The essay traces Emerson's ideas of “godless religion”; his attraction to and disenchantment with contemporary science; the challenges of 1841–44 as his thought impelled him beyond the terms of his religious synthesis; his efforts thereafter toward a new synthesis; and, when these failed, his retreat to an increasingly rarefied idealism.

Hawthorne's years in England, the least studied phase of his career, are especially significant for the challenge that English materialism posed to his New England austerity and his romancer's idealism. Beyond recording his complex response to English life and character, his “English Notebooks” and “Our Old Home” show how England permanently inflected his character and sense of experience.

With their fluent colloquial prose and curiosity about life's spectacle, Hawthorne's voluminous notebooks belie the common notion that temperament and talent led him to write works of allegorical romance rather than realism. The essay argues that Hawthorne cultivated romance not because he believed in its idealizing vision but rather because, extrapolating from his experience of “the real,” he didn't.

Recasting Perry Miller's classic “From Edwards to Emerson,” the essay relocates Emerson in the New England spiritual tradition from the Puritans to William James. Even as he dismissed the theological doctrines of Calvinism, Emerson increasingly came to understand himself as replicating many of the psychospiritual truths at its core.