The Divine Mind

Abstract

It is in Emerson’s 1836 monograph Nature that he first publishes the progress of his attempt to determine the intimate relationship between nature, man and God which I am condensing into the title of this chapter: ‘the divine mind’. We have already seen that man and nature are mutually defined through Emerson’s homocentrism and that he connects man and God through his interpretation of Coleridge’s reason. This trinity of man, nature and God can be further refined through an examination of Emerson’s speculations on difference, that is the ‘me’ and the ‘not-me’ alluded to at the beginning of Nature. In the 1820s and 1830s he would have come across this distinction in some form in several places: Coleridge’s compressed philosophical chapter twelve of the Biographia Literaria as well as his Aids to Reflection, Victor Cousin’s Introduction to the History of Philosophy (1828/1832), Frederick Henry Hedge’s essay ‘Coleridge’s Literary Character’, printed in an 1833 issue of The Christian Examiner, and in various of Carlyle’s essays and in Sartor Resartus. Each of these works expresses in some way the distinction between the ‘me’ and the ‘not-me’ that was introduced most fully into philosophy by Johann Gottlieb Fichte and developed by Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling in the late 1790s and early 1800s. As in the last chapter I shall establish how Emerson’s thoughts develop from what he would have read in Coleridge, Carlyle, Hedge and Cousin, rather than examining his relationship with the German originators.