EMERSON | THE MIND ON FIRE

A few excerpts from “Emerson: The Mind on Fire” by Robert D. Richardson Jr.

Emerson is the great American champion of self-reliance, of the adequacy of the individual, and of the importance of the active soul or spirit. 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.”

Ideas were not less real than the phenomenal world. If anything, ideas were more important than phenomena because they lay behind them, creating and explaining the visible world.

Emerson lived for ideas, but he did so with the reckless, headlong ardor of a lover. 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.

I have tried to reconstruct the natural history of his enthusiasms.
He had a powerful craving for direct, personal, unmediated experience. This is what he meant when he insisted that one should strive for an original relation to the universe. Not a novel relation, just one’s own.

Emerson had come to accept the idea that the highest, most trustworthy knowledge consists of intuitive graspings, moments of direct perception, free mental acts of cognition and recognition, a series of mental activities that, as he now realized, could be summed up in the word reason. Customarily he used visual imagery for these acts of knowing, calling them insights, perceptions or visions. What he was now doing in his reading was looking for traces of the momentary outbreaks of reason — the flashings forth of intuitive truth, as Melville called them — down through history. And already he was recognizing his own ideas reflected back to him in the ideas of Confucius, Pythagoras, and Heraclitus. Instead of proving him wrong, history kept validating Emerson’s own perceptions.