In "History," Emerson argues that the human mind and the human life are both microcosmic for the total sweep of history—which is to say that we can find correlation between our own individual experiences and the experiences of historical figures and even entire historical eras. Key to this argument is the idea that facets of different ages of human history are represented in different periods of a human life. In the following passage, Emerson uses childhood as a metaphor for the supposed "purity" of classical Greek antiquity:
What is the foundation of that interest all men feel in Greek history, letters, art and poetry, in all its periods from the Heroic or Homeric age down to the domestic life of the Athenians and Spartans, four or five centuries later? What but this, that every man passes personally through a Grecian period.
Greek antiquity has a childlike quality, and its literature has a corresponding quality that feels somehow fundamental and original, especially as taught and studied in the West during the 18th and 19th centuries. The attraction of the Grecian way, therefore, is that Greek works "belong to man, and are known to every man in virtue of his being once a child"—if we take Greek antiquity to represent the "childhood" of civilization, that is.
In "History," Emerson makes the case that humankind is drawn together by a fundamental nature that also inextricably ties humanity to the natural world. In a particularly potent metaphor, Emerson demonstrates the equivalence between the work of nature and the work of human civilization when he describes a cathedral in the language of flowers:
The Gothic cathedral is a blossoming in stone subdued by the insatiable demand of harmony in man. The mountain of granite blooms into an eternal flower, with the lightness and delicate finish as well as the aerial proportions and perspective of vegetable beauty.
Like a flower bud will blossom into a fantastic complex of patterns and color, hunks of stone can "blossom" into the fantastic complex of a Gothic cathedral. In this way, Emerson treats a cathedral as an "eternal flower" that draws upon the actual patterns and shapes of nature for its beauty.
Though Emerson's comparison relies on abstract and figurative language, he makes a compelling argument—aside from the philosophical correlation between natural and human creation, architects and historians alike have long commented on the influence that natural forms appear to have had on Gothic architecture.
This simile fits neatly into Emerson's exploration of unity and spirituality throughout "History": what better proof of a "universal nature" of things than the fact that humanity, in setting out to craft great houses of worship, ends up recreating the marvelous works of nature herself?
In service of his larger philosophical argument about the unity of all living things, Emerson employs a broad variety of literary devices that illustrate such unity. At one point, Emerson adopts the language of gestation and evolution to craft a metaphor that equates the similarity of a life form (a butterfly) back through its stages of life to the egg with the total similarity of all life forms through creation:
Genius studies the causal thought, and far back in the womb of things sees the rays parting from one orb, that diverge, ere they fall, by infinite diameters. Genius watches the monad through all his masks as he performs the metempsychosis of nature. Genius detects through the fly, through the caterpillar, through the grub, through the egg, the constant individual, through countless individuals the fixed species; through many species the genus; through all general the steadfast type; through all the kingdoms of organized life the eternal unity.
"Genius"—which is to say, the ingenuity of the human mind—is able to perceive that an "eternal unity" is present in all living things, just like it can appreciate how the fly, caterpillar, grub, and egg are all variants of the same species. In the same way, the human mind can also appreciate how everything in the universe has emerged from the same "monad," or the same hypothetical fundamental substance, "far back in the womb of things," toward the very beginning of the universe and time itself. In this highly metaphysical language, speaking of a primordial "orb" that casts out all of creation from itself, Emerson echoes the atomic theory that had first emerged in ancient philosophy before being furthered through scientific inquiry in the 18th century. He also unconsciously anticipates the theories of the Big Bang and the origins of the universe that would be studied by the theoretical physicists of the 20th century.
Through this passage, Emerson emphasizes not just the unity of the universe but also the unique potential of humanity to understand this unity—and to act accordingly, in service to the natural world as a whole.
In "History," Emerson works tirelessly to understand what, exactly, it is that transforms the people and events of the past—the basic facts—into what we call history. It seems to him that the passage of time sets these facts adrift, and they begin to morph into something more—something narrative, that begins to resemble literature. He uses a metaphor to convey this sentiment, which compares pieces of the past to poetry—and invokes a famous metaphor that Napoleon once used, comparing the past to a "fable":
Time dissipates to shining ether the solid angularity of facts. No anchor, no cable, no fences avail to keep a fact a fact. Babylon, Troy, Tyre, Palestine, and even early Rome are passing already into fiction. The Garden of Eden, the sun standing still in Gibeon, is poetry thenceforward to all nations. Who cares what the fact was, when we have made a constellation of it to hang in heaven an immortal sign? London and Paris and New York must go the same way. "What is history," said Napoelon, "but a fable agreed upon?"
Emerson's metaphors map out the effect of time in transforming historical events (the past) into pieces of narrative or fabulation like works of literature, either "poetry" or "fable." The greater the distance from the present, the more full this transformation. "Even Rome," Emerson asserts, is becoming fiction.
This is a wonderful example of Emerson's theory of history, and the inextricable relationship between humanity's incessant need to tell stories and the network of past events that we draw upon in order to make sense of the present.
To Emerson, because all cultural production is the product of the same human mind (which is constant across all humanity through time), the "wise man" will find himself reflected in every piece of culture he contemplates. He uses a metaphor of a painted portrait to convey this sentiment:
All literature writes the character of the wise man. Books, monuments, pictures, conversation, are portraits in which he finds the lineaments he is forming. The silent and the eloquent praise him and accost him, and he is stimulated wherever he moves, as by personal allusions. A true aspirant therefore never needs look for allusions personal and laudatory in discourse. He hears the commendation, not of himself, but, more sweet, of that character he seeks, in every word that is said concerning character, yea further in every fact and circumstance,—in the running river and the rustling corn.
By Emerson's metaphor, all of culture is a portrait of the "wise man" himself, or a portrait in which the "wise man" can see himself begin to appear. This is to say that humanity can find itself reflected in the art and literature of the world—and, in fact, humanity can find itself reflected in the world itself, in the "running river and rustling corn." This is an excellent example of Emerson's theory of unity, in which all things are part of one cohesive whole and share an intrinsic nature, at work.
Emerson uses an endless assortment of metaphor and simile to convey his theory of unity, but this is one of the earliest sets of comparisons: using metaphor, Emerson declares that "man" is an encyclopedia, an endless font of creation, just like an acorn has the potential to populate the world with forests:
A man is the whole encyclopædia of facts. The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn, and Egypt, Greece, Rome, Gaul, Britain, America, lie folded already in the first man. Epoch after epoch, camp, kingdom, empire, republic, democracy, are merely the application of his manifold spirit to the manifold world.
If everything that humanity creates originates from the same impulse to create contained within each human mind, then any one human mind holds the potential to create anything and everything. This passage is an excellent example of Emerson's optimistic belief in the infinite capacity of all human life for creativity and cultural production, and also a useful example of his vision of unity between humanity and nature—with the metaphor of the acorn, he demonstrates how the manifold qualities of the natural world and the human mind appear to mirror each other.
