There's allusion around every corner in "History," but this passage contains a particularly compelling series of references. To demonstrate his theory of unity, Emerson chains together disparate historical events and figures, both great and terrible, in order to convey that they are the product of the same human instincts:
We must in ourselves see the necessary reason of every fact—see how it could and must be. So stand before every public and private work; before an oration of Burke, before a victory of Napoleon, before a martyrdom of Sir Thomas More, of Sidney, of Marmaduke Robinson; before a French Reign of Terror, and a Salem hanging of witches; before a fanatic Revival and the Animal Magnetism in Paris, or in Providence. We assume that we under like influence should be alike affected, and should achieve the like...
This is a far-flung list of major actors and actions in early modern and modern Europe and America. In order of appearance, Emerson references:
1. Edmund Burke was an Irish statesman who supported the American revolutionary cause and spoke out against religious persecution.
2. Napoleon Bonaparte was the French emperor responsible for a striking number of military victories for the French in the early 19th century.
3. Sir Thomas More, Algernon Sidney, and one "Marmaduke Robinson" (an apparent mistaken conflation, on Emerson's part, of the martyrdoms of Marmaduke Stephenson and William Robinson) were all religious figures of various faiths executed by the English state (or, in the case of Stephenson and Robinson, by the early American colonies) in acts of religious persecution—and thereby became martyrs for their cause.
4. The Reign of Terror was a period in the French Revolution at the end of the 18th century when the revolutionary government (also called the First Republic) brutally repressed other revolutionaries in a series of massacres and executions.
5. The "Salem hanging of witches" refers to the infamous Salem witch trials of colonial Massachusetts, after which 19 people who had been accused of witchcraft were executed.
6. The "fanatic Revival" likely refers to the "Great Awakenings" or "Evangelical Revivals" of the 18th century, a period of profound religious fervor in Britain and the American colonies that saw a unification of belief and mission between various denominations of Christian Protestantism along evangelical lines.
7. Animal Magnetism was a pseudo-scientific theory, proposed by Franz Anton Mesmer in the 18th century, that supported the healing properties of an invisible life force that united all living organisms.
As Emerson writes just before the above passage, "all history becomes subjective... there is properly no history, only biography [...] Every law which the state enacts indicates a fact in human nature; that is all." He means, with this lengthy invocation of various bits of history, to demonstrate this point: history is a collection of human lives, lived with the same instinctive curiosities, fears, hopes, passions, and more—and if we examine the way that these instincts have played out in the past, we can see how they have led to various achievements and atrocities alike.
It is humanity's natural impulse, Emerson argues, to study history and try to trace how the experiences of individuals could lead to such events—or, as he continues after this passage, to "master intellectually the steps and reach the same height or the same degradation that our fellow, our proxy has done." To study history, in other words, is to treat historical figures as our proxy: to put ourselves in their shoes and follow their lives from within. To Emerson, this is possible because of humanity's inherent unity: all minds, across time, are fundamentally the same.
A central concept in Emerson's theories of unity, on which he expounds at great length in "History," is that all historical figures—great and terrible—are reflections of the same human mind at work. Given that it's this very same human mind that the reader will be using to peruse Emerson's writing, Emerson argues for a vision of history that treats every historical figure as a version of our own selves—which means that we can learn from historical mistakes as if they were our own blunders.
This much he relates through the use of allusion and simile:
Each new law and political movement has a meaning for you. Stand before each of its tablets and say, 'Under this mask did my Proteus nature hide itself.' This remedies the defect of our too great nearness to ourselves. This throws our actions into perspective,—and as crabs, goats, scorpions, the balance and the waterpot lose their meanness when hung as signs in the zodiac, so I can see my own vices without heat in the distant persons of Solomon, Alcibiades, and Catiline.
Emerson compares the way that the zodiac neuters and distills the wild nature of animals by adopting them into the zodiac signs with the way that our own vices soften if we consider their historical counterparts in famous figures of the past. He grounds the simile in an allusion to a few famously divisive biblical and classical figures: King Solomon, a king of Israel in the Old Testament who lived a life of self-indulgence and sin, Alcibiades, a treacherous Ancient Greek statesman who played both sides in the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, and Catiline, a Roman politician who led a failed coup against the Roman government.
From Emerson's perspective, we can use the study of history—the study of our forebears and their own flawed human nature—as a path toward productive, self-critical reflection.
