Toward the end of the essay, Emerson addresses the sense of jealousy and inferiority many people feel when they encounter a very smart person. He uses a simile to reframe such an encounter as an opportunity, and he then refines the simile into a metaphor:
Instead of feeling a poverty when we encounter a great man, let us treat the new comer like a traveling geologist, who passes through our estate, and shows us good slate, or limestone, or anthracite, in our brush pasture. The partial action of each strong mind in one direction, is a telescope for the objects on which it is pointed.
Emerson suggests that instead of reflecting on our "poverty" of intellect when we come across ideas we could never have come up with ourselves, we should instead invite "the new comer" into our minds. He imagines this person as "a traveling geologist" who can point out the materials we already have with which to build our own ideas. We might have "good slate, or limestone, or anthracite" that we did not realize was there for us to use. Emerson is confident that we all have a high capacity for invention and imagination within ourselves, even though we are limited by our own spheres of existence. Obsessing over our shortcomings in the face of new ideas cuts us off from discovering that capacity. Emerson seems to note that we rarely understand everything that a "great mind" has written, but he argues that even "partial" ideas can act like a telescope allowing us to make our own new observations if we let them.
After the epigraph, Emerson opens the essay with a question about "where we find ourselves." He uses an extended metaphor to answer this question, and as the metaphor goes on, it becomes clear that the essay itself is an allegory for human experience:
WHERE do we find ourselves? In a series of which we do not know the extremes, and believe that it has none. We wake and find ourselves on a stair; there are stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended; there are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward and out of sight. But the Genius which, according to the old belief, stands at the door by which we enter, and gives us the lethe to drink, that we may tell no tales, mixed the cup too strongly, and we cannot shake off the lethargy now at noonday.
Emerson compares the human experience to waking up partway up a staircase. Although there seems to be no way we could have reached this point on the staircase without climbing up it, we don't remember doing so. We also don't know where the staircase started. The "old belief" many people have is that a "Genius"—maybe God, but maybe some other source of power—ushered us onto the staircase to start our human lives. This "Genius" stands at the bottom of the stairs and gives each person a potion, "lethe," to make them forget the eternity their soul is leaving behind by embarking on earthly life. But the potion is strong enough that from moment to moment, we still struggle to get our bearings. Even "at noonday," (i.e. in the middle of life), Emerson argues that "we cannot shake off the lethargy." He seems to be saying that we can never really take stock of where we have been and how each moment in our life has led us up the staircase to the place we are now.
Emerson's metaphor is strange and a bit difficult to grasp. This is not poor writing, but rather an allegorical attempt to invite the reader into the feeling Emerson himself is grappling with. The central idea of the essay is that we all have a subjective version of reality that is made up of the way our experiences collect like beads on the wire of our temperament. Each new "bead" is like another step up the staircase. We can never know what is really happening around us, nor can we know what anyone else's staircase looks like. At the same time, Emerson imagines that we can try our best to brush up as close as possible to others' reality and thus try to orient ourselves just a little better on our own staircase. Emerson gives his reader the disorienting experience of entering the essay in the middle of a thought to mimic the sense of waking up on the staircase with incomplete context and a vague sense that we have missed something. As he goes on, there are hopefully little pieces of the extended metaphor that resonate for the reader, giving them a better sense of where they are walking. As opposed to a cohesive argument with a clear starting and ending point, the essay itself is a "series" of ideas that Emerson presents as points of orientation for the reader. By reading the essay, the reader can hopefully return to their own subjective reality with a slightly broadened perspective.
Early on in Emerson's essay, he uses a metaphor alluding to a scientist named Boscovich, whose ideas were foundational to atomic theory:
Was it Boscovich who found out that bodies never come in contact? Well, souls never touch their objects.
Emerson is referring to the idea within atomic theory that matter is composed of tiny particles that, in their most basic form, never actually come into contact with one another. Rather, the particles are drawn so close to one another that we can no longer perceive the negative space between them. Emerson uses this concept from physics as a metaphor for his philosophical theory of subjective experience. Individuals may be able to form bonds with one another, such as the bond Emerson had with his son while he was alive. Nevertheless, even two bonded individuals can never permeate one another's spheres of existence. We are always locked in our own subjectivity and can merely brush the surface of another person's reality.
Emerson's idea of physics is not absolutely correct, but his choice of metaphor is significant. Philosophy and physics are, at their highest level, interrelated because they each attempt to describe how the world works. Emerson's work is deeply rooted in his personal experience, and he does not believe that empirical observation (the cornerstone of most branches of science) captures all the truth about life. By drawing on the world of physics, which does support the notion of truths we cannot observe, Emerson positions his work as not antithetical to serious science but rather scientific in its own right.
Toward the end of the essay, Emerson repeats his epigraph's personification of "the lords of life": Use, Surprise, Surface, Dream, Succession, spectral Wrong, Temperament, and "the inventor of the game." This time, Emerson calls some of them by slightly different names and also uses a metaphor comparing them to "threads on the loom of time:"
Illusion, Temperament, Succession, Surface, Surprise, Reality, Subjectiveness,—these are threads on the loom of time, these are the lords of life. I dare not assume to give their order, but I name them as I find them in my way.
Now, after writing through many of his thoughts, Emerson has substituted "Illusion" for what he once called "spectral Wrong." Temperament, Succession, and Surface remain the same. What he first called "Use" and "Surprise" seem now to just be "Surprise." "Dream" and "the inventor of the game" (i.e. some sort of God or objective power) have become "Subjectiveness" and "Reality." Emerson is not being sloppy in his terms—or, rather, any sloppiness is deliberate. The essay form allows him to present not a pre-formed argument, but rather a dynamic thought process to arrive at a conclusion. Through that process, Emerson has discovered that we are all living in a kind of subjective "dream" that gestures at a greater objective "reality" that some might consider divine.
Emerson is also deliberately imprecise in the way he first calls all these forces "threads on the loom of time" and then calls them "the lords of life." He cannot quite settle on the figure of speech that most clearly captures what he means. On the one hand, as metaphorical "threads on the loom of time," the forces represent the instrument the Fates of polytheistic theology are often said to use to create the fabric of people's lives. Emerson's phrasing suggests that these are the threads that are stretched across the loom at the start of a project, forming the warp of the woven fabric; each "string of beads" making up subjective experience would then be woven into the warp as time passes, creating the fabric of time. In this sense, these "threads" are the omnipresent forces holding the fabric of all human experience together.
The idea that these forces are living "lords" of life similarly imbues them with governing power. Like lords, these forces determine the lives of those over whom they rule. By repeating this bit of personification from the epigraph, Emerson also draws his readers' attention back to the beginning of the essay and conveys the sense that even if his writing has been winding and meditative, it has nonetheless come full circle.
When Emerson introduces the idea that everyone has a stable, inborn "temperament" on which all the "colored beads" of their experience are strung, he nonetheless rejects the idea that human behavior is predictable. He uses a metaphor and logos to explain why:
Shall I preclude my future, by taking a high seat, and kindly adapting my conversation to the shape of heads? When I come to that, the doctors shall buy me for a Cent.—“But, sir, medical history; the report to the Institute; the proven facts!”—I distrust the facts and the inferences. Temperament is the veto or limitation-power in the constitution, very justly applied to restrain an opposite excess in the constitution, but absurdly offered as a bar to original equity.
Emerson is referring to the pseudoscience of phrenology, by which some scientists and doctors claimed to be able to predict someone's personality and capabilities by observing the shape of their head. Phrenology is a big part of the history of scientific racism, or the use of pseudoscience to prop up the ideology of white supremacy. Emerson's idea of an inborn temperament at first seems to support the idea, central to phrenology, that people's capabilities are determined from birth. However, Emerson argues that every person contains multitudes that no one can see from the outside. He "distrust[s] the facts and inferences" of phrenology because someone's temperament can never really be observed in full.
He compares temperament to "veto or limitation-power in the constitution." He is playing with words here: he is referring to the legal constitution that forms the basis of the United States government, but he is also referring to the "constitution" of an individual—that is, the way they behave based on both nature and nurture. Under the United States constitution, the three branches of government are meant to "check" one another, limiting the ability of a single branch to exert excessive power. This does not mean that any branch is powerless. Rather, it means that they are all (theoretically) balanced. Emerson argues that an individual's "constitution" operates the same way. Their innate temperament is a "check" on their constitution, perhaps making them predisposed to certain behaviors like daydreaming rather than focusing on their work. But it does not outright "bar" them from any behavior; for instance, the same person might undergo schooling that teaches them to be a highly focused person. By comparing a person's constitution to the U.S. constitution, Emerson demonstrates that human capacity is not determined from birth.
In the second part of the essay, when Emerson moves on from discussing his grief to discussing the joys of his life, he argues that the way to get the most out of life is to find balance between letting our bodies feel and letting our minds analyze those feelings. He uses imagery and a metaphor to describe what he means:
Everything good is on the highway. The middle region of our being is the temperate zone. We may climb into the thin and cold realm of pure geometry and lifeless science, or sink into that of sensation. Between these extremes is the equator of life, of thought, of spirit, of poetry,—a narrow belt. Moreover, in popular experience, everything good is on the highway.
The "highway" Emerson mentions is not a physical road. Rather, it is a metaphorical continuum between two "extremes." Emerson has noticed that many people in his intellectual community in Boston and Concord tend to spend most of their time analyzing their lives. These people are always "climb[ing] into the thin and cold realm of pure geometry and lifeless science." This image, of climbing an intellectual mountain until the air grows too thin and cold to breathe suggests that a life spent chasing mental greatness looks impressive but has little payoff. He prefers to allow himself to shut his analytical mind off from time to time and simply enjoy "small mercies" and "the potluck of life." At the same time, Emerson does not want to "sink into [the realm] of sensation" so deeply that he cannot come up for air. He describes the "narrow belt" of "highway" between lofty thought and embodied sensation as the "equator of life, of thought, of spirit, of poetry." He believes that the best way to spend a life is in this liminal space between the body and the mind.
Emerson's metaphor and imagery capture the nuance of his argument against the empiricism of the Enlightenment. Empiricists believed in objective reality that could be observed through bodily sensation. Emerson believes instead in subjective reality, but that does not mean that he outright rejects the value of bodily sensation. Instead, he believes that when we are at our best, our bodies and our minds work together to create a transcendent experience of life.
