Emerson and Philosophy (according to Cavell)

I [Cavell] think of no one else in the history of thought about whom just this gesture of denial is characteristic, all but universal, as if someone perversely keeps insisting---perhaps it is a voice in the head---that despite all appearances it must be Emerson himself whose insistence on some such question it is so urgent to deny. Yet we know that Emerson was himself convinced early that his "reasoning faculty" was weak, that he could never "hope to write Butler's ANALOGY or an Essay of Hume"...And nothing I find could be more significant of his prose than its despair of and hope for philosophy. (This New Yet Unapproachable America, 78)