Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American writer, lecturer, philosopher and leader of the Transcendentalist movement of self-reliance of the mid- 19th century, whose number included Henry David Thoreau, Bronson Alcott, Louisa May Alcott, Walt Whitman and Margaret Fuller. Praising the relationship between man and nature, Ralph Emerson asserted that this was important to man’s essential soul, and that in pursuing the path of virtuous individualism, he paved the way to infinity. He also outraged the Christian community with his solid belief in the goodness of the Christ figure, but not the absolute divinity. In his view, everything and everyone is connected to God, therefore, all is divine. During the Civil War, Emerson was an active abolitionist, often harboring its proponents in his home in Concord, Massachusetts. Admiration of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s character and the unencumbered nature of his philosophy of the human condition are almost as widespread today as they were in his times. In his own words, he embraces a philosophy that resonates as strongly with us today as it did with his contemporaries: “I dare attempt to lay out my own road/That which myself delights in shall be Good/That which I do not want – indifferent,/That which I hate is Bad.â€
