Emerson and Evolution

EMERSON AND EVOLUTION JOSEPH VVARREN BEACH P OETS, in forming their general views, are not always most influenced by the first-rate thinkers. VVhat they rely on for their own effects is the imagination, and they are likely to receive the greatest stimulus from writers who appeal to that faculty in them. A poet like Shelley read everything, and somewhere behind his poetry lies the discipline of Locke and Berkeley, of Plato and Spinoza. But when we undertake to trace in it the obvious influence of individuals, what we can put our fingers on are concepts derived from D'Holbach and Volney and Godwin. This for his early poems, before Platonism took strong hold upon him. And when his materialism gave way to a large extent before the charms of Platonism, it was quite as much Plotinus as the great original from whom he derived his notion of that mystical system. Thomas Taylor in his translations and interpretations of the Neo-Platonists was, in Shelley's day, the popular exponent of the doctrine of Eternal Ideas; just as D'Holbach and Godwin were the popular exponents of eighteenth-century empirical philosophy. It is perfectly natural that the poet, however serious he may be, should find matter better shaped to his need in popular writers than in the severe logic of the great thinkers. His need is for ideas easily assimilated to the. substance of his thought, as one concerned with human destiny and aspiration. And the matter of philosophy is often found, in popular writers, in simpler and more picturesque form, or built up into systematic structures that impress the lay mind more than the sober and . 474 EMERSON AND EVOLUTION modest offerings of the masters. Thus Wordsworth seems to have been more literally influenced by the psychological system of David Hartley-a second-rate manthan by the great English philosophers in whom his system was grounded. Coleridge was more dazzled by the ambitious structures of Plotinus and Schelling than by the severe rationalism of Aristotle and Kant. And in his speculations on the evolution of life, the writer on whom he drew most extensively was a disciple of Schelling , Henrik Steffens. Steffens was a scien tist so unimportant that you will not find his name in standard histories of the evolution theory, or of geology, which was his special branch. But thanks to Schelling and the "deductive" method, he was able to give Coleridge a more comprehensive view of scientific principles than any sober scientist could do. Emerson, again, while he had a speaking acquaintance with all the great names in philosophy', derived his chief inspiration.from second-rate thinkers, from Swedenborg and Boehme, from Plotinus and the " Zoroastrian Oracles," and-from Coleridge. Emerson was a man of great intellectual candour, and he frankly acknowledged that certain authors were read by him not so much to get to the bottom of a subject as for the "lustres" which they shed upon it for his imagination. The books which probably influenced him most profoundly in fhe years when he was preparing to write his little treatise on Nature were Coleridge's Friend and Aids to Reflection. The first of these, in particular, is largely responsible for Emerson's general philosophy of science, with its rather precarious grounding in "idealism." And while Emerson invariably wrote like an angel, we must conclude that his nature-philosophy was a loose and popular rendering of Coleridge, who was a loose and popular rendering of 475 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY Schelling, who-for all his magnificent show of dialecticwas no better than a Kan t run wild. One of the most curious chapters in the development of a poet's mind is the process by which Emerson arrived at his transcendental version of the theory of evolution. And here again, his opinions were not formed primarily by the great scientific evolutionists, Buffon, Lamarck, Saint-Hilaire, and Darwin, but by a succession of secondrate , popular, and more or less dubious authorities. And the first of these was Coleridge. Much has been made, by literary critics, of passages in certain English poets-Coleridge, Tennyson, Browning , Emerson-which, long before the publication of The Origin oj Species...