Emerson And Thoreau Quotes

It has always been my understanding that truth and freedom can only exist in wild places.

I wouldn't know where to start." "He who chooses the beginning of the road chooses the place it leads to." "Thoreau?" "Harry Emerson Fosdick...

Over time, I came to realize that this was the point of reading Emerson and, for that matter, Thoreau and Margaret Fuller and all the rest of them. The reason to read the American Transcendentalists wasn’t to hang on to their every word, but to be inspired by them. This early American philosophy was about inspiration, about moving beyond the inert and deadening ways of the past. *

76. David Hume – Treatise on Human Nature; Essays Moral and Political; An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding 77. Jean-Jacques Rousseau – On the Origin of Inequality; On the Political Economy; Emile – or, On Education, The Social Contract 78. Laurence Sterne – Tristram Shandy; A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy 79. Adam Smith – The Theory of Moral Sentiments; The Wealth of Nations 80. Immanuel Kant – Critique of Pure Reason; Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals; Critique of Practical Reason; The Science of Right; Critique of Judgment; Perpetual Peace 81. Edward Gibbon – The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Autobiography 82. James Boswell – Journal; Life of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D. 83. Antoine Laurent Lavoisier – Traité Élémentaire de Chimie (Elements of Chemistry) 84. Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison – Federalist Papers 85. Jeremy Bentham – Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation; Theory of Fictions 86. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – Faust; Poetry and Truth 87. Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier – Analytical Theory of Heat 88. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel – Phenomenology of Spirit; Philosophy of Right; Lectures on the Philosophy of History 89. William Wordsworth – Poems 90. Samuel Taylor Coleridge – Poems; Biographia Literaria 91. Jane Austen – Pride and Prejudice; Emma 92. Carl von Clausewitz – On War 93. Stendhal – The Red and the Black; The Charterhouse of Parma; On Love 94. Lord Byron – Don Juan 95. Arthur Schopenhauer – Studies in Pessimism 96. Michael Faraday – Chemical History of a Candle; Experimental Researches in Electricity 97. Charles Lyell – Principles of Geology 98. Auguste Comte – The Positive Philosophy 99. Honoré de Balzac – Père Goriot; Eugenie Grandet 100. Ralph Waldo Emerson – Representative Men; Essays; Journal 101. Nathaniel Hawthorne – The Scarlet Letter 102. Alexis de Tocqueville – Democracy in America 103. John Stuart Mill – A System of Logic; On Liberty; Representative Government; Utilitarianism; The Subjection of Women; Autobiography 104. Charles Darwin – The Origin of Species; The Descent of Man; Autobiography 105. Charles Dickens – Pickwick Papers; David Copperfield; Hard Times 106. Claude Bernard – Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine 107. Henry David Thoreau – Civil Disobedience; Walden 108. Karl Marx – Capital; Communist Manifesto 109. George Eliot – Adam Bede; Middlemarch 110. Herman Melville – Moby-Dick; Billy Budd 111. Fyodor Dostoevsky – Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Brothers Karamazov 112. Gustave Flaubert – Madame Bovary; Three Stories 113. Henrik Ibsen – Plays 114. Leo Tolstoy – War and Peace; Anna Karenina; What is Art?; Twenty-Three Tales 115. Mark Twain – The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; The Mysterious Stranger 116. William James – The Principles of Psychology; The Varieties of Religious Experience; Pragmatism; Essays in Radical Empiricism 117. Henry James – The American; The Ambassadors 118. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche – Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Beyond Good and Evil; The Genealogy of Morals;The Will to Power 119. Jules Henri Poincaré – Science and Hypothesis; Science and Method 120. Sigmund Freud – The Interpretation of Dreams; Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis; Civilization and Its Discontents; New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis 121. George Bernard Shaw – Plays and Prefaces

I found when I had finished my new lecture that it was a very good house, only the architect had unfortunately omitted the stairs.

His friend and fellow writer, Ralph Waldo Emerson, agreed, but thought it futile to protest. When Emerson visited Thoreau in jail and asked, “What are you doing in there?” it was reported that Thoreau replied, “What are you doing out there?

our tragedy begins humid. in a humid classroom. with a humid text book. breaking into us. stealing us from ourselves. one poem. at a time. it begins with shakespeare. the hot wash. the cool acid. of dead white men and women. people. each one a storm. crashing. into our young houses. making us islands. easy isolations. until we are so beleaguered and swollen with a definition of poetry that is white skin and not us. that we tuck our scalding. our soreness. behind ourselves and learn poetry. as trauma. as violence. as erasure. another place we do not exist. another form of exile where we should praise. honor. our own starvation. the little bits of langston. phyllis wheatley. and angelou during black history month. are the crumbs. are the minor boats. that give us slight rest. to be waterdrugged into rejecting the nuances of my own bursting extraordinary self. and to have this be called education. to take my name out of my name. out of where my native poetry lives. in me. and replace it with keats. browning. dickson. wolf. joyce. wilde. wolfe. plath. bronte. hemingway. hughes. byron. frost. cummings. kipling. poe. austen. whitman. blake. longfellow. wordsworth. duffy. twain. emerson. yeats. tennyson. auden. thoreau. chaucer. thomas. raliegh. marlowe. burns. shelley. carroll. elliot… (what is the necessity of a black child being this high off of whiteness.) and so. we are here. brown babies. worshipping. feeding. the glutton that is white literature. even after it dies. (years later. the conclusion: shakespeare is relative. white literature is relative. that we are force fed the meat of an animal that our bodies will not recognize. as inherent nutrition. is not relative. is inert.)

Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.

Concord is a classic land. The names of Emerson and Thoreau and Channing and Hawthorne are associated with the fields and forests and lakes and rivers of this township.

For Muir, Emerson and Thoreau were insufficiently wild; they thought from the head down, not feet up.

I'll admit that I was surprised to see two decades of film journalism canonized in the same church as Lincoln, Thoreau, Emerson, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson; that's a fairly loose canon.

We fly to beauty as an asylum from the terrors of finite nature. — Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: The conduct of life. (Ams Pr Inc June 2004) Originally published 1841.

[Thoreau's] famous night in jail took place about halfway through his stay in the cabin on Emerson's woodlot at Walden Pond. His two-year stint in the small cabin he built himself is often portrayed as a monastic retreat from the world of human affairs into the world of nautre, though he went back to town to eat with and talk to friends and family and to pick up money doing odd jobs that didn't fit into Walden's narrative. He went to jail both because the town jailer ran into him while he was getting his shoe mended and because he felt passionately enough about national affairs to refuse to pay his tax. To be in the woods was not to be out of society or politics.

Epictetus has had a long-standing resonance in the United States; his uncompromising moral rigour chimed in well with Protestant Christian beliefs and the ethical individualism that has been a persistent vein in American culture. His admirers ranged from John Harvard and Thomas Jefferson in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau in the nineteenth. More recently, Vice-Admiral James Stockdale wrote movingly of how his study of Epictetus at Stanford University enabled him to survive the psychological pressure of prolonged torture as a prisoner of war in Vietnam between 1965 and 1973. Stockdale’s story formed the basis for a light-hearted treatment of the moral power of Stoicism in Tom Wolfe’s novel A Man in Full (1998).52

if my memory serves me right, here is my genealogical line: Boccaccio, Petronius, Rabelais, Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau, Maeterlinck, Romain Rolland, Plotinus, Heraclitus, Nietzsche, Dostoievsky (and other Russian writers of the Nineteenth Century), the ancient Greek dramatists, theElizabethan dramatists (excluding Shakespeare), Theodore Dreiser, Knut Hamsun, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Elie Faure, Oswald Spengler, Marcel Proust, Van Gogh, the Dadaists and Surrealists, Balzac, Lewis Carroll, Nijinsky, Rimbaud, Blaise Cendrars, Jean Giono, Celine, everything I read on Zen Buddhism, everything I read about China, India, Tibet, Arabia, Africa, and of course the Bible, the men who wrote it and especially the men who made the King James version, for it was the language of the Bible rather than its “message” which I got first and which I will never shake off.

You must get your living by loving.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.

No truth so sublime but it may be trivial to-morrow in the light of new thoughts.

We as we read must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner, must fasten these images to some reality in our secret experience, or we shall learn nothing rightly.

Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost, even John Irving. All the literary kings of New England, who understood the pull of the moon, the lure of the woods, and the solace of solitude.

In 1881, being on a visit to Boston, my wife and I found ourselves in the Parker House with the Ingersoll's, and went over to Charleston to hear him lecture. His subject was 'Some Mistakes of Moses,' and it was a memorable experience. Our lost leaders, -- Emerson, Thoreau, Theodore Parker, -- who had really spoken to disciples rather than to the nation, seemed to have contributed something to form this organ by which their voice could reach the people. Every variety of power was in this orator, -- logic and poetry, humor and imagination, simplicity and dramatic art, moral and boundless sympathy. The wonderful power which Washington's Attorney-general, Edmund Randolph, ascribed to Thomas Paine of insinuating his ideas equally into learned and unlearned had passed from Paine's pen to Ingersoll's tongue. The effect on the people was indescribable. The large theatre was crowded from pit to dome. The people were carried from plaudits of his argument to loud laughter at his humorous sentences, and his flexible voice carried the sympathies of the assembly with it, at times moving them to tears by his pathos. {Conway's thoughts on the great Robert Ingersoll}

Who is he that shall control me? Why may I not speak and write and think with entire freedom? What am I to the universe, or, the universe, what is it to me? Who hath forged the chains of wrong and right, of Opinion and Custom? And must I wear them? I say to the universe, Mighty One! thou art not my mother. Return to chaos if thou wilt. I shall still exist. I live. If I owe my being, it is to a destiny greater than thine. Star by star, world by world, system by system shall be crushed,-but I shall live.

Among those who could read, books were prized possessions. Words on paper were powerful magic, seductive as music, sharp as a knife at times, or gentle as a kiss. Friendships and love affairs blossomed as men and women read to each other in summer meadows and winter kitchens. Pages were ambrosia in their hands. A new novel or collection of poems was something everybody talked about. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shakespeare, Bronte, Austen, Dickens, Keats, Emerson, Cooper, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Twain. To read these authors was to go on a grand adventure and see things as you never had before, see yourself as you never had before.

His books stood neatly along the glassed-in shelves of four vaultlike oak bookcases: the collected Shakespeare, Jefferson’s essays, Thoreau, Paine, Rousseau, Crevecoeur, Locke, Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, Dickens, Tolstoy. Henri Bergson, William James, Darwin, Buffon, Lyell, Charles Lamb, Sir Francis Bacon, Lord Chesterton. Swift, Pope, Defoe, Stevenson, Saint Augustine, Aristotle, Virgil, Plutarch. Plato, Sophocles, Homer, Dryden, Coleridge, Shelley, Shaw. A History of Washington State, A History of the Olympic Peninsula, A History of Island County, Gardens and Gardening, Scientific Agriculture, The Care and Cultivation of Fruit Trees and Ornamental

There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.

He wasn’t just placing himself at risk; he was putting his self at risk, the same self that Thoreau thought was worth defending and protecting, the self whose primacy Emerson had argued for. (They’d read “Civil Disobedience” and “Self-Reliance” in her eighth-grade class.) The young, she claimed, were always being asked to risk who they really were, deep down, before they’d even had the opportunity to become acquainted. In her view it was wrong to ask them to gamble something they didn’t even know they possessed, much less what it might be worth.

Perceptive and valuable personal explorations of time alone include A Book of Silence by Sara Maitland, Party of One by Anneli Rufus, Migrations to Solitude by Sue Halpern, Journal of a Solitude by May Sarton, The Point of Vanishing by Howard Axelrod, Solitude by Robert Kull, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby, A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit, The Story of My Heart by Richard Jefferies, Thoughts in Solitude by Thomas Merton, and the incomparable Walden by Henry David Thoreau. Adventure tales offering superb insight into solitude, both its horror and its beauty, include The Long Way by Bernard Moitessier, The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst by Nicholas Tomalin and Ron Hall, A Voyage for Madmen by Peter Nichols, Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer, and Alone by Richard E. Byrd. Science-focused books that provided me with further understanding of how solitude affects people include Social by Matthew D. Lieberman, Loneliness by John T. Cacioppo and William Patrick, Quiet by Susan Cain, Neurotribes by Steve Silberman, and An Anthropologist on Mars by Oliver Sacks. Also offering astute ideas about aloneness are Cave in the Snow by Vicki Mackenzie, The Life of Saint Anthony by Saint Athanasius, Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke, the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson (especially “Nature” and “Self-Reliance”) and Friedrich Nietzsche (especially “Man Alone with Himself”), the verse of William Wordsworth, and the poems of Han-shan, Shih-te, and Wang Fan-chih. It was essential for me to read two of Knight’s favorite books: Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Very Special People by Frederick Drimmer. This book’s epigraph, attributed to Socrates, comes from the C. D. Yonge translation of Diogenes Laërtius’s third-century A.D. work The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers. The Hermitary website, which offers hundreds of articles on every aspect of hermit life, is an invaluable resource—I spent weeks immersed in the site, though I did not qualify to become a member of the hermit-only chat groups. My longtime researcher, Jeanne Harper, dug up hundreds of reports on hermits and loners throughout history. I was fascinated by the stories of Japanese soldiers who continued fighting World War II for decades on remote Pacific islands, though none seemed to be completely alone for more than a few years at a time. Still, Hiroo Onoda’s No Surrender is a fascinating account.

Every American who checks the spiritual-but-not-religious box or shuffles off to a meditation retreat is squarely in the Transcendentalist lineage. A surprising number of the people I interviewed, when recalling the origins of their interest in Eastern philosophy, named Emerson or Thoreau as a catalyst.

I omitted one of my favorite anecdotes, related by Emerson, that when asked at the table what dish he preferred, Thoreau answered so typically, “The nearest.

In America, where we have incredible abundance, we are becoming increasingly cranky. Our touchiness is fed by an outlook on life that, following Emerson and Thoreau, enshrines the self. When feeling happy is the goal, we always end up testy because life conspires against us.

Henry,” Emerson reportedly asked through the jail cell’s bars, “What are you doing in there?” To which Thoreau replied, “Ralph, what are you doing out there?

Anyway, Thoreau was in jail because he wouldn’t pay a tax to support the Mexican War. He didn’t believe in the war. And Emerson came to jail to see him. ‘Henry,’ he said, ‘why are you here?’ And Thoreau said, ‘Ralph, why aren’t you here?

When Thoreau was arrested for protesting an injustice, Ralph Waldo Emerson had visited him in prison and said, “Henry, what are you doing in there?” And Thoreau had replied, “Ralph, what are you doing out there?

a community riven by factions and sects, the very advances of the age at once opened new prospects for personal fulfillment and weakened the bonds of interdependence still more. These changes would also prepare the social and cultural ground for the individualism of Emerson and Thoreau.

In my last years of high school I read Thomas Payne’s The Crisis and “Self-Reliance” by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walden by Henry David Thoreau, a book that made me want to live in a cabin in the woods. I drew a picture of the cabin I wanted to live in, and drew the floor plan, and made a list of the furniture and dishes and utensils and other things I would need. I don’t remember exactly when, but I started copying out passages that I liked into a tablet. And then I started making what I thought were improvements on the things I copied; I was uneasy about that, not being sure it was right. Also I kept a list of words I especially liked: independent, I remembered, was one, and then tintinbabulation and self-reliant and free and outside. There got to be a good many.

owning states, since he was an ardent Abolitionist). Among those directly inspired by Emerson’s lectures and writings were Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson (the two greatest American poets of the Nineteenth Century), Henry David Thoreau (the greatest literary observer of nature), John Muir (wilderness advocate and “Father of the National Parks”), and William James (pioneering psychologist and founder of Pragmatic philosophy). He also met President Abraham Lincoln and encouraged him to declare an end to slavery, which he did the next year with the Emancipation Proclamation. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s reach was vast, and his influence has continued to reverberate through every succeeding generation.

But philosophy has always been conceived more broadly than this. From the beginning, it has also included a general reflection on life, and this reflection does not have to be terribly complicated or use lots of specialized terminology. This is the sense in which figures like Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, More, Montaigne, Rousseau, Voltaire, Johnson, Emerson, or Thoreau can legitimately be called philosophers

Walden Pond into large chunks of global commodity prompted Henry David Thoreau to quip, “Thus it appears that the sweltering inhabitants of Charleston and New Orleans, of Madras and Bombay and Calcutta, drink at my well.” Frozen New England gave the South one of its symbols of hospitality, ice tea.10

Emerson, Whitman, Thoreau, the trumpeters of the Golden Day, were all possessed of the vision of a spiritually beautiful and materially secure America and, if for no other reason, they are the men to whom democratic America is now turning for the literary manifestation of its own dream. It is of course impossible to return to the past, even to Whitman and Emerson. But they are essential links; from them and from the entire epic through the last two centuries, we can make our own departure. The American scene is still as much of a challenge as it was in 1776. Thoreau’s dream of what it is to live a full life, and Emerson’s vision of a society that shall be oriented completely towards life, must still be our philosophical guides.

Ever since, he has routed his rivals in the competition for readers. Emerson, once regarded as a dangerous infidel, remarked in his journal that “I hate goodies,” but he strikes many readers as something of a goody himself. That other New England worthy, Emerson’s neighbor and friend Henry D. Thoreau, tells us in Walden that he is seized by the desire “to devour” a woodchuck raw, but it seems a good bet that Thoreau cooked his meat thoroughly. These writers are kept alive mainly as classroom assignments; but Melville is different: he is a living presence in the larger culture. Among his contemporaries, he is today by far the largest, having combined Whitman’s New York bluster with Hawthorne’s New England gravity into a sensibility that created, in Moby-Dick, the one nineteenth-century American classic (possibly along with Huckleberry Finn) that remains morally powerful without having come to seem moralistic.

Aristotle, Emerson, Seneca, Gandhi, Thoreau, Dorothea Brande, and many

The second main argument to support the idea that simple living enhances our capacity for pleasure is that it encourages us to attend to and appreciate the inexhaustible wealth of interesting, beautiful, marvelous, and thought-provoking phenomena continually presented to us by the everyday world that is close at hand. As Emerson says: “Things near are not less beautiful and wondrous than things remote. . . . This perception of the worth of the vulgar is fruitful in discoveries.”47 Here, as elsewhere, Emerson elegantly articulates the theory, but it is his friend Thoreau who really puts it into practice. Walden is, among other things, a celebration of the unexotic and a demonstration that the overlooked wonders of the commonplace can be a source of profound pleasure readily available to all. This idea is hardly unique to Emerson and Thoreau, of course, and, like most of the ideas we are considering, it goes back to ancient times. Marcus Aurelius reflects that “anyone with a feeling for nature—a deeper sensitivity—will find it all gives pleasure,” from the jaws of animals to the “distinct beauty of old age in men and women.”48 “Even Nature’s inadvertence has its own charms, its own attractiveness,” he observes, citing as an example the way loaves split open on top when baking.49 With respect to the natural world, celebrating the ordinary has been a staple of literature and art at least since the advent of Romanticism in the late eighteenth century. Wordsworth wrote three separate poems in praise of the lesser celandine, a common wildflower; painters like van Gogh discover whole worlds of beauty and significance in a pair of peasant boots; many of the finest poems crafted by poets like Thomas Hardy, Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, William Carlos Williams, and Seamus Heaney take as their subject the most mundane objects, activities, or events and find in these something worth lingering over and commemorating in verse: a singing thrush, a snowy woods, a fish, some chilled plums, a patch of mint. Of course, artists have also celebrated the extraordinary, the exotic, and the magnificent. Homer gushes over the splendors of Menelaus’s palace; Gauguin left his home country to seek inspiration in the more exotic environment of Tahiti; Handel composed pieces to accompany momentous ceremonial occasions. Yet it is striking that a humble activity like picking blackberries—the subject of well-known poems by, among others, Sylvia Plath, Seamus Heaney, and Richard Wilbur—appears to be more inspirational to modern poets, more charged with interest and significance, than, say, the construction of the world’s tallest building, the Oscar ceremonies, the space program, or the discovery of DNA’s molecular structure. One might even say that it has now become an established function of art to help us discover the remarkable in the commonplace

Although the making of a religion of one’s own can be satisfying, it can progress further and faster with the aid of the spiritual traditions. Your own spiritual path risks being too personal and limited. What resources do you have compared to the traditions that have thought of things you will never consider? They have refined ideas and images and teachings and moral guidelines expressed in elegant and inspiring ways. They have produced spiritual beauty of a kind no single person could ever create. Read Emerson’s journals and you find that he was reading Hafiz for months, and Thoreau’s homespun spiritual insights come wrapped in references from the Western and Eastern traditions.

Tradition as a Resource Although the making of a religion of one’s own can be satisfying, it can progress further and faster with the aid of the spiritual traditions. Your own spiritual path risks being too personal and limited. What resources do you have compared to the traditions that have thought of things you will never consider? They have refined ideas and images and teachings and moral guidelines expressed in elegant and inspiring ways. They have produced spiritual beauty of a kind no single person could ever create. Read Emerson’s journals and you find that he was reading Hafiz for months, and Thoreau’s homespun spiritual insights come wrapped in references from the Western and Eastern traditions.

read that summer as if searching for the right recipe—how to do it. In Bob’s book I found familiar prescriptions: travel, reading, nature, friendship, journal-keeping, letter-writing. Yet all of this was delivered with heightened impact through a method Bob calls “documentary biography,” in words and scenes lifted straight from the past, as if the book were a documentary film.

What all three of these writers and thinkers teach, through their lives as much as their writings, is resilience—that is, how to recover from losses, how to get back up after being knocked down, how to construct prosperity out of the wreckage of disaster.

the material will be familiar to readers and scholars. But the documentary method is intended to facilitate a personal, even a sympathetic, connection—rather than a detached, critical, or judgmental connection—between the reader and the subject.

A distinguishing mark of both American and German transcendentalism is to insist on the connection between the mind and nature. In Emerson’s work, as in that of Thoreau later, the interest in nature is at least partly an interest in what science can teach us about nature. Emerson’s interest in science and his interest in the natural world reinforce each other. He read books of science and scientific biography. He became particularly fascinated with the working of the scientific mind, with the nature of scientific knowledge, and with the strange union of precision and wonder in scientific inquiry.

Stoicism had an enormous impact on Emerson and his circle, probably greater than that of Puritanism, whether direct or indirect. Stoicism, like Puritanism, is more than a matter of character traits; it is a body of thought underlying and giving coherence to certain character traits. It teaches that we must turn to nature as the primary source of moral principles. Stoicism was founded by Zeno, at the end of the fourth century B.C., after Alexander had shattered the Greek polis, which had been the traditional context for moral action. From Zeno to Marcus Aurelius, the Stoics aimed to provide a basis for moral action and a means of personal well-being in the natural endowments of any human being, irrespective of social status. The value of any particular theoretical inquiry depends on whether it has any significance for the moral life. Stoicism is not anti-intellectual. It insists that true morality is impossible without knowledge, especially scientific knowledge. Stoicism endorses Heraclitus’s “All individual things in the world are manifestations of one primary substance” and insists that there is a law that governs the course of nature and should govern human action. Stoicism has been claimed as a Semitic element in Greek thought and as a pagan element in Christianity. In Emerson and Thoreau it takes on its modern form of self-reliance understood not as self-sufficiency but as self-respect.

Pencils were made by Nehemiah Ball and also by John Thoreau, whose second son, David Henry, was a sophomore at Harvard.

Parish affairs and town affairs overlapped substantially. Church and state were not officially separated in Massachusetts until 1834, and as late as that date is, Concord did not comply with the new law until 1856. The church was no longer the only social force in town. When Emerson moved there, Concord had an exclusive group called the Social Circle, limited to twenty-five members, which went back to 1778 (and which still continues), and a library that had been started in 1794 and reorganized in 1821. There was a Female Charitable Society and a Society for the Suppression of Intemperance, both dating from 1814. By Emerson’s time there was a strong antislavery society, in which Cynthia Thoreau, mother of David Henry, was active. The women of Concord sent frequent petitions and memorials to the government in Washington. A lyceum was begun in 1828; it incorporated an earlier debating society. A Mozart society was founded in 1832. By 1835 Concord had sixty-six college graduates, with another four or five currently enrolled as undergraduates. The town itself had six school districts, with separate schools for boys and girls. The schoolhouses, one of which was directly across the street from the Emersons’ new house, were plain and bare, without paint or equipment. Heated by a single stove each, they were always too hot or too cold, and they struggled with an absentee rate that averaged 33 percent. There was a small, precariously maintained private academy for college-bound students.

thought.” Emerson himself gave the most lucid account in an 1842 address: It is well known to most of my audience that the Idealism of the present day acquired the name of transcendental, from the use of that term by Immanuel Kant of Konigsburg, who replied to the skeptical philosophy of Locke which insisted that there was nothing in the intellect which was not previously in the experience of the senses, by showing that there was a very important class of ideas, or imperative forms, which did not come by experience, but through which experience was acquired: that these were intuitions of the mind itself; and he denominated them Transcendental forms. The extraordinary profoundness and precision of that man’s thinking have given vogue to his nomenclature, in Europe and America, to that extent, that whatever belongs to the class of intuitive thought is popularly called at the present day Transcendental.2

The American idealists did not, singly or in a group, make a perceptible contribution to the development of German idealism. They pioneered no advance in metaphysics or epistemology. Insofar as the technical problem of knowledge concerned them, it was as it affected language and the communication of knowledge, and the New England group was a fertile one in ideas about the symbolic aspects of language. But their overriding interest was in the ethical implications of the new subjectivism. In ways that prefigure William James and pragmatism, they asked what the practical implications of the new ideas were for life and writing. Thus the great—and to a large extent still unrecognized—achievement of the transcendentalists as a group, and Parker and Ripley, Fuller and Peabody, Emerson and Thoreau in particular, was in working out the ethical implications of transcendentalism and making them widely accessible and, above all, liveable.3

The death of a dear friend, wife, brother, lover, which seemed nothing but privation, somewhat later assumes the aspect of a guide or genius; for it commonly operates revolutions in our way of life, terminates an epoch of infancy or of youth which was waiting to be closed, breaks up a wonted occupation, or a household, or style of living, and allows the formation of new ones more friendly to the growth of character.

On the twenty-sixth of April, Thoreau solved for the time being his problem of where to live, if not the problem of what to live for, by moving into Emerson’s house. The arrangement turned out to be a good one and it would last for two years, a sojourn almost equal in length to his later stay at Walden Pond. Thoreau

United States and the defense of the American Indians. Thoreau himself became an active and early supporter of John Brown, and even Emerson was far warmer and more active in the antislavery movement than most of those who mocked transcendentalists for having their heads in the clouds. If indeed they did, the clouds were more apt to be storm clouds of revolt than wisps of antisocial daydreaming.4

kind of sketching with words.4 It is not quite accurate to say flatly that Goethe influenced Thoreau; no one more resisted influence in the usual sense. But, like Emerson, Goethe showed Thoreau the path to his own work. Reading Goethe’s account of his Italian trip made Thoreau all the more eager to start on his own travels and to be about his own work.

a paying career out of her writing. She and Emerson talked about many things, including self-reliance, but most concentratedly about German literature. She, as well as Carlyle, was now absorbed in Goethe’s writings and was working on a translation of Eckermann’s great Conversations with Goethe. Emerson was working on his (German, increasingly convinced, as were other friends such as Hedge from Bangor, and Parker and Ripley from Boston, that the most interesting intellectual and artistic currents, the really vital ideas seemed recently to have been coming out of Germany. No one, they thought, would be able to understand the nineteenth century without taking Kant, Herder, Hegel, and Goethe into account. Until one had read them, one’s basic education was not complete.

Emerson’s leading idea about history is that there is one mind, of which history is the record. Another way to put it is to say that human nature—the human mind—is and has been essentially the same in all ages and places. There are variations, of course, sometimes important and even blinding differences. But the similarities between people, even those of widely different times and places, far outweigh, in importance, the differences. If the human mind has always been essentially the same, then it has neither progressed nor declined from age to age. Chronology, therefore, is not what is important in history. All ages are equal; the world exists for the writer today just as much as it did for Homer. This way of looking at history, which sets the present as high as any past era, is a direct response to what W. J. Bate has so brilliantly described as the burden of the past, it is the basis for most of Emerson’s best work from 1835 to 1850, and it quickly became a deep and permanent conviction—and a liberating, enabling conviction for Henry Thoreau. In October of 1837, evidently at Emerson’s urging, he began to keep the journal that would be his own history, and by the third week in November he was telling himself to read Virgil to be reminded of the essential uniformity of human nature, past and present, Roman and American.

Emerson and the circle of liberal intellectuals around him, Kant and Fichte were simply more important than Locke or Hume or the Scottish Common Sense school in philosophy; Goethe and Novalis were more important than Wordsworth or Keats in literature, and the work of Herder, Coleridge (himself strongly influenced by German thought), and Schleiermacher was more important in theology than Jonathan Edwards and the American Puritan tradition. One simply could not expect, in 1837, to understand the advanced intellectual atmosphere of the times without taking up Germany.1

But it is principally in Emerson’s writings that the German concept of self-culture was taken over and reworked into the still-familiar American emphasis on self-reliance and self-improvement. Emerson had, in fact, been writing on the subject since at least 1828, long before his serious encounter with Goethe, and in the titles of some of his early sermons we can see how deeply he was interested in the problem of self-development.

Concord—was to America what Goethe’s Weimar had been to Germany. In each case, a small if not humble society came to have enormous moral and intellectual importance for a country, coming eventually to symbolize the best of the national culture. And both Concord and Weimar owed that central and symbolic importance to their productive interest in what John Stuart Mill called “the culture of the inward man.” Concord was acutely aware that it was following Weimar in this interest; nothing Emerson and his friends took from Goethe’s Germany was more important than the concept of Bildung.

Although not so much influenced, he said, by the German concept of Kultur (public, “official” culture: plays, operas, cultural institutions and events), the idea of individual culture struck a deeply responsive chord in Emerson, and his study of Goethean and Herderian ideas of self-culture led Emerson to his 1837—38 lecture series called “Human Culture.” Testimony to the importance he gave the subject is his catechistic note to himself in 1837: “What is culture? the chief end of man.”6

He knows us literally through thick and thin. He never asks for a sign of love, but can distinguish it by the features which it naturally wears. We never need to stand upon ceremony with him with regard to his visits. Wait not till I invite thee, but observe that I am glad to see thee when thou comest. It would be paying too dear for thy visit to ask for it.