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In _Nature_, Emerson sets forth his idealistic philosophy. "Idealism sees
the world in God" is with him an axiom. This philosophy seems to him to
free human beings from the tyranny of materialism, to enable them to use
matter as a mere symbol in the solution of the soul's problems, and to make
the world conformable to thought. His famous sentence in this connection
is, "The sensual man conforms thoughts to things; the poet conforms things
to his thoughts."
In _The American Scholar_, an address delivered at Cambridge in 1837,
Emerson announced what Oliver Wendell Holmes calls "our intellectual
Declaration of Independence." Tocqueville, a gifted Frenchman who visited
America in 1831, wrote: "I know no country in which there is so little
independence of opinion and freedom of discussion as in America.... If
great writers have not existed in America, the reason is very simply given
in the fact that there can be no literary genius without freedom of
opinion, and freedom of opinion does not exist in America." Harriet
Martineau, an English woman, who came to America in 1830, thought that the
subservience to opinion in and around Boston amounted to a sort of mania.
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