SOURCE: “Emerson and Nature,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson, edited by Joel Porte and Saundra Morris, Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp. 97-105.

[In the following essay, Richardson defines Emerson's perception of nature and the role it played in his philosophical thinking and writing.]

Explicit or implicit in nearly everything Emerson wrote is the conviction that nature bats last, that nature is the law, the final word, the supreme court. Others have believed—still believe—that the determining force in our lives is grace, or that it is the state—the polis, the community—or that it is the past. More recently it has been argued that the central force is economics or race or sex or genetics. Emerson's basic teaching is that the fundamental context of our lives is nature.

Emerson's definition of nature is a broad one. Nature is the way things are. Philosophically, Emerson says, the universe is made up of nature and the soul, or nature and consciousness. Everything that is not me is nature; nature thus includes nature (in the common sense of the green world), art, all other persons, and my own body.

Emerson's interest in nature was more than theoretical. Like his friends Alcott and Thoreau, Emerson was passionately attached to the natural world. “The mind,” says Alcott, speaking for them all, “craves the view of mountain, ocean, forest, lake and plain, the open horizon, the firmament—an actual contact with the elements.” As a boy, Emerson rambled in the woods and fields outside Boston. As a young man, he thought for a while of becoming a naturalist. As a father, he took his children on nature walks and taught them all the flowers and birds and trees. All his life his interest in nature was rooted in his delight in and close observation of nature. Of one sunrise he wrote, “the long slender bars of cloud float like fishes in the sea of crimson light.” Of a particularly fine January sunset, he wrote, “The western clouds divided and subdivided themselves into pink flakes modulated with tints of unspeakable softness; and the air had so much life and sweetness, that it was a pain to come within doors. … The leafless trees become spires of flame in the sunset, with the blue east for their background, and the stars of the dead calices of flowers, and every withered stem and stubble rimed with frost contribute something to the mute music.”¹

The decisive moment in Emerson's interest in nature came in 1832, in Paris, when he was 29. He had trained for the Unitarian ministry, and in 1829 became the minister of Boston's Second Church. At about the same time he fell in love with and married a beautiful young woman named Ellen Tucker, who hoped to become a poet. But Ellen died in 1831, after they had been married only a year and a half. This tragic event, together with Emerson's growing interest in science, especially astronomy, led him to question seriously what he called “historical Christianity.” In May 1832, he told his congregation, “I regard it as the irresistible effect of the Copernican astronomy to have made the theological scheme of redemption absolutely incredible.”²

Emerson resigned from his church, gave up his house, sold his furniture, relocated his mother, and sailed for Europe. After an eight-month tour of Italy and a quick trip through Switzerland and France, he found himself in Paris gazing at the vast and wonderful exhibits in the Jardin des Plantes, where he experienced a vocational epiphany. He observed in his journal that “the Universe is a more amazing puzzle than ever as you glance along this bewildering series of animated forms—the hazy butterflies, the carved shells, the birds, beasts, fishes, insects, snakes—& the upheaving principle of life everywhere incipient in the very rock aping organized forms.”³ Not only were the specimens in the exhibits linked to each other, they were also linked to him. Perhaps for the first time since the death of Ellen, Emerson felt an agitated, sympathetic—almost physical—connection with the natural world. He was powerfully stirred. “I feel the centipede in me—cayman, carp, eagle & fox. I am moved by strange sympathies, I say continually ‘I will be a naturalist’.”⁴

When Emerson returned home and began a new career as a public lecturer, the first subject he took up was science, which he understood as the study of nature. But Emerson never became a scientist, or even a naturalist, not in the semiliterary way Thoreau did, and certainly not in the way his cousin, George B. Emerson, author of a standard botany of Massachusetts, did. Emerson had, however, a daily and a detailed knowledge of the natural world, as his family and friends testified. He taught his children how to recognize the birds by their songs. He knew the names of all the plants; he took daily walks to Walden Pond. He loved the word lespedeza, his daughter recalled, and he would say it over and over as a sort of homemade Yankee mantra. Emerson was an avid gardener and orchard keeper. He planted trees to mark his children's birthdays. He grew many varieties of apple, pear, and quince, although he did so with more enthusiasm than skill. His son recalled how the local botanical society launched an inquiry into how Emerson could get such poor results from such splendid stock.

Emerson remained interested in the sciences all his life. He read in geology, astronomy, chemistry, and, above all, botany. He was a friend of Louis Agassiz, who was the leading scientist of his time, and he kept up with new discoveries and controversies. As Dirk Struik, a modern historian of New England's contributions to science, has observed, Emerson's warm interest in science—his hospitable openness to it—was itself a real contribution, because it helped to create an intellectual atmosphere in which there is no necessary gulf between science and the humanities, no structural reason for the existence of the “two cultures” described by C. P. Snow in his famous essay of 1956. What science and the humanities have in common, Emerson argued, is a perennial interest in nature.

The most important result of Emerson's long engagement with nature was the publication in 1836 of the small book he called Nature. Its opening paragraph represents a turning point, not only in American literature, but also in his own life. It records the moment when Emerson turned explicitly and self-consciously from biography, history, and criticism to nature for his starting point. Reading the first paragraph of Nature has brought about a similar shake-up in many a reader as well. “Our age is retrospective,” he begins. “It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism.” Emerson clears the agenda with a dismissive sweep, pointing out that “the foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes.” The question Emerson incites us to ask is “Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?” The emphasis is on the word also. “Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”⁵

Pursuing his own question, Emerson sets out the main benefits we derive from nature, and from putting nature first. In the chapter called “Commodity,” he considers how nature provides the raw material and the energy for everything we build, grow, or eat. Who can fail to be impressed by “the steady and prodigal provision that has been made for his support and delight on this green ball which floats through the heavens?” It was the practical usefulness of nature that Emerson had in mind as he admired a tide-mill, “which, on the seashore, makes the tides drive the wheels and grind corn, and which thus engages the assistance of the moon like a hired hand, to grind, and wind, and pump, and saw, and split stone, and roll iron.” And it was a typical leap of imagination for Emerson to draw from this activity his much-repeated injunction to “hitch your wagon to a star,” which gains its full force when we see that the emphasis is on the word your. But nature as commodity is only the most obvious and most tangible of benefits, and Emerson quickly moves on to the less-material gifts of nature.⁶

In the chapter called “Beauty,” he outlines a theory of aesthetics grounded in nature. “Such is the constitution of 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.” Nature provides us our first and most reliable standards of beauty. “Nature is a sea of forms,” he says, and “the standard of beauty is the entire circuit of natural forms.” This is a fundamental proposition, a given, an “ultimate end.” “No reason can be asked or given why the soul seeks beauty,” says Emerson. It cannot be explained, but is itself the explanation for other things.

Just as nature provides us with our standard of beauty (Emerson's natural aesthetic can be traced from Henry Thoreau and Horatio Greenough to Frederick Church, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Edward Weston and John Cage), so Nature provides us with language and with an explanation of the use of language. Emerson goes further; for him, nature is language. “Nature is the vehicle of thought” is his formulation. Certainly for writers—and perhaps for everyone—this is the central chapter of Emerson's central book. To begin with, Emerson shows how “words are signs of natural facts.” Not only does “apple” stand for an apple, but most abstractions, when traced to their origins, will be found to have roots in the visible, the concrete, the tangible. Sierra means saw, “supercilious” is from the Latin super cilia, meaning raised eyebrow. “Experience” goes back to Latin periculum and so means something won or snatched from danger. So, as Emerson will say later in his essay “The Poet” (to which the book Nature is linked by the underground river of Emerson's interest in language), language is fossil poetry. It is noteworthy that Emerson's ideas about language were picked up in England by Richard Trench and led, perhaps indirectly, to the undertaking of the Oxford English Dictionary.⁷

The next step of Emerson's argument is the most difficult, the most philosophically limiting, and, for the writer, the most exciting point. The writer understands, says Emerson, that “it is not words only that are emblematic; it is things which are emblematic.” He fills a paragraph with examples. “Who looks upon a river in a meditative hour, and is not reminded of the flux of all things? Throw a stone into the stream, and the circles that propagate themselves are the beautiful type of all influence.” What writers understand is “this immediate dependence of language upon nature.” What writers do is “this conversion of an outward phenomenon onto a type of somewhat [something] in human life.”⁸

What Emerson understood, and what American writers since Emerson have been able to get from him, is the importance of the primary connection between the writer and nature. Emerson puts it with unusual vehemence. “Hundreds of writers may be found in every long-civilized nation, who for a short time believe, and make others believe, that they see and utter truths, who do not of themselves clothe one thought in its natural garment, but who feed unconsciously on the language created by the primary writers of the country, those, namely, who hold primarily on nature.”⁹

The essence of language then is imagery. For this reason “good writing and brilliant discourse are perpetual allegories.” The reason we love imagery and respond to it is not just that language is a vast river of images, but also that nature itself is the inexhaustible upstream reservoir and source of all the rivers of language. “The world is emblematic,” Emerson says. “Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.” Every mind can claim all of nature for its material.¹⁰

Emerson is an idealist, a believer that process, purpose, or concept precedes and determines product. The most daring, and to a modern reader, the most challenging aspect of Emerson's nature, is his argument that nature teaches him to look beyond nature. To put it more carefully, he says that the beauty and interrelatedness of physical, outward nature leads him to inquire into the inner laws of nature which determine the outer appearances.

“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?” Conceding that phenomena are real enough whether they objectively exist or exist only in the mind, Emerson pushes on to contend that “it is the uniform effect of culture [education, consciousness] on the human mind, not to shake our faith in the stability of particular phenomena, as of heat, water, azote [nitrogen]; but to lead us to regard nature as a phenomenon, not a substance; to attribute necessary existence to spirit; to esteem nature [that is, external nature] as an accident and an effect.”¹¹

The distinction Emerson makes here between the inner, invisible laws of nature, and the external, visible forms of nature is not a new one. The English Romantic poets, especially Coleridge, recognized a similar distinction between natura naturans (nature as a collection of active forces and processes) and natura naturata (the finished products of nature, natural objects). Perhaps Emerson's greatest contribution was his account of how these two aspects of nature are interrelated. His lifelong endeavor was to show how the laws and processes of nature are part of mind, and to work out the relation between mind and external nature. Emerson was, finally, a naturalist of mental more than of physical facts. Beginning around 1848, he worked on and off for the rest of his life on a project he called “Natural History of Intellect.”

Like all thorough romantics, and like the new scientists from Goethe to Lyell and Darwin, Emerson understood that nature is in continuous change or flux. “There are no fixtures in nature,” he wrote in “Circles.” “The universe is fluid and volatile. Permanence is but a word of degrees.” He understood nature to be a process rather than a thing. “Thus there is no sleep, no pause, no preservation, but all things renew, germinate and spring.” His view of nature as dynamic also explains his preference for nature over history. “In nature every moment is new; the past is always swallowed and forgotten; the coming only is sacred. Nothing is secure but life, transition, the energizing spirit.”¹²

As much as Emerson was committed to the idea that all is flux—an idea he called “the metamorphosis”—and as much as he was committed to the pluralistic, the diverse, and the particular, he also understood that there were laws governing appearances and that things in nature are unified and whole, though not always in obvious ways. “Everything in nature contains all the powers of nature,” he wrote in “Compensation.” “Every thing is made of one hidden stuff, as the naturalist sees one type under every metamorphosis.”¹³

The central point, the pivot of Emerson's understanding of nature, is his conception of the all-encompassing relationship that exists at all times between the mind—understood as a more or less constant, classifying power—and the infinite variety of external nature. He had read Kant and Schelling and was echoing Kant when he wrote in “The Oversoul” that “the sources of nature are in [man's] own mind.” He knew Schelling's breathtaking all-inclusive proposal that “nature is externalized mind; mind is internalized nature.” In “The American Scholar” Emerson said that “nature is the opposite of the soul, answering to it part for part. One is seal and one is print. Its beauty is the beauty of his own mind. Its laws are the laws of his own mind. So much of nature as he [the scholar] is ignorant of, so much of his own mind does he not yet possess.” In “Compensation” he wrote, “each new form repeats not only the main character of the type, but part for part all the details, all the aims, furtherances, hindrances, energies and whole system of every other. Every occupation, trade, art, transaction, is a compend of the world, and a correlative of every other. Each one is an entire emblem of human life; of its good and ill, its trials, its enemies, its course and its end.”¹⁴

This radical and comprehensive connection between nature and mind is the unwobbling pivot, the fundamental condition of most of Emerson's work, and it explains why he can turn to nature for his starting point on virtually any subject. We can touch here only on a few of the most important.

Nature was Emerson's starting point for a new theology. His rejection, in the Divinity School “Address,” of organized—or as he called it, historical—Christianity was a protest not against, but on behalf of, religion. Following the Scottish Common Sense philosophers, Emerson argued that the “moral sentiment,” which is found in all human beings, “is the essence of all religions.” By religion, Emerson means concrete, personal, religious feelings or experience. “The intuition of the moral sentiment is an insight into the perfection of the laws of the soul.” Intuition is, for Emerson, like religion, a matter of actual, present personal experience. “It cannot be received at second hand. Truly speaking it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul. What he announces, I must find true in me, or wholly reject: and on his word, or as his second, be he who he may,” be he Jesus or Moses, or Paul, or Augustine, “I can accept nothing.” Thus revelation must be revelation to me or to you. “Men have come to speak of the revelation as somewhat [something] long ago given and done, as if God were dead.” But if there is a God then he is present now in all of us, Emerson believes. “It is the office of a true teacher to show us that God is, not was, that he speaketh, not spake.” Emerson is not interested in secondhand revelations, secondhand gospel. For this reason he never refers to the Bible as an authority. He cares about what he calls the “Gospel of the present moment.” He rejects the standard Christian chronological concept of history, the idea that there was one creation, that there will be one day of judgment. Religious convictions and feelings, like all others, exist for Emerson only in the present.

Thus he says “there is no profane history … all history is sacred.” Creation is continuous. Every day is a day of creation. So, too, with the day of judgment. “No man has learned anything until he has learned that every day is judgment day.” Noting that the Hebrew word for prophet is also the word for poet, Emerson insists that the modern poet can do for his people what the old Hebrew prophet-poets did for theirs. (Walt Whitman was listening.) The incarnation means God takes on flesh in every person, not just in one. When Emerson writes that “infancy is the perpetual Messiah,” he means that the power of the concept of the Messiah is the hope and promise we feel in every infant. Because we live in nature, Emerson believes we can see God every day, face to face. He will have none of the disabling, through-a-glass-darkly dirge of lamentation. As he expresses it in his finest lyric poem, “Days,” the days themselves are gods, bringing to each of us gifts according to our capacity to receive. Every day offers us new kingdoms, powers, and glories. It is on our own heads if we settle out of court for a few herbs and apples.¹⁵

Nature is also Emerson's practical guide to an ethical life. In this he is a modern stoic. He believed, like Marcus Aurelius and Montaigne, that nature rather than tradition or authority or the state is our best teacher. To live in nature means above all to live in the present, to seize the day. “Life only avails, not the having lived,” he says in “Self-Reliance.” “Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf.”¹⁶

Nature for Emerson was a theory of the nature of things—how things are; it was a guide to life, a foundation for philosophy, art, language, education, and everyday living. “Nature is what you may do.” It was the green world of gardens and parks, and the wild world of the sea and the woods. Above all, and running through all his thought on the subject, nature was for Emerson the experience of nature. Some of the most often-cited passages in Emerson's writings are accounts of immediate physical experiences. “Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thought any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear.” Even the famous passage about becoming a transparent eyeball is best understood not as a theory of nature, but as an actual moment of experience, a feeling. Emerson devoted an entire essay to this aspect of nature. It is called “The Method of Nature.” To a post-Darwinian reader, the title inevitably suggests a discussion of evolution, or the formation of elements beginning with hydrogen. The essay is, however, about the human experiencing of nature, which is, at its most intense, a state Emerson calls “ecstasy.” By ecstasy he does not mean a technical out-of-body experience, but a joyous consciousness of the rich plenitude of existence. He speaks of the “redundancy or excess of life which in conscious beings we call ecstasy.” “Surely joy is the condition of life,” said Thoreau, and Emerson agreed, saying “Life is an ecstasy.” For Emerson the feeling of joy was a state of ecstasy which, in his lexicon, meant nearly the same thing as “enthusiasm,” that other key to a fully lived life. “Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm,” he said in “Circles,” adding that “the way of life is wonderful: it is by abandonment.” When we are in this state of heightened awareness, of enthusiasm, of ecstasy, we come as close to the secret heart of nature as we can get. The important thing about your enthusiasm for nature—or for Emerson—is the enthusiasm in you. This is the highest and most valuable teaching of that nature we all agree we cannot do without. As Emerson says in “Illusions,” the permanent interest of every person is “never to be in a false position, but to have the weight of nature to back him in all that he does.”¹⁷

Notes

1. Amos Bronson Alcott, “Report of the School Committee, 1861” in Essays on Education, ed. Walter Harding (Gainesville, FL: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1960), p. 189. R. W. Emerson, Nature, in Essays and Lectures (New York: Viking Press, The Library of America, 1983), p. 15.

2. R. W. Emerson, Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks, vol. 4, ed. Wm. H. Gilman et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), p. 26.

3. Cited in Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p. 208.

4. JMN 4, pp. 198, 199, 200.

5. Emerson, Nature, in Essays and Lectures, p. 7, emphasis added.

6. R. W. Emerson, “Civilization,” in Society and Solitude (Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press, 1904), p. 30.

7. Richard Trench, On the Study of Words, 22d ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1900, orig. 1851), p. 5. In earlier editions RWE is not named but is identified as “a popular American author.”

8. Emerson, Nature, in Essays and Lectures, pp. 20, 21, 22.

9. Emerson, Nature, in Essays and Lectures, pp. 22-23.

10. Emerson, Nature, in Essays and Lectures, pp. 23, 24.

11. Emerson, Nature, in Essays and Lectures, pp. 32, 33.

12. Emerson, “Circles,” in Essays and Lectures, pp. 403, 412-13.

13. Emerson, “Compensation,” in Essays and Lectures, p. 289.

14. Emerson, “The Oversoul,” in Essays and Lectures, p. 399; “The American Scholar,” in Essays and Lectures, p. 56; “Compensation,” in Essays and Lectures, p. 289.

15. Emerson, “An Address …” in Essays and Lectures, pp. 76, 79, 88; “The Oversoul,” in Essays and Lectures, p. 400; “Days,” in Collected Poems and Translations (New York: Viking Press, The Library of America, 1994), p. 178.

16. Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” in Essays and Lectures, p. 271.

17. Emerson, “Fate,” in Essays and Lectures, pp. 949, 963; “The Method of Nature,” in Essays and Lectures, p. 121; “Circles,” in Essays and Lectures, p. 414; “Illusions,” in Essays and Lectures, p. 1122.