The Particular and the Universal
The purpose of the journey inward is to arrive at the universals revealed by particular expressions found in nature, history, and human character. The image of the all-encompassing river — composed of the many small streams flowing into it, all of them together emptying into the ocean — richly suggests the relationship between the particular and the universal. In A Week, Thoreau presents the comprehension of the divine and infinite as the object of all thought and activity. He writes in "Friday":
Indeed, all that we call science, as well as all that we call poetry, is a particle of . . . information, accurate as far as it goes, though it be but to the confines of the truth. If we can reason so accurately, and with such wonderful confirmation of our reasoning, respecting so-called material objects and events infinitely removed beyond the range of our natural vision, so that the mind hesitates to trust its calculations even when they are confirmed by observation, why may not our speculations penetrate as far into the immaterial starry system, of which the former is but the outward and visible type?
Symbolic particulate information provides the evidence through which we understand the eternal. However, the accumulation of evidence will not by itself lead us to the universal. An alertness to revelation and a sense of vision — some degree of intuition — are required. We must be patient in waiting for insight.
Throughout A Week, Thoreau uses a number of specific examples to demonstrate the ways in which the universal is expressed through the particular. As the journey begins in "Saturday," he considers the place of the human life that he observes along the river within the context of universal history. In the same chapter, the specificity of his catalog of fishes threatens to overwhelm the reader until Thoreau places these creatures within the broad framework of nature's plan. Although there is a tremendous waste of individuals in the course of spawning and in the position of particular species within the food chain, the fishes comply with the role that nature has assigned them. In so doing, they thrive in the aggregate, despite the precariousness of the life of each one individually. In "Wednesday," he writes of watching the boats off Staten Island until they become generic rather than individual.
Thoreau finds little value in current science, history, and other disciplines that focus on the particular but stop short of broader perception. He looks more favorably on certain forms of expression — myth and fable, the literatures of ancient and more elemental times, Oriental scripture and literature, poetry, and music — that are not reducible into factual particulars and consequently allow a kind of direct perception of universals. Myth presents archetypal generalities of human experience rather than the biography of individual men. Poetry possesses a mystical, oracular quality. Music is "the sound of the universal laws promulgated." Fact and detail have their place but are only meaningful when interpreted by those with a larger sense of vision. Thoreau states his belief in the possibility that men of science and others devoted to the specific may achieve the perspective necessary to transform particular data into universal meaning.
