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INTRODUCTION TO Nature
Ralph
Waldo Emerson was born in Boston of an old English
family of preachers. He followed the family trade into
the Unitarian ministry, but resigned after theological
disagreements. In 1833 he visited Europe, met with
Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Carlyle, and returned to
Concord, Massachusetts to spend his days talking and
writing about what has become known as American
Transcendentalism – a new view of nature as, not a mere
component of the world but rather as an all-encompassing
divine entity into which we can, and ought, to immerse
ourselves.
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THE
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Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1836
Nature
"A man is a god in ruins."
Our age is retrospective. The foregoing
generations beheld God face to face; we
through their eyes. Philosophically
considered, the universe is composed of
Nature and Soul. Nature and Art, all other
men and my own body, must be ranked under
this name, Nature. Nature, in the common
sense, refers to essences unchanged by man:
space, the air, the river, the leaf. Miller
owns this field, but none owns the
landscape. In the presence of Nature a wild
delight runs through the man in spite of
real sorrow. The private poor man hath
cities, ships, canals, bridges, built for
him. A nobler want of man is served by
Nature, namely, the love of beauty. In
proportion to the energy of his thought and
will he takes up the world into himself.
Language is another use which Nature
subserves to man. How much tranquility has
been reflected to man from the azure sky?
The happiest man is he who learns from
Nature the lesson of worship. The noblest
ministry of Nature is to stand as the
apparition of God. The foundations of man
are not in matter, but in spirit. A man is a
god in ruins. Man cannot be a naturalist
until he satisfies all the demands of the
spirit. Nature is not fixed, but fluid. What
we are, that only can we see. All that Adam
had, all that Caesar could, you have and can
do. Build, therefore, your own world.
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Nature
Ralph Waldo Emerson
1836
Squashed version edited by
Glyn
Hughes
© 2008
I. To
What End is Nature?
Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchers of
the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and
criticisms. The foregoing generations beheld God face to
face; we through their eyes. Why should not we also have
an original relation to the universe? Why should we
grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living
generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe?
Let us interrogate the great apparition that shines so
peacefully around us. Let us inquire to what end is
Nature.
Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of
Nature and Soul. Strictly speaking, therefore, all that
is separate from us, all which philosophy distinguishes
as not me, that is both Nature and Art, all other men
and my own body, must be ranked under this name, Nature.
Nature, in the common sense, refers to essences
unchanged by man: space, the air, the river, the leaf.
Art is applied to the mixture of his will with the same
things, as in a house, a canal, a statue, a picture. But
his operations, taken together, are so insignificant, a
little chipping, baking, patching, and washing, that in
an impression so grand as that of the world on the human
mind they do not vary the result.
To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from
his chamber as from society. But if a man would be alone
let him look at the stars. The rays that come from those
heavenly bodies will separate between him and what he
touches. One might think the atmosphere was made
transparent with this design, to give man in the
heavenly bodies the perpetual presence of the sublime.
Seen in the streets of cities, how great they are! If
the stars should appear one night in a thousand years,
how men would believe and adore, and preserve for many
generations the remembrance of the city of God which had
been shown! But every night come out these envoys of
beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing
smile.
Nature never wears a mean appearance. Neither does the
wisest man extort her secret, and lose his curiosity by
finding out all her perfection. 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. 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 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.
II. Her Delight
In the presence of Nature a wild delight runs through
the man in spite of real sorrow. 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 mind,
from breathless noon to grimmest midnight. Crossing a
bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a
clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any
occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a
perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear. In
the woods, too, a man casts off his years as the snake
his slough, and at what period soever of life is always
a child. Within these plantations of God a decorum and
sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the
guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand
years. Standing on the bare ground, my head bathed in
the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, all
mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I
am nothing; I see all; the currents of universal being
circulate through me; I am a part or particle of God. I
am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty.
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
nymphs is overspread with melancholy to-day. Nature
always wears the colors of the spirit.
The misery of man appears like childish petulance when
we explore the steady and prodigal provision that has
been made for his support and delight on this green ball
which floats him through the heavens. 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 the rain on this;
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. 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 book-shop, and the human
race read and write all that happens for him; to the
court-house, and nations repair his wrongs.
III. Her Loveliness
A nobler want of man is served by Nature, namely, the
love of beauty. Such is the constitution of all things,
or such the plastic power of the human eye, that the
primary forms, as the sky, the mountain, the tree, the
animal, give us a delight in and for themselves, a
pleasure arising from art, line, color, motion, and
grouping. This seems partly owing to the eye itself. The
eye is the best of artists, as light is the first of
painters.
To the body and mind which have been cramped by noxious
work or company Nature is medicinal, and restores their
tone. But in other hours Nature satisfies by her
loveliness and without any mixture of corporeal benefit.
I see the spectacle of morning from the hilltop over
against my house from daybreak to sunrise with emotion
which an angel might share. How does Nature deify us
with a few and cheap elements. Give me health and a day,
and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous. The
dawn is my Assyria; the sunset and moon rise my Paphos,
and unimaginable realms of faerie; broad noon shall be
my England of the senses and the understanding; the
night shall be my Germany of mystic philosophy and
dreams.
The inhabitants of cities suppose that the country
landscape is pleasant only half the year. To the
attentive eye each moment of the year has its own
beauty, and in the same fields it beholds every hour a
picture which was never seen before, and which shall
never be seen again.
Every rational creature has all Nature for his dowry and
estate. He may divest himself of it, he may creep into a
corner and abdicate his kingdom, as most men do, but he
is entitled to the world by his constitution. In
proportion to the energy of his thought and will he
takes up the world into himself.
IV. Her Gift of Language
Language is another use which Nature subserves to man.
Words are signs of natural facts. The use of natural
history is to give us aid in supernatural history. Every
word which is used to express a moral or intellectual
fact, if traced to its root, is found to be borrowed
from some material appearance. Right means straight;
wrong means twisted; transgression the crossing of a
line. Most of the process by which this transformation
is made is hidden from us in the remote time when
language was framed; but the same tendency may be daily
observed in children.
It is not words only that are emblematic, it is things.
Every appearance in Nature corresponds to some state of
mind, and that state of mind can only be described by
presenting that natural appearance as its picture. An
enraged man is a lion, a cunning man is a fox, a firm
man is a rock, a learned man is a torch. Visible
distance behind and before us is respectively an image
of memory and hope.
Man is conscious of a universal soul within or behind
his individual life, wherein, as in a firmament, the
natures of justice, truth, love, freedom, arise and
shine. This universal soul he calls reason: it is not
mine, or thine, or his, but we are its; we are its
property and men. And the blue sky in which the private
earth is buried, the sky with its eternal calm and full
of everlasting orbs is the type of reason. That which,
intellectually considered, we call reason, considered in
relation to Nature we call spirit. Spirit is the
creator. Spirit hath life in itself, and man in all ages
and countries embodies it in his language as the Father.
As we go back in history language becomes more
picturesque until its infancy, when it is all poetry.
When simplicity of character and the sovereignty of
ideas are broken up, new imagery ceases to be created
and old words are perverted to stand for things which
are not; a paper currency is employed when there is no
bullion in the vaults.
V. Her Moral Discipline
In view of the significance of Nature we arrive at the
fact that Nature is a discipline. What tedious training,
day after day, year after year, never ending, to form
the common sense; what continual reproduction of
annoyances, inconveniences, dilemmas; what rejoicing
over us of little men, what disputing of prices, what
reckoning of interest and all to form the hand of the
mind!
The exercise of will or the lesson of power is taught in
every event. Nature is thoroughly mediate. It is made to
serve. It receives the dominion of man as meekly as the
ass on which the Saviour rode. It offers all its
kingdoms to man as the raw material which he may mold
into what is useful. And he is never weary of working it
up. He forges the subtle and delicate air into wise and
melodious words, and gives them wings as angels of
persuasion and command. One after another his victorious
thought comes up with and reduces all things, until the
world becomes at last a realized will.
Every natural process is a version of a moral sentence.
The moral law lies at the center of Nature and radiates
to the circumference. What is a farm but a mute gospel?
The chaff and the wheat, weeds and plants, blight, rain,
insects, sun it is a sacred emblem from the first furrow
of spring to the last stack which the snow of winter
overtakes in the fields. Who can guess how much firmness
the sea-beaten rock has taught the fisherman? How much
tranquility has been reflected to man from the azure
sky? How much industry and providence and affection we
have caught from the pantomime of brutes?
The unity of Nature meets us everywhere. Resemblances
exist in things wherein there is great superficial
unlikeness. Thus architecture is called "frozen music"
by Goethe. "A Gothic church," said Coleridge, "is
petrified religion." The law of harmonic sounds
reappears in the harmonic colors. The granite is
different in its laws only by the more or less of heat
from the river that wears it away. The river, as it
flows, resembles the air that flows over it; the air
resembles the light that traverses it with more subtle
currents.
Each creature is only a modification of the other, the
likeness in them is more than the difference, and their
radical law is one and the same. This unity pervades
thought also.
VI. Is Nature Real?
A noble doubt suggests itself whether discipline be not
the final cause of the universe, and whether Nature
outwardly exists. The frivolous make themselves merry
with the ideal theory as if its consequences were
burlesque, as if it affected the stability of Nature. It
surely does not. The wheels and springs of man are all
set to the hypothesis of the permanence of Nature.
But while we acquiesce entirely in the permanence of
natural laws, the question of the absolute existence of
Nature still remains open. It is the uniform effect of
culture on the human mind to lead us to regard Nature as
a phenomenon, not a substance; to attribute necessary
existence to spirit.
Intellectual science fastens the attention upon immortal
necessary uncreated natures, that is, upon ideas; and in
their presence we feel that the outward circumstance is
a dream and a shade. Whilst we wait in this Olympus of
the gods we think of Nature as an appendix to the soul.
Finally, religion and ethics, which may be fitly called
the practice of ideas, have an analogous effect. The
first and last lesson of religion is: "The things that
are seen are temporal; the things that are unseen are
eternal."
VII. The Spirit Behind Nature
The aspect of Nature is devout. Like the figure of
Jesus, she stands with bended head and hands folded on
the breast. The happiest man is he who learns from
Nature the lesson of worship. Of that ineffable essence
we call spirit, he that thinks most will say least. We
can foresee God in the coarse, as it were, distant
phenomena of matter; but when we try to define and
describe Himself, both language and thought desert us,
and we are as helpless as fools and savages. The noblest
ministry of Nature is to stand as the apparition of God.
It is the organ through which the universal spirit
speaks to the individual, and strives to bring back the
individual to it.
I conclude this essay with some traditions of man and
Nature which a certain poet sang to me.
The foundations of man are not in matter, but inspirit.
And the element of spirit is eternity. To it, therefore,
the longest series of events, the oldest chronologies
are young and recent. A man is a god in ruins. When men
are innocent, life shall be longer and shall pass into
the immortal as gently as we awake from dreams. Infancy
is the perpetual Messiah which comes into the arms of
fallen men, and pleads with them to return to paradise.
The problem of restoring to the world the original and
eternal beauty is solved by the redemption of the soul.
The ruin that we see when we look at Nature is in our
own eye. Man cannot be a naturalist until he satisfies
all the demands of the spirit. Love is as much its
demand as perception. When a faithful thinker shall
kindle science with the fire of the holiest affection,
then will God go forth anew into the creation.
Nature is not fixed, but fluid. Spirit alters, molds,
makes it. The immobility, or bruteness, of Nature is the
absence of spirit. Every spirit builds itself a house,
and beyond its house a world, and beyond its world a
heaven. What we are, that only can we see. All that Adam
had, all that Caesar could, you have and can do. Adam
called his house heaven and earth; Caesar called his
house Rome; you, perhaps, call yours a cobbler's trade,
a hundred acres of ploughed land, or a scholar's garret.
Yet, line for line, and point for point, your dominion
is as great as theirs, though without fine names. Build,
therefore, your own world. As fast as you conform your
life to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its
great proportions.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
1803-1882
Emerson's grave in Sleepy Hallow Cemetery, Concord,
Massachusetts
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