This article provides a genealogy of the architectural figuration of human cognition from the ancient world to Renaissance Europe and, finally, to the American Renaissance where it came to possess a striking cultural and literary potency. The first section pursues the two-fold task of elucidating this archetypal trope for consciousness, both its ancient moorings and its eventual transmission into Europe. The second section shows that three of the most prominent writers of the American Renaissance—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Nathaniel Hawthorne—engaged this mystically inspired architectonic symbolism, employing far older techno-cultural suppositions about interior space. I thereby offer an account of the intellectual and spiritual heritage upon which Romantic writers in the United States drew to articulate cognitive interiority. These Romantics did more than value creativity in contradistinction to Enlightenment rationalism; they were acknowledging themselves as recipients of the ancient belief in cosmogenesis as self-transformation.

本文提供了从古代世界到欧洲文艺复兴时期，再到美国文艺复兴时期人类认知的建筑形象的家谱，在这里它具有惊人的文化和文学潜力。第一部分进行两方面的任务，阐明这种原型的意识形态，包括古老的系泊结构以及最终传入欧洲的意识。第二部分显示了美国文艺复兴时期最杰出的三位作家拉尔夫·沃尔多·爱默生，亨利·戴维·梭罗和纳撒尼尔·霍桑，他们运用了关于室内空间的更古老的技术文化假设，参与了这种神秘启发的建筑象征主义。因此，我将介绍美国的浪漫主义作家用以阐述认知内在性的思想和精神遗产。这些浪漫主义者在与启蒙理性主义形成鲜明对比的同时，不仅仅重视创造力。他们承认自己是古老观念的接受者，认为宇宙形成是自我转化。