Ralph Waldo Emerson

Gebundenes Buch

Essays Series 2

Beschreibung

Purchase one of 1st World Library's Classic Books and help support our free internet library of downloadable eBooks. Visit us online at www.1stWorldLibrary.ORG - Those who are esteemed umpires of taste are often persons who have acquired some knowledge of admired pictures or sculptures, and have an inclination for whatever is elegant; but if you inquire whether they are beautiful souls, and whether their own acts are like fair pictures, you learn that they are selfish and sensual. Their cultivation is local, as if you should rub a log of dry wood in one spot to produce fire, all the rest remaining cold. Their knowledge of the fine arts is some study of rules and particulars, or some limited judgment of color or form, which is exercised for amusement or for show. It is a proof of the shallowness of the doctrine of beauty as it lies in the minds of our amateurs, that men seem to have lost the perception of the instant dependence of form upon soul. There is no doctrine of forms in our philosophy. We were put into our bodies, as fire is put into a pan to be carried about; but there is no accurate adjustment between the spirit and the organ, much less is the latter the germination of the former. So in regard to other forms, the intelle- ctual men do not believe in any essential dependence of the material world on thought and volition. Theologians think it a pretty air-castle to talk of the Spiritual meaning of a ship or a cloud, of a city or a contract, but they prefer to come again to the solid ground of historical evidence; and even the poets are contented with a civil and conformed manner of living, and to write poems from the fancy, at a safe distance from their own experience.

Autor

The American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, abolitionist, and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803 - April 27, 1882), also known by his middle name Waldo, was also the founder of the transcendentalist movement in the middle of the 19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society. Friedrich Nietzsche considered him "the most gifted of the Americans" and Walt Whitman referred to him as his "master". Emerson gradually moved away from the religious and social beliefs of his contemporaries, formulating and expressing the philosophy of transcendentalism in his 1836 essay "Nature". Following this work, he gave a speech entitled "The American Scholar" in 1837, which Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. considered to be America's "intellectual Declaration of Independence."

Produktdetails

• Verlag: 1st World Library - Literary Society
• Seitenzahl: 196
• Erscheinungstermin: 1. Juli 2005
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 222mm x 145mm x 14mm
• Gewicht: 397g
• ISBN-13: 9781421808468
• ISBN-10: 1421808463
• Artikelnr.: 21050621