Emerson belittles history into meaning nothing but what suits the reader’s biography, which approach is nothing less than denying that history contains the facts that it does contain. But why does he do this? Ralph Waldo Emerson was of strict Puritan stock. Many of his forefathers were ministers. He too became a minister for a period of time. Will not the facts dogmatically passed down from the Puritans to their successors become the worst thorn in the side of that descendent who has decided against the implications and conclusions of these facts? What better way to deny God his right to rule over the soul than to dismiss the wheel of Providence that rolls through the history that all souls are born into at his own prerogative and for his own purpose and pleasure? Emerson must have been nagged by the history that his eminent Christian ancestors bequeathed. Rebelling against reality, he must have felt the need to throw this history off his conscience. It seems that by the impulse of his temperament and the use of his talent, he dreamed up an esoteric view of history in order to evacuate it of facts, which is a process, I guess, of making history transcendental. Emerson was a transcendentalist and an idealist. Transcendentalists posit that ultimate reality is either not knowable and/or that through self-generating insight man may determine or discover his own higher reality irrespective of evidence that may be gathered through experiment or experience. As for idealists, they believe that only what is mental is knowable; they may go so far as to deny the existence of material bodies; and they attempt to view the world as they think it should have been and should be instead of what it has been and is. These philosophies are, then, nearly synonymous; they are Platonic, or impractical; and they are inimical, or hostile, to a historical view of the world. So Emerson’s method of treating history is to orate whatever he does not like about it into oblivion through an opaque communication. “Time dissipates to shining ether the solid angularity of facts. No anchor, no cable, no fences avail to keep a fact a fact” (p. 6.) Are these words not full of hope that the future will not be similar to the past that he hates? Did the mores of the times he lived in prevent him living like he would or from pursuing the future that he wanted to indulge? It sounds like it. Apart from how history affected him personally and how history turned out, what could he have had against history being told except that the teaching of it might result in, or at least hint at, a future that he dreaded?
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