...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...

...titled "Pan," Emerson famously wrote of being "bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space — all mean egotism vanishes": "I become a transparent eyeball. I am nothing; I see all."28 Even more than in The Blithedale Romance — a novel that derides this "blithe air" of transcendentalism—...

...130). Lee's transcendentalism bears a strong resemblance to Emerson's, whose famous declaration goes, "[A]ll mean egotism vanishes, I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all" (Ziff 39). Lee's "360-degree seeing" and Emerson's "transparent eyeball" offer a political liberal...