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Ralph Waldo Emerson

Serving New Thought is pleased to present

Ralph Waldo Emerson's

Nature, Addresses, and Lectures

Book page numbers, along with the number to the left of the .htm extension match the page numbers of the original books to ensure easy use in citations for research papers and books


Introduction - Nature - Commodity - Beauty - Language - Discipline - Idealism - Spirit - Prospects - The American Scholar - Divinity College, Cambridge - Literary Ethics - The Method of Nature - Man the Reformer - Lecture on the Times - The Transcendentalist - The Young American - Contents -


so fair, and meditates to cast himself into the arms of that society and manner of life which he had newly abandoned with so much pride and hope. Is it that he attached the value of virtue to some particular practices, as the denial of certain appetites in certain specified indulgences, and afterward found himself still as wicked and as far from happiness in that abstinence as he had been in the abuse? But the soul can be appeased not by a deed but by a tendency. It is in a hope that she feels her wings. You shall love rectitude, and not the disuse of money or the avoidance of trade; an unimpeded mind, and not a monkish diet; sympathy and usefulness, and not hoeing or coopering.. Tell me not how great your project is, the civil liberation of the world, its conversion into a Christian church, the establishment of public education, cleaner diet, a new division of labor and of land, laws of love for laws of property; --- I say to you plainly there is no end to which your practical faculty can aim, so sacred or so large, that, if pursued for itself, will not at last become carrion and an offence to the nostril. The imaginative faculty of the soul must be fed with objects immense and eternal. Your end should be one inapprehensible to the senses; then will it be a god always approached, never touched; always giving health. A man adorns himself with prayer and love, as an

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