Years before the "Divinity School Address" of 1838, Emerson had decided that man creates a consciousness of God — "God" being the spiritual force that he also termed the "oversoul," or the "ideal." If, Emerson reasoned, man creates consciousness of the divine, then, in effect, he creates the divine. If he intellectually creates the divine, then he possesses a divine power and must thus be divine himself. Accordingly, in Nature (1836), Emerson described the individual who does not realize this god-like power of consciousness within himself as "a god in ruins." (Thoreau used a phrase very similar to Emerson's in the "Winter Animals" chapter of Walden; there, the men who are unconscious of the divinity in them are termed "defaced and leaning monuments" of God.) He believed that each man, through the potential power of his intellect, has the ability to become god-like, to realize an ideal mode of existence, to raise himself above (that is, transcend) his presently imperfect, unsatisfactory situation in life. In short, Emerson proposed to his readers the possibility of total, ecstatic self-fulfillment; this was what fired Thoreau's imagination. Years later it was what he offered to his readers in Walden: "I do not mean to prescribe rules to strong and valiant natures . . . but mainly to the mass of men who are discontented, and idly complain of the hardness of their lot or of the times, when they might improve them." With the same optimism and faith in man's capabilities that Emerson had, Thoreau told his audience, "I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor."
In Walden, Thoreau offers an example of one possible approach to realizing one's divinity, to fulfilling one's potential for ideal existence in the real world. Like Emerson, he advises his readers to exercise their minds and create an idea of themselves as they might ideally be, and then find the means of making that idea, or dream, come true. Thoreau made this explicit when, in the chapter "Economy," he wrote:
When one man has reduced a fact of the imagination [the idea of one's ideal self as created by the mind] to be a fact of his understanding [a fact of everyday, concrete reality], I foresee that all men will at length establish their lives on that basis.
