Essays — First Series

"Essays — First Series" is a series of essays written by Ralph Waldo Emerson, published in 1841, concerning transcendentalism. Waldo was an avowed Transcendentalist, a movement that sprung up in the New England region of the United States in the mid-19th century. Its core belief is in the inherent goodness of people and nature, and while society and its institutions have corrupted the purity of the individual, people are at their best when truly "self-reliant" and independent. Transcendentalists saw divine experience inherent in the everyday, rather than believing in a distant heaven. They viewed physical and spiritual phenomena as part of dynamic processes rather than discrete entities.