This is the social and ethical imperative of American Transcendentalism. Individual liberation is important—crucial even—but it is only a starting point. Emersonian thought is a form of popular Kantianism, embracing the famous categorical imperative or moral law, which says we should act only upon those rules of conduct which we can will to rule everyone. Emersonian thought also has strong parallels with, and sources in, Hindu thought. Emerson’s idea of compensation, for example, is very close to the Hindu concept of Dharma, meaning “law in the widest sense, the presiding order,…the moral law and religious merit.” Emersonian Transcendentalism is more than a set of beliefs. It is a way of life with social as well as personal implications.

The social logic of American Transcendentalism led Henry Thoreau to support John Brown and the abolition movement. It led Margaret Fuller into the fight for women’s rights, and later into the struggle for Italian independence. It led Sophia Peabody into education reform (the Kindergarten movement) and the defense of the American Indians. Emerson himself at various times actively supported the effort to stop the Cherokee relocation, the antislavery movement, and the women’s movement. “Outside the doors of study,” as Joanne Greenberg says, “an angel waits.”

Like his favorite authors, Plutarch and Montaigne, Emerson is a Stoic; he prizes autonomy and self-sufficiency. The austere notion which in Marcus Aurelius seems defensive (“the human body is not asked to endure anything it has not been prepared to endure”), Emerson reshapes into an enabling affirmation that provides essentially the same protection. “The powers of the soul are commensurate with its needs, all experience to the contrary notwithstanding.” Emerson also follows the Stoic lead in his belief that nature, rather than the state, the gods, or history, is the proper place to turn for answers to the question, How should I lead my life?

Emerson loves the red-brown of fall, the gray New England winter, the gold and green of spring. He takes daily walks to Walden Pond long before Thoreau gets the idea of going there to live. Emerson has both visual acuity and the ability to reflect on that acuity. He notices both how “night hovers all day in the branches of the fir tree,” and how “it is the eye that makes the horizon.” His strongest experiences are out of doors. “Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have been glad to the brink of fear.”

At the heart of Emerson’s thought is his broad inclusive conception of nature. His first book, called simply Nature, is a bold Lucretian attempt to work out, for himself, in under a hundred pages, De Rerum Natura, the way things are. Nature, says Emerson, provides us not only with the material goods of life (the chapter on Commodity), but also with a theory of beauty (“The standard of beauty is the entire circuit of natural forms.”), and a theory of language that amounts to a virtual metaphysic (“It is not words only that are emblematic: it is things which are emblematic.”) Nature further teaches us to accept that there is a world outside our perception of it (his chapter on Discipline), and to acknowledge the role our own mind plays in the construction and deconstruction of everyday reality. “The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is, because man is disunited with himself.” Nature teaches the necessity of both cultivation and self-cultivation. Finally, and most importantly, by calling our attention repeatedly to the processes and patterns and laws that everywhere underlie and explain appearances, nature teaches us to look beyond nature to Nature, and persuades us to call that apparent which we used to call real, and that real, which we used to call visionary.