He became a wholesale druggist, not a Unitarian minister, and devoted his wealth to the Swedenborgian church. In 1821 the 18-year old Emerson heard Reed's oration on genius, which indicted formalism in the liberal church, rejected Locke, and suggested that all who turned to nature could become geniuses. This work supplied Transcendentalists with the basic content of their revolutionary aesthetic theory, giving the function of the artist a new dignity and so preparing the way for the Transcendental vocation. It formulated the essentials of the organic style in asserting that the artist achieves form by giving direct expression to the arrangements of nature, not by imposing artificial proportions and groupings upon nature. It announced that the organic principle, if piously observed, cannot fail to achieve coherence by the method of surrender and receptivity, because the correspondence of idea and object, of word and thing, is inherent in the universe.
Nothing is a more common subject of remark than the changed condition of the world.
There is a more extensive intercourse of thought, and a more powerful action of mind upon mind, than formerly. The good and wise of all nations are brought nearer together, and begin to exert a power, which, though yet feeble as infancy, is felt throughout the globe. Public opinion, that helm which directs the progress of events by which the world is guided to its ultimate destination, has received a new direction. The mind has attained an upward and onward look, and is shaking off the errors and prejudices of the past. The loud call on the past to instruct us, as it falls on the rock of ages, comes back in echo from the future.