Extract
The promise of technology versus the pastoral ideal: Ralph Waldow Emerson's conflict over the role of mankind in nature.
Ralph Waldo Emerson was among the first American philosophers to address the role of technology in the early development of the United States. His work "The American Scholar" has been called the intellectual Declaration of Independence and works such as "Nature" and "The Poet" capture a way of thinking known as Transcendentalism, a kind of mystical philosophy that emphasizes the primacy of the spiritual over the material and empirical. Nature, in this schema, was divine, "the present expositor of the divine mind," by which mankind could transcend the material to access t...
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