Thoreau and the Philosophy of Wilderness

Ralph Waldo Emerson's short 1836 essay Nature laid the philosophical groundwork on which Henry David Thoreau would later build, arguing for a correspondence between the natural world and the human spirit and describing, in a much-quoted passage, an experience of self-dissolution in the woods in which he becomes "a transparent eyeball" through which the "currents of the Universal Being circulate." This transcendentalist premise — that nature offers direct, unmediated access to spiritual truth, bypassing both institutional religion and inherited convention — supplied the intellectual framework within which Thoreau, a younger member of Emerson's Concord, Massachusetts circle, would conduct his own more sustained and deliberate experiment in living close to nature.