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When he resigned the pastorate of Boston's Second Church in 1832, Ralph Waldo Emerson forsook his ecclesiastical office but not his ministerial duties. To be sure, he did enjoy a two-year hiatus, during which he undertook a tour of Europe and experienced a period of recuperative peace in relative solitude. But all was to change with the publication of his first major work, Nature, in 1836. The wide dissemination of his essays and his growing fame as a lecturer were to give Emerson a more expansive pastoral charge than he had ever held within the Church. The lectern was now his pulpit, the lecture his sermon, and the public his congregation. If the blind did not see and the lame did not walk as a result of Emerson's secular care, many who labored and were heavy laden nevertheless found rest in his words.

One of the early, restless adherents to Emerson's vision was Henry James, Sr., a man who had been made materially wealthy by birth and spiritually tormented by training. In early 1842, James heard Emerson lecture and was so taken with the message that he wrote the inscrutable man from Concord what R. W. B. Lewis calls "a spiritual love letter, expressing a desire to 'talk familiarly with one who earnestly follows truth through whatever frowning ways she beckons him on.'" He implored Emerson to visit him at his home in lower Manhattan. Emerson obliged, and when he arrived, he was first ushered upstairs to the nursery "'to admire and give his blessing' (in the younger Henry's words) to the two-month-old William."

There is something sweetly incongruous about the picture of Emerson dispensing an "apostolic" blessing and the infant William James receiving it. Few things were more galling to Emerson than the claim that authority could be imparted from without rather than generated from within. Belief in the authority of office and the practice of rites of succession—these belonged to that "icehouse of externals" that Roman Catholicism was to Emerson. As James himself would assert six decades hence at the Emerson centenary, "there is something in each and all of us, even the lowliest, that ought not to consent to borrowing traditions and living at second hand." The disdain for tradition and derivative thinking was intense in Emerson, and "the hottest side of him is this non-conformist persuasion." The living soul, the vital individual "is the aboriginal reality," and as a result "the past man is irrelevant and obliterate for present issues."

Despite Emerson's and James' aversions to the "traditions" of "the past man," it seems clear that an apostolic mantle of sorts did pass between the man and the infant that night in 1842. We can speak with confidence of a tradition of enquiry that has wended its way through American intellectual life from the time of Emerson to today.

It is a tradition of disavowing tradition, and it worships whatever unknown gods adaptive individuals are able to fashion out of their experience alone. This tradition moves from the Concord sage through James and William Dewey and finds its center at present in the work of Richard Rorty, Stanley Fish, and other key figures in what is frequently referred to as the "revival of pragmatism."

The charter document of this movement was Emerson's greatest essay, "Experience," written only months after his introduction to the James family. In that aching work, composed in the wake of the death of his beloved five-year-old son Waldo, Emerson explained, "Grief too will make us idealists." Having discovered through his sorrow that "bodies never come in contact," Emerson could only conclude, "souls never touch their objects. An innavigable sea washes with silent waves between us and the things we aim at and converse with."

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