Nature

“The charming landscape which I saw this morning is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet.” 

Here, Emerson argues that while the petty chartered farms belong to individual men, the jewel of nature, which is the landscape or horizon, belongs to no one who is concerned with commodities, but to the poet, who can appreciate the wholeness of the scene. Here, as in other parts of his essay, Emerson suggests that the poet is a seminal influence on man’s ability to have an enlightened relationship with nature.

“Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.” 

The image of the transparent eyeball stands as a metaphor for the subject’s complete receptivity to God. As the “mean egotism” that defines man as a limited individual dissipates, he opens himself up to divine infinity. In this way, he is no longer just a man, but part of divinity.

“Nature, in its ministry to man, is not only the material, but is also the process and the result. All the parts incessantly work into each other’s hands for the profit of man. The wind sows the seed […] the plant feeds the animal; and thus the endless circulations of the divine charity nourish man.” 

Here, Emerson seeks to raise nature from its subordinate purpose as the passive, material agent to man’s advancement. Instead, natural processes such as wind pollination and plants providing nourishment for animals show nature to be an active collaborator. As God is the author of nature, he also has a hand in these processes, which are more mystical than mundane.

“Nature is a sea of forms radically alike and even unique. A leaf, a sun-beam, a landscape, the ocean, make an analogous impression on the mind. What is common to them all,—that perfectness and harmony, is beauty […] Nothing is quite beautiful alone: nothing but is beautiful in the whole. A single object is only so far beautiful as it suggests this universal grace.” 

Emerson traces the paradox inside of nature, whose forms are as “radically alike” as they are “unique.” Beauty and a sense of harmony are the common denominators of forms as varied as a leaf and the ocean. The harmony and, in many cases, symmetry of such objects suggests the kind of “universal grace” that bears the stamp of the original creator, God, who is the first discerner of beauty.

“Because of this radical correspondence between visible things and human thoughts, savages, who have only what is necessary, converse in figures. As we go back in history, language becomes more picturesque, until its infancy, when it is all poetry; or all spiritual facts are represented by natural symbols.” 

As Emerson traces that the roots of language lie in nature and that visual motifs correspond to human thoughts, he proposes that “savages,” who have civilizations that he considers less developed than the Western ones he is familiar with, converse in “figures” that are more concrete representations of nature. He thus equates greater abstraction with superior human advancement and puts forth an attitude that is emblematic of his privileged position as a White, educated man.

“Every universal truth which we express in words, implies or supposes every other truth […] It is like a great circle on a sphere, comprising all possible circles; which, however, may be drawn, and comprise it, in like manner. Every such truth is the absolute End seen from one side. But it has innumerable sides.” 

Emerson here uses the image of a circle on a sphere to show how all universal truths are related and form part of the same truth. Just like the figure of a circle, all truths seem complete in themselves. However, each circle is one of many perspectives of the universal truth of the sphere. Thus, this image allows for simultaneous unity and diversity in the consideration of truths.

“In my utter impotence to test the authenticity of the report of my senses, to know whether the impressions they make on me correspond with outlying objects, what difference does it make, whether Orion is up there in heaven, or some god paints the image in the firmament of the soul?” 

Here, Emerson confronts the theory put forth by the ancient Greek philosopher Plato that the natural world is a shadowy realm inferior to the sphere of logic and ideas. Emerson argues that his inability to test whether the world he perceives through his senses is real means that it makes little difference to him whether natural phenomena such as the constellation Orion are real or the image created by some god. He argues that we can learn from nature regardless of whether it is real or the projection of a superior god.

“We are not built like a ship to be tossed, but like a house to stand. It is a natural consequence of this structure, that, so long as the active powers predominate over the reflective, we resist with indignation any hint that nature is more short-lived or mutable than the spirit.” 

Emerson’s view of man as a sturdy house as opposed to a ship on turbulent seas is one that puts humanity and then nature at the center of God’s plan. In contrast to the Platonic conception of an ephemeral world that is secondary to the celestial realm of ideas, Emerson posits that nature, and humanity at its center, is the purpose of creation. Despite the transience of worldly phenomena, this distinction makes man and nature’s position stable.

“Nature is made to conspire with spirit to emancipate us. Certain mechanical changes, a small alteration in our local position apprizes of us a dualism. We are strangely affected by seeing the shore from a moving ship, from a balloon, or through the tints of an unusual sky.” 

This is one of many passages where Emerson discusses how nature affects the human spirit. Nature’s beauty and variety can emancipate humans from their mundane routines and give them access to a higher spiritual vision. They can thus perceive themselves as dual creatures who both inhabit the present moment and have access to the more sublime state of communing with eternity.

“The Imagination may be defined to be, the use which the Reason makes of the material world.” 

Emerson claims that the imagination, the primary tool of poets and other creators, is the form of intellect that can best make use of nature. Through poetry the phenomena of the natural world find deep and expressive applications.

“Idealism sees the world in God. It beholds the whole circle of persons and things, of actions and events, of country and religion, not as painfully accumulated, atom after atom, act after act, in an aged creeping Past, but as one vast picture, which God paints on the instant eternity, for the contemplation of the soul.”

Emerson makes the case that true idealism deals in unity and in the view of creation as “one vast picture” rather than as a series of discrete events and facts. The empirical approach, which is taken by the chronological structure of the gospels, misses the true nature of God.

“As a plant upon the earth, so a man rests upon the bosom of God; he is nourished by unfailing fountains, and draws, at his need, inexhaustible power. Who can set bounds to the possibilities of man? Once inhale the upper air, being admitted to behold the absolute natures of justice and truth, and we learn that man has access to the entire mind of the Creator, is himself the creator in the infinite.” 

Emerson uses the natural tropes of fountains of endless supply and a plant’s reliance on the earth to show how integral God is to man’s spiritual enlightenment. Just as God is infinite and endowed with limitless possibilities, so is man. Emerson implies that the closer man gets to God, the more he will have access to God’s wisdom. There are no limitations to man’s access to God.

“We are as much strangers in nature, as we are aliens from God. We do not understand the notes of birds. The fox and the deer run away from us […] Is not the landscape, every glimpse of which hath a grandeur, a face of him?” 

Emerson traces a direct correlation between human alienation from nature and human alienation from God. He points out man’s deficiencies in communing with the natural world—for example, his inability to understand bird song or to make shy animals, such as deer, feel at ease in his presence. Such a broken relationship with nature cannot be taken lightly when nature is evidence of God.