CHAPTER IV
THE WALDEN EXPERIMENT
THE methods of modern scholars happily blend induction and deduction. With analysis keen and delicate, which current science applies to all phases of life, there is joined the careful synthesis of these component elements before the ultimatum of criticism is reached. In past history and biography, there was a proneness to overrate certain prominent facts in character-analysis and overlook more integral but less obvious features. Modern historians coalesce the major and minor life-expressions of an individual or a period. The result of this later method in biography has been especially corrective. Greater use had been made of autobiographic journals and letters, revealing the entire man, less has depended upon partial and prejudiced conjectures.
Until very recent years it has been the honest opinion of the general world of readers that Thoreau was a stoic and a hermit. Critics have sacrificed justice to cleverness, they have delighted to picture him as an American Diogenes, sitting in his
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