Emerson doesn’t discourage the reading of past masters, but he does warn against taking what we read—even from the most respected, even from him—on faith. The purpose of books, he says, is to inspire our own ideas, not to demand fealty to theirs. Even genius can be harmful if it over-influences, if I am knocked “clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.” Emerson wants to protect the individual’s trust in her own genius, her own capacity to uncover the world’s secrets. Books and the institutions that teach them are indispensable tools, but they serve us best “when
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Powerful paragraph and a new idea I’ll dive into more. Be a system, not a satellite.
