Emily Dickinson grew up in the middle of an ideological war. At stake was what it means to be human. Also at stake was an idea of immutable truth upon which the structures of society ought to be built. The war was for the hearts and minds of the educated West, on behalf of God, morality, and truth according to one side, and against superstition and dogmatism according to the other. If one side might call the choice that between faith and doubt, the other side might characterize the choice as between certitude and humility. The question, in a nutshell, was whether humans are able to know God, each other, and the world (and by extension our moral and religious duties) directly by intuition and reasoning, or whether our knowledge is imperfect, accidental, customary, and even fictive, a product of unconscious perceptual processing, the making of connections (called “associations”) through the mass of impressions coming into consciousness every millisecond.