...force of all life. Emerson, in a famous phrase, had imagined himself closing an electrical circuit: "I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see...Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God" (Nature, 21). These "floods of life stream around and through us" (ibid., 24). We experience...

...infinite space," he saw the end to all "mean egotism." "I become a transparent eye-ball," he testified. "I am nothing. I see all. The currents of the Universal...Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God."137 This was well enough, but the announcement that followed brought would-be mystics back in...

...uplifted into infinite space, - all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; 1 see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God.3 The experience of transparency between self and nature is mystical, but the setting...

...one of living participation rather than one of domination: 'Standing on the bare ground', he wrote, 'the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God.'22 This mystical view of Nature increasingly caught the popular mood. It became commonplace...

...sky," Emerson became "a transparent eye -ball," ecstatic revelation ensuing:"I see all. The currents of Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God." It was Romanticism in American form, the imagination lifted above reason as a gift from the gods. Kerouac...

...nearly two hundred years after Religio Medici—but also some one-hundred forty after the Opticks—that "I see all. The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me" (CollW, 1:10), one must surely be speaking in anything but literal terms, right? In each age, one finds...