Explore "The Breath of Life" by John Burroughs on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Emerson confessed in his "Journal" that he could not read the physicists; their works did not appeal to him. He was probably repelled by their formulas and their mathematics. But add a touch of chemistry, and he was interested. Chemistry leads up to life. He said he did not think he would feel threatened or insulted if a chemist should take his protoplasm, or mix his hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon, and make an animalcule incontestably swimming and jumping before his eyes. It would be only evidence of a new degree of power over matter which man had attained to. It would all finally redound to the glory of matter itself, which, it appears, "is impregnated with thought and heaven, and is really of God, and not of the Devil, as we had too hastily believed. " This conception of matter underlies the new materialism of such men as Huxley and Tyndall. But there is much in the new physics apart from its chemical aspects that ought to appeal to the Emersonian type of mind. Did not Emerson in his first poem, "The Sphinx," sing of
Journeying atoms, Primordial wholes?