1. Ralph Waldo Emerson

2. His Transcendentalist Ideals Non-conformity/Individualism Intuition – “Trust thyself.” Man should be in natural harmony with nature, not separate. Innate goodness – Evil exists only because we allow it to. The “Oversoul” – Conception of God

3. Major Works Nature (1836) “Self-Reliance” (1841)

4. “…the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude” - “Self-Reliance”

5. “In the woods, we return to reason and faith…all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.” - Nature

6. Influences Kantianism – viewed the mind “as an active originator of experience rather than just a passive recipient of perception” Confucianism – “respected Nature as a divinity and believed that it was a power working for righteousness in the universe” Neo-Platonism Romanticism The works of Saint Augustine, Sir Francis Bacon, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

7. Henry David Thoreau

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

11. “Simplify, Simplify”

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

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

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