The Nature Of The Beast Essay Research — страница 2

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people don’t exist in a vacuum. Society does exist and it just so happens that what Manson chose to do conflicted with what society has chosen as right. Very possibly there might have existed another world where their roles would be reversed. Emerson’s view was best summed up when Emerson wrote “Else, to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another” (20). Such a tragic fate that would be. The very thing that gives a person claim to their existence, claim to their place in space, is the idea. That person’s unique idea, the summation of that person’s experience and previous thoughts, is what, in Emerson’s view, distinguishes one person

from another. Whether that idea is original to mankind has no relevance on that idea’s importance. The point is that the person’s idea was original in their own mind; it did not come to them from an outside source. Thus comes Emerson’s view of traveling, “Traveling is a fool’s paradise” (34). Rooted in society is the notion that if a person is to be “educated”, they should be well traveled. Emerson would say that it is not the travel that makes the person educated, yet just the opposite. It is the original thinker, the wise man, that makes traveling “venerable in the imagination” (34). It is the mind that makes different places, different things worthy of reverence or reflection; the attributes of those different places that only exist in the mind are what

truly make those places great. Does that mean that everyone should stay home pondering the mysteries of the universe? No, since there is obviously some inherent value in experience. The point is not to go somewhere, or do anything for that matter, just for the sake doing it, rather one should take that experience and relate it to their own unique person, getting out of it something that only they can.