Often enough, we do not have time or, in some instances, the enthusiasm to spend enough time with our loved ones or do the things that we are most passionate about in life. ... I strongly concur with Thoreau on the idea that people should focus more on life, and less on the unimportant or materialistic things in life. ... The house that is described sitting on Walden Pond is considered, by him, a smaller version of God's creation of the world and heaven. Thoreau does not intend to compare himself to a God, but he rather urges everyone to be able to create his or her own piece of heaven. ....

• Word Count: 1035
• Approx Pages: 4
• Grade Level: High School

It originated among a small group of intellectuals who were reacting against the orthodoxy of Calvinism and the rationalism of the Unitarian Church, developing instead their own faith centering on the divinity of man and nature. ... Transcendentalists thought that the intuitive faculty, instead of rational or sensical, became the means for a conscious union of the individual psyche (known in Sanskrit as Atman) with the world psyche also known as the Oversoul, like force, prime mover and God (known in Sanskrit as Brahma). ... It is not a rejection of the existance of God, but a preference to ex...

• Word Count: 1093
• Approx Pages: 4
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

The fundamental capacity to understand the world outside the world of the individual and his or her internal world includes the ability to interpret, characterize, and associate what things seem to be singular, or at least, singular groups of things. ... For Plato, the physical things of the world must have bodily form. ... And, for Pieper, God's role in the life of every individual and the cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, courage, temperance, and love are the ways by which human beings understood truth. ... Henry David Thoreau had gone to Walden Pond, a small body of water outside...

• Word Count: 1300
• Approx Pages: 5
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

Though I share Phillips's belief that "we need to cure ecocriticism of its fundamentalist fixation on literal representation," the larger theory and critique of ecocriticism of the sort he pursues is beyond my scope here. (8) Rather, in paying greater attention to the sort of ecological literacy or, less anachronistically, the natural history writing and thinking that emerge in Emerson as it does in Thoreau, I will be arguing that both writers complicate the assumption that the literal and literary senses of things can be separated irreducibly in this way. ...

• Word Count: 9971
• Approx Pages: 40
• Grade Level: Undergraduate