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With this most personal of essays, Emerson was signaling a major shift in modern conceptions of theological authority. For more than a century before him, the English-speaking world had leaned ever more heavily upon nature for ethical and spiritual support, as the traditional Christian sources of authority seemed increasingly shaky and unstable. Humean skepticism had called miracles, including the resurrection of Jesus, into question; the historical criticism of the Bible had cast doubt upon its historicity and authority; and Newton's mechanistic science threatened to leave no room in the world's workings for the energies and agencies of spirit.
As the traditional pillars of religious authority became badly eroded, the poets of England, along with the theologians and philosophers of Germany, had looked to the union of the potent human spirit and the fertile natural world for deliverance. At the dawn of the nineteenth century, William Wordsworth gave classic expression to the hopes invested in this marriage. About Eden, the Elysian Fields, and the lost Atlantis, he asked,
why should they be
A history only of departed things,
Or a mere fiction of what never was?
For the discerning intellect of Man,
When wedded to this goodly universe
In love and holy passion, shall find these
A simple produce of the common day.
Yet only decades later, for Emerson at mid-century, the differences between spirit and nature had come to seem all but irreconcilable. Darwin had not yet published his Origin of Species, so it was not a materialist vision that drove Emerson to despair of the possibilities of union. Instead, it was that Emerson's idealism had triumphed so thoroughly that its mate, the material otherness of nature, appeared to fade from his view and draw back from his touch: "Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion," for "life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them," they prove to be lenses of many colors that "paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus." "Experience" was Emerson's discovery that nature and spirit had been put asunder, as well as his announcement that divorce papers had been filed, on the grounds of desertion.
William James was a product of this divorce, and he would labor to the end of his life to articulate a theology of experience that could replace the discredited theology of nature. "The axis of reality runs solely through the egoistic places,—they are strung upon it like so many beads," he wrote, echoing Emerson. "The whole drift of my education goes to persuade me that the world of our present consciousness is only one of many worlds of consciousness that exist." Those other worlds must contain larger, more copious "experiences which have a meaning for our life also." They keep their distance from us yet become "continuous at certain points, and [then the] higher energies filter in."
"I believe rather that we stand in much the same relation to the whole of the universe as our canine and feline pets do to the whole of human life," James explains in Pragmatism. "They inhabit our drawing rooms and libraries. They take part in scenes of whose significance they have no inkling." Content with barking, purring, and sniffing, these creatures "are merely tangent to curves of history the beginnings and ends and forms of which pass wholly beyond their ken. So are we tangent to the wider life of things." But just as the cats and dogs have ideals that coincide with ours, and just as they "have daily living proof of the fact, so we may well believe, on the proofs that religious experience affords, that higher powers exist and are at work to save the world on ideal lines similar to our own."
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