There were a lot of points that Emerson made in both of the essays that we read that I want to talk about but the first is Emerson’s mentions of science across the poems. In The Divinity School Address, on page 226 he says, “By it, is the universe made safe and habitable, not by science or power.” Personally, I am a firm believer in science so this sentence immediately caught my eye, I marked it as something that I wanted to review later on, but then later when reading I marked another sentence mentioning science on page 257, “This day shall be better than my birth-day: then I became an animal: now I am invited into the science of the real.” This sentence stuck out to me because I immediately thought of the other mention of science and I was questioning if Emerson’s points. He says that the universe is not made safe and habitable by science, but then later says that he is being invited into the science of the real. I want to know more about what Emerson considers to be “the science of the real”, or as I am interpreting that statement, “real science”. I want to explore the connections between Emerson’s ideas of science and the universe.
Cargan Blog Post 2: Thoughts on Emerson’s “The Divinity School Address” and “Self Reliance”
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I also found Emerson’s discussion of science to be really interesting. Saying that he becomes a part of the “real science” when he becomes an animal feels very insightful to me and ahead of his time. In his theory of nature, he calls to men to interact with nature in order to reach the divine, which can be easily continued to say that all living beings that are a part of nature can have this connection with the divine, including animals. In my interpretation (which may not be what he intended), his theory of nature requires that humans are not separate from the animal world like traditional Christian theology states, but that we are all a part of the greater whole and purpose of nature.