Ralph Waldo Emerson: The World of Cosmic Unity
By Laara Lindo

1. Ralph Waldo Emerson and American Transcendentalism

Ralph Waldo Emerson early in his professional career broke with traditional thinking of his day to develop a new and uniquely American transcendentalist thinking. Quite aside from what came to Emerson through direct inspirational and intuitive understanding, which permeates his work, various threads of influence may be traced in the development of both Emerson’s thinking and that of the large group of Transcendentalists to whom he provided leadership. 

Transcendentalism in America was initially started as a revolt against traditional orthodox Christianity, in Emerson’s case and many others, particularly against the Unitarian Church.  It was a quest for authentic religious experience, rejecting forms, creeds and rituals in favor of direct and immediate encounter with God without a mediator.  Emphasis is on intuitive understanding, intuitive perception of spiritual truth.  “[We] should empty our mind of everything coming from tradition and the rest would be Transcendentalism,” counseled Emerson.*

“I am a transcendental idealist.  I do not believe that man’s senses tell him all he knows,” said Hedge, the American “radical,” as he, Emerson and this group of thinkers were called at the time.  Transcendentalism includes a sense of joy and wonder at creation and a belief that there is direction, purpose and Universal Intelligence immanent within creation.  Beyond all that makes up the din of the commercial world lies the essential miracle and mystery of creation.

Transcendentalism is not pantheism. Pantheism considers the universe as God. Transcendentalism presents God as CAUSE and the universe as EFFECT.  Each man and woman is a special individuation of the basic divine energy and each has a unique part to play in the drama of life.  Independence, self-reliance and full use of individual creative talent is of first value.  Self-knowledge, honesty, courage and integrity are all essential to true manifestation of one’s individuality.  Intuition is a major source of creativity.

The measure of civilization, the Transcendentalists believed, is found not in a nation’s political stature, but in the quality of its culture; its art, music, literature, philosophy, science, and religion. Transcendentalists thought that high culture nourished creativity.  Emerson believed that culture was the “chief end of man.” 

In 1836, the Transcendental Club held its first meeting at the home of Ralph Waldo Emerson, in Boston, Henry David Thoreau being one of the youthful members.   A number of women were members, including Margaret Fuller, who became editor of the Transcendentalist magazine, The Dial. Though the Club itself lasted only about three years, the intellectual activity it engendered lasted for decades and continues to affect American thought today.

Emerson states in Transcendentalism: “What is popularly called Transcendentalism among us, is Idealism: Idealism as it appears in 1842…. It is well known to most of my audience that the Idealism of the present day acquired the name Transcendental from the use of that term by Immanuel Kant, of Konigsberg, who replied to the skeptical philosophy of Locke, which insisted that there was nothing in the intellect which was not previously in the experience of the senses, by showing that there was a very important class of ideas or imperative forms, which did not come by experience, but through which experience was acquired; that these were intuitions of the mind itself; and he denominated them Transcendental forms.  The extraordinary profoundness and precision of that man’s thinking have given vogue to his nomenclature, in Europe and America, to that extent that whatever belongs to the class of intuitive thought is popularly called at the present day Transcendental.”

Most Americans, including Emerson, learned of Kant through others, and then took what they liked and revised it to fit their unique, New World thinking.  “The young Transcendentalists blended what they learned from Kant with ideas coming from other sources and with those springing from the actions and passions of their own time.” (Page 36.)  Emerson, when he visited England in 1833, met Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas Carlyle.  Coleridge had studied in Germany, reading Kant in the original, though he gave the philosophy a spiritual “twist,” not to be found in the original. (Page 45).   New Englanders stressed the intuitive rather than the rational elements in Kant’s philosophy, not overly concerning themselves with precise interpretations of Kant’s concepts of Pure and Practical Reason.

However, Emerson’s personal favorite philosophers were Plato and Plotinus, from whom he adopted ideas—or with whom he shared understanding— in his personal Transcendentalism, as for example, the concept that the flux of nature is an emanation from a spiritual source; the view of evil as absence of spirit and thus negative in nature; that all the universe is a microcosm containing all the laws of nature in miniature; and the idea that mystical union with God, the Supreme Unity, was the highest religious experience.  (Pages 58—59)  From Neoplatonism, Emerson went on to Asian thought, becoming keenly interested in Indian, Chinese and Persian literature, in particular The Bagavad-Gita and the Upanishads.

Emerson met Herbert Spencer during his 1842 visit to England.  Although he and Spencer were antithetical in their philosophical views, Herbert Spencer being an exponent of Social Darwinianism and a declared materialist, they shared in common a concern for the betterment of world conditions and a passionate belief in the sovereignty of the individual.  Oliver Wendell Holmes says, on page 315 in his biography, Emerson: “Emerson sympathized with all generous public movements, but he was not fond of working in associations, though he liked well enough to attend their meetings as a listener and looker-on.”  It is no doubt in this capacity that Emerson, during the last decade of his life, became with Herbert Spencer a co-founder of the original Twilight Club.

“If the Transcendentalists believed in the preponderance of good in the universe, they also had high hopes for the future of humanity.” (Page 143) [Emerson’s] Transcendentalism was essentially a philosophy of good hope, which looked to the future instead of to the past, and which saw possibilities rather than limitations.  (Page 156). The Transcendentalist, advised Emerson, must “Be an opener of doors to those who come after us.”  Or, to quote Walter Russell, must assist in “opening doors to glory.” 

2.  Ralph Waldo Emerson & Walter Russell

Ralph Waldo Emerson was a Founder of the original Twilight Club

with Herbert Spencer, Walt Whitman, John Burroughs, Mark Twain,

Edwin Markham & Andrew Carnegie

The extent to which Emerson influenced his contemporaries, both in America and in Europe, cannot fully be charted.  Suffice it to say that his transcendent idealism continues to inspire and influence each succeeding generation of Americans: with self-reliance, intellectual declaration of independence, personal courage and individual heroism, with a sense of unity of man, nature and all things, and a deep underlying spiritual connection with the Over-Soul.

That Emerson deeply inspired Walter Russell is very obvious in Russell’s writing and in his own transcendental idealism.  For example, in Russell’s Book of Early Whisperings, as in Emerson’s work, is found the compelling sense of a mystical unity with nature, and the discovery of Self through intuitive connection with nature and the whole of Life.  Russell strongly shares Emerson’s convictions about the spiritual significance of character, beauty, art and culture.  He was in complete and full agreement with Emerson as to the nature of reality and human existence.  However, after his Illumination of 1921, Russell developed the scientific and philosophical basis for his idealism far beyond anything Emerson himself expressed.  In his essay “Transcendentalism,” Emerson states: “Everything divine shares the self-existence of Deity.  All that you call the world is the shadow of that substance which you are, the perpetual creation of the powers of thought, of those that are dependent and of those that are independent of your will.  … You think me a child of my circumstances: I make my circumstance.  Let any thought or motive of mine be different from that they are, the difference will transform my condition and economy.  I—this thought which is called I—is the mould into which the world is poured like melted wax.  The mould is invisible, but the world betrays the shape of the mould.  You call it the power of circumstance, but it is the power of me.  Am I in harmony with myself?  My position will seem to you just and commanding.  ...[The Transcendentalist] believes in…the openness of the human mind to new influx of light and power; he believes in inspiration and ecstasy.”

Walter Russell’s inspired writing, from The Universal One to The Secret of Light and The Message of the Divine Iliad, expresses the fundamental truths of Emerson’s intuitive and studied idealistic understanding of the Nature of Being.  It was Russell’s life mission to put into practical expression and concrete application intuitively learned concepts and ideas.  From this came his genius as an artist.  From this came his Cosmogony, in which Russell expound the science underlying Emerson’s vision that “There is at the surface infinite variety of things; at the center there is simplicity of cause.  Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done, for this is the only and sovereign agent.  Of the universal mind each individual man is one more incarnation.” (from History)

In his 1903 children’s book, The Bending of the Twig, Walter Russell, the narrator, writes:  “I had given myself up to the enjoyment of a charming book and a comfortable hammock, swung in the shadiest of places.  The air was exceedingly hot and sultry outside the tiny forest, in the midst of which I reclined in comfort and peace, fanned by the gentlest of breezes, and lulled to a feeling of lazy luxury by the monotonous beat and rush of ocean waves upon the beach near by, and by the music of the birds overhead.  ‘Ah, this is Utopia,’ I soliloquized.  Now for a chapter of my Emerson ...”

3.   An excerpt from The Over-Soul

By Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ineffable is the union of man and God in every act of the soul. The simplest person, who in his integrity worships God, becomes God; yet forever and ever the influx of this better and universal self is new and unsearchable. It inspires awe and astonishment. How dear, how soothing to man, arises the idea of God, peopling the lonely place, effacing the scars of our mistakes and disappointments.  When we have broken our god of tradition, and ceased from our god of rhetoric, then may God fire the heart with his presence. It is the doubling of the heart itself, nay, the infinite enlargement of the heart with a power of growth to a new infinity on every side. It inspires in man an infallible trust. He has not the conviction, but the sight, that the best is the true, and may in that thought easily dismiss all particular uncertainties and fears, and adjourn to the sure revelation of time, the solution of his private riddles. He is sure that his welfare is dear to the heart of being. In the presence of law to his mind, he is overflowed with a reliance so universal, that it sweeps away all cherished hopes and the most stable projects of mortal condition in its flood. He believes that he cannot escape from his good. The things that are really for thee gravitate to thee. You are running to seek your friend. Let your feet run, but your mind need not. If you do not find him, will you not acquiesce that it is best you should not find him? For there is a power, which, as it is in you, is in him also, and could therefore very well bring you together, if it were for the best. You are preparing with eagerness to go and render a service to which your talent and your taste invite you, the love of men and the hope of fame. Has it not occurred to you, that you have no right to go, unless you are equally willing to be prevented from going?  0, believe, as thou livest, that every sound that is spoken over the round world, which thou oughtest to hear, will vibrate on thine ear! Every proverb, every book, every byword that belongs to thee for aid or comfort shall surely come home through open or winding passages. Every friend whom not thy fantastic will, but the great and tender heart in thee craveth, shall lock thee in his embrace. And this, because the heart in thee is the heart of all; not a valve, not a wall, not an intersection is there anywhere in nature, but one blood rolls uninterruptedly an endless circulation through all men, as the water of the globe is all one sea, and, truly seen, its tide is one.

Let man, then, learn the revelation of all nature and all thought to his heart; this, namely: that the Highest dwells with him; that the sources of nature are in his own mind, if the sentiment of duty is there. But if he would know what the great God speaketh, he must “ go into his closet and shut the door,” as Jesus said. God will not make himself manifest to cowards. He must greatly listen to himself, withdrawing himself from all the accents of other men’s devotion. Even their prayers are hurtful to him, until he have made his own. Our religion vulgarly stands on numbers of believers. Whenever the appeal is made —no matter how indirectly—to numbers, proclamation is then and there made, that religion is not, He that finds God a sweet, enveloping thought to him never counts his company. When I sit in that presence, who shall dare to come in? When I rest in perfect humility, when I burn with pure love, what can Calvin or Swedenborg say?

It makes no difference whether the appeal is to numbers or to one. The faith that stands on authority is not faith. The reliance on authority measures the decline of religion, the withdrawal of the soul. The position men have given to Jesus, now for many centuries of history, is a position of authority.  It characterizes themselves. It cannot alter the eternal facts. Great is the soul, and plain. It is no flatterer, it is no follower; it never appeals from itself. It believes in itself. Before the immense possibilities of man, all mere experience, all past biography, however spotless and sainted shrinks away. Before that heaven which our presentiments foreshow us, we cannot easily praise any form of life we have seen or read of. We not only affirm that we have few great men, but, absolutely speaking, that we have none; that we have no history, no record of any character or mode of living, that entirely contents us. The saints and demigods whom history worships we are constrained to accept with a grain of allowance. Though in our lonely hours we draw a new strength out of their memory, yet, pressed on our attention, as they are by the thoughtless and customary, they fatigue and invade. The soul gives itself, alone, original, and pure, to the Lonely, Original, and Pure, who, on that condition, gladly inhabits, leads, and speaks through it. Then is it glad, young, and nimble. It is not wise, but it sees through all things. It is not called religious, but it is innocent. It calls the light its own, and feels that the grass grows and the stone falls by a law inferior to, and dependent on, its nature. Behold, it saith, I am born into the great, the universal mind. I, the imperfect, adore my own Perfect. I am somehow receptive of the great soul, and thereby I do overlook the sun and the stars, and feel them to be the fair accidents and effects which change and pass. More and more the surges of everlasting nature enter into me, and I become public and human in my regards and actions. So come I to live in thoughts, and act with energies, which are immortal. Thus revering the soul, and learning, as the ancient said, that “its beauty is immense,” man will come to see that the world is the perennial miracle which the soul worketh, and be less astonished at particular wonders; he will learn that there is no profane history; that all history is sacred; that the universe is represented in an atom, in a moment of time.  He will weave no longer a spotted life of shreds and patches, but he will live with a divine unity. He will cease from what is base and frivolous in his life, and be content with all places and with any service he can render. He will calmly front the morrow in the negligency of that trust which carries God with it, and so hath already the whole future in the bottom of the heart.