Emerson Individualism Quotes

To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.

Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can offer with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation, but of the adopted talent of another, you have only an extemporaneous, half possession.

Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.

God will not have his work made manifest by cowards

Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another you have only an extemporaneous half possession. That which each can do best, none but his Maker can teach him.

A man is known by the books he reads.

God enters by a private door into every individual.

Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore it if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.

Imitation cannot go above its model.

Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind, and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era.

The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it, because it was natural to him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator, something else is natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty, to come short of another man's.

Let me admonish you, first of all, to go alone; to refuse the good models, even those most sacred in the imagination of men, and dare to love God without mediator or veil.

The life of man is a self-evolving circle, which, from a ring imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides outwards to new and larger circles, and that without end. The extent to which this generation of circles, wheel without wheel, will go, depends on the force or truth of the individual soul.

Dark influences from the American past congregate among us still. If we are a democracy, what are we to make of the palpable elements of plutocracy, oligarchy, and mounting theocracy that rule our state? How do we address the self-inflicted catastrophes that devastated our natural environment? So large is our malaise that no single writer can encompass it. We have no Emerson or Whitman among us. An institutionalized counterculture condemns individuality as archaic and depreciates intellectual values, even in the universities. (The Anatomy of Influence)

In good company there is never such discourse between two, across the table, as takes place when you leave them alone. In good company, the individuals merge their egotism into a social soul exactly coextensive with the several consciousnesses there present. No partialities of friend to friend, no fondnesses of brother to sister, of wife to husband, are there pertinent, but quite otherwise. Only he may then speak who can sail on the common thought of the party, and not poorly limited to his own. Now this convention, which good sense demands, destroys the high freedom of great conversation, which requires an absolute running of two souls into one.

On my saying, What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from within? my friend suggested,--"But these impulses may be from below, not from above." I replied, "They do not seem to me to be such; but if I am the Devil's child, I will live then from the Devil." No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is against it. A man is to carry himself in the presence of all opposition as if everything were titular and ephemeral but he. I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions. Every decent and well-spoken individual affects and sways me more than is right. I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways.

These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world. Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint stock company in which the members agree for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It [That is, conformity.] loves not realities and creators, but names and customs. "Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of our own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world. I remember an answer which when quite young I was prompted to make to a valued adviser who was wont to importune me with the dear old doctrines of the church. On my saying, What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from within? my friend suggested--'But these impulses may be from below, not from above.' I replied, 'They do not seem to me to be such; but if I am the devil's child, I will live them from the devil.' No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is against it. A man is to carry himself in the presence of all opposition as if everything were titular and ephemeral but he. I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions. Every decent an well-spoken individual affects and sways me more than is right. I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways.

No member of a crew is praised for the rugged individuality of his rowing.

None believeth in the soul of man, but only in some man or person old and departed. Ah me! no man goeth alone. All men go in flocks to this saint or that poet, avoiding the God who seeth in secret. They cannot see in secret; they love to be blind in public. They think society is wiser than their soul, and know not that one soul, and their soul, is wiser than the whole world.

There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same. He that is once admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has thought, he may think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has befallen any man, he can understand. Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done, for this is the only and sovereign agent.

Man is conscious of a universal soul within or behind his individual life, wherein, as in a firmament, the natures of Justice, Truth, Love, Freedom, arise and shine. This universal soul, he calls Reason: it is not mine, or thine, or his, but we are its; we are its property and men. And the blue sky in which the private earth is buried, the sky with its eternal calm, and full of everlasting orbs, is the type of Reason. That which, intellectually considered, we call Reason, considered in relation to nature, we call Spirit. Spirit is the Creator. Spirit hath life in itself. And man in all ages and countries, embodies it in his language, as the FATHER.

Every experiment, by multitudes or by individuals, that has a sensual and selfish aim, will fail.

In happy hours, nature appears to us one with art; art perfected, -- the work of genius. And the individual, in whom simple tastes and susceptibility to all the great human influences overpower the accidents of a local and special culture, is the best critic of art. Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not.

The purpose of life seems to be to acquaint a man with himself and whatever science or art or course of action he engages in reacts upon and illuminates the recesses of his own mind. Thus friends seem to be only mirrors to draw out and explain to us ourselves; and that which draws us nearer our fellow man, is, that the deep Heart in one, answers the deep Heart in another, -- that we find we have (a common Nature) -- one life which runs through all individuals, and which is indeed Divine.

It is a secret which every intellectual man quickly learns, that, beyond the energy of his possessed and conscious intellect, he is capable of a new energy (as of an intellect doubled on itself), by abandonment to the nature of things; that, beside his privacy of power as an individual man, there is a great public power, on which he can draw, by unlocking, at all risks, his human doors, and suffering the ethereal tides to roll and circulate through him: then is he caught up into the life of the Universe, his speech is thunder, his thought is law, and his words are universally intelligible as the plants and animals.

Each land in the world produces its own men individually bad - and, in time, other bad men who kill them for the greater good.

The eye was placed where one ray should fall, that it might testify of that particular ray.

Man is surprised to find that things near are not less beautiful and wondrous than things remote. The near explains the far. The drop is a small ocean. A man is related to all nature.

It is tragic how few people ever ‘possess their souls’ before they die. ‘Nothing is more rare in any man,’ says Emerson, ‘than an act of his own.’ It is quite true. Most people are other people.

We are taught by great actions that the universe is the property of every individual in it. Every rational creature has all nature for his dowry and estate. It is his, if he will. He may divest himself of it; he may creep into a corner, and abdicate his kingdom, as most men do, but he is entitled to the world by his constitution.

I confess myself utterly at a loss in suggesting particular reforms in our ways of teaching. No discretion that can be lodged with a school-committee, with the overseers or visitors of an academy, of a college, can at all avail to reach these difficulties and perplexities, but they solve themselves when we leave institutions and address individuals.

When Emerson said, “Nothing great was ever created without enthusiasm,” he wasn’t just talking about works of art, he was talking about individual lives. No one creates a great life without reconnecting to the enthusiasm experienced in childhood.

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

Just as religion has fettered the human mind, and as property, or the monopoly of things, has subdued and stifled man’s needs, so has the State enslaved his spirit, dictating every phase of conduct. “All government in essence,” says Emerson, “is tyranny.” It matters not whether it is government by divine right or majority rule. In every instance its aim is the absolute subordination of the individual.

God enters by a private door into every individual.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson

The universal soul is the alone creator of the useful and the beautiful; therefore to make anything useful or beautiful, the individual must be submitted to the universal mind.

The antidote to this abuse of formal government, is, the influence of private character, the growth of the Individual.

One consequence of thoroughgoing evangelical individualism is a tendency to be ahistorical, to not grasp fully how history has an influence on the present.

We are taught by great actions that the universe is the property of every individual in it.

We see insurmountable multitudes obeying, in opposition to their strongest passions, the restraints of a power which they scarcely perceive, and the crimes of a single individual marked and punished at the distance of half the earth.

There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same. [...] Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done, for this is the only and sovereign agent.

Tears and hugs and saying I’m sorry is a good first step, but for me, the question is not one of changing the hearts of individuals as [much as] it is dealing with the systems and the structures that are devastating African-American people.”43

There is a class whose value I should designate as Favorites: such as Froissart's Chronicles; Southey's Chronicle of the Cid ; Cervantes ; Sully's Memoirs ; Rabelais ; Montaigne ; Izaak Walton; Evelyn; Sir Thomas Browne; Aubrey ; Sterne ; Horace Walpole ; Lord Clarendon ; Doctor Johnson ; Burke, shedding floods of light on his times ; Lamb; Landor ; and De Quincey ;- a list, of course, that may easily be swelled, as dependent on individual caprice. Many men are as tender and irritable as lovers in reference to these predilections. Indeed, a man's library is a sort of harem, and I observe that tender readers have a great pudency in showing their books to a stranger.

experience in profounder laws. The whole character and fortune of the individual are affected by the least inequalities in the culture of the understanding; for example, in the perception of differences. Therefore is Space, and therefore Time, that man may know that things are not huddled and lumped, but sundered and individual. A bell and a plough have each their use, and neither can do the office of the other. Water is good to drink, coal to burn, wool to wear; but wool cannot be drunk, nor water spun, nor coal eaten. The wise man shows his wisdom in separation, in gradation, and his scale of creatures and of merits is as wide as nature. The foolish have no range in their

The soul is what knows—and draws us towards—truth, beauty, and goodness. Moreover, for Emerson, each person’s soul is only a part of the great, universal “over-soul.” He describes the soul as a vast ocean, with our individual souls being tiny inlets into the shore. Individuality is an illusion—really, we’re all connected, like fingers extending from one hand.

In a library we are surrounded by many hundreds of dear friends, but they are imprisoned by an enchanter in these paper and leathern boxes; and though they know us, and have been waiting two, ten, or twenty centuries for us, — some of them, — and are eager to give us a sign and unbosom themselves, it is the law of their limbo that they must not speak until spoken to;

Materialists speak of the power of people in masses—nations, societies, classes, institutions. Idealists speak of the power of individuals, measuring people by the strength of spirit they exude. According to idealists, mind is the fundamental reality—the ground of all being—and everything else is its reflection. Everything in nature is an expression of the universal mind.

She had made the observation several years before to a startled Waldo Emerson that “women are Slaves.” Married women in particular—and that meant most American women—were, in countless legal and emotional respects, the property of their husbands. Their liberation, however, was not to be found in a political movement, Margaret believed, but in reform of themselves as individuals,

This is the history of governments, - one man does something which is to bind another. A man who cannot be acquainted with me, taxes me; looking from afar at me, ordains that a part of my labour shall go to this or that whimsical end, not as I, but as he happens to fancy. Behold the consequence. Of all debts, men are least willing to pay the taxes. What a satire is this on government! Everywhere they think they get their money's worth, except for these. Hence, the less government we have, the better, - the fewer laws, and the less confided power. The antidote to this abuse of formal Government, is, the influence of private character, the growth of the Individual; the appearance of the principal to supersede the proxy; the appearance of the wise man, of whom the existing government, is, it must be owned, but a shabby imitation. That which all things tend to educe, which freedom, cultivation, intercourse, revolutions, go to form and deliver, is character; that is the end of nature, to reach unto this coronation of her king. To educate the wise man, the State exists; and with the appearance of the wise man, the State expires. The appearance of character makes the State unnecessary. The wise man is the State. He needs no army, fort, or navy, - he loves men too well; no bribe, or feast, or palace, to draw friends to him; no vantage ground, no favourable circumstance. He needs no library, for he has not done thinking; no church, for he is a prophet; no statute book, for he has the lawgiver; no money, for he is value; no road, for he is at home where he is; no experience, for the life of the creator shoots through him, and looks from his eyes. He has no personal friends, for he who has the spell to draw the prayer and piety of all men unto him, needs not husband and educate a few, to share with him a select and poetic life. His relation to men is angelic; his memory is myrrh to them; his presence, frankincense and flowers.

As the air I breathe is drawn from the great repositories of nature, as the light on my book is yielded by a star a hundred millions of miles distant, as the poise of my body depends on the equilibrium of centrifugal and centripetal forces, so the hours should be instructed by the ages, and the ages explained by the hours. Of the universal mind each individual man is one more incarnation.

Who looks upon a river in a meditative hour, and is not reminded of the flux of all things? Throw a stone into the stream, and the circles that propagate themselves are the beautiful type of all influence. Man is conscious of a universal soul within or behind his individual life, wherein, as in a firmament, the natures of Justice, Truth, Love, Freedom, arise and shine. This universal soul, he calls Reason: it is not mine, or thine, or his, but we are its; we are its property and men. And the blue sky in which the private earth is buried, the sky with its eternal calm, and full of everlasting orbs, is the type of Reason. That which, intellectually considered, we call Reason, considered in relation to nature, we call Spirit. Spirit is the Creator. Spirit hath life in itself. And man in all ages and countries, embodies it in his language, as the FATHER.

La sociedad está en constante conspiración contra la virilidad de cada uno de sus miembros. La sociedad es una compañía de acciones conjuntas, en los que los miembros llegan a acuerdos que aseguren el pan a los accionistas, pero sacrificando la libertad individual de tal accionista. En tales casos, la sociedad exige conformidad. La autoconfianza es todo lo contrario. El conformismo no ama a emprendedores y creadores, sino a nombres y costumbres.

Let us learn the revelation of all nature and thought, that the Highest dwells within us, that the sources of nature are in our own minds. As there is no screen or ceiling between our heads and the infinite heavens, so there is no bar or wall in the soul where we, the effect, cease, and God, the cause, begins. I am constrained every moment to acknowledge a higher origin for events than the will I call mine. There is a deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is accessible to us. Every moment when the individual feels invaded by it is memorable. It comes to the lowly and simple; it comes to whosoever will put off what is foreign and proud; it comes as insight; it comes as serenity and grandeur. The soul's health consists in the fullness of its reception. For ever and ever the influx of this better and more universal self is new and unsearchable. Within us is the soul of the whole, the wise silence, the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal One. When it breaks through our intellect, it is genius; when it breathes through our will, it is virtue; when it flows through our affections, it is love.

We can foresee God in the coarse, and, as it were, distant phenomena of matter; but when we try to define and describe himself, both language and thought desert us, and we are as helpless as fools and savages. That essence refuses to be recorded in propositions, but when man has worshipped him intellectually, the noblest ministry of nature is to stand as the apparition of God. It is the organ through which the universal spirit speaks to the individual, and strives to lead back the individual to it. When we consider Spirit, we see that the views already presented do not include the whole circumference of man. We must add some related thoughts.

As, in useful art, so far as it is useful, the work must be strictly subordinated to the laws of Nature, so as to become a sort of continuation and in no wise a contradiction of Nature; so in art that aims at beauty must the parts be Subordinated to Ideal Nature, and everything individual abstracted, so that it shall be the production of the universal soul. The artist who is to produce a work which is to be admired, not by his friends or his townspeople or his contemporaries but by all men, and which is to be more beautiful to the eye in proportion to its culture, must disindividualize himself, and be a man of no party and no manner and no age, but one through whom the soul of all men circulates as the common air through his lungs.

Ralph Waldo Emerson would later observe that “Souls are not saved in bundles.”16 Johnson fervently believed in each individual’s mysterious complexity and inherent dignity. He was, through it all, a moralist, in the best sense of that term. He believed that most problems are moral problems. “The happiness of society depends on virtue,” he would write. For him, like other humanists of that age, the essential human act is the act of making strenuous moral decisions. He, like other humanists, believed that literature could be a serious force for moral improvement. Literature gives not only new information but new experiences. It can broaden the range of awareness and be an occasion for evaluation. Literature can also instruct through pleasure. Today many writers see literature and art only in aesthetic terms, but Johnson saw them as moral enterprises. He hoped to be counted among those writers who give “ardor to virtue and confidence to truth.” He added, “It is always a writer’s duty to make the world better.” As Fussell puts it, “Johnson, then, conceives of writing as something very like a Christian sacrament, defined in the Anglican catechism as ‘an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace given to us.’ ” Johnson lived in a world of hack writers, but Johnson did not allow himself to write badly—even though he wrote quickly and for money. Instead, he pursued the ideal of absolute literary honesty. “The first step to greatness is to be honest” was one of Johnson’s maxims. He had a low but sympathetic view of human nature. It was said in Greek times that Demosthenes was not a great orator despite his stammer; he was a great orator because he stammered. The deficiency became an incentive to perfect the associated skill. The hero becomes strongest at his weakest point. Johnson was a great moralist because of his deficiencies. He came to understand that he would never defeat them. He came to understand that his story would not be the sort of virtue-conquers-vice story people like to tell. It would be, at best, a virtue-learns-to-live-with-vice story. He wrote that he did not seek cures for his failings, but palliatives. This awareness of permanent struggle made him sympathetic to others’ failings. He was a moralist, but a tenderhearted one.

The whole character and fortune of the individual are affected by the least inequalities in the culture of the understanding; for example, in the perception of differences. Therefore is Space, and therefore Time, that man may know that things are not huddled and lumped, but sundered and individual. A bell and a plough have each their use, and neither can do the office of the other. Water is good to drink, coal to burn, wool to wear; but wool cannot be drunk, nor water spun, nor coal eaten. The wise man shows his wisdom in separation, in gradation, and his scale of creatures and of merits is as wide as nature. The foolish have no range in their scale, but suppose every man is as every other man. What is not good they call the worst, and what is not hateful, they call the best.

Did you ever consider how ridiculous it would be to try to cram on a farm—to forget to plant in the spring, play all summer and then cram in the fall to bring in the harvest? The farm is a natural system. The price must be paid and the process followed. You always reap what you sow; there is no shortcut. This principle is also true, ultimately, in human behavior, in human relationships. They, too, are natural systems based on the law of the harvest. In the short run, in an artificial social system such as school, you may be able to get by if you learn how to manipulate the man-made rules, to “play the game.” In most one-shot or short-lived human interactions, you can use the Personality Ethic to get by and to make favorable impressions through charm and skill and pretending to be interested in other people’s hobbies. You can pick up quick, easy techniques that may work in short-term situations. But secondary traits alone have no permanent worth in long-term relationships. Eventually, if there isn’t deep integrity and fundamental character strength, the challenges of life will cause true motives to surface and human relationship failure will replace short-term success. Many people with secondary greatness—that is, social recognition for their talents—lack primary greatness or goodness in their character. Sooner or later, you’ll see this in every long-term relationship they have, whether it is with a business associate, a spouse, a friend, or a teenage child going through an identity crisis. It is character that communicates most eloquently. As Emerson once put it, “What you are shouts so loudly in my ears I cannot hear what you say.” There are, of course, situations where people have character strength but they lack communication skills, and that undoubtedly affects the quality of relationships as well. But the effects are still secondary. In the last analysis, what we are communicates far more eloquently than anything we say or do. We all know it. There are people we trust absolutely because we know their character. Whether they’re eloquent or not, whether they have the human relations techniques or not, we trust them, and we work successfully with them. In the words of William George Jordan, “Into the hands of every individual is given a marvelous power for good or evil—the silent, unconscious, unseen influence of his life. This is simply the constant radiation of what man really is, not what he pretends to be.

The bitterest tragic element in life to be derived from an intellectual source is the belief in a brute Fate or Destiny; the belief that the order of nature and events is controlled by a law not adapted to man, nor man to that, but which holds on its way to the end, serving him if his wishes chance to lie in the same course, — crushing him if his wishes lie contrary to it, — and heedless whether it serves or crushes him. This is the terrible idea that lies at the foundation of the old Greek tragedy, and makes the; Oedipus and Antigone and Orestes objects of such hopeless commiseration. They must perish, and there is no over-god to stop or to mollify this hideous enginery that grinds and thunders, and takes them up into its terrific system. (...) But this terror of contravening an unascertained and unascertainable will, cannot coexist with reflection: it disappears with civilization, and can no more be reproduced than the fear of ghosts after childhood. It is discriminated from the doctrine of Philosophical Necessity herein: that the last is an Optimism, and therefore the suffering individual finds his good consulted in the good of all, of which he is a part. But in Destiny, it is not the good of the whole or the best will that is enacted, but only one particular will. Destiny properly is not a will at all, but an immense whim; and this is the only ground of terror and despair in the rational mind, and of tragedy in literature. Hence the antique tragedy, which was founded on this faith, can never be reproduced.

What is it, exactly, that draws me to certain people like Wright, Dylan, Picasso, Emerson, Fromm, Frankl, Steiner, etc.? They seem to move in a channel flowing from their essence; leading them directly to what they think, do, and create. This is it!

The development of symbolic methods of storage immensely increased the capacity of the city as a container: it not merely held together a larger body of people and institutions than any other kind of community, but it maintained and transmitted a larger portion of their lives than individual human memories could transmit by word of mouth. This condensation and storage, for the purpose of enlarging the boundaries of the community in time and space, is one of the singular functions performed by the city; and the degree to which it is performed partly establishes the rank and value of the city; for other municipal functions, however essential, are mainly accessory and preparatory. The city, as Emerson well observed, "lives by remembering.

From the Daily Herald, November 1, 1981: Provo police have asked school officials to warn children not to accept candy or stamps from strangers. The stamps could contain glue laced with LSD. “Timpanogos, Franklin and Grandview elementary schools have reported seeing a male dressed as a clown in the vicinity of the schools,” says Provo Police Chief Swen Nielsen. “At Timpanogos, children said a clown was giving away candy and stamps.” Nielsen says in all instances, Provo police canvassed neighborhoods but could not find evidence that the clown was the same individual or if LSD-laced stamps were involved. “We’ve gotten varying descriptions of the clown,” adds Nielsen. “There’s no doubt a clown has been in the area of elementary schools. But whether it is the same clown, or if he is doing anything illegal, is still a question.

Of course, most of us, in the service of sanity, don’t fixate on the end. We go about the world focused on worldly concerns. We accept the inevitable and direct our energies to other things. Yet the recognition that our time is finite is always with us, helping to shape the choices we make, the challenges we accept, the paths we follow. As cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker maintained, we are under a constant existential tension, pulled toward the sky by a consciousness that can soar to the heights of Shakespeare, Beethoven, and Einstein but tethered to earth by a physical form that will decay to dust. “Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever.”2 According to Becker, we are impelled by such awareness to deny death the capacity to erase us. Some soothe the existential yearning through commitment to family, a team, a movement, a religion, a nation—constructs that will outlast the individual’s allotted time on earth. Others leave behind creative expressions, artifacts that extend the duration of their presence symbolically. “We fly to Beauty,” said Emerson, “as an asylum from the terrors of finite nature.”3 Others still seek to vanquish death by winning or conquering, as if stature, power, and wealth command an immunity unavailable to the common mortal. Across the millennia, one consequence has been a widespread fascination with all things, real or imagined, that touch on the timeless. From prophesies of an afterlife, to teachings of reincarnation, to entreaties of the windswept mandala, we have developed strategies to contend with knowledge of our impermanence and, often with hope, sometimes with resignation, to gesture toward eternity. What’s new in our age is the remarkable power of science to tell a lucid story not only of the past, back to the big bang, but also of the future. Eternity itself may forever lie beyond the reach of our equations, but our analyses have already revealed that the universe we have come to know is transitory. From planets to stars, solar systems to galaxies, black holes to swirling nebulae, nothing is everlasting. Indeed, as far as we can tell, not only is each individual life finite, but so too is life itself. Planet earth, which Carl Sagan described as a “mote of dust suspended on a sunbeam,” is an evanescent bloom in an exquisite cosmos that will ultimately be barren. Motes of dust, nearby or distant, dance on sunbeams for merely a moment. Still, here on earth we have punctuated our moment with astonishing feats of insight, creativity, and ingenuity as each generation has built on the achievements of those who have gone before, seeking clarity on how it all came to be, pursuing coherence in where it is all going, and longing for an answer to why it all matters. Such is the story of this book.

The soul cannot be intellectually grasped or scientifically examined, Emerson insisted; it can only be felt, loved, and enjoyed. Through our individual souls, we have direct access to the universal soul—God.

But the real strength and energy of the Quakers comes from neither prohibitions nor theology but from “the centering of life on the realities of inward intercourse with God.” Quakerism is supremely committed to the individual’s own experience. “No other religious community so deliberately and emphatically bases its individual and corporate life upon the supreme fact of the soul’s immediate contact with God,” says a modern Quaker historian.

Even Margaret’s beloved Wordsworth fell short on the issue; for him, she quoted ruefully, the ideal woman should not be “Too bright and good / For Human nature’s daily food.” Margaret drew on examples from ancient myth, wherein “the idea of female perfection is as fully presented as that of male,” to show that women had been accorded greater respect in earlier times. In Egyptian mythology, “Isis is even more powerful than Osiris,” and “the Hindoo goddesses reign on the highest peaks of sanctification.” In Greek myth, “not only Beauty, Health and the Soul are represented under feminine attributes, but the Muses, the inspirers of all genius,” and “Wisdom itself . . . are feminine.” Margaret’s dream was to bring the dispirited “individual man” together with the disempowered woman—unite the two sides of the Great Hall’s classroom—and create, by merging the best attributes of each, “fully” perfected souls. Then, a nation of men and women will for the first time exist, she might have said, amending Waldo Emerson’s visionary claim.

statement of the central truth of religious—not secular—humanism, the idea that is also the foundation of democratic individualism: “The highest revelation is that God is in every man.” This is not anthropomorphism but its antithesis, theomorphism.3

These people came from a variety of backgrounds and educations, but they came together now because they were in general if not complete agreement on a number of points. They were dissatisfied, individually and as a group, with the present state of philosophy, religion, and literature in America. They looked for hope to Europe, especially to Germany, to Kant in philosophy, to Schleiermacher in religion, and to Goethe in literature. They were mostly anti-Lockean; most believed in intuition. They were romanticists, not classicists or philosophes. They were radicals or liberals rather than conservatives in politics and almost all followed the logic of their belief in freedom and autonomy into one or another arena of social action.

of the individual—of all the individuals—is the basic purpose and ultimate justification for all social organizations and second that autonomous individuals cannot exist apart from others. In the transcendentalist vocabulary “association” is just as charged a word as “self.” Transcendentalism believes that the purpose of education is to facilitate the self-development of each individual. The political trajectory of transcendentalism begins in philosophical freedom and ends in democratic individualism.12

There is one mind common to all individual men.” This is Platonism; Emerson means we all have reason in common. Communication is possible because all human minds are, in important respects, similarly constituted. The second of Emerson’s Goose Pond principles is the Stoic ground law: “There is a relation between man and nature so that whatever is in matter is in mind.” This is the basis for language and for what the writer does. The third point is that expression is as basic a human drive as sex: “It is a necessity of the human nature that it should express itself outwardly and embody its thought.” “As all creatures are allured to reproduce themselves, so must the thought be imparted in speech.” He adds, as a corollary, “Action is as great a pleasure and cannot be foreborne.” Point four says, “It is the constant endeavor of the mind to idealize the actual, to accommodate the shows of things to the desires of the mind.” He gives architecture and art as examples.6 Point five is the theory of classification: “It is the constant tendency of the mind to unify all it beholds, or to reduce the remotest facts to a single law.” Point six extends point five and is a specific application of point two: “There is a parallel tendency/corresponding unity in nature which makes this [unification] just, as in the composition of a compound shell or leaf or animal from few elements.” Point seven describes, in Baconian fashion, an idol of the mind, the tendency to “separate particulars” and magnify them, from which come “all false views and particular sects.” Emerson’s last point is the intellectual parallax or corrective postulate for the previous point: “The remedy for all abuses, all error in thought or practice, is the conviction that underneath all appearances and causing all appearances are certain eternal laws which we call the Nature of Things.

Emerson says, "This Energy" (or consciousness of God in the soul) " does not descend into individual life on any other condition than entire possession. It comes to the lowly and simple; it comes to whomsoever will put off what is foreign and proud; it comes as insight; it comes as serenity and grandeur.

PIE God enters by a private door, into every individual. —Ralph Waldo Emerson

The American Scholar,” as Emerson titled the speech for a press run of five hundred copies that swiftly sold out, pointedly omitted any acknowledgment of Harvard’s role in educating the rising generation. Rather it was an impassioned appeal to the individual man—any man—to “plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide.” The speech was a hymn to self-education, to the scholar as a man of action, and an implicit denunciation of life within the academy. Oliver Wendell Holmes would later call it “our intellectual Declaration of Independence.” “I

Every spirit builds itself a house,” wrote Emerson in the crescendo that ends Nature, the book that sprouted from his walk in the Jardin des Plantes, and beyond its house a world; and beyond its world, a heaven. Know then, that the world exists for you. For you is the phenomenon perfect. What we are, that only can we see. All that Adam had, all that Caesar could, you have and can do. Adam called his house, heaven and earth; Caesar called his house, Rome; you perhaps call yours, a cobbler’s trade; a hundred acres of ploughed land; or a scholar’s garret. Yet line for line and point for point, your dominion is as great as theirs, though without fine names. Build, therefore, your own world.22 This was the Emersonian stone that rippled outward into the stream of collective consciousness. Each of us is a creator of worlds, each of us individually and collectively has the power to reflect back a vision of truth, justice, beauty, love, and freedom. We should not fear what others think of us. Skip your stone across the generations of time. Each of us is blessed.

Third places remain upbeat because of the limited way in which the participants are related. Most of the regulars in a third place have a unique and special status with regard to one another. It is special in that such people have neither the blandness of strangers nor that other kind of blandness, which takes zest out of relationships between even the most favorably matched people when too much time is spent together, when too much is known, too many problems are shared, and too much is taken for granted. Many among the regulars of a third place are like Emerson's "commended stranger" who represents humanity anew, who offers a new mirror in which to view ourselves, and who thus breathes life into our conversation. In the presence of the commended stranger, wrote Emerson, "We talk better than we are wont. We have the nimblest fancy, a richer memory, our dumb devil has taken leave for a time. For long hours, we can continue a series of sincere, graceful, rich communications, drawn from the oldest, secretest experience, so that those who sit by, of our kinsfolk, and acquaintance, shall feel a lively surprise at our unusual power.: The magic of commended strangers fades as one comes to know them better. They are fallible. They have problems and weaknesses like everyone else and, as their luster fades, so does their ability to inspire our wit, memory, and imagination. The third place, however, retards that fading process, and it does so by keeping the lives of most of its regulars disentangled. One individual may enjoy the company of others at a mutual haunt for years without ever having seen their spouses; never having visited their homes or the places where they work; never having seen them against the duller backdrop of their existence on the "outside." Many a third place regular represents conversationally and socially what the mistress represents sexually. Much of the lure and continuing allure of the mistress rests in the fact that only pleasure is involved. There is no rising from bed to face the myriad problems that husband and wife must share and that contaminates their lives and their regard for one another. Third places surely contain many of these "mistresses of conversation," people who meet one another only to share good times and scintillating activities and with whom good times and scintillation thus come to be associated. Out of tacit agreement not to share too much, the excitement attaching the commended stranger is preserved among third place regulars. What, after all, are such incidentals as home and family and job when the nature of life itself, the course of the world in modern times, or the booted ball that cost a victory in last night's game are on the agenda?

The less government we have the better—the fewer laws, and the less confided power. The antidote to this abuse of formal government is the influence of private character, the growth of the individual. . . . —Politics Ralph Waldo Emerson C.E. 1844

It was Waldo Emerson who would stay, bound to his “imperfect” marriage “because he dont believe in any thing better,” and unable to forget Margaret, who, he would realize with increasing gratitude in later years, with her “radiant genius & fiery heart was perhaps the real centre that drew so many & so various individuals to a seeming union.

individualism does not mean isolation or self-sufficiency. This is not a paradox, for it is only the strong individual who can frankly concede the sometimes surprising extent of his own dependence.8

as their obvious interest in Concord, in nature, in walks, and in Walden Pond. They were both modern Stoics, interested in self-rule and autonomy. Both believed in the stability of human nature, in the essential equivalence of all times and places, and in Kantian rather than in Lockean theories of mind. Both believed in the process of individuation and in the authority of individual conscience.

Emerson’s master metaphor now is metamorphosis, a metaphor that for the next ten years will increasingly dominate his thinking and writing. Now in his journal he writes boldly, “Metamorphosis is nature,” and he balances this bold statement by saying that while life is “a flux of moods,” there is “that which changes not, and which ranks all sensations and states of mind.”6 The other idea Emerson took from Plotinus, an idea that blazed up in Emerson like fire in a dry forest, is Plotinus’s conception of the final stage in the developing self-consciousness of the individual soul. This last stage is a mystical union of the self with the One “in an ecstasy characterized by the absence of all duality.

the all-in-each idea as two overlapping but still discrete tendencies. “Self-Reliance” affirms the tendency toward individuation. “The Oversoul” affirms the existence of “that great nature in which we rest.” This

As the Jardin des Plantes had shown him his way fifteen years earlier, so the revolutions of 1848 now showed him that his way had nothing to do with current events. “The world is always childish,” he wrote in his journal, “and with each gewgaw of a revolution or a new constitution that it finds, thinks it shall never cry any more.” What Emerson had to say was true only at the level of the individual, but he insisted that that level was the only one that mattered in the long run. “It is always becoming evident that the permanent good is for the soul only and cannot be retained in any society or system.

Self-Reliance” is Emerson’s essay on the unalienated human being. The essay is not a blueprint for selfishness or withdrawal; it is not anti-community. It recommends self-reliance as a starting point—indeed the starting point—not as a goal. When a better society evolves, it will not, in Emerson’s view, come about through a suppression of the process of individuation but through a voluntary association of fulfilled individuals.

Emerson’s sympathies were with the existing government on this occasion, that is, with the bourgeois government that had replaced Louis Philippe in February and in which the poet Lamartine held a major position. “I am heartily glad of the shopkeepers’ victory,” Emerson wrote on May 17. He understood that “this revolution has a feature new to history, that of socialism,” but he had little faith in socialism by now. “For the matter of socialism,” he wrote, “there are no oracles. The oracle is dumb. When we would pronounce anything truly of man, we retreat instantly on the individual.”13

The lectures return again and again to two main points. One is a radical dechronologized conception of history; the other is an insistence on the subordination of the individual to the whole. Emerson begins by deprecating the “battles and leaders” view of history, the “barren and wearisome chronicle” in which “the unity of the story is secured by concentrating attention to the man or woman on the throne.” Emerson now insists that human history can be understood only as the expression of that human nature that is common to all men and women. There is one mind, in which we all share, and “of this one mind, History is the record.

Finally, in the “Ethics” lecture Emerson reached the formulation of this relationship between the individual and the collective mind which was to remain with him permanently. He called it “self-trust” and described it as “the one maxim which makes the whole ethics of the mind.” He defined self-trust now—with a balance he was never later to improve on—as “not a faith in a man’s own whim or conceit as if he were quite severed from all other beings and acted on his own private account, but a perception that the mind common to the universe is disclosed to the individual through his own nature

Emerson put the development of the individual, rather than service to society, at the heart of his educational vision.

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.

was deeply congenial to the man who was already brooding on the idea that all things have their compensations.3 Cousin was on a path parallel to Emerson’s in several respects. Lecture 10 of the Cours is an extensive treatment of great men, understood by Cousin as by Emerson, not as individuals but as representative or symbolic figures. Great persons are “representations of nations, epochs, of humanity, of nature, and of universal order.” Cousin was farther down this road than Emerson at the moment, but Emerson would return to this theme in the 1840s.4 From Emerson’s excited reading of

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.

Alcott believed—and lived as though he believed—that “God is present in his whole nature and being in every part of every particle of the universe, including the souls of each individual man.” His school was designed in every detail to lead out of each pupil what Alcott knew was already there.3

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

In his essay “Self-Reliance,” Ralph Waldo Emerson famously wrote, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”; in the same passage, he worried that individuals were getting stuck in “a reverence for our past act or word because the eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loath to disappoint them.” Data. Computing. That was written in 1841,

Much research points to the race problem as rooted in intergroup conflict over resources and ways of life, the institutionalization of race-based practices, inequality and stratification, and the defense of group position.1 These are not the views of white evangelicals, however. For them, the race problem is one or more of three main types: (1) prejudiced individuals, resulting in bad relationships and sin, (2) other groups—usually African Americans—trying to make race problems a group issue when there is nothing more than individual problems, and (3) a fabrication of the self-interested—again often African Americans, but also the media, the government, or liberals.

In early Leninist terminology, the geographical opposition of "city" (proletariat) versus "countryside" (peasant) was often expressed in terms of "consciousness" versus "spontaneity." Consciousness in this Marxist sense meant not individual creativity, inspiration, or (as it often did for Dostoevsky) the freedom of personal will and the responsibility of choice, but was applied more narrowly, to mean an awareness of the dialectical shape of history and the inevitable victory of the proletariat. Opposed to this party-minded awareness was "spontaneity": people reacting anarchically, instinctively, out of their immediate anger or blind need, peasants burning manor houses ... Many believed that a symbiotic relation between these two forces was possible, at the level of the individual body as well as the body politic.

Americans prize individualism—an outlook that stresses the moral worth and capabilities of each person, as opposed to systems that put faith in centralized, socialistic control. Ralph Waldo Emerson summed up this way of thinking in his essay Self-Reliance: 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.