One widespread misunderstanding about the events that took place in "Walden," is that Thoreau failed in his attempt to live a more authentic, simple life on his own. This failure is a misjudgment however, because Thoreau did not mean for his trip to be permanent be a permanent lifestyle shift, but instead an experiment to glean what he could about transcendentalism from living simply. Thoreau believed that he had succeeded in his attempt and said, "I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours" (Walden, Part XVIII). He knew he had succeeded, but after living beside Walden Pond for two years and two months, Thoreau felt that he had gleaned all he could from the forest. The fact that Thoreau succeeded is supported even more by the fact that he published "Walden  which outlines what he wanted to accomplish and how he did what he set out to do. He did not leave the forest because of failure, but because he felt he had more to do. Thoreau says, "I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one" (Walden, Part XVIII). Living in the forest was just one stage of his life that he felt he had to go through, and that he also thought was a success. There are some arguments that are made that say that Thoreau wanted to learn more about the social intricacies of humans, yet he went to live out in the forest alone. Thoreau however was a Transcendentalist, one of the core beliefs of which is that humans must transcend their current nature and try to bring themselves closer to God. The following quote by Aristotle helps to show what Thoreau was trying to accomplish: "Man is by nature a social animal; an individual who is unsocial naturally and not accidentally is e