Ideals of the Mind

But he, in his private observatory, cataloguing obscure and nebulous stars of the human mind, which as yet no man has thought of as such, — watching days and months, sometimes, for a few facts; correcting still his old records; — must relinquish display and immediate fame.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar”

IDEALS OF THE MIND
a Wisdom of Thought

Our fourth conversation is with Thought. We believe in the ideal of the “American Scholar” in whom a knowledge of books is balanced by experience of nature and practical activity in the world.

Innermost House explores this ideal of whole thought, where Truth, Beauty, and Goodness come together in one Unity of conversation. We believe in the ideals of the mind, the whole mind, the mind made whole with the entirety of life. We seek the living forms of a higher learning in the deepest foundations of experience.

ih folios desat.jpg

That age will be rich indeed when those relics which we call Classics, and the still older and more than classic but even less known Scriptures of the nations, shall have still further accumulated, when the Vaticans shall be filled with Vedas and Zendavestas and Bibles, with Homers and Dantes and Shakespeares, and all the centuries to come shall have successively deposited their trophies in the forum of the world. By such a pile we may hope to scale heaven at last.

Henry David Thoreau, Walden, “Reading”

We are dedicated to thinking ideas back to their origins in the elemental forms of thought. We invite thinkers and practitioners of the classical liberal and aesthetical arts to join with us in a worldwide circle of shared conversation, seeking the meaning of our self-evident truths in the abiding ideals of the mind. Our purpose is to regain to the individual an original and universal relation to knowledge.

Visit our Classick Pages Project

Read not the Times. Read the Eternities. Knowledge does not come
to us by details, but in flashes of light from heaven.

Henry David Thoreau, Life Without Principle

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The office of the scholar is to cheer, to raise, and to guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances. . . For the ease and pleasure of treading the old road, accepting the fashions, the education, the religion of society, he takes the cross of making his own, and, of course, the self-accusation, the faint heart, the frequent uncertainty and loss of time, which are the nettles and tangling vines in the way of the self-relying and self-directed; and the state of virtual hostility in which he seems to stand to society, and especially to educated society. For all this loss and scorn, what offset? He is to find consolation in exercising the highest functions of human nature.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The American Scholar"

Ralph Waldo Emerson ca 1857 retouched,

IMAGES
Diana Lorence: Innermost House II: NW Corner Study Paideia
Diana Lorence: Innermost House I: Paideia Folios
Ralph Waldo Emerson ca 1857 retouched, Wikimedia Commons

QUOTATIONS
”I have sometimes imagined a library. . .” Henry David Thoreau, Journals
”Read not the Times. Read the Eternities. . .” Henry David Thoreau, “Life Without Principle”
”But we must not follow those. . .” Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
”The office of the scholar is to cheer. . .” Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar”