Ellective Affinities: Emerson’s “Poetry and Imagination” as Anticipation of Peirce’s Buddhisto-Christian Metaphysics

Abstract

The paper is the first of two to be published in Cognitio which explore the hypothesis that the thought of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), brilliantly expounded in the generation before Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), anticipated, if not provided the direct provenance of, Peirce’s mature metaphysical ideas. The papers provide running commentaries on Emerson’s later-phase essays, “Poetry and Imagination” (1854, published in 1876) and “The Natural History of Intellect” (1870). “Poetry and Imagination” is shown to contain the seeds of Peirce’s objective idealism – namely, that “matter is effete mind,” or “mind hide-bound with habits,” – set within an evolutionary cosmology that grounds the human mind’s connaturality or affinity with the laws of nature, a doctrine subtending his abductory logic scientific discovery. Mutatis, all these components were already present in Emerson’s essay. Peirce spoke of his “buddhisto-christian religion,” which was another name for Emersonian cosmosemiosis. His originality consisted in applying Emerson’s emphasis on the poetic to the specific imagination, though the seeds of the latter are present in Emerson’s “The Natural History of Intellect” and other essays as well.