Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882) was a teacher at Harvard University and a Unitarian pastor until 1832, when he resigned after losing his wife. He defended the transcendentalist theory, which holds that the essence of things is achieved through a process of contemplation, intuition and ecstasy. Later, his talks would integrate Representative Men (1850), a book on characters that typify the main modes of personality, and six years later he published England and the English character. His humanistic thought has had a notable influence throughout the Western world.