Ralph Waldo Emerson

In the essay the American Scholar, Emerson portrays the scholar as a person who learns from three main things. These things by which a scholar is educated are by nature, by books (the past) and by action. Emerson uses nature as a comparison to the human mind where he states, “There is never a beginning,…

Transcendentalism, in philosophy and nature, is the belief in a higher reality than found in sense experience or in a higher knowledge than achieved by human reason. Transcendentalism upholds the goodness of humanity, the glories of nature, and the importance of free individual expression. In addition, it is maintained that an awareness of reality, or…