Emerson and Quite Uncommon Sense

"All conservatives are such from personal defects," the American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82) strikes out pointedly.

As for Emerson on the English, didn't he look down on others, treating all alike? (see Ability). The impression a person gives could depend on how you look at him also, hopefully not too permeated by "personal defects", with a drowsy mind "steeped in beer" and "hard of hearing and dim of sight".

EMERSON AT RANDOM AND ON EDUCATION

A SERIES OF EXTRACTS AND QUOTATIONS

EMERSON TEXTS

MYSTERIES?

ASPIRING TO COSMOS-UNDERSTANDING

OTHER

Due Care

"Common sense knows its own." - Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82), in Nature

"The continents swim and do not sit upon anything." [Rudolf Steiner earlier than 1925, Faculty Meetings with Rudolf Steiner, p. 618. Emphasis added]

If he had sad 'float' or 'drift' instead of 'swim', plate tectonics would eventually have proved him right. Plate tectonics, evolving only generations after Steiner, explains the slow drift of continents and parts of them by large plates that move about due to convection currents in the region below them. [◦Plate tectonics]

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