SOURCE: "The Case against the Past," in The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century, The University of Chicago Press, 1955, pp. 13-27.

In this excerpt, Lewis discusses Thoreau's prescription for casting off tradition and convention and immersing oneself in the world of nature. Only those footnotes pertaining to the excerpt below have been reprinted.

"We have the Saint Vitus dance." This was Thoreau's view of the diversion of energies to material expansion and of the enthusiastic arithmetic by which expansion was constantly being measured. Miles of post roads and millions of tons of domestic export did not convince Thoreau that first principles ought to be overhauled; but a close interest in these matters did convince him that first principles had been abandoned. Probably nobody of his generation had a richer sense of the potentiality for a fresh, free, and uncluttered existence; certainly no one projected...