Romanticism and early modern science are strongly associated with the Reformation. Passages like these show how they could have sprung from the same root. An intelligible Creation addressed itself in every moment to every perceiver, more profoundly as the capacities of perception were enlisted in the work of understanding. The most persistent and fruitful tradition of American literature from Emily Dickinson to Wallace Stevens is the meditation on the given, the inexhaustible ordinary. Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James wrote about the subtle and splendid processes of consciousness in this
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