To remain receptive to the intuitive process, a man must trust in himself. In "Self-Reliance," Emerson wrote of the need for each man to think for himself, to trust in his own ability to understand, evaluate, and act. He warned his audiences and his readers not to give up their freedom as individuals to constricting beliefs and customs, to common values, to established institutions:
But now we are a mob. Man does not stand in awe of man, nor is his genius admonished to stay at home, to put itself in communication with the internal ocean, but it goes abroad to beg a cup of water of the urns of other men. We must go alone. I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching. . . . Why should we assume the faults of our friend, or wife, or father, or child, because they sit around our hearth, or are said to have the same blood? All men have my blood, and I have all men's. Not for that will I adopt their petulance or folly. . . . But your isolation must not be mechanical, but spiritual, that is, must be elevation.
The intellectually, morally, and spiritually independent individual maintains his ability to come to a direct understanding of the world around him and of his place in it and in the universe.
Emerson argued against reliance on the thought of the past in "The American Scholar," and against conformity to established religion in the "Divinity School Address." Unquestioning acceptance and compliance close off spontaneous communication with the divine and limit the fulfillment of human potential. Self-reliance is equivalent to trust in the divine. Emerson wrote in "Self-Reliance":
The magnetism which all original action exerts is explained when we inquire the reason of self-trust. . . . What is the aboriginal Self on which a universal reliance may be grounded? What is the nature and power of that science-baffling star, without parallax, without calculable elements, which shoots a ray of beauty even into trivial and impure actions, if the least mark of independence appear? The inquiry leads us to that source, at once the essence of genius, of virtue, and of life, which we call Spontaneity or Instinct. We denote this primary wisdom as Intuition. . . . In that deep force, the last fact behind which analysis cannot go, all things find their common origin.
