RalphWaldo

Emerson

His Transcendentalist Ideals• Non-conformity/Individualism • Intuition– “Trust thyself.”

• Man should be in natural harmony with nature, not separate.

• Innate goodness– Evil exists only because we allow it to.

• The “Oversoul”– Conception of God

Major Works

• Nature (1836)

• “Self-Reliance” (1841)

“…the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude”

- “Self-Reliance”

“In the woods, we return to reason and faith…all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the

Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.”

- Nature

Influences• Kantianism– viewed the mind “as an active originator of experience

rather than just a passive recipient of perception”

• Confucianism– “respected Nature as a divinity and believed that it was

a power working for righteousness in the universe”

• Neo-Platonism• Romanticism• The works of Saint Augustine, Sir Francis Bacon,

and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Henry David

Thoreau

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately.”

• “Simplify, Simplify”

• “How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity!”

• “If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”

• “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.”