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“The knowledge of all the facts of all the laws of nature will give man his true place in the system of beings,” said Ralph Waldo Emerson. His lectures on the natural sciences were key to his role as educator in early 19th-century America. “Healthy, useful and delights the mind”, added Emerson of natural history, who found it useful in generating enthusiasm and disciplining the mind. In The Mind on Fire (University of California, £27/$35, ISBN 0 520 08808 5), Robert Richardson, Emerson’s thorough yet modest biographer, explains that transcendentalism, the philosophical movement associated with Emerson, embraces the mainstream of modern science and technology while asserting that greatness lies not in materialism but in those with power to alter the way we think.