Transcendentalist Vs Ralph Waldo Emerson

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America’s foundation started in Puritans like John Winthrop whose religious ideals lead him to teach that the community would alway be more important that the individual, but in the eighteenth century the people’s point of view had changed dramatically, as seen in writings by Transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson. Some people may read Emerson and think he writes about the ‘common good’ of society, but truly he only looked at the good of the individual. For Emerson there was no common good, because the definition of good, in his eyes, was so different from person to person. In his essay Emerson writes, “No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature.” (Emerson, 137) In this quote he reject religion as well as the laws of good and bad,

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