
Literary Roots
Emerson and Science
Bryan Hileman
Science was crucial to Emersons development,
particularly during the pre-Nature period of 1830-1833. Emerson during
this period was searching for parallels between the dual Kantian realms
of understanding and reason. Through grasping the principles of science,
Emerson hoped to better realize and define the realm of Understanding and
its relationship to the realm of reason.
The physics of Newton was very much in
the fore during the Classical Period. The Romantic period marked
and influenced the rise if biology and geology. The great biologist
Georges Cuvier, brought to Emersons attention through the writings of
his acquaintance Louis Agassiz, and James Hutton, the great geologist,
popularized and expanded on by Charles Lyell, both had a definite influence
on the formation of Romantic philosophy, and that of Emerson in particular.
Cuviers contribution was the notion that organisms are a collection of
organs and bones, bits and pieces made viable and whole by thought.
Huttons uniformitarianism suggested that a single force, volcanism, was
responsible for the creation of the majority of variations of the earths
crust. These were thus sciences of one from many, of constancy in
change, and underlying theme of much of Emersons work, the human mind
being the singular object necessary to bind the various phenomena in nature
into a coherent whole.
The German naturalist Lorenz Oken also
developed a scientific philosophy similar to Emerson that had a slight
influence on Emersons philosophy of science in his later years.
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