Emerson is a heady thinker, filling his paragraphs with aphorisms (memorably sayings) and connections that we often have to translate. He is known as being tough to remember, too! Readers revisiting him often note this feature of his style. As critical readers, we need to analyze, or break down, the material into our own terms. To this end, take on the following translation task of one of his paragraphs. Put it into your own words.
To the young mind, every thing is individual, stands by itself. By and by, it finds how to join two things, and see in them one nature; then three, then three thousand; and so, tyrannized over by its own unifying instinct, it goes on tying things together, diminishing anomalies, discovering roots running under ground, whereby contrary and remote things cohere, and flower out from one stem. It presently learns, that, since the dawn of history, there has been a constant accumulation and classifying of facts. But what is classification but the perceiving that these objects are not chaotic, and are not foreign, but have a law which is also a law of the human mind? The astronomer discovers that geometry, a pure abstraction of the human mind, is the measure of planetary motion. The chemist finds proportions and intelligible method throughout matter; and science is nothing but the finding of analogy, identity, in the most remote parts. The ambitious soul sits down before each refractory fact; one after another, reduces all strange constitutions, all new powers, to their class and their law, and goes on for ever to animate the last fibre of organization, the outskirts of nature, by insight.
CC licensed content, Original
- Emerson Translation Activity. Authored by: Joshua Dickinson. Provided by: Jefferson Community College. Located at: http://www.sunyjefferson.edu. Project: American Lit 1. License: CC BY-SA: Attribution-ShareAlike