Henry James's view that Emerson's life was “curiously devoid of complexity” (1987, 210) is hardly borne out by the evidence of Emerson's essays. Certainly the radical, optimistic call to arms of Nature arose from the contradictary experience that “our age is bewailed as the age of Introversion” (EL, 68). Emerson goes on to quote Hamlet's epitaph for his own failure of nerve – “Sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought” – and it seems that the play's sense of modern men and women drowning in self–doubt and existential terror haunted Emerson. It is certainly a theme to which he turned repeatedly. As a result transcendentalism cannot be either explained or understood without reference to Emerson's belief that his was an age “miserable with inaction. We perish of rest and rust” (EL, 204).

As Margaret Gilman (1943) has suggested, what Baudelaire and others in France discovered in Emerson was both an acknowledgement of, and a corrective to, often profound anxieties. Baudelaire, who diagnosed the tributary cause of his own lack of will to the fact that, as his father had been thirty–four years older than his mother, only a freak could have been born to them, must have concurred with Emerson that it was a consummation devoutly to be wished that we should not be subject to inherited traits nor our future circumscribed by the past. In this, ironically, Baudelaire, who loathed America for its democratic institutions and, as he saw it, appointment of the masses as the arbiters of taste, was responding to an essential aspect of not only Emerson's writings but American culture: the promotion of the modern over the inherited, and a deep–rooted belief in rationalization and progress.

“Let a Stoic open the resources of man,” Emerson wrote, “and tell men they are not leaning willows, but can and must detach themselves” (EL, 275).