as we all know, emerson is the representative of the Transcendentalists, who lived in the decades before the American Civil War and the national division that it both reflected and helped to create. Just as emerson said that:"The Transcendentalist adopts the whole connection of spiritual doctrine. He believes in miracle, in the perpetual openness of the human mind to new influx of light and power; he believes in inspiration, and in ecstasy. He wishes that the spiritual principle should be suffered to demonstrate itself to the end, in all possible applications to the state of man, without the admission of anything unspiritual; that is, anything positive, dogmatic, personal. ".
Then, let me move to the paragraph from "what pretty oracles." to "make us seniors very unnecessary." In this short paragraph, I only want to concentrate one thing-- --Emerson's .
trope on infants. In his eyes, infants has the most powerful weapons,because they didn't infected the bad habits of the adults' social (consistency and conformity). They only obey theirselves. If they are hungry, they will cry, if they are cold, they will cry. Hearing the infants' cry, the adults would listen to them and do anything the infants want to do. That's why In emerson's eyes, infants are not the fragile ones, but the most powerful ones. In my opinion, this trope exponds emerson's pointview of self-reliance perfectly. When we think about the trope more and more, we will come realize the things that we never noticed before.
yes, in self-reliance or self-trust, most of us even worse than the infants.
In ermerson's self-reliance,he talked lot about self-trust or self-convinced, he appealed to the earthlings that they should pay much more attention to theirselves and dropped all the consistency and conformity. "What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think" that's ermerson brought to himself and the readers. Yes,just as that, we should do everything for ourselves ,but not any one else, we can and should disobey what we said wrong yesterday, that's not an shame, but a glory.