155–56. See also conceptual metaphors: the part is the whole; dualism Van Leer, David, 105–6 Walls, Laura Dassow, 6, 106, 120– 21, 160 Wilson, Eric, 119–20 Woloksy, Shira, 6

About the Author

Dr. David Greenham is a professor of English literature at the University of the West of England, UK. He has written widely on Emerson, including his 2012 monograph Emerson’s Transatlantic Romanticism (Palgrave) and essays in ESQ and The Journal of the History of Ideas. He has also worked on methodologies and pedagogies of close reading (Close Reading: The Basics: Routledge, 2018).

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