The Human Spirit and the Natural World

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The Human Spirit and the Natural World
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Ralph Waldo Emerson

• The son of a Unitarian minister
• Lived with his aunt after his father died she
  encouraged his independent thinking
• Became pastor of the Second Church of Boston
• Resigned after 3 years because he was
  dissatisfied with spiritual restrictions in
  Unitarianism
• His controversial ideas attracted many young
  people of the time
• Highly individualistic and resisted conformity
• Writings express individuality and humanitys
  spiritual connection to nature

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Transcendentalists The Seekers of the Nature
of Truth
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Revolutionizing American Literature

• The individual is at the center of the universe
  no institution (religious or political) is as
  powerful as the individual.
• At this time, many religious and scholarly
  institutions downplayed the importance of the
  individual.
• To the Transcendentalist, the mind is the most
  powerful and important force in the universe.
• The human mind is so powerful that it can unlock
  any mystery from Nature to God.

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The Over-Soul

• Read Buddhist and Hindu religious texts to
  examine their own faiths

• Every soul and all of Nature is part of an
  Over-Soul We all come from the mind of God,
  and in death, we all return to it.
• Man, Nature, and the Over-Soul are all equally
  connected.
• Eastern Mysticism Romantic Ideals
  Transcendentalism!!

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The Transcendental Legacy

• Ideas that the government should work to serve
  the people who created it
• Believed in nonviolent, civil disobedience
• Fierce abolitionists
• Considered a ripple in history, it lasted only
  10 years and only produced only two major books
  Emersons Self-Reliance and Thoreaus Walden.
• Followers included Amos Alcott, Margaret Fuller,
  and Henry David Thoreau.

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Emersons Self-Reliance

• Envy is ignorance
• Imitation is suicide
• Linguistic inversions language inverted to
  prove a point
• You must follow your own path not someone
  elses.
• God will not have his work made manifest by
  cowards.

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• Trust thy self.
• Be a leader! Not a follower.
• If you truly want to be free, then you must be a
  nonconformist.
• The only person that you have to answer to in
  reality is yourself.
• A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little
  minds. ?????????????

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• To be great is to be misunderstood.
• DONT BE AFRAID TO BE WRONG!
• Victory belongs to the daring or the bold!

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Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau p. 412

• Civil Disobedience is a work that encourages
  people to resist governmental policies
  nonviolently with which they disagree.
• Nonviolence is the key
• Government is best that governs least
• The army is being used by the government to
  oppress people.

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Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau

• The danger of big government is that the
  government can act before citizens are asked
  whether or not they are in line with the
  particular action.
• Government itself is like a gun that can shoot
  those citizens which disagree with its actions
  this is a perversion of what the founding fathers
  created our government for.

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Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau

• Government does not settle the West, does not
  educate the youth or future of America, and does
  not keep our country free the American people
  do.
• Oftentimes government rewards the criminals of
  society and he uses the world of business in
  America as an example as opposed to those
  citizens who are actually working for the benefit
  of our country.