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    HISTORICAL AND FICTIONAL UTOPIAS converge at Brook Farm, where Nathaniel Hawthorne was a founding member in 1841, and in Hawthorne's novel of 1852, The Blithedale Romance, which he partly based on his experience there. Scholars, though acknowledging this link, have largely acceded to the author's claim in the novel's preface that the "affair is altogether incidental to the main purpose of the Romance, nor does he put forward the slightest pretension to illustrate a theory" (1). Critics of the novel have, with a few exceptions, dissented from this position only by reading Blithedale as a roman a clef, in which the feminist Zenobia may stand for Margaret Fuller, who visited Brook Farm; the reformer Hollingsworth (or the mesmerist Westervelt) for Albert Brisbane, the community's "apostle of Fourierism"; and the narrator, Coverdale, for Hawthorne himself. Historians of American utopias from John Humphrey Noyes to Carl Guarneri have in their turn minimized any reference the novel may have to Brook Farm (Noyes 107; Guarneri 2). Thus, even though this classic text and this prestigious community intersect in the United States's "American Renaissance" of literature and in one of its most extensive utopian movements, they remain surprisingly isolated not only from each other but also from the surrounding culture of which utopia is, in Ernst Bloch's phrase, "the condensed form" (107).(FN1)
    If the fictional and the actual utopia are instead placed in dialogue, the language they share traces the historical narrative of a scientific and cultural revolution. To reconstruct this background, a cryptic yet conspicuous rhetoric in the novel and in the farm's records must be highlighted: a vernacular of "spheres," "influences," "sympathies," and other occult signs. This peculiar jargon at Brook Farm and in The Blithedale Romance, like the historical relation between them, has been remarked but not scrutinized. Guarneri, for instance, notes Fourierism's "alien language" envisioning "global bliss" (3). The congruities between this idiom and vision have been neglected, however, beginning with Hawthorne's major literary heir, Henry James, who in his critical biography Hawthorne (1879) chided his subject's "disposition" in Blithedale "to talk about spheres and sympathies" (108). Such figures of speech were generally in disuse by James's time, but if they are recovered from their intellectual background in the American Renaissance, Brook Farm's and Blithedale's "alien language" relates a history of antebellum utopianism and of scientific and cultural change.
    The field of reference for the rhetoric of "spheres and sympathies" emerges from the history of science. The prototype for the narrative in which these figures participate is the scientific revolution in Europe centuries before, in which an occult cosmos of spheres, influences, and sympathies was replaced by a mechanical universe of multiplying stars and expanding space. As above, so below: European people imitated (if they did not inspire) this new natural worldview as they abandoned their rural spheres for growing cities in the Old World or spacious skies in the New. This intellectual and social transformation recurs in abbreviated form in the antebellum decades, before which the USA had no astronomical observatories. "Spheres" and "sympathies" prevailed in colonial folklore until the scientific ferment of the 1840s and 50s--the same decades as Brook Farm and Blithedale--when the "American Observatory Movement" publicized a new cosmos and erected dozens of telescopes, an event to which The Blithedale Romance alludes in two "observatory" scenes. As in the European Renaissance, this scientific revolution corresponded to cultural change, as the Jeffersonian, agrarian economy of early America gave way to a state mirroring the modern sky: manifest destiny's "star of empire" on the expanding frontier, and "cities of lights" taking the form of the new galaxies then being discovered.(FN2) Yet, as during the European Renaissance and in the manner of a scientific revolution, these changes in nature and culture met resistance.(FN3) At Brook Farm, in Blithedale, and in the larger antebellum society, an array of contemporary popular sciences--Mesmerism, Spiritualism, domestic science, and Fourierism--rose to mediate between the intimate rural nature of the past and the alien urban cosmos of the future.
    This history of earth and sky is premised on a community's imitation of the order of the cosmos. For Lewis Mumford, cities and utopias are "symbolic representation[s] of the universe itself" (14), and "Utopian orders" for Michael Winter "transfer the harmony of the cosmos" to society (74). This premise is evident in Campanella's City of the Sun (1623), laid out in "seven large circuits, named after the seven planets" (27). Natural and social cosmologies also correspond to sexual or gendered identity, as when Fourier imagines planetary erotics modeling earthly orgies, or when domestic science assigns women and men to "separate spheres" in order to relegate them to ancient or modern systems of nature, as we shall see with Hollingsworth and Priscilla or, later, Zenobia in Blithedale.
    The Blithedale Romance, written eleven years after Hawthorne's brief stay at Brook Farm, subtly reconstructs the extravagant cosmic theory behind this utopia. From his later position outside the utopia, however, Hawthorne places the utopia within a larger cultural history, against which it reacts but to which it ultimately succumbs. As ironic author and fallen utopian, Hawthorne devises scenes and situations suggesting this new natural and social cosmos, which his narrator, Coverdale, beholds but does not intellectually grasp.
    The specific background for this cosmic rhetoric and the social change it encodes is that Brook Farm at its founding imagined heaven on earth through a worldview inherited from folklore and classical physics, especially alchemy. In Blithedale Coverdale likewise refers to archaic natural systems to describe the early fictional utopia, but the novel dramatizes this discourse by recontextualizing its arcana within the antebellum cult of true womanhood, especially the domestic microcosm known as "woman's sphere of influence"--or, occasionally, the "family circle" of "feminine sympathy"--whose terms were cognate with "the music of the spheres," "the influence of the stars," the "bands of angels" circling God in heaven, and "universal sympathy."(FN4) This utopia of spheres and sympathies reacts against a state modeled after the modern, mechanical cosmos, which Blithedale represents in Hollingsworth, who embodies an industry based on modern science. His "magnetism" or gravity attracts Zenobia, the character most identified with the original utopian farm, to the dystopian city, where her sphere "transfigures" to exemplify the city of lights.
    The founding and dissolution of Brook Farm or 'Blithedale' (its fictional counterpart) enact thus far a resonant but familiar story--that of a utopia's hapless, nostalgic reaction against a dominant revolutionary culture, fulfilling Frank Lentricchia's New Historicist model of "a totalitarian narrative coincidental with the emergence of the modern world as dystopian fruition" (235). Yet this essay does not intend merely to set the rural "sphere of influence" and the "city of lights" in opposition but also to examine how the peculiar rhetoric of popular and utopian science mediates their past and future. When the primitive utopias fail, domestic science, Fourierism, Mesmerism, and Spiritualism fuse the signs of the original communities' comforting yet obsolete past with signs of a threatening yet inevitable future, until at last the utopians relocate to the massive, brilliant world of the industrial city, to "separate spheres" for men and women, and to the sterile, mechanistic cosmos of modern science and culture.

I. THE "LITTLER SPHERE" OF THE "FARM-HOUSE" AND THE RURAL HEAVENS
    Any reading of the early Brook Farm or "Blithedale" community must make much of little. Richard Francis notes the "lack [of] adequate accounts of the thinking that led up to the establishment of the community and then propelled it along its course" (Transcendental Utopias 41), and critics of the novel have similarly regretted its scant detail concerning the "Blithedale" community.(FN5) Yet the rhetoric used by Brook Farm's founders and by Coverdale in Blithedale's opening chapters indexes a system behind the early community that identifies it with George Sorel's "literary utopia" that "seek[s] to reverse economic history" and also with Bloch's "regressive" utopia (Levitas 63). For instance, although Brook Farm and the 'Blithedale' of Hawthorne's novel were dedicated to human equality, conceptions of gender and class premised on a premodern correspondence between the heavens and the earth mark these communities' rhetoric and limit their social development.
    At the early Brook Farm, "spheres and sympathies" and other occult signs for human relations derive from a correspondence between the language and forms of heaven and earth. In an 1841 article on Brook Farm in The Dial, Hawthorne's future sister-in-law Elizabeth Peabody imagined the "Kingdom of Heaven ... rising again upon vision" ("A Glimpse," 218), and an 1842 letter to the New-York Daily Tribune by a "gentleman" at the community saw the "Kingdom of God ... descending into all men" ("West Roxbury" 25).(FN6) Brook Farm thus fulfills Mumford's vision of utopia being "'lowered down from heaven' and cut to a heavenly pattern" (14). Yet this rhetoric's very obsolescence betrays that Brook Farm, rather than hazarding the future, was a "romantic archaism ... go[ing] back into primeval times" (Bloch 122-3).
    Brook Farm's use of heavenly figures to merge higher and lower spheres attempts to render intellectual and manual labor compatible. Peabody in a second article wrote, "A true life, although it aims beyond the highest star, is redolent of the healthy earth," suggesting a natural paradigm for the "uniting [of] successful labor with improvement in mind and manners" (361, 367). This covenant, described by George Hochfield as a "relation between the sphere of value derived from religion and literature and the sphere of economic organization" (48), appears repeatedly at Brook Farm: founder George Ripley urged a "more natural union between intellectual and manual labor" (qtd. in Golemba, 66); resident John Codman honored the early blend of "Transcendental" ideals with "farm and household labors" (vii); and James admired the "mixture of manual labour and intellectual flights--dish-washing and aesthetics, wood-chopping and philosophy" (70).
    The dynamic that was supposed to reconcile heaven and earth and intellectual and manual labor at Brook Farm was a primeval folkway that attempted to spiritualize fractious subjects such as the sexual desire repressed by "higher" thought and the class and gender divisions implicit in this hierarchical cosmology. Natural alchemy, a preindustrial process in which "crude" ores develop over time into "noble" metals like silver or gold, provides metaphors not only for the division of classes into either "clods" or "nobles" or of sexual relationships as either "crude" or "pure," but also for the means by which these oppositions' prior terms are "refined" into the latter. Sexual or class relations are spiritualized or idealized, that is, through a discourse of "nobility," "purity," and "refinement." Resident Georgiana Bruce Kirby, noting "the almost unrestrained companionship of so many young people of both sexes," thus elevates them: "how really noble and pure were the relationships" (162-3). As class, the heaven-earth dialectic puts aesthetes like Hawthorne or Coverdale to work while urging laborers to higher aspirations. In an 1842 description of Brook Farm, Orestes A. Brownson suggested that those residents who "have not been in society ... need to have things so arranged that the table manners of the more educated and best bred should have chance to be observed, and do their work of refinement" (36). Hawthorne's first letters from Brook Farm gloried in the potential of natural alchemy and gendered nature to redeem labor and unite heaven and earth: "It almost seemed as if I were at work in the sky itself," Hawthorne wrote; his task was to convert a "heap of manure" to "gold ore"--i.e., fertilizer--which "Mother Nature devoured so readily and ... returned in such a rich abundance" (542). Likewise early in the novel, Coverdale sees "Nature [as] a strict, but loving mother" and anticipates the "spiritualization of labor" into a "form of prayer" (65).
    For Bloch, such forms inscribe a "reactionary utopianism as so often in romanticism" (118), and, indeed, alchemy's incapacity to mitigate modern class differences seems transparent at Brook Farm, in Blithedale's community, and in the contemporary social impulses against which the communities reacted. Within a month of the letters above, Hawthorne was scorning the "heap of manure" as "That abominable gold mine!" (545), and the narrator of his novel also quickly concedes alchemy's limits: "clods of earth ... never etherealized into thought" (66). Confuting the "union between intellectual and manual labor," Coverdale concludes that the "yeoman and the scholar ... can never be melted ... into one substance" (66).(FN7)
    In his portrait of "Blithedale" Hawthorne, writing 11 years after his few months at Brook Farm and six years after the experiment's dissolution, thus partly replicates its "romantic archaism[s]," but he also complicates them in order both to dramatize the human nature of such ideologies and to register the irony of "reactionary utopianism." To personify the ideologies at work on the original farm, he draws on alternative occult traditions in addition to alchemy. Having witnessed the unfolding of history since the early 1840s, Hawthorne also immediately engages the contrary trends of history, specifically the threat posed to the "reactionary utopianism" of the farm by "visitors from the city" who represent radically different forms of nature and gender from the urban-industrial future. Indeed, from its opening the novel evinces an awareness of the demographic, scientific, and sexual issues in both the antebellum utopia and its surrounding culture; for instance, in the first chapter Coverdale in the city reflects on an "exhibition of the Veiled Lady," a "phenomenon in the mesmeric line" that leads him to ask if such a "scientific experiment" represents an "old humbug" or a "new science," indicating the hybrid nature of antebellum popular science (5-7). By the second chapter, Coverdale has abandoned the city and all things "new" for an "old farm-house" where he meets others "in quest of a better life" (12, 10). In this rural framework Blithedale uses alternative traditions to reproduce the historical utopia's original cosmology even while exposing its contradictions in gender, class, and labor.
    The community in Blithedale, like Brook Farm, is reticent about its principles, but again its rhetoric betrays a premodern intellectual base. Coverdale does "not greatly care ... for the written constitution under which our millennium had commenced," but his speech implies a correspondence between the natural macrocosm and the utopian microcosm. Astronomical rhetoric first centers around Zenobia, who appears at the farm "beam[ing]" a "celestial warmth" (16, 24). The cosmology behind her model of "woman's sphere" is not, however, the starry, sympathetic form we will see associated with Priscilla. Rather, Zenobia's "sphere" is based on the ancient gendered nature of "Mother Earth," which in classical thought stood at the center of the crystalline spheres, whose outermost rim was the spiritual empyrean of God the Father. This intellectual and cultural artifact reflects the historic centrality of women on early American family farms and reinforces traditional sexual and class differences. Irving Howe characterized Zenobia as a "New England earth goddess" (174), and Lauren Berlant noted "Coverdale's particular obsession" with Zenobia's body as "a topographical one" that unites her "sex effect" with "national utopian fantasy" (31, 35).(FN8) Coverdale, proving again his fluency in archaic systems of thought, persistently mixes natural metaphors of alchemy with those of sex or gender, as Zenobia's "noble earthliness" and "richest maturity" prompt a "picture of [her] ... figure, in Eve's earliest garment": "One felt an influence breathing out of her, such as we might suppose to come from Eve, when she was just made.... [One felt] a certain warm and rich characteristic, which seems, for the most part, to have been refined away out of the feminine system" (101, 15, 44, 17, emphases added). Here "woman's influence" is less the "influence of the stars"--as it is with the ethereal Priscilla--than of a related "feminine system" concerning folk beliefs of aromas or miasmas "breath[ed]" by Mother Earth. Mircea Eliade confirms this correlation of natural alchemy with maternal nature while indicating a gradualism that will frustrate any rapid resolution of class inequalities:

Very early we are confronted with the idea that ores "grow" in the belly of the earth after the manner of embryos.... The underlying belief is that, given enough time, the ores become "pure" metals in the womb of Mother Earth. Further, the "pure" metals become gold [i.e., a "noble" metal] if allowed to "grow" undisturbed for a few thousand years. (184)

    Carolyn Merchant in The Death of Nature confirms the analogy "between the female's reproductive and nurturing capacity and mother earth's ability to give birth to stone and metals within its womb" (25). Given the sterility of the main characters who survive Blithedale's narrative, fertility is disturbing in itself, and, in Coverdale's agitated portrait of Zenobia, Hawthorne questions whether Brook Farm's and domestic science's alchemical thought could ever mediate class differences.(FN9)
    In domestic science, a gradual natural process extenuates the differences between "refined" and "raw" women, creating an equivalent of geological time suggested by Margaret Fuller as that of "secret veins of earth fashion[ing] existences which have a longer share in time" (225). "Given enough time," in Eliade's words, a society based on natural alchemy might refine all to nobility and resolve class and sexual differences. Far from demonstrating any such patience, however, antebellum America is undergoing a self-accelerating revolution in science, technology, demographics, and gender. Brook Farm had little enough of the time it anticipated needing; its primary phase of heaven on earth through natural alchemy lasted about a year before the community reorganized as a Fourierist "phalanstery," and that utopia fell too within the decade.
    In Blithedale, Hawthorne signals the imminence of these changes by having representatives of the urban and industrial future enter by the end of the farm's first night. Zenobia, at the time of their arrival, is ritually uniting the poles of heaven and earth by serving a celestial "nectar" of tea in "earthen cups" both to "people of ... refinement" and to "earthen company" (24, 35). Diverging from this attempt at utopian unity, the two visitors, Hollingsworth and Priscilla, exemplify the antebellum division of genders to "separate spheres," according to which men venture out from the domestic sphere into a brave new world of empirical motion and mass, while women remain enclosed within a reactionary circle of occult sympathies. In this context, Coverdale's description of Hollingsworth, by profession a blacksmith, aligns him with industrial revolution: instead of being alchemically refined, "his features seemed to have been hammered out of iron" (28).
    Priscilla, representing an urban version of woman's sphere, substantially differs from both the modern material manhood of Hollingsworth and from Zenobia's rural, material model of American womanhood. It is Priscilla who prompts James's criticism of Blithedale's "spheres and sympathies," which he associates with her "mesmeric gifts" and "clairvoyance" (108)--in fact, she is "the Veiled Lady," the "phenomenon in the mesmeric line" Coverdale witnessed in the city. Yet her difference from Zenobia appears particularly in signs from a discourse correlative to these movements, that of urban domestic science, whose alchemical rhetoric develops in such a way as to dematerialize woman's sphere. In contrast to Zenobia, Priscilla is "one of those delicate, nervous young creatures [created] by the gradual refining away of the physical system" (33, 95).
    Similarly, in keeping with the antebellum era's ideology of "separate spheres" for men and women, the "refine[d]," "etherealized," and "spiritual[ized]" status of this "insubstantial girl" distinguishes her from Hollingsworth's masculine materiality (17, 66, 95). Rosemary Radford Ruether has remarked the antebellum "antithesis" between a "sphere of feminine virtue" and the "'real world' [of] commercial values," which makes "a peculiar reversal of the traditional dualism of male spirituality ... and female "carnality'"--a tradition reflecting the Mother Earth-God the Father cosmology cited above (131). In the antebellum decades this "reversal" was not unique to Blithedale: the year before its publication, Elizabeth Oakes Smith in Woman and Her Needs saw man as "Lord of the material Universe" while woman is "etherial" and "heavenly" (27 [sic], 22), and Sarah Hale, discussing Adam and Eve, imitates alchemy with a geological trope in which a new woman is "refined" in such a way as to differ from Zenobia as "Eve ... just made": "Like diamond from carbon, woman [was] formed from man," a "refining process" that "increased her beauty and purity" (xxvii). Zenobia will later acquiesce in this new model of womanhood, transforming from a raw and rural earth mother to a sparkling urban "diamond."
    Beyond Coverdale's understanding, we shall see, Hawthorne suggests that this change is accomplished through the modern forces of mechanics and gravity that are represented by Hollingsworth. Coverdale, however, consistently registers the utopia's and Zenobia's change through an apparent power from the history of science that is current in antebellum popular science, a dynamic that comes to replace alchemy as the utopia's medium of change: sympathy.(FN10) In many respects a synonym for "influence," sympathy was originally transmitted from God the Father to the terrestrial sphere; when Hollingsworth projects upon Priscilla an identity as "the Sympathizer" and "the Echo of God's own voice," he characteristically speaks in the language of the "separate spheres," identifying her with spiritual and moral qualities while he himself assumes a material, amoral identity (122).
    As far as Coverdale is concerned, all these changes are accomplished less through material than sympathetic action, which is manifested by Priscilla's "nervous" qualities. In the medieval cosmos, sympathy appears as vibration, a mechanism Hawthorne's preface registers by relating Priscilla's "Sibylline attributes" to her "tremulous nerves" (2). Historian of science J.D. North writes that the crystalline spheres, grinding against each other, stirred the "music of the spheres" through "sympathetic vibration," as a fingertip rubbing a crystal tumbler makes it ring (258). D.H. Lawrence noted this "apparatus of human consciousness" in Blithedale, remarking the novel's "vibrations from the stars, vibrations from unknown magnetos, vibrations from unknown people" (116), and Evan Carton in The Rhetoric of American Romance (1985) cites an antebellum definition of sympathy as a relation between "bodies capable of communicating their vibrational energy to one another" (248). The Blithedalers, "without the liberty of choosing whether to sympathize or no," behold Priscilla "shiver[ing] either with cold, or fear, or nervous excitement, so that you might have beheld her shadow vibrating on the firelighted wall" (29, 27; emphases added). Coverdale repeatedly plays variations on this form--"sympathetic impulse" "nervous sympathy," a "mysterious tremor," a "tremulous vibration" or "throb" (180, 139, 202, 180, 241). Vibrations type Priscilla's sympathy--"What fragile harp-strings were her nerves[!]" (75)--and her father's lack of it--"His mind needed screwing up, like ... the strings of [an instrument that] have ceased to vibrate smartly or sharply" (87). At Brook Farm, Ripley similarly claimed that in utopian society, "every chord in [man's] sensitive and finely vibrated frame will respond; call[ing] forth, as from a well-tuned instrument ... the 'music of his being'" (qtd. in Crowe, 498).
    Coverdale, for all his limits in representing the structural dynamics of modern physics and demographics, thoroughly comprehends how sympathy supposedly operates, and on that first night its workings successfully portend both the utopia's disorientation and its partial adaptation as it reacts to the emerging reality. Sympathy, Michel Foucault wrote of Renaissance nature in The Order of Things, is "brought into being by a simple contact" and has "the dangerous power of assimilating" (23). For Coverdale, a "contact" shared by Zenobia and Priscilla begins the process of confusing and then transforming antebellum gendered nature. When Zenobia welcomes Priscilla with "one caress," "the touch [has] a magical effect" (35): she "flush[es]" with the organic warmth that was Zenobia's and later "blossom[s,] as if we could see Nature shaping out a woman" (72). With the same touch, however, Zenobia's identity is relocated from "Mother Earth" to the sterile realm of urban womanhood's separate sphere: "A brilliant woman is often an object of the devoted admiration ... of some young girl, who perhaps beholds the cynosure only at an awful distance, and has as little hope of personal intercourse as of climbing among the stars of heaven" (32-33, emphases added). Instead of "noble earthliness," Zenobia now glitters with "brilliant" heavenly signs: "cynosure" (for "polestar") detaches her from fertile "intercourse." Following Ruether's paradigm, Zenobia begins to take on a new, celestial "spirituality," while Coverdale and Hollingsworth assume woman's "carnality": "We men are too gross to comprehend it" (33). Yet this early in the novel the change is far from complete, and, in the gap between the heterosexual certainties of past and future, there is a glimpse of alternative sexualities that briefly emerge in parallel with hybrid cosmologies of popular science. The women pose in the first of several scenes in Blithedale that bend traditional sexual roles and relations: commenting on this scene in her introduction to the novel, Annette Kolodny sees Priscilla kneeling before Zenobia in "the familiar pose of the suitor in nineteenth-century melodrama" (xix).
    However limited Coverdale's range of thought, he senses the incompatibility between the primitive utopia and its surrounding nature and culture. At the end of that first night on the farm, Hawthorne for the first time suggests, at the edge of Coverdale's understanding, the macrocosmic scale and nature of the changes that impend. The storm outside the farmhouse that made Priscilla "shiver" led Coverdale first to imagine the nature beyond the utopia and how little it corresponds to spheres and sympathies, and then to glimpse the urban reality that it does dictate--vast, teeming, distantly lighted, formally unsphered: "The sense of vast, undefined space, pressing from the outside, ... was fearful to the poor girl, heretofore accustomed to the narrowness of human limits, with the lamps of neighboring tenements glimmering across the street ..." (36). Later, in Zenobia's parlor in the city, the "vast, undefined space" on the "outside" of the utopia and over the city--a sky composed not of spheres or stars but of "lamps"--will fuse to a single vision. As the first night comes to a close, Coverdale again intuits not harmony but hostility between the enormous modern macrocosm and the utopian microcosm of spheres and sympathies, sensing "an outer solitude, ... like another state of existence, close beside the littler sphere of warmth and light" (37).

II. POPULAR SCIENCE: "LINKING THE PRESENT LIFE TO FUTURITY"
    The passage from the rural "sphere" to the "undefined," lamp-lit space of the city--the historical narrative shared by The Blithedale Romance, Brook Farm, and the American Renaissance--is guided by Fourierism, Spiritualism, Mesmerism, and domestic science. These popular sciences use the assimilating power of sympathy to concoct a provisional cosmology of ancient and modern parts, to experiment with a demography midway between country and city, and to hazard similarly mismatched sexualities. If Brook Farm's and Blithedale's communities initially violated Bloch's utopia with "archaic regression," they now use these volatile compounds to reverse his "cultural anticipation" of a socialist future, as Fourierism and its intellectual fellow-travelers negotiate a progression from the occult spheres of the utopian farm to the mechanisms of the dystopian city (123, 118).
    As brilliant and repellent as an electric arc, the rhetoric of popular science flashes across the poles of past and future. Coverdale acknowledges this anachronistic mix of ideas in the American Renaissance: "It was a period when science ... was bringing forward, anew, a hoard of facts and imperfect theories, that had partially won credence, in elder times, but which modern skepticism had swept away as rubbish" (187). The antebellum era's array of popular, occult, or pseudo-sciences has been surveyed by Howard Kerr, Robert Fuller, Taylor Stoehr, and Maria Tatar, but these sciences' shared rhetoric has been scanted, with Tatar echoing James that Hawthorne's "use of such vague terms as 'influence,' 'sympathy,' and 'sphere' to define the psychology of [Blithedale's] characters does little to illuminate the disconcertingly elusive nature of the bond between them" (221). The "nature" of Mesmerism, Fourierism, and Spiritualism may be "elusive," but if the background to these "vague terms" is reconstructed, they may be seen to redefine characters and their "bonds" during a period of social and intellectual change.(FN11)
    Though the intellectual base of these popular sciences is premodern, they appropriate the prestigious forms of modern astronomy. For the Spiritualist Andrew Jackson Davis, "spheres of spheres" in the heavens shed "sympathetic influx" (Principles 123, xvii), but he also insists that "clairvoyant vision" is "telescopic" and that actual telescopes will locate the "populated planets" of the afterlife in the Milky Way (qtd. in Lawton, 29, 47, 41). The founder of Mesmerism, Anton Mesmer, who began his career with a thesis on astrological medicine, Influence of the Planets in the Cure of Diseases, claimed that "magnetic attraction of the spheres permeates all parts of our body" and that a "responsive influence" exists "between the heavenly bodies ... and all animated bodies" (Binet and Fere 4; Goldsmith 70). Yet "Magnetism" could serve both occult and empirical purposes, figuring not only the purported influence of the stars--which like magnetism was effective despite being invisible--but also, in the scientific revolution, the invisible yet attractive power of gravity. The hypothetical medium for magnetism, a "fluid universally diffused"--like the Mesmerist Westervelt's "fluid medium of the spirits" in Blithedale (201)--maintains the earlier form of "influence" or "influx" but also conforms with Benjamin Franklin's "fluid" model of electricity and with the "nebulous fluid" of stellar formation promoted by the antebellum astronomer O.M. Mitchel (246). In Blithedale the Mesmerist Westervelt similarly shifts between premodern and modern forms: city gossip avers that his "power" reaches the "third sphere of the celestial world"; yet he claims the mantle of empirical science and progress (188), threatening to brandish "his universally pervasive fluid" in "a glass phial," assuming "a strange, philosophical guise, .. as if [the occult] were a matter of chemical discovery," and announcing "a new era ... dawning upon the world; an era that would link ... the present life to what we call futurity" (200).
    Like Mesmerism and Spiritualism, Fourierism works from premodern principles while proclaiming an advanced position in the scientific revolution. "The calculation of horoscopes," Fourier wrote, would "play an influential role" in his utopia (Utopian 354, 356), yet he also claimed to have "completed the task that the Newtonians began and left unfinished" (Theory 26).(FN12) Zoltan Haraszti suggested that Fourierism's cosmic "phantasmagorias" and "extravagant elements" were "purged" by his French followers (28), but Albert Brisbane, who studied with Fourier in France, circumvented this ban by supervising translations in Brook Farm's Fourierist journal The Phalanx of the master's "cosmogonies," which declared both the "laws of astral affinity" and, again, to have "completed the task commenced by Newton" ("Translations" 28).
    To unite these archaic and modern elements and, by extension, to heal the fragmentation caused by scientific revolution, Fourierism, Mesmerism, and Spiritualism rely--like domestic science--on the assimilating power of sympathy. Emerson locates the opportunity that arose for sympathy in an antebellum "war" between "the party of the past and the party of the Future" (594). For Emerson, "Modern Science" created a "crack in Nature," but Mesmerism, however speciously, "affirmed unity ... between remote points" and "felt connection where the professors denied it," while Fourierism was likewise "not daunted by ... remoteness of any sort" (594, 600, 608).(FN13) Jonathan Beecher remarks Fourierism's "romantic reformulation of the classical and Christian tradition of analogical thinking" and its faith "that everything that transpired in the world of man had some echo or correspondence in the world of nature" (347, 341). Thus for Brook Farmer John Dwight in 1844, "Every man is a microcosm, or world in miniature, reflecting all the laws of all things ..., as is each planet ... in the celestial sphere" (105).
    Despite such assertions of shared identity, Fourier's microcosm had no practical mechanism for bringing the utopian future into being except to hypothesize a large-scale reversal of sympathy's normal dir...