Manners

By Ralph Waldo Emerson

In Manners, Ralph Waldo Emerson expounds on the meaning of customs and politeness in civil society. He argues that the purpose of manners is more to facilitate the creation and proper working of society, and not to establish hierarchies.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dreamscape Media
• Release date: Aug 8, 2017
• ISBN: 9781974995103

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson was the leading proponent of the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-nineteenth century. He was ordained as a Unitarian minister at Harvard Divinity School but served for only three years before developing his own spiritual philosophy based on individualism and intuition. His essay Nature is arguably his best-known work and was both groundbreaking and highly controversial when it was first published. Emerson also wrote poetry and lectured widely across the US.

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MANNERS

By

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

This edition published by Dreamscape Media LLC, 2017

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About Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803 – April 27, 1882) was an American essayist, lecturer, and poet who led the transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. 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 published essays and more than 1,500 public lectures across the United States.

Emerson gradually moved away from the religious and social beliefs of his contemporaries, formulating and expressing the philosophy of transcendentalism in his 1836 essay Nature. Following this work, he gave a speech entitled The American Scholar in 1837, which Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. considered to be America's intellectual Declaration of Independence.

Emerson wrote most of his important essays as lectures first and then revised them for print. His first two collections of essays, Essays: First Series (1841) and Essays: Second Series (1844), represent the core of his thinking. They include the well-known essays Self-Reliance, The Over-Soul, Circles, The Poet and Experience. Together with Nature, these essays made the decade from the mid-1830s to the mid-1840s Emerson's most fertile period.

Emerson wrote on a number of subjects, never espousing fixed philosophical tenets, but developing certain ideas such as individuality, freedom, the ability for mankind to realize almost anything, and the relationship between the soul and the surrounding world. Emerson's nature was more philosophical than naturalistic: Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul. Emerson is one of several figures who took a more pantheist or pandeist approach by rejecting views of God as separate from the world.

He remains among the linchpins of the American romantic movement, and his work has greatly influenced the thinkers, writers and poets that followed him. When asked to sum up his work, he said his central doctrine was the infinitude of the private man. Emerson is also well known as a mentor and friend of Henry David Thoreau, a fellow transcendentalist.

Source: Wikipedia

Manners

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1. Half the world, it is said, knows not how the other half live. Our Exploring Expedition saw the Feejee Islanders³⁶⁸ getting their dinner off human bones; and they are said to eat their own wives and children. The husbandry of the modern inhabitants of Gournou³⁶⁹ (west of old Thebes) is philosophical to a fault. To set up their housekeeping, nothing is requisite but two or three earthen pots, a stone to grind meal, and a mat which is the bed. The house, namely, a tomb, is ready without rent or taxes. No rain can pass through the roof, and there is no door, for there is no want of one, as there is nothing to lose. If the house do not please them, they walk out and enter another, as there are several hundreds at their command. It is somewhat singular, adds Berzoni, to whom we owe this account, "to talk of Happiness among people who live in sepulchers, among corpses and rags