...more complicated than that as Emerson himself explained in a passage from his essay "Experience." It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped, the discovery...mediately, and that we have no means of correcting these colored and distorting lenses which we are, or of computing the amount of their errors. Perhaps these...

...thus becomes a condition for philosophical progress. In "Experience," Emerson puts it this way: "It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped, the discovery...called the Fall of Man. Ever afterwards we suspect our own instruments." 61 Stella Dallas and A Thousand Acres This idea recurs under the Nietzschean rubric...

...words, "it is very unhappy, but too late to be helped, the discovery we have made that we exist. The discovery is called the Fall of Man. Ever afterwards...learned that we do not see directly, but mediately" (487). In vain as well is William James's plea in A Pluralistic Universe (1908) that we stop what he...

...of will, of possession), he implicitly insists we recognize the connection in a central remark: "It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped, the discovery...learned that we do not see directly, but mediately.... Perhaps there are no objects" (E 487). We are invited to take this declaration two ways. One emphasizes...

...the psychological significance of this mythic event in the essay "Experience" in which he states: "It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped, the discovery...exist. That discovery is called the Fall of Man." 68 Mankind's freedom, represented here as freedom from "original sin," is therefore contingent upon...