Essays, First Series

Pages: 135

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Read by Linda Leu, David Barnes, Geoff Dugwyler and others · 8 h 28 min · 12 parts

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Essay 01 - History
56:20
Essay 02 - Self-Reliance
67:12
Essay 03 - Compensation
56:24
Essay 04 - Spiritual Laws
51:27
Essay 05 - Love
27:15
Essay 06 - Friendship
43:08
Essay 07 - Prudence
32:10
Essay 08 - Heroism
31:56
Essay 09 - The Over-Soul
50:34
Essay 10 - Circles
35:12
Essay 11 - Intellect
31:06
Essay 12 - Art
25:49

Essays, First Series (1841) is a public domain work.

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About this book

For Ralph Waldo Emerson, the past becomes intelligible when people recognize its events in their own experience. The opening essay of this 1841 collection argues that historical knowledge depends on an active, personal engagement with earlier lives and ideas. Ancient civilizations, political movements and literature become occasions for examining the powers of the individual mind. The contents extend that inquiry into self-reliance, friendship, prudence, spiritual laws, intellect and art.

In the passage on love, affection for another person develops into a wider recognition of beauty and spiritual connection. Emerson questions the assumption that marriage should limit a woman's ambitions to managing a household. His philosophical prose draws on earlier writers and uses natural images, including expanding circles in water, to explain changes in thought and feeling. Readers interested in personal judgment and moral life can follow these arguments essay by essay, considering how everyday experience shapes an understanding of the world.

About the author

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson, who went by his middle name Waldo, was an American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, minister, abolitionist, and poet who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and critical thinking, as well as a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society and conformity.