To know God at second hand, through the church and scripture, was not enough; and Emerson, who eventually left the ministry, made this clear when he addressed the Harvard graduating class of 1838. He declared to an audience made up of many clergymen and students for the Unitarian ministry that they should not let any institutional church, dogma, creed, or even Christ himself, stand in the way of their direct communication with God. This was a radical declaration, but a logical one for Emerson who had in the previous years formulated a belief in man's ability to attain supersensory knowledge and to experience the supernatural.
For the student of Thoreau's Walden, the key point behind Emerson's "Divinity School Address" is a view of man that denies the Lockean image of the mind. Emerson and the other transcendentalists asserted that man is not limited to simply learning about God; rather than being only a receiver of sense impressions, man's mind is also a faculty that can create, independent of the senses, a consciousness of God. Contrary to Locke's "blank tablet," the mind is a potentially powerful instrument capable of imagination and intuition, and capable of establishing personal communion with the divine.
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, German transcendentalist philosophers such as Kant, Fichte, and Schelling had originally proposed this view of the "creative intellect." And the English romantic poet Coleridge had popularized it in his country before Emerson and his fellow transcendentalists made it the core idea of their intellectual revolution in New England. It had arrived in America "in the nick of time," when an intellectually and spiritually hungry Thoreau graduated from Harvard in 1837 looking for a way of life, a cause, a philosophy, anything worth devoting his life to. There, waiting for him, were the New England transcendentalists with their vitally new and exciting vision of man's capabilities. Since this vision is the core of Walden, a further word should be said about these extraordinary capabilities that Emerson claimed for man.
