Ralph Waldo Emerson His Transcendentalist Ideals NonconformityIndividualism Intuition

Ralph Waldo 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

• Kantianism Influences – 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. ”