ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with Ralph Waldo Emerson and his attempted manipulation of the polarities of "solitude" and "society" within the scheme of a benevolent nature. Emerson, who lived much of his life on the fringes of a polite and lettered society and even of sects, like Brook Farm, was, with his friend Thoreau, the American oracle of an unpeopled city of God. Emerson represents the quandary of the American intellectual, for he was at the same time a resolute believer in the commanding power of genius with its right to be recognized, and a democrat of the spirit. A consideration of the status of American sects and cults showed the difficulty of making exquisite discriminations between their origins and peculiarities or of distancing the populist from the more recondite movements. To locate Emerson as an individualist capable of transmitting the sectarian impulse requires some discrimination of "individualisms" and of "sectarianisms".
