Nature

At the outset of “Nature,” Emerson argues for overturning the retrospective tendencies of his age and instead proposes that his contemporaries should focus on their “original relation to the universe” (15). They should thus nurture a religion that arrives “by revelation to us” rather than the one put forth in the scriptures of organized religion (15). As Emerson points out the intellectual and spiritual richness of his own age, he shows that the United States, with its relatively new civilization and philosophical tradition, is just as fitting a place for enlightenment as the historic Eastern scenes of the scriptures. He thus turns to the subject of nature, an entity that, unlike culture, this new civilization has in abundance. Natural wonders such as woods, stars, and sunsets are available for all to study and learn from, regardless of their level of education.

Emerson identifies different uses of nature, including commodity, beauty, language, and discipline. Through each of these uses, we can understand a different aspect of man’s relationship to nature. Whether Emerson discusses man’s cultivation of land as the use of nature as a commodity or man’s linguistic tendency to pass “a ray of relation” between other natural beings and himself (29), it is clear that Emerson puts man at the center of God’s natural world. Man, Emerson argues, is the most superior aspect of God’s creation owing to his ability to reason and see beyond the nature of the senses. Emerson thus addresses the tension between the imminence of nature in this world and the promise of something greater in the next—a stance that echoes both Platonism and Christianity, which pronounce the nature on Earth as inferior and an ephemeral shadow of the eternal truth of heaven.

Still, Emerson argues that nature shows signs of divinity in imitating the style of human reason. Nature displays a capacity to distinguish and order no less than the intellect, and it can be a fountain of moral truths for the wise man. Indeed, Emerson goes as far as assessing virtue or corruption according to man’s proximity or divergence from nature. While the virtuous are likely to respect natural laws, those who have lapsed are more likely to live in cities and have suffered under the influence of society or politics.

Emerson’s essay shows features of the late-18th- and early-19th-century Romantic movement, which prioritized emotional experience over rationality in its reverence of the child over the mature adult, and of poetry over science. As with the British Romantic poets William Wordsworth and William Blake, Emerson promotes the wisdom of a childlike state that enables one to see nature with curious eyes and appreciate its vastness. The childlike approach is a guard against what Emerson views as man’s impoverished, commodity-driven relationship with nature. Further, Emerson’s essay shows a Romantic preference for poetry over science, as while science tends to reduce nature to individual facts and details, poetry deals in wholes and ideas and so is closer in spirit to God’s creation of the world.