This essay is adapted from Traversal.

Just before the eleven-year-old Walt Whitman dropped out of school to begin his first job, his parents diverted a portion of their meager working-class means toward a subscription to the radical paper The Free Enquirer, inspired by The Enquirer published by the radical philosopher William Godwin — Mary Shelley’s father — a generation earlier and an ocean over.

The prospectus of The Free Enquirer promised:

While there is no doctrine so sacred that we shall approach its discussion with apprehension, there is none so extravagant that we shall treat its expression with contempt… We will reject no creed but the creed of force, nor any system of morality but that which teaches intolerance.

One half of that we was the Scottish-born, newly naturalized radical reformer Fanny Wright. “She possessed herself of my body and soul,” Whitman would recall of her in the final years of his life, adding that he “never felt so glowingly towards any other woman.” He would remember her as “a brilliant woman, of beauty and estate, who was never satisfied unless she was busy doing good—public good, private good,” a woman “whose orbit was a great deal larger” than those of her contemporaries — “too large to be tolerated long by them,” rendering her “one of the best in history though also one of the least understood.”

Born into a well-off freethinking family in Scotland in 1795, Frances Wright was still a toddler when she lost her father, her mother, and her only brother in close succession. No inheritance is large enough to recompense the loss that savages a child orphaned at so tender an age, but the inheritance Fanny and her surviving younger sister received contoured a different possibility of life than was granted most orphans. Into that possibility Fanny sketched in a life of uncommon courage and action.

Raised in England by an eighteen-year-old aunt who introduced her to the ideas of French materialism and bruised her with the temperamental lashes of a teenager, Fanny returned to Scotland at sixteen to live with a great-uncle — a professor of moral philosophy who vehemently opposed the slave trade and who now held the chair Adam Smith had held a generation earlier at the University of Glasgow, heralded as the academically commensurate but more progressive counterpart to Oxford and Cambridge. Taken with Fanny’s restive intellect, the university librarian risked his job to grant her full access to one of Europe’s most lavish repositories of knowledge. Fanny — tall, slender, muscular, with a firm step and large, forthright blue eyes awned by short, curly chestnut hair — sought out everything she could about the history of the United States, spending the leaden Scottish winters immersed in the ideals of the New World and the emerald summers roaming the ancient Highlands with her sure-footed stride, dreaming about the democratic vistas of the American experiment in government that had captivated her moral and political imagination.

She was eighteen when she composed A Few Days in Athens — an imaginative fictional translation of a lost ancient Greek manuscript. At the heart of her lyrical, thoroughly original novel is an admonition against self-righteousness and a clarion call for justice, tolerance, and moral discipline, advancing the Epicurean philosophy of atomic realism, which for many centuries was misunderstood as a philosophy of pleasure but is, in fact, predicated on a moral framework that the young Wright encapsulated perfectly:

In the pleasure, — utility, — propriety of human action — whatever word we employ, the meaning is the same — in the consequences of human actions, that is, in their tendency to promote our good or our evil, we must ever find the only test of their intrinsic merit or demerit.

Much of what the world remembers of Epicurus — the first of the Greek philosophers to admit women as his students — has come to us on the wings of poetry. A quarter millennium after him, the Roman poet Lucretius grew enchanted with the Epicurean vision of fathoming life through matter, introducing it to a Roman audience in his monumental book-length poem On the Nature of Things, which opened with an ode to Venus and went on to inspire millennia of minds: Isaac Newton and Thomas Jefferson, Mary Shelley and Mary Oliver. Channeling Epicurus, Lucretius wrote in the first century:

Nor was the mass of matter more compact
nor ever set at wider intervals,
for nothing increases and nothing perishes.
Therefore the motion of the atoms themselves
is the same now as it has ever been,
and so hereafter will their motion be;
and what has been born will evermore be born
in the same way; will be, and will grow
strong with strength as it is given by natural law.
For nothing can ever change the sum of things;
there is no hiding-place, nothing outside,
no source-place where another power might rise
bursting, to change the nature and course of things.

Epicurus and Lucretius were the original arithmeticians of the world, the poets of interdependence, singing the totality of things. Across the immense expanse of time and space, across the abyss of cultures and civilizations, Walt Whitman would rise as the next great poet of totality, with Fanny Wright as his formative influence. “What chemistry!” he would exult in the transmutation of life into death into more life in a poem titled “This Compost.” But it was Fanny Wright who revived the Epicurean materialist poetics in the golden age of chemistry. In an author’s note tucked toward the end of the novel, she crystallized its basic conceit:

How beautifully have the modern discoveries in chemistry and natural philosophy, and the more accurate analysis of the human mind — sciences unknown to the ancient world — substantiated the leading principles of the Epicurean ethics and physics — the only ancient school of either, really deserving the name.

Epicurus was largely influenced by Democritus, born a century earlier — the first person to formulate an atomic theory of the universe. In one of the handful of surviving fragments from his immense and influential body of work, Democritus personifies the senses and the intellect, staging between them an argument about the nature of reality. When the intellect scoffs that everything we perceive as blue or red, sweetness or bitterness, is just “atoms in the void,” the senses quip: “Poor intellect, do you hope to defeat us while from us you borrow your evidence? Your victory is your defeat.”

Epicurus seized upon this paradox to expose fundamental truths of human experience. Taking his ideas as a touchstone, Fanny Wright argued that everything from our happiness to our conceptions of right and wrong hinges on how well or poorly we understand “the position we hold in this beautiful material world.” She argued that “the elements composing all substances, so far as we know and can reason, eternal, and in their nature unchangeable; and it is only the different disposition of these eternal and unchangeable atoms that produces all the varieties in the substances constituting the great material whole, of which we form a part.”

She took care to keep materialism from slipping into reductionism — such a conception of nature’s phenomena, she added, “is not explaining their wonders, for that is impossible, but only observing them.” She placed the observation of external and internal phenomena at the center of our conscious experience, at the center of any understanding of the world calibrated by reality rather than taken on faith from doctrine and dogma. She argued — against the grain of her time, against the preoccupations of her age bracket — that moral philosophy is closer to science than to theology, for it concerns itself with the pursuit of truth and justice — a pursuit governed by observation and experiment:

Real philosophy is opposed to all systems. Her whole business is observation; and the results of that observation constitute all her knowledge. She receives no truths, until she has tested them by experience; she advances no opinions, unsupported by the testimony of facts; she acknowledges no virtue, but that involved in beneficial actions; no vice, but that involved in actions hurtful to ourselves or to others. Above all, she advances no dogmas — is slow to assert what is, and calls nothing impossible. The science of philosophy is simply a science of observation, both as regards the world without us, and the world within; and, to advance in it, are requisite only sound senses, well developed and exercised faculties, and a mind free of prejudice… Both as regards the philosophy of physics and the philosophy of mind, all is simply a process of investigation. It is a journey of discovery.

The science-minded Thomas Jefferson cherished A Few Days in Athens as “a treat… of the highest order.” It became a great influence on the young Whitman, who saw in it an emboldening testament to how powerful an instrument the poetic imagination could be for dismantling dogma, unfastening social strictures, and magnifying alternative possibilities for the realities we have taken as givens. “[The book] was daily food to me: I kept it about me for years,” he recounted in old age, urging the young in his orbit to read it. At the age Mary Shelley was when she composed Frankenstein, Wright wrote:

Knowledge… is the best riches that man can possess. Without it, he is a brute; with it, he is a god. But like happiness, he often pursues it without finding it; or, at best, obtains of it but an imperfect glimpse. It is not that the road to it is either dark or difficult, but that he takes a wrong one; or if he enters on the right, he does so unprepared for the journey.

[…]

All learning is useful, all the sciences are curious, all the arts are beautiful; but more useful, more curious, and more beautiful, is the perfect knowledge and perfect government of ourselves. Though a man should read the heavens, unravel their laws and their revolutions; though he should dive into the mysteries of matter, and expound the phenomena of earth and air; though he should be conversant with all the writings, and the sayings, and the actions of the dead… though he should do one or all of these things, yet know not the secret springs of his own mind, the foundation of his opinions, the motives of his actions; if he hold not the rein over his passions; if he have not cleared the mist of all prejudices from his understanding; if he have not rubbed off all intolerance from his judgments; if he know not to weigh his own actions, and the actions of others, in the balance of justice — that man hath not knowledge; nor, though he be a man of science, a man of learning, or an artist, he is not a sage.

Fanny Wright was twenty-three when she left Scotland and sailed for America with her sister. Aboard the ship, she composed a poem in which she declared her “daring hand and fearless soul,” a soul whose twin she saw in Lord Byron’s Childe Harold — a soul “as strange, as proud, as lonely from its birth — with powers as vast.”

In her studies, she had seen again and again how every political system aimed at justice and equality, from the dawn of democracy in ancient Greece to the French Revolution of her childhood, had fissured under the uneven weight of its stated ideals staked on moral imagination and their warped enactments aimed at profit and power. America was to her the oasis of optimism that stood a chance of making the ideal real, and so she set out to see for herself how the principles laid out in the Declaration of Independence were translating into practice. On America’s soil, she would soon prove herself to possess that rare and rapturous quality of resolve that sets the revolutionary apart from the mere rebel — a life devoted not only to exposing the roots of evil but to uprooting them, remedying the poisoned soil, and replanting lush ennobling alternatives.

Shortly after arriving in New York, she wrote, produced, and published a play about Switzerland’s fight for independence from Napoleonic rule, which Jefferson lauded for the way it granted “dignity and usefulness to poetry.” From there, Fanny and her sister traversed several thousand miles inland — two young women traveling unchaperoned across small towns and frontier hinterlands. She recorded her exuberant impressions in a series of letters to the erudite, radical, and charming Scottish relative who was the closest thing Fanny had to a mother figure — a woman who had lived in America in her youth and had encouraged the adolescent Fanny’s countercultural aspiration to be a woman of letters with the assurance to see herself as endowed with “the imagination, the temperament… of genius.”

Fanny exulted in the new frontiers of possibility in America, particularly around the one colossal issue on which she parted ways with the ancient Greeks: the Aristotelian assertion that men were the proprietors of reason and therefore the proprietors of women, whose reasoning faculty was inferior by nature. She saw America as Grecian in its democratic ideals but unencumbered by the limiting gender-role conventions of the old world — a new world where “women are assuming their place as thinking beings, not in despite of the men, but chiefly in consequence of their enlarged views and exertions as fathers and legislators.” But the reality of slavery — which had been only a political abstraction at the Scottish library — disquieted her, staggered her with its flagrant betrayal of this new nation’s founding principles.

Upon returning to Europe two years later, Fanny edited her transatlantic letters into what became one of the era’s most popular geopolitical bridges in literature: Views of Society and Manners in America — part travelogue, part memoir, part treatise of political philosophy. Luminaries and decorated revolutionaries on both sides of ocean and channel lavished her with commendations and invitations — Jeremy Bentham, Thomas Paine, Mary Shelley. Among them was the Marquis de Lafayette — a key figure in the French Revolution, who had been so moved by America’s struggle for independence that in the bad English he picked up along the way to Philadelphia, he had offered to serve, and did serve, without pay in the war, then helped draft one of the most influential documents of human rights in collaboration with Thomas Jefferson.

Through the portal of mutual admiration, across the gaping divide of language and nation and age, Fanny Wright and Lafayette became friends, then lovers. She wrote to him:

You marvel sometimes at my independent way of walking through the world just as if nature had made me of your sex instead of poor Eve’s. Trust me, my beloved friend, the mind has no sex but what habit and education give it, and I who was thrown in infancy upon the world like a wreck upon the waters have learned, as well to struggle with the elements as any male child of Adam.

Three years later, Fanny returned to America, this time with Lafayette, accompanying him on his twenty-four-state farewell tour of the country, witnessing his hero’s welcome at every stop, and staying with him at Jefferson’s home at Monticello. He was especially celebrated in New York, where he was invited to ceremoniously lay down the corner-stone of a new free library for youths and mechanics. From there, Fanny Wright parted from Lafayette to travel down the Mississippi River by herself before rejoining him in New Orleans. Along the way, she grew increasingly disquieted to see the country she had admired since girlhood as a pinnacle of democracy prop itself up on the backs of disenfranchised people.

When Lafayette headed back to Europe, she decided to stay and do what she could to help a young nation live up to the ideals that would build not just a new nation but a new world. Within a year — her thirtieth — she had become an American citizen and ridden horseback to Memphis to found an experimental colony on the banks of the Wolf River, devoted to preparing enslaved men and women for their self-earned emancipation and lifelong empowerment, devoted to rectifying the many ways in which America’s institutions fell short of its founding principles. She had identified slavery as the greatest hypocrisy in the American dream of democracy — the greatest fault line along which the new landmass of possibility could collapse into a failed experiment. She had conversed with many a slaveholder and managed to sway them on moral grounds but failed to weaken their attachment to the material profit they derived from slavery. And so she set out to make her counterargument empirically — to prove that an enslaved person could become a free person with no cost to society, and an intellectual equal worthy of citizenship.

In the experimental community, labor was divided among all the members, who were paid for their work, and the work schedules were structured so that portions of each day were devoted to education and the elevation of mind. Raised in the lap of European aristocracy, where most young people never learn to perform basic chores, Fanny labored shoulder to shoulder with her Black colleagues from dawn until nightfall, her Amazonian frame seen chopping wood and rolling logs up the Tennessee hills. Word of the community — which she named Nashoba, the indigenous Chickasaw word for “wolf” — soon spread across the continent and across the Atlantic.

When Fanny, having worked herself into physical collapse, became dangerously ill with malaria, her physician insisted that she take a break from the toil and the humid climate. She returned to England — partly to recover, but partly to recruit new allies for Nashoba. She met with Mary Shelley and left her longing to visit America for the blazing example of what a woman could achieve there, forever remembering “Miss Wright of Nashoba” as “the most wonderful and interesting woman I ever saw.”

But that is all Nashoba remained — a contour of possibility. The experiment struggled to flourish under a trying confluence of chance and callousness. Just as crop failure imperiled the community’s livelihood, it became known that Fanny had fallen in love with one of the Black women in the colony. Her critics squandered no time using the relation- ship against her, hurling incendiary public accusations of “free love” in the backwoods of the South. Fanny responded with dignity and reason, proposing that miscegenation, rather than a condemnable corruption of American society, was a necessary next step toward living up to America’s founding democratic ideals.

America was not ready — her supporters grew too frightened of being tarred with immorality by proxy and withdrew their support.

Having devoted years of her life and more than half of her material assets to the Nashoba experiment, Fanny dismantled the colony. It was decided that New Orleans would be the place for the Black Nashobans to resettle. She traveled with them to see to their safety, arranging for their housing and employment. She then headed to the country’s epicenter of culture to attack the problem at the root.

Fanny had come to see that prejudice — be it racism or sexism or the hostility to reality perpetrated by the religiously devout — was not the cause of the malady but a symptom of the malady: the American failure to rein in emotional quickenings with reason and discern fact from opinion. The remedy for unreason and unreality was science, is always science. Without science — without a framework for apprehending reality unsullied by human subjectivity — there can be no social justice.

In 1829, Fanny Wright moved to New York and purchased a former church in the Bowery. A generation after the French revolutionaries renamed Notre Dame “The Temple of Reason,” she converted the church into what she christened the Hall of Science — a space “uncontaminated and undistracted by religious discussion or opinionative dissensions,” devoted to examining facts rather than teaching opinions and making science the pasture of the many rather than the province of the few, devoted to the conviction that systematic advances in self-knowledge and the knowledge of reality are the only means for humanity to outgrow the childishness of religious superstition. The lectures she delivered there — impassioned, rigorously reasoned, rhetorically muscular speeches about universal access to education, about dismantling the docility of religious dogma, about women’s sexual freedom and reproductive rights, about the emancipation of slaves, about equitable divorce laws, about the necessity of being a reasoning creature and the inalienable right to be a human being among human beings no matter one’s gender, race, class, creed, or station — enveloped the city in a wildfire of scandal and wakefulness. They were the maturation and physical embodiment of the ideas she had first set forth in her Epicurean novel as a teenager, in which she had written:

In our search after truth, we must equally discard presumption and fear. We must come with our eyes and our ears, our hearts and our understandings open; anxious, not to find ourselves right, but to discover what is right; asserting nothing which we cannot prove; believing nothing which we have not examined; and examining all things fearlessly, dispassionately, perseveringly… There is no mystery in nature, but that involved in the very existence of all things.

Half a lifetime later, Fanny affirmed this animating ethos in her welcome speech at the Hall of Science opening ceremony, casting a farseeing eye on the potential — and pitfall — of the human mind and how the general practice of “teaching opinions,” rather than fostering critical thinking, “has tended to affect our species with a mental paralysis.” For two centuries, the antidote she offered would stand shelved and dust-coated in America’s apothecary of opinions:

The more we know, the less, in the popular sense of the word, do we believe. The better we understand the phenomena of nature in the visible and tangible world without us, and in the mental, moral, and physical world within us, the more just and perspicuous must be all our ideas. It is possible, indeed, to subvert, by process of reasoning, many human superstitions, and to confute by the ad absurdum many books, maxims, and statutes honored as wise, or worshipped as divine… to distinguish what in human practice is in violation and what in unison with the laws of our being.

Whitman would echo this countercultural invocation almost verbatim in the preface of Leaves of Grass, seeing himself, seeing poetry, as the great joiner of humanity. Fanny Wright saw science — this poetics of reality — as the mightiest binding agent for human divisiveness. Perched in time between the Transit of Venus expedition, which annealed a shared purpose in humanity for the first time, and Einstein’s insistence upon “the common language of science” amid a war-torn world, she exhorted:

Let us unite on the safe and sure ground of fact and experiment, and we can never err; yet better, we can never differ… The field of nature is before us to explore; the world of the human heart is with us to examine. In these lie for us all that is certain, and all that is important.

Relish more of Fanny Wright’s visionary life, and how it entwines with the lives of other visionaries as varied as Walt Whitman, Mary Shelley, and Frederick Douglass, in Traversal.