From the Classroom - Laura Dassow Walls

Lafayette faculty are experts in their fields. Interests among the 186 members range across the full spectrum of scientific, technological, and humanistic knowledge. In "From the Classroom," faculty members give insight into their particular subject, providing a window on the intellectual rigor that characterizes the environment of academic excellence at Lafayette. This issue features an excerpt from Emerson's Life in Science: The Culture of Truth by Laura Dassow Walls (copyright © 2003 by Cornell University).

The Sun of Science

Ralph Waldo Emerson lived during the golden age of science, and he hoped to translate its dawning radiance into a beacon for the masses. Modern America owes largely to Emerson its faith in science as the bulwark of truth against the tides of history and the storms of war. Yet Emerson has never been known as a "scientist." During his heyday the word barely existed, and to suggest today that his work was scientific strains belief. The degree of that strain marks the distance the "two cultures" of literature and science have drifted apart since 1836, when Emerson could so confidently assert: "The true philosopher and the true poet are one, and a beauty, which is truth, and a truth, which is beauty, is the aim of both." Science for Emerson was not a rarefied method or a specialized field of study but the highest form of mental action. For him, the true man of science and the American scholar were one and the same, and science was the dynamic heart of America.

"All science has one aim," Emerson proclaimed: "namely, to find a theory of nature." He knew he could point the way: nature was the embodiment of divine mind. Through knowledge of nature the human mind embodied itself until at last body and spirit were not the sundered halves of Creation but one great whole, God walking forth anew into the world. Through science the intellect seized the fragmented and unmeaning phenomena of the world and forged them into meaningful, productive wholes. The "method" of science would be the model for thought and action in the world. Yet beneath this sublime confidence lurked a deep uncertainty: were not the phenomena of the world fragmented and without meaning? Was not truth coming apart, into many truths or none? Against this fear, Emerson proposed his marriage of mind and nature by creative reason as the last best hope to make the world whole again, and his proposal carried all the urgency of his conviction that only a collective dedication to the process of making truth would carry America safely into the future.

For unlike scattered and quarreling humanity, nature was self-evidently single, bound into one by the Law that created it and guided it still. Therefore the study of nature seemed to Emerson the one sure path to truth. As a result, science permeated his thought and writing at every level, from its deepest structure to his most casual analogies. The very method of thought, of science, and of nature was one and the same: the search for the clairvoyant insight that galvanized the chaos of particulars into their rightful order. Poetry, too, participated: while science was the vehicle of truth already existing, poetry was the expression of truth in new forms. Moreover, the law of nature that governed both science and poetry was the same with the moral law that ruled every individual human being. As Emerson said, "the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind. The laws of moral nature answer to those of matter as face to face in a glass. . . . The axioms of physics translate the laws of ethics." By this metaphoric transference, the key working concepts of nineteenth-century science—polarity, magnetism, Newtonian optics, chemical affinity, electrical circulation, the balance of nature, progressive development, geologically deep time, anatomical correlation of parts, physical geography—became so much a part of Emerson's familiar, accepted and unquestioned working vocabulary that they dropped virtually out of view. . . .

The operative division in Emerson's day was not the one that emerged later between science and imagination, but the one, in [Madame] de Staël's words, between "the region of universal ideas," where every science touched upon all the rest, and the "mechanic arts" of labor and material production, ruled over not by the synthesis of intellectual culture but by Adam Smith's principle of the division of labor. It was against this world of trades and manufactures and commercial enterprises that science and literature formed one single intellectual culture, unified by the belief that the various human capacities could be integrated into a harmonious system centered on the creative power of the human soul. As de Staël added, "Literature and science reflect alternate light upon each other; and the connection which exists between all the objects in nature, must also be maintained among the ideas of man." In short, "The universe resembles a poem more than a machine."

However, no one urges a marriage between partners who are not separate, and de Staël, like Emerson, reminded her readers that her version of unity was urged against a background of growing division. "The scholar has nothing to say to the poet; the poet to the physicist; and even among savants, those who are differently occupied avoid each other, taking no interest in what is out of their own circle. This cannot be when a central philosophy establishes connections of a sublime nature between all our thoughts. The scientific penetrate nature by the aid of imagination. Poets find in the sciences the genuine beauties of the universe." Emerson wanted to be a "central philosopher" in de Staël's sense, establishing sublime connections between poetry and science and reminding each of their need for the other. His warnings to science were quite explicit: "Empirical science is apt to cloud the sight, and, by the very knowledge of functions and processes, to bereave the student of the manly contemplation of the whole. The savant becomes unpoetic." His warnings to poets were rather more implicit, contained in his knotty, fact-dappled prose, which continually roped the poet back to de Staël's "genuine beauties": "Nor has science sufficient humanity, so long as the naturalist overlooks that wonderful congruity which subsists between man and the world; of which he is lord, not because he is the most subtile inhabitant, but because he is its head and heart, and finds something of himself in every great and small thing, in every mountain stratum, in every new law of color, fact of astronomy, or atmospheric influence which observation or analysis lay open."

The finding of self in nature draws men to science; the poet, too, "invests dust and stones with humanity, and makes them the words of the Reason. The imagination may be defined to be, the use which the Reason makes of the material world." Imagination is reason's projection into the material world beyond mind, the necessary mediator between "me" and the "not me" without which reason would be, literally, unrealized. Is reason, the truth-seeking faculty of science, then prior to imagination and the truth-making faculty of poetry? No, for the division is false: science grasps the world through imagination, as much as poetry needs reason to see "all things in their right series and procession." Both poetry and science are formations of reason working through the imagination to create new integrated wholes, new forms for eternal truths. In Emerson's view, nature is not "built up" around us so much as "put forth" through us, "as the life of the tree puts forth new branches and leaves through the pores of the old." Both the fine and useful arts, and science, too, are all "a nature passed through the alembic of man," original creative force manifested in different forms, different faces of the same truth. Poetry may, in Plato's words, come "nearer to vital truth," but only if it lifts its own lamp next to that of the scientist and shows that "when the fact is seen under the light of an idea, the gaudy fable fades and shrivels. We behold the real higher law. To the wise, therefore, a fact is true poetry, and the most beautiful of fables. . . ."

Emerson's way of talking about science had breathtaking implications for America. As Leonard Neufeldt points out, "Among literary figures Emerson was virtually alone in his endorsement of the possibilities of technology and science for the individual and the culture." In his treatment of science, Emerson was "more comprehensive than Poe, more ambitious and philosophically rigorous than Thoreau or Hawthorne, and more practical than Whitman." Emerson's inclusive definition of science as, in Neufeldt's words, "a quality of mental action" amounted to something more than the Romantic "marriage" of science and poetry, for it abolished the distinction between them by making each a form of the other. Similarly, as Neufeldt continues, "Emerson rejects the popular distinction among artists of his time between the mechanical and the natural, for machines have as their ultimate origin 'the same Spirit that made the elements at first.' . . . A machine is the wit and will of man combined with the 'will of nature'." Thus technology, for Emerson, was not the conqueror or violator of nature, but nature itself in another form. Conversely, nature was no less than the art or technology of God, the means by which God brought change—progress—into the world. Man—that is, American industrial men—by taking hold of nature's material means and scientific laws for his own purposes, was melding man, God, and nature into an exciting new union unlike anything the world had ever seen.