THE TENSION BETWEEN THOREAU's NEGATIVE VIEWS of certain ethnic groups and his confidence in the potential of the enlightened individual, whatever the race or ethnicity, seems to have remained incompletely resolved until the end of his career, but Walden was in important ways an attempt to find a resolution. Thoreau's focus on the enlightened individual does, of course, predate Walden and his readings in racial science. It is rooted quite obviously in his Transcendentalism, in Emersonian self-reliance, and in Emerson's idea of the “American scholar” as a leader of American culture. Thoreau also read Thomas Carlyle, and while living at Walden Pond he wrote a review essay in which he asserts approvingly that “All of Carlyle's works might well enough be embraced under the title of one of them, a good specimen brick, ‘On Heroes, Hero-worship, and the Heroic in History’” (Early Essays 262). Thoreau's readings in racial science and ethnology did not create this view of the historical and cultural importance of the individual as cultural hero, but in combination with his study of nature they certainly reinforced and helped him to shape that view.

According to the books Thoreau was reading, in the process of human succession through competition, nations and races are only the vehicles for moving forward toward an enlightened society. For Thoreau this meant a society of enlightened individuals. The occasional black or Irishman or Indian individual might have a place in such a society, but Thoreau mostly accepts the conventional view of his time as voiced by Guyot and others that some races are simply inferior and unlikely to fall into step with the march of civilization. Some races will necessarily fall by the wayside or be pushed aside. “Nations! What are nations?” he asks in his journal. “Tartars! and Huns! and Chinamen! Like insects they swarm. The historian strives in vain to make them memorable. It is for want of a man that there are so many men. It is individuals that populate the world” (J 2: 188).

This journal passage, which he uses later in “Life without Principle” (RP 171), is reminiscent of Thoreau's strong passage at the end of the “Spring” chapter of Walden in which he describes a dead horse by the path to his cabin “which compelled me sometimes to go out of my way, especially in the night when the air was heavy” (318).