Emerson's Life in Science

Laura Dassow Walls is John H. Bennett, Jr. Chair of Southern Letters at the University of South Carolina. She is the author of Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Natural Science.

'The revelation of Thought takes man out of servitude into freedom.... The day of days, the great day of the feast of life, is that in which the inward eye opens to the Unity in things, to the omnipresence of law.' Emerson's Life in Science shows us how Emerson developed this faith.(The New England Quarterly) Emerson's Life in Science is the best: Of the spate of books on Emerson that have marked the bicentennial of his birth, this is one that will endure.... The author's command of her subject comes through unmistakably. No specialist in nineteenth-century American literature surpasses Walls in knowledge of the history of science.... Anyone wishing to know more about what science meant to Emerson should start here.- Lawrence Buell, Harvard University (American Scientist) In Emerson's Life in Science: The Culture of Truth, Laura Dassow Walls gives a full account of Ralph Waldo Emerson's engagement with the discourses and philosophy of natural and social science. The range of Emerson's interests was very broad, extending from astronomy, physics, geology, and botany to anthropology, sociology, and statistics. In characterizing these interests, Walls maintains a judicious balance between the judgmental and the appreciative. On the one hand, she freely grants Emerson's old-fashioned propensity for enlisting science as reinforcement of a vision of cosmos and history rendered coherent by moral law; on the other hand, she also does fuller justice than any precursor has to Emerson's more avant-garde insistence that what counts as truth must be obedient to science—and to Emerson's canniness at his best as a critical interpreter of scientific claims.... Through Emerson's Life in Science, Walls encourages scholars to look more closely at Emerson's place in modern science. In trying to better define the relationship between Emerson and science—and perhaps between science, culture, and literature—Walls questions the overall place of science in Emerson's life.(Biology Digest) Rather than a life narrative, she delivers a brilliantly associative intellectual biography, organized around central habits of nineteenth-century scientific thought: patterns of gnomic growth, polarity, evolution.- Lance Newman, California State University, San Marcos (American Literature) The evolution of ideas on the grand scale is a fascinating problem, and Walls' exploration of Emerson, the dominant American prophet of science and technology, opens up this world for a delightful and revealing read.(New Scientist)