What is Emerson Saying about isolation? "Isolation must precede true society""Self-Reliance" by Ralph Waldo Emerson

While most early thinkers felt that the group held a
priority over the individual with the need for the dissenters to accept society's
greater wisdom, such Transcendentalists as Thoreau and Emerson held another position. 
Their position was in the value and greater worth of the individual.  Emerson
wrote:

Society
everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its
members.

Thus, valuing the
development of the individual, Emerson suggested that "Isolation must precede true
society."  That is, "we must go alone."  As Thoreau went into the woods deliberately to
learn what it had to teach, so, too, does Emerson in
his Self-Reliance recommend that the individual develop spiritual
intuition afforded by nature and solitude in it.  The creator is not the conformist, but
the man who can think things through himself.  To Emerson, individualism is the greatest
virtue of man. For Emerson, a greater self-reliance--a new respect for the "divinity of
man"--must effect a revolution of sorts against the "hobgoblins" of
conformity.