Self-Reliance: Paragraph 17-20 Summary & Analysis

Emerson’s wish for his age is that people will finally come to understand how ridiculous consistency and conformity are. Conformity to society should therefore be actively opposed, and Emerson hopes that the individual will “reprimand the smooth mediocrity and squalid contentment of the times, and hurl in the face of custom, and trade, and office, the fact which is the upshot of all history, that there is a great responsible Thinker and Actor working wherever a man works” —that is, the Oversoul or God. In fact, Emerson believes that a clear-eyed examination of the people cited as the sources of morality—Jesus, for example—will reveal that they were simply individuals who lived with perfect trust in themselves.

Given that the people commonly revered by society were just individuals with complete self-trust, Emerson says, modern individuals should take heart that their intuitions and self-trust are equal to anyone else’s. An ordinary person might think that there is nothing in them that “corresponds to the force which built a tower or sculptured a marble god,” or might feel that “a palace, a statue, or a costly book have an alien or forbidding air.” But a more self-reliant attitude would help the individual to understand that their own human perceptions are more important than the physical art or architecture they perceive: these objects are “suitors for his notice, petitioners to his faculties” and not anything to feel overawed by.