cant feature of this enterprise and of his proposed Art of Virtue was the realistic spirit in which they were conceived, the bold attempt to ground the virtues upon experience rather than upon authority, the assertion of the doctrine "that vicious actions are not hurtful because they are forbidden, but forbidden because they are hurtful, the nature of man alone considered."
Emerson as moralist takes up the work which Frnaklin's political duties prevented him from carrying out. He repeats Franklin's revolt in the name of sincerity, truth, actuality. "Whoso would be a man," he declares in "Self-Reliance," "must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness." He does not take up the virtues so methodically and exhaustively as Franklin does. That is mainly because he conceives morality to lie in a right condition and attitude of the whole self, from which particular acts will result with a kind of instinctive and inevitable rightness. "The less a man thinks or knows about his virtues," he says in "Spiritual Laws," "the better we like him." He concerns himself less with particular acts than many less exacting moralists, because he demands as the evidence of goodness that one's entire life shall be "an alms, a battle, a conquest, a medicine." The grand business of the moral explorer, as he understands it, is to push past conduct to the springs of conduct, to blaze a path
