Natural History of Intellect, and Other Papers

The Harvard course of 1870 and 1871 in which Emerson treated thinking as a natural process with laws of its own.

English, the original language, and your language

First published: 1893(published posthumously)
Original language: English

Overview

For almost twenty years Emerson kept announcing lecture courses on a natural history of the intellect: an account of the mind's powers drawn from watching them work, the way a naturalist studies living things, instead of from a philosophical system. He began on it in England in 1848 and returned to it at intervals. In 1870 Harvard gave him the chance to do it at length, inviting him into its new University Courses on philosophy, taught by people who were not members of the faculty. He gave eighteen lectures, three a week, and repeated the course in 1871. By the end he was sixty-eight, worn out by the journeys from Concord to Cambridge, and his memory had begun to fail. The lectures argue that thought is part of nature and obeys the laws of the natural world, so that the right method in philosophy is observation: watch instinct, perception, memory and imagination at work, and describe what they do. "Memory," from the same course, treats remembering as the power that holds a life together. James Elliot Cabot, his literary executor, published the lectures in 1893, eleven years after Emerson's death, as a twelfth volume of the Riverside Edition, and filled it out with a lecture on Boston from 1861, two essays on Michelangelo and Milton from the North American Review, and eight papers from The Dial, the quarterly Emerson and Margaret Fuller edited in the early 1840s.

Key concepts

What is a natural history of intellect?

It is an account of the mind drawn from watching its powers at work, the way a naturalist describes living things, instead of deduced from a philosophical system. Emerson treats perception, memory, instinct and imagination as facts that can be numbered and recorded like stamens and vertebrae. The method rests on his belief that the laws of thought are the same laws found in the rest of nature.

What does Emerson mean by instinct?

Instinct is his name for the unspoken power of thought beneath all conscious thinking, which he calls the potential wit. It is shared: each person feels that what is done well anywhere is done by the same wit as their own. Emerson pictures it as a shapeless giant in a cave, without hands or tongue, and calls inspiration this same power roused into speech.

Why does Emerson call memory a primary faculty?

Because no other power of the mind can work without it. Memory, he writes, is the cement or matrix in which the other faculties are embedded, the thread on which a person's beads are strung. It makes personal identity, and so it makes moral action possible: a being that could not remember yesterday could not keep a promise or answer for a deed.

What is subjectiveness in modern literature?

It is the turn of the writer's attention away from the world and back onto the mind that sees it. In an early paper from The Dial, Emerson notes that where older poets looked at the birds, the modern writer asks what the birds are to him, and what he is. He treats this inward turn as the mark of his age, with power to deepen and danger of self-absorption.

Why is belief in a brute fate the bitterest tragic element?

Because it makes suffering meaningless. Emerson describes it as the belief that the order of nature is a law not fitted to human beings, which serves them when their wishes happen to lie in its course and crushes them when they do not. Where reason and faith teach a better order, he adds, the tragic element shrinks, though the laws of the world will always cross some private wish.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

The mind watched like nature

Can the mind be studied the way a naturalist studies plants and animals, by watching rather than by building a system? Emerson's Harvard lectures try exactly that.

The powers and laws of thought, Emerson argues, are facts in a natural history, to be numbered and recorded like stamens and vertebrae. Behind the method lies a claim: the laws of mind and of nature are identical, as every hose in nature fits every hydrant. He watches instinct, the shapeless giant beneath thinking, and inspiration, which is instinct roused into speech. Memory is the thread on which a person's beads are strung. He declines the systematic form expected of philosophy and offers instead a fragmentary curve of observed points.

intellect
memory
knowledge
perception
thought
instinct
imagination
nature
intellectual development
learning
human nature
truth

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Early papers on art, poets and sorrow

What does a young critic look for in a great artist, an old poet or a hard season of life? The Dial papers and the essays on Michelangelo and Milton show Emerson's first answers.

The portraits measure great makers by singleness of purpose. Michelangelo pursued one idea, beauty inward and outward, through a single life. Milton is honoured as a voice of liberty and faulted for ribald scolding. The Dial papers turn the same eye on his own time: modern literature, he observes, has withdrawn its gaze from the object to the mind that sees it, and a farmer at his plough earns more respect than many writers. "The Tragic" opens on the house of Pain and names belief in a brute fate as sorrow's bitterest form.

literary criticism
literature
poetry
art
aesthetics
beauty
genius
suffering
resilience
agriculture
liberty
social criticism
tradition
religion

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Within this work

passages held: 238
distinct concepts: 500
by passages held, corpus-wide: #314

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “knowledge” and “memory”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 16 pairings. 94 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
knowledge	memory	6
literary criticism	poetry	6
nature	poetry	6
literary criticism	nature	4
knowledge	nature	2
literary criticism	literature	2
poetry	religion	2
education	literature	1
education	nature	1
education	poetry	1
education	religion	1
knowledge	literature	1
literature	nature	1
literature	poetry	1
literature	religion	1
nature	religion	1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1836 Nature
Emerson's first book, and the seed of nearly everything he wrote afterward. He signed his name to it only when it was reprinted in 1849, in a volume alongside his addresses and lectures.
EN
1841 Essays: First Series
Lectures reworked into essays; with the Second Series of 1844, the book on which Emerson's standing as a philosopher mainly rests.
EN
1844 Essays: Second Series
Darker than its predecessor of 1841, and the book of "Experience" and "The Poet". It closes what is usually counted Emerson's most fertile decade, which had begun with Nature.
EN
1849 Addresses and Lectures
Emerson's public speeches of 1837 to 1844, given to college societies and Boston lecture audiences. The two Harvard addresses here are the best-known occasions of his early career.
EN
1850 Representative Men
Emerson's one book built of portraits of other minds, published after his lecture tour of England in 1847–48 — the journey that later produced English Traits (1856).
EN
1860 The Conduct of Life
One of Emerson's most successful books in its day, and the last collection he published for ten years.
EN
1870 Society and Solitude
Ten years after The Conduct of Life, and continuing its turn toward practical life. It appeared in the same year that Harvard asked Emerson to lecture on philosophy.
EN
1875 Letters and Social Aims
Begun to forestall an unauthorized London edition, and the last essay collection published in Emerson's lifetime. Its pieces range from essays of the early 1840s to lectures of his last working years.
EN
1883 Lectures and Biographical Sketches
Added to Emerson's collected works in the years just after his death; a later volume, Natural History of Intellect, followed in 1893.
EN
1893 Natural History of Intellect, and Other Papers you are here EN

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