Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 The Mystic and the Self-made Saint
- 2 Politics and Ecstasy
- 3 The Text of Experience
- 4 “Here or Nowhere”: Essays: Second Series
- 5 The Eclipse of the Hero: Representative Men
- 6 The Old and New Worlds: English Trait
- 7 “Work Is Victory”: The Conduct of Life
- 8 “Plain Living and High Thinking”: Society and Solitude
- 9 Toward a Grammar of the Moral Life
- Notes
- Work Cited
- Index
- Titles in the series
6 - The Old and New Worlds: English Trait
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 The Mystic and the Self-made Saint
- 2 Politics and Ecstasy
- 3 The Text of Experience
- 4 “Here or Nowhere”: Essays: Second Series
- 5 The Eclipse of the Hero: Representative Men
- 6 The Old and New Worlds: English Trait
- 7 “Work Is Victory”: The Conduct of Life
- 8 “Plain Living and High Thinking”: Society and Solitude
- 9 Toward a Grammar of the Moral Life
- Notes
- Work Cited
- Index
- Titles in the series
Summary
THE MACHINE IN THE ENGLISH GARDEN
“In the lonely woods I remember London, and think I should like to be initiated in the exclusive circles”
(JMN, 8:127).The pragmatic reorientation of Emerson's philosophy accelerated in the late 1840s, spurred by his pivotal lecture tour in England in 1847–8. He undertook the journey with the lectures that made up Representative Men substantially completed, and thus with a conviction of the lapse of the hero fresh in his mind. The exhaustion of his hope for the human possibility suggested in Representative Men seemed to be mirrored in his own psyche. He looked to England as a source of personal renewal, and the journey was a catalyst of change arguably as significant as his first European tour of 1833–4, which marked his transition from preacher to lecturer and essayist.
We can trace to the journey the rebirth of his conviction that science might offer a usable interpretive paradigm for the ultimate translation of nature's metaphysical code. Shocked into the hope for science as an instrument of intellectual renewal early in his career by his 1834 visit to the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, he found himself stimulated again in England by a new exposure to the work of scientists such as Michael Faraday and Richard Owen. The clearest evidence of that impact is the largely unrealized project he called Natural History of Intellect, which will be examined later.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Emerson and the Conduct of LifePragmatism and Ethical Purpose in the Later Work, pp. 112 - 133Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1993