Active Filtration and Constant Intention

 Robert Richardson describes Emerson's amazing power of taking on the ideas of others.

With Quakerism, as with de Stael, Coleridge, Carlyle, Kant, and Hinduism and Stoicism, Emerson was not so much converted as he was confirmed.

Later

We all read hundreds of books, but the reading does not make us great writers, nor does it very often change our lives. When we have canvased Emerson's vast reading, it will by itself have told us little or nothing about the creative process or the growth of character.  Sometimes the books of a month of Emerson's life are merely an inventory of a month's distractions. Anyone can amass an impressive amount of reading. But the active filtration and the tight focus of constant intention which convert that reading into real life experience and then into adequate expression, these are the exclusive properties of the great writer.