Emerson, Embryology, and Culture

One of the most striking recent developments in the historiography of nineteenth-century science has been the increased recognition that European romanticism contributed to the rise of evolutionary theory. Although Thomas Henry Huxley and other Victorian biologists worked hard to distance themselves from more transcendentalist romantic thinkers and were convinced that romanticism had to be overturned in order for rigorous, empirical science to take hold, scholars of the last three decades have argued that a romantic understanding of the natural world helped lay the groundwork for Charles Darwin’s reconceptualization of speciation.¹ In fact, before “evolution” took on its specifically Darwinian and transmutationist sense, the biological application of the term, which had originated in embryo studies, meant simply organic development or unfolding. As such, this earlier concept of evolution was central to the romantic notion of a universe that was always in a state of gestation.

In hindsight, it is easy to see how a romantic vision of a dynamic natural world—a vision that A.O. Lovejoy famously contrasted with the neoclassical understanding of the universe as static and mechanical—might have shaped new thinking about organic development and biodiversity.² Especially crucial to this view of organic development was the romantic tradition in embryology, which held up the gestating embryo as proof of nature’s essential tendency to flux. What made the embryo particularly compelling was that it simultaneously kept intact the notion of nature’s underlying metaphysical order. For transcendentalist embryologists, such as Lorenz Oken, Étienne Geoffroy St.–Hilaire, and Louis Agassiz, the dramatic transformations of animal embryos “recapitulated” a preordained progression of species from lower to higher orders: the expression of gills and a tail in early stages of human embryonic development, for example, were taken as indication that humans were the culmination of a purposeful ascent in the animal kingdom. Although romantic embryology posited this chain of ascent in metaphysical terms, it was only a matter of time before it suggested to Darwin, Huxley, Ernst Haeckel, and others a genealogical relation between an organism and the less complex forms from which it had descended.

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s encounter with the embryology of Oken, Geoffroy, and Agassiz reveals in vivid detail how biological theories steeped in romantic notions of dynamism, on the one hand, and teleology, on the other, facilitated the acceptance of transmutation theories among Victorian American readers. Emerson scholars have been intrigued with the extent to which a thinker so moved by the notion of a spiritually imbued natural world came to embrace Darwin’s materialist theory of species transmutation. Some readers might conclude that Emerson read Darwin selectively or simply endorsed new ideas without bothering to square them with the old.³ Other readers, taking up Branka Arsić’s recent argument for Emerson’s coherence as a thinker, might understand this seeming eclecticism as, in fact, a literary practice of systematically transplanting terms from one discourse to another.⁴ Still others might see his approval of Darwin as a consequence of his growing sense, beginning in the mid-1840s, that the natural world was alien to humans. In this essay, however, I would like to shift attention away from Emerson’s idiosyncrasies and consider the possibility that the eagerness with which he absorbed transmutationist theories without fully discarding romantic metaphysics was both typical for his time and also a direct result of the way transmutation was understood as an embryological phenomenon.

Essential to Emerson’s reconciliation of the concepts of material transmutation and metaphysical order, as Philip Nicoloff, Laura Dassow Walls, and William Rossi have shown, was his reading of Robert Chambers’s controversial and anonymous Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844). Chambers envisioned transmutation as originating in the embryo and proceeding teleologically along preordained lines of ascent that culminated with humans. He posited that all life-forms start out as the same embryonic structure, the mature form determined only by the point at which development is “arrested.” Higher orders of animals result from longer gestations, he reasoned, while those of the lower orders are less complex precisely because their development has somehow been held...