Nature, Addresses, and Lectures by Ralph Waldo Emerson - Read the Complete Text for free at NewThoughtLibrary.com

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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 -

' Knives and muskets, if we meet you in the act; imprisonment, if we find you afterward.
'And by what authority, kind gentlemen?
'By our law.'
And your law, --- is it just?'
' As just for you as it was for us. We wrought for others under this law, and got our lands so.
'I repeat the question, Is your law just?
' Not quite just, but necessary. Moreover, it is juster now than it was when we were born; we have made it milder and more equal.'
' I will none of your law,' returns the youth; 'it encumbers me. I cannot understand, or so much as spare time to read that needless library of your laws. Nature has sufficiently provided me with rewards and sharp penalties, to bind me not to transgress. Like the Persian noble of old, I ask " that I may neither command nor obey." I do not wish to enter into your complex social system. I shall serve those whom I can, and they who can will serve me. I shall seek those whom I love, and slum those whom I love not, and what more can all your laws render me? '

With equal earnestness and good faith, replies to this plaintiff an upholder of the establishment a man of many virtues:

'Your opposition is feather-brained and overfine. Young man, I have no skill to talk with

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