Ralph Waldo Emerson

Through his writing and his own personal philosophy, the famed philosopher unburdened his young country of Europe's traditional sense of history and showed Americans how to becreators of their own circumstances. His mandate, which called for harmony with, rather than domestication of, nature, and for areliance on individual integrity, rather than on materialistic institutions, is echoed in many of the great American philosophical and literary works of his time and ours, and has given an impetus to modern political and social activism."