ABSTRACT
The wary and tough-minded response of Peirce is not atypical of a philosophical assessment of Emerson. The central theme of Emerson’s life and work is that of possibility. In an anticipation of the attitude of Martin Buber, Emerson believes that ‘people are really able’, that is, people and the world are continuous in an affective and nutritional way. It is human insight which is able to “animate the last fibre of organization, the outskirts of nature.” The malleability and novelty-prone capacity of nature feeds the formulating and constructive powers native to the human imagination. Words are not simply grammatical connectors. The philosophy of John Dewey reflects a similar tension between a confidence in empirical method and the acknowledgment of novelty and unpredictability as indigenous to the history of nature. William James is profoundly aware of these alternate versions of our situation and often evokes them in an extreme way.
