Emerson:

Transcendentalism, generally: puts forth a view of the dignity and value of the individual. Puts forth a view that feeling and intuition are more valuable than reason and empirical observation.

· Self-Reliance – to bring about a renewal of society – with the appearance of the wise man, the state expires.

· A seer rather than a systematic philosopher.

· People should be creative and honest and not afraid to think today something different from what they thought yesterday simply because the two positions are incompatible with each other.

· God is in every man. We are “part and particle of God.”

“Self-Reliance”

The person with the courage to speak his own mind, to be a creator – this the person we remember, and the person we would aspire to imitate – but not for the sake of imitation, but to be creative, too.

How many times have you had a good idea, but you were afraid that if you verbalized it, others would look at you and wonder what is wrong with you? The problem here is that people think of something that is grand or original, but then they are convinced that their idea isn’t so good after all. But someone of greater spirit thinks the same thing, publishes it, speaks it, and now it is no longer yours.

Society tends to want conformity from people – society wants everything categorized and orderly, and the self-reliant person is a source of fear.

To be a man is to be a non-conformist. “Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.”

Every person thinks for himself – right and wrong are determined by each person – but each person thinks for every other, he thinks as every other. So it is not a matter of relativism – it is form of objectivism far higher than rules and laws – it is a view in which we give to ourselves the moral law – this elevates and celebrates the stature and importance of the individual human being as capable of running his own life, of determining his own nature, and being beholden to no one, of being capable of finding and following whatever truth exists.

Expresses a sort of Nietzschean view of a will to power – even sometimes to play the “Devil’s Advocate” – to inspire, to enrage, to call the real man to the will to power.

Don’t limit yourself to what other people think. Trust yourself. It is easy to follow the crowd, and it is easy to be yourself when you are alone. The great person is the one who can be himself even in the presence of the crowd – actually, even in spite of the crowd.

Don’t limit yourself to “foolish consistency.” The great person recognizes that not only is today different from yesterday, but that truth itself might be different today from yesterday, and if you find that what you said last week or last year is different from what you feel or think today, why should you stop and wonder at what you said or thought before, when you LIVE what you think now?

Don’t worry that you will be misunderstood. All great people are misunderstood. Everyone great has been considered strange or odd. Mill says this, too, in On Liberty where he celebrates the genius, the person who pushes the limits.

“The American Scholar”

The scholar unfortunately sometimes becomes one who thinks rather than Man Thinking – and the worst thing is simply to become someone who simply thinks what others have thought.

Books are useful – they are the springboard of ideas – they are there to be inspiring, but not to be a burden. What happens to the scholar when he sees in books the words of the wise and locks himself into them and fails to use them as they ought to be used – to form and build his own principles – then what we get is not the creative scholar, but a bookworm. Books should be used properly – like friends, they should be kept close by, but used infrequently. When we start to idolize the wisdom of the past, we imprison the human soul and spirit – it is to look backward (THERE IS AN AFFINITY HERE TO JAMES’S VIEW).

Books are for the idle times of a scholar. The word of God is in nature – notice the affinity to Paine here).

Humanity is everything. That is what the scholar must know.