Page:Thoreau - His Home, Friends and Books (1902).djvu/217

Rh interested in the empirical rather than the exigetical phases of past and present methods of philosophy. These tenets he studied and dissected but he collated such as appealed to his needs into an individual philosophy of life. Mr. Waldstein, in his analytic life of Ruskin, has said,—"Ruskin is a man who has dared to live his thoughts." The same words are applicable to Ruskin's antitype, Thoreau. Not alone did he formulate a philosophy to meet the exigencies of his manhood but he also adapted his life to the philosophic principles and educated his conscience, will, words and acts to embody and unfold these principles. Without difficulty one may trace the practical problems that confronted him and their gradual and consistent solution. When he entered college, with cravings for the best in literature but with limited financial resources, he met the problem of education, he recognized the defects of a college for full educement of all the faculties, and he solved the difficulty by an individual tenet. Believing that the true life must be nourished by the great thoughts and poetry of the past, he stored his mind with classic literature and such material on natural history as was then available; without defiance, but with calm judgment, he made prescribed texts subsidiary to these studies which would bring him the