the mystic must be steadily told,—All that you say is just as true without the tedious use of that symbol as with it. Let us have a little algebra, instead of this trite rhetoric,—universal signs, instead of these village symbols,—and we shall both be gainers. The history of hierarchies seems to show that all religious error consisted in making the symbol too stark and solid, and was at last nothing but an excess of the organ of language.

Emerson. Emancipation is the demand of civilization". I wish to learn this language not that I may know a new grammar but that I may read the great book that is written in that tongue.

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His essays remain among the linchpins of American thinking[citation needed] and his work has greatly influenced the thinkers writers and poets that have followed him. He was seen as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society and he disseminated his thoughts through dozens of publiRalph Waldo Emersond essays and more than 1500 public lectures across the United States. Together with Nature these essays made the decade from the mid-1830s to the mid-1840s Emerson's most fertile period.