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That which we find within ourselves, which is more than ourselves, and yet the ground of whatever is good and permanent therein, is the substance and life of all other knowledge.
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Aids to Reflection (1825)
1.
"Self-Reliance," Emerson's best-known essay, has dazzled and puzzled generations of readers. The crucial contrast is stark: "The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion." Exalting the intuitive "individual" over the conformist hindrances of "society" Emerson urges us to reject the dead past and "avoid all pledges," observing things again "from the same unaffected, unbiased, unbribable, unaffrighted innocence" of "Infancy," which "conforms to nobody." Though his promotion of radical innocence has opened him to accusations of nai ve enthusiasm, Emerson's concept of the autonomous self simultaneously incorporates an insistence that every person's inmost identity is part of a larger whole, a transpersonal universal-what he would later call the Over-Soul. When he praises moral "enlargements" enabling the self to transcend narrow egoism, exalts Intuition, and concludes "Self-Reliance" with the "triumph of principles," Emerson is echoing his transatlantic mentor, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, on the "enlargement and elevation of the soul above its mere self," sanctioning "the intuition of ultimate PRINCIPLES."
There is more than enough in Emerson's canon, and in "Self-Reliance," to justify the conviction that, on this point, Emerson believed as Coleridge did. But the Coleridgean enlarged self, and the inclusion in the essay of truth, virtue, and a higher morality, is hardly what most moves us while reading "Self-Reliance," caught up as we are in Emerson's rhapsodic celebration of the spontaneous self as the font of originality and power. In the opening paragraph, the reader is urged "To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men,-that is genius." The reciprocity, added immediately, between "inmost" and "outmost," the individual and the "universal sense," tends to be lost in the opening emphasis on "your own thought."
Emerson wants to shake and shock us out of our conformist complacency. The lesson "he would drive home," says Stephen Whicher, is "man's entire independence. The aim of this strain in his thought is not virtue, but freedom and mastery. It is radically anarchic, overflowing all...