Emerson’s famous “transparent eyeball” metaphor from his essay Nature (1836) is difficult to understand if broken into separate components, but nonetheless communicates quite well because it is presented as a unified statement. This paper argues that the metaphor asserts its poetic force because it is a conceptual blend of the kind described by cognitive theorists. That is, the reader is invited by Emerson’s language approach to make certain cognitive leaps in order to fuse together certain physical manifestations that are not normally found together. Emerson’s implied argument is that the eye is both an organ of seeing and “unseeing,” the latter being a function of passive acquiescence in the phenomena that nature provides us with in an endless flow. The spiritual result replicates the metaphoric duplicity of the transparent eyeball in that we are paradoxically prevented from articulating the very phenomena that might normally be considered to be most worthy of description.

中文翻译：

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艾默生的透明眼球在概念上融合了

艾默生的论文《自然》中著名的“透明眼球”隐喻（1836）如果将其分解成单独的部分很难理解，但由于它以统一的陈述形式出现，因此沟通得很好。本文认为，隐喻之所以具有诗意的力量，是因为它是认知理论家所描述类型的概念融合。也就是说，艾默生的语言方法邀请读者进行某些认知上的飞跃，以便将通常不会一起发现的某些身体表现融合在一起。艾默生的一个隐含论点是，眼睛既是看见的器官，又是“看不见的”器官，后者是自然在无休止的流动中为我们提供的现象的被动默许的功能。