Self-Reliance Self-Reliance "Self-Reliance" is an 1841 essay written by American transcendentalist philosopher and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson. It contains the most thorough statement of one of Emerson's recurrent themes: the need for each individual to avoid conformity and false consistency, and follow their own instincts and ideas. It is the source of one of Emerson's most famous quotations: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines." This essay is an analysis into the nature of the “aboriginal self on which a universal reliance may be grounded.” The first hint of the philosophy
Essays on Truth and Reality Essays on Truth and Reality Essays on Truth and Reality is a 1914 book by the English philosopher Francis Herbert Bradley, in which the author expounds his philosophy of absolute idealism and gives the classic statement of a coherence theory of truth and knowledge. The British philosopher Timothy Sprigge has suggested that in some respects Bradley's absolute idealism receives a better exposition in "Essays on Truth and Reality" than it had in Bradley's earlier work "Appearance and Reality" (1893). He notes that Bradley's coherence theory of truth is the classic statement of such a position, comparing Bradley's views to those