A lecturer, poet, and essayist, Ralph Waldo Emerson was the leading voice of the New England Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century, which valued insight over logic while also advocating for humanity’s inherent goodness. This revelation comes from the closing paragraph of “Circles,” a chapter in his 1841 book “Essays, First Series.” “One thing which we seek with insatiable desire is to forget ourselves... to do something without knowing how or why; in short, to draw a new circle,” he wrote. Emerson believed people need to trust their inner vibrancy to stoke the “flames and generosities of the heart.”
