Nature

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Nature

Essay

Date: 1836

Source: Ralph Waldo Emerson. "Nature." Boston: James Munroe and Company, 1836.

About the Author: American author, poet, lecturer, and philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), educated at Harvard and Harvard Divinity School, was an ordained Christian Minister. Early in his career, however, as pastor of Boston's Second Church, he resigned his ministry because of doctrinal doubts. His misgivings about formal Christianity, however, did not shake his spirituality or religious faith. Neither did the many tragic deaths of loved ones he sustained throughout his life—although they darkened his spirit—including the death of his first wife, Ellen Tucker, in 1832, and of his young son, Waldo, in 1842. Emerson maintained a belief in the unity of man and nature and espoused a doctrine of optimism, self-reliance, mysticism, and the immanence of a God whose presence could be seen and felt in all nature. Along with such figures as Bronson Alcott (1799–1888) and Margaret Fuller (1810–1850), Emerson was a central figure in the New England Transcendentalist Movement of the 1830s and 1840s and the founder of its magazine, The Dial. The defining principle of Transcendentalism, which is also at the heart of Emerson's thought, is that the world itself has a soul and that the world's soul is identical with each individual person's soul.

INTRODUCTION

Emerson wrote "Nature" following a trip to Europe he made after his wife's death from tuberculosis. In England, he met the great poet of nature, William Wordsworth, and toured the Lake District with him. He spoke with the political philosopher John Stuart Mill, and developed a close friendship with Thomas Carlyle, a highly influential Scottish writer who brought together, in his powerful and highly-charged prose, a German Romantic sense of the force of nature and a stiff-backed morality of individual responsibility.

Growing out of these encounters and Emerson's own misgivings about traditional Christianity, as well as his own experiences of solitude and communion, "Nature" is a moral and inspirational essay devoted to shaping its reader's attitude towards nature. Emerson wants to elicit more than a sense of reverence for nature, although he begins with the assumption that beholding the natural world will provoke reverence. More significantly to him is the doctrine of oneness or the interdependence of the person and nature. As Emerson experiences the process of beholding nature, he comes to understand that, not only is nature responsible for what he experiences, but he is responsible for what nature expresses. With great subtlety, Emerson attempts to affect the way mankind sees and experiences nature in order to influence the way people define themselves and act in relation to nature—as the industrial tools to reconfigure nature become more sophisticated and more widely available.

PRIMARY SOURCE

The stars awaken a certain reverence, because though always present, they are inaccessible; but all natural objects make a kindred impression, when the mind is open to their influence. Nature never wears a mean appearance. Neither does the wisest man extort her secret, and lose his curiosity by finding out all her perfection. Nature never became a toy to a wise spirit. The flowers, the animals, the mountains, reflected the wisdom of his best hour, as much as they had delighted the simplicity of his childhood. When we speak of nature in this manner, we have a distinct but most poetical sense in the mind. We mean the integrity of impression made by manifold natural objects. It is this which distinguishes the stick of timber of the wood-cutter, from the tree of the poet. 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. This is the best part of these men's farms, yet to this their warranty-deeds give no title. To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood. His intercourse with heaven and earth, becomes part of his daily food. In the presence of nature, a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows. Nature says—he is my creature, and maugre [in spite of] all his impertinent griefs, he shall be glad with me. Not the sun or the summer alone, but every hour and season yields its tribute of delight; for every hour and change corresponds to and authorizes a different state of the mind, from breathless noon to grimmest midnight …

The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister, is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them. The waving of the boughs in the storm, is new to me and old. It takes me by surprise, and yet is not unknown. Its effect is like that of a higher thought or a better emotion coming over me, when I deemed I was thinking justly or doing right.

Yet it is certain that the power to produce this delight, does not reside in nature, but in man, or in a harmony of both. It is necessary to use these pleasures with great temperance. For, nature is not always tricked in holiday attire, but the same scene which yesterday breathed perfume and glittered as for the frolic of the nymphs, is overspread with melancholy today. Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.

… 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 sun evaporates the sea; the wind blows the vapor to the field; the ice, on the other side of the planet, condenses rain on this; the rain feeds the plant; the plant feeds the animal; and thus the endless circulations of the divine charity nourish man. The useful arts are reproductions or new combinations by the wit of man, of the same natural benefactors. He no longer waits for favoring gales, but by means of steam, he realizes the fable of Aeolus's bag, and carries the two and thirty winds in the boiler of his boat. To diminish friction, he paves the road with iron bars, and, mounting a coach with a ship-load of men, animals, and merchandise behind him, he darts through the country, from town to town, like an eagle or a swallow through the air. By the aggregate of these aids, how is the face of the world changed, from the era of Noah to that of Napoleon! The private poor man hath cities, ships, canals, bridges, built for him. He goes to the post-office, and the human race run on his errands; to the bookshop, and the human race read and write of all that happens, for him; to the court-house, and nations repair his wrongs. He sets his house upon the road, and the human race go forth every morning, and shovel out the snow, and cut a path for him.

… The simple perception of natural forms is a delight. The influence of the forms and actions in nature is … needful to man … To the body and mind which have been cramped by noxious work or company, nature is medicinal and restores their tone. The tradesman, the attorney comes out of the din and craft of the street, and sees the sky and the woods, and is a man again. In their eternal calm, he finds himself. The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon. We are never tired, so long as we can see far enough …

The world proceeds from the same spirit as the body of man. It is a remoter and inferior incarnation of God, a projection of God in the unconscious. But it differs from the body in one important respect. It is not, like that, now subjected to the human will. Its serene order is inviolable by us. It is, therefore, to us, the present expositor of the divine mind. It is a fixed point whereby we may measure our departure. As we degenerate, the contrast between us and our house is more evident. 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; the bear and tiger rend us. We do not know the uses of more than a few plants, as corn and the apple, the potato and the vine. Is not the landscape, every glimpse of which hath a grandeur, a face of him? Yet this may show us what discord is between man and nature, for you cannot freely admire a noble landscape, if laborers are digging in the field hard by….

SIGNIFICANCE

That an essay like "Nature" should be written in the early years of the American Republic seems essential as well as inevitable, for it lays a philosophical groundwork for the idea of democracy. Each person's perception of the natural world, Emerson asserts, has its own validity and authority; each person is endowed, moreover, with the same power of perception as every other person if he or she will only choose to use it; and each person can participate in the experience of nature which Emerson sees as the primary spiritual exercise of mankind and as a primary way of seeing God and of knowing God's attributes.

In addition, nature provides a justification for exploration, which is the other pillar upon which America is founded. Historians and philosophers often characterize Americans as a people traditionally drawn to nature, who seek divinity in it, and find in it a limitless prospect. Nature is an extension of humanity.

Emerson, however, also uses the essay to issue a warning. Nature is given its full existence by human perception of it. But nature must be the force and guide that shapes the quality of human perception. If humans are to be true to themselves and to nature, they must interact with the natural environment with a sense of awe and respect. In "The Winter's Tale," Shakespeare states this idea with paradoxical irony: there "is an art/ Which doth mend Nature, change it rather; but/ The art itself is Nature." Emerson, in "Nature," states the idea with representative American pragmatism: "You cannot freely admire a noble landscape, if laborers are digging in the field hard by." Regard for nature and self-regard are one.

Emerson's influence was great and telling in its subtlety, for he set a group of ideas flowing through American culture. His ideas influenced the thought of such advocates and protectors of nature as Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), author of Walden, and Walt Whitman (1819–1892), visionary poet of a democratic America in which nature and industry combine in a way that ennobles both. Emerson's work also had directly practical results. He was an important influence on the naturalist and educator John Muir (1838–1914), who explored the glaciers of Yosemite and became one of the founders of the Sierra Club, which remains today an important voice for environmental preservation and conservation.