Henry David Thoreau tests the transcendentalist ideas about nature by living at Walden Pond, where he discovers that simplicity in physical aspects brings openness to our mind, our soul to its fullest potential, and our imagination to be upl

After examining Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature and Henry David Thoreau’s Walden one can see how these two transcendentalist’s beliefs are commonly shared. Thoreau took Emerson's teachings and expanded on them. Emerson played his role as teacher and Thoreau played his role as student. Emerson taught transcendentalist philosophy and Thoreau not only expanded on those teachings, he used them for experimenting with transcendentalism at Walden Pond. They both had a similar common goal and nature was essential to it. They wanted to live in harmony with nature. They both felt that the key to this was to simplify life, to know thyself through nature and not through possessions. The individual needs to live his own experiences, not through the past’s traditional values. With personal experience comes wisdom and knowledge.

Emerson open’s up his essay Nature with some valuable insight about the present times. “Our age is retrospective……Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition……Let us demand our own works and laws worship (Emerson 35).” Emerson is arguing that why should our generation and future generations be subjected to a life that has already been lived. Nature is the key to living an individual life, free of other generations’ experiences, thoughts and beliefs. Again, nature is ever changing and people have to encounter there own original experience with themselves through nature. Man should look inwards and evolve as a person through nature. Emerson believes that to know thyself is the key and not material goods. Would America be the nation of simplicity and self-reliance or a country obsessed with material goods and consumption?

Like Thoreau’s Walden, Emerson’s Nature also strives for the individual’s connection with nature. In Nature he speaks of the seven relationships between humans and nature; commodity, beauty, language, discipline, idealism, spirit and prospects. Emerson writes about people’s percepti

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