Abstract I argue that the aphoristic style of Emerson and Thoreau is inseparable from their scientific practice. Drawing on Francis Bacon’s vision of the aphorism as seed-like and perpetually generative, the Transcendentalists developed an open-ended aphoristic mode as a democratic alternative to the increasing professionalization of nineteenth-century science.
Abstract Through a reading of Samuel Hayes Elliot’s New England’s Chattels (1858)— which confronts the similarity between slave auctions and the auction system of poor relief in the North — this essay meditates on analogies and the possibility they create for sympathy.
