A Few Quote Comparisons

As I've read over some of Emerson's essays and Thoreau's "Walden" I have come across a couple of very powerful sections which express some very Barfieldian ideas. Here are some comparative quotes to think about.

- Mind is the only reality, of which men and all other natures are better or worse reflectors. Nature, literature, history are only subjective phenomena. -Emerson "The Transcendentalists"

- The familiar world which we see and know around us; the blue sky with white clouds in it, the noise of a waterfall or a motor bus, the shapes of flowers and their scent, the gesture and utterance of animals and the faces of our friends, the world too...is a system of collective representations. -Barfield "Saving the Appearances"

- His thought - that is the Universe. His experience inclines him to behold the procession of facts that you call the world as flowing perpetually outward from an invisible, unsounded centre in himself, centre alike of him and of them, and necessitating him to regard all things as having a subjective or relative existence, relative to that aforesaid Unknown Centre of him. -Emerson "The Transcendentalists"

- It is only when we have risen from beholding the creature into beholding creation that our mortality catches for a moment the music of the turning spheres. -Barfield "Poetic Diction"

-Thus to him, this school boy under the bending dome of day, is suggested that he and it proceed from one root; one is leaf and one is flower; relation, sympathy, stirring in every vein. And what is that root? Is not that the soul of his soul? A thought too bold; a dream too wild. Yet when this spiritual light shall have revealed the law of more earthly natures--when he has learned to worship the soul, and to see that the natural philosophy that now is, is only the first gropings of its gigantic hand, he shall look forward to an ever expanding knowledge, as to a becoming creator. -Emerson "The American Scholar"

Although long estranged,
Man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed.
Dis-graced he may be, but he is not de-throned,
and keeps the rags of lordship once he owned:
Man, Sub-Creator, refracted light
through whom is splintered from a single white
to many hues, and endlessly combined
in living shapes that move from mind to mind.
Though all the crannies of the world be filled
with Elves and Goblins, though we dared to build
Gods and their houses out of dark and light,
and sowed the seed of dragons--'twas our right
(used or misused). That right has not decayed:
we make still by the law by which we're made.
-Tolkien "In a letter to C.S. Lewis."

-I am monarch of all I survey
My right there is none to dispute" -Thoreau "Walden"

- All you call the world is the shadow of that substance which you are, the perpetual creation of the powers of thought... -Emerson "The Transcendentalists

- For, as the organs of sense are required to convert the unrepresented "particles" into sensations for us, so something is required in us to convert sensations into "things." It is this something that I mean. And it will avoid confusion if I will purposely choose and unfamiliar and little-used word and call it, at risk of infelicity, figuration.
Let me repeat it. On the assumption that the world whose existence is independent of our sensation and perception consists solely of "particles," two operations are necessary...in order to produce the familiar world we know. First, the sense organs must be related to the particles in such a way as to give rise to sensations; and secondly, those mere sensations must be combined and constructed by the percipient mind into the recognizable and nameable objects we call "things." It is this work of construction which will here be called figuration. -Barfield "Saving the Appearances"

Thoreau is very subtle in the expounding of his Transcendental thoguhts, but it should be kept in mind in the following quote that Walden Pond itself is used by Thoreau as a symbol of the mind of man. He is fishing on a clear starlit night...

-It was very queer, especially on dark nights when your thoughts had wandered to vast and cosmogonal themes in other spheres, to feel this faint jerk, which came to interrupt your dreams and link you to nature again. It seemed as if I might next cast my line upward into the air, as well as downward into this element, which was scarcely more dense. Thus I caught two fish as it were on one hook.

Please feel free to comment on any of these quotes or to bring up any other quotes you may have read. Enjoy!

Brandon