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Emerson鈥檚 Life in Science by Laura Dassow Walls, Cornell University Press, $35, ISBN 0801440440 Reviewed by Ray Percival

ON HIS first tour of Europe, Ralph Waldo Emerson had a revelation in the Paris Museum of Natural History. 鈥淚 will be a naturalist,鈥� he declared. This insight was the basis for his lifelong fascination and commitment to science, and its mark is discernible throughout his writings. On returning to the US, Emerson gave a series of lectures on science, which formed the material for his first book, Nature (1836). Laura Dassow Walls argues in Emerson鈥檚 Life in Science that, far from being simply a dreamer and a mystic, Emerson was an intellectual leader, promoting the idea that science was the path to truth and therefore power. He established this ethos in American society almost single-handedly.

Thus Emerson entered the long-standing debate about the compatibility of science and poetry. The poet Keats had complained that Newton had destroyed the beauty of the rainbow by reducing it to a prism. But to Emerson it seemed that Newton had revealed only another aspect of the rainbow.

Walls shows how Emerson was heavily influenced by philosopher Francis Bacon. Emerson adopted Bacon wholesale: his pantheism, his inductive view of the scientific method, and his prediction that the whole of science would one day be reducible to a few unifying principles.

Walls also makes it clear that there is far more to Emerson than a mere Baconian disciple. The evolution of ideas on the grand scale is a fascinating problem, and Walls鈥檚 exploration of Emerson, the dominant American prophet of science and technology, opens up this world for a delightful and revealing read.