TOCQUEVILLE Individualism is a calm and considered feeling which disposes each citizen to isolate himself from the mass

of his fellows and withdraw into the circle of his family and friends; with this little society formed to his taste, he gladly leaves the greater society to look after himself.

It appears that motion, poetry, physical and intellectual science, and religion, all tend to affect our convictions of the reality of the external world. But I own there is something ungrateful in expanding too curiously the particulars of the general proposition, that all culture tends to imbue us with idealism.

Idealism: presuposses a difference between appearance and reality (puritans deeply suspicious of reality and the world-fall of the humankind, corrupted world; interested indthe distiction between the phenoumenal and the noumenal) What is real, according to Emerson, is the noumenal, but only through the human mind. The world is always is phenomenal, and virtue subordinates it to the mind.

Spirit: Idealism is trying to get us beyond the limitations of materialist philosophy; but according to Emerson there are limitations to idealist philosophy as well. This is what is going to make him move to the realm of the spirit (related to the idea of God; a kind of reconversiont ot the idea of providence.) Human nature language of possibility.

Emerson style of writing.

But why should you keep your head over your shoulder? Why drag about this corpse of your memory, lest you contradict somewhat you have stated in this or that public place? Suppose you should contradict yourself; what then? It seems to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on your memory alone, scarcely even in acts of pure memory, but to bring the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed present, and live ever in a new day. In your metaphysics you have denied personality to the Deity: yet when the devout motions of the soul come, yield to them heart and life, though they should clothe God with shape and color. Leave your theory, as Joseph his coat in the hand of the harlot, and flee. A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. "Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood." Is it so bad, then, to

be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood. Take a kind of liability and take it to his advantage. CONTRADICTION BASIC TO ACHIEVE SPIRITUAL AWAKEMENT; to be self-reliant. Cosmopolitan thinker: fill gaps, make the things have a connection with another.

Interest in plotinus (platnic ideas, idealism) original relation to the universe (inside of each of us) also: we are bound to what other people said, we havent tried to experiment with the world by ourselves; by means of our own self-reliance. DEISM we deduce existence of God by looking at manifestations of what has to be intention in the world. Experience: theory of nature (related to Gods creation)

Your condition is contingent. He lais on an individualistic ontollogical concept of epistemology. He wants to get away from the idea of BELATEDNESS; away from those conditionings on individuals imposed on them.

NATURE BECOMES THE NATURE BECOMES THE GROUNDS OF REVELATION.Nature becomes our conduit to the self. By studying the self we study the divine.