Emerson: The Mind on Fire

Everything about her was bold, vigorous, extravagant. She advised the Emerson boys: “Always do what you are afraid to do.” Her

Adam Smith goes furthest with this link between morality and feeling in a book Emerson read in July 1824, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Smith argues that “as we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation.”

The second half of his history of modern thought, called—formidably—Dissertation: Progress of Metaphysical, Ethical, and Political Philosophy, appeared in 1821. What Emerson got from this book was a kind of roadmap of modern ideas, a framework within which to think or from which to depart.

He associated the human mind and its capacity for thought with activity and energy. He hated the passive notion of the mind as a blank slate. He concentrated instead on the individual’s sources of power, on access to the central fires that ignite the mind. His main image of the creative mind is of a volcano.

Emerson never wrote for groups or classes or institutions; his intended audience was always the single hearer or reader. Where this biography parts company with its

The Uilsa story reveals his strong, almost violent emotional side and his ability to tap the Dionysian spirit; the ethics essay reflects his lifelong interest not in epistemology but in ethics. Already his question is not “What can I know?” but “How should I live?”10

Mason teaches a religious tending of one’s own self. “Self-knowledge,” he says, “is that acquaintance with ourselves, which shows us what we are, and do, and ought to be, and do, in order to live comfortably and usefully here, and happily hereafter.” The means urged is self-examination, the purpose self-government and “self-fruition.” These books s

Emerson was now feverishly active. He spent the end of his junior year “reading and writing and talking and walking.”

Emerson’s lifelong search, what he called his heart’s inquiry, was “Whence is your power?” His reply was always the same: “From my nonconformity. I never listened to your people’s law, or to what they call their gospel, and wasted my time. I was content with the simple rural poverty of my own. Hence this sweetness.”2