Nature
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text
- Extent:
- ~15,600 words · 74 passages
Cite this work
- APARalph Waldo Emerson. (n.d.). Nature. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/ralph-waldo-emerson/nature
- MLARalph Waldo Emerson. "Nature." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/ralph-waldo-emerson/nature.
- ChicagoRalph Waldo Emerson. Nature. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/ralph-waldo-emerson/nature.
What it is about
Nature (1836): the text, written at thirty, that founded American transcendentalism.
Context and history
Published anonymously and without fuss, but all of Emerson is in it: nature as language, the eye that becomes transparent, and the question of why we should look at the world through the eyes of the dead. **A note on the edition: this text is also inside the volume Miscellanies embracing Nature, addresses, and lectures, which is in the catalogue. They are not a duplicate — two different editorial units, and both stay.**
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
OUR age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? 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? Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship. Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable. We must trust the perfection of the creation so far, as to believe that whatever curiosity the order of things has awakened in our minds, the order of things can satisfy. Every man's condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth. In like manner, nature is already, in its forms and tendencies, describing its own design. Let us interrogate the great apparition, that shines so peacefully around us. Let us inquire, to what end is nature? All science has one aim, namely, to find a theory of nature. We have theories of races and of functions, but scarcely yet a remote approach to an idea of creation. We are now so far from the road to truth, that religious teachers dispute and hate each other, and sp← Back to Ralph Waldo Emerson