Nature in the View of Ralph Waldo Emerson

In Nature, Ralph Waldo Emerson traces what he calls the final cause of the world . He believes that the world is made of Nature and Soul. "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" (Emerson 7-8). In his view, nature is coupled with solitude as well as the city of God . Nature proffers a dwelling wherein humans transcend matter and become part of the Universal Being that runs through every living soul, that s God. In other words, "the field is at once his flour, his work-yard, his play-ground, his garden, and his bed (16). Nature is understood to be a durable commodity for humans and a focal resource for their sustainment, progress, and survival. Nature is also associated with beauty. The shallowest perception of natural elements is a relish. The human body and soul is constantly encumbered, and nature is their ultimate panacea. "Beauty is the mark God sets upon virtue. Every natural action is graceful" (25). The universe, and nature for that matter, is the possession of every individual living in it. The intellect, for example, relies on the beauty of the world as an object of his thought. All natural phenomena is a representation of moral and intellectual verdicts.
As he travels in the mind of God, the intellect seeks the depths and order of nature. Creation exists in order to attain the telos of beauty for the Soul. Beauty remains one aspect of the universe. "God is the all-fair. Truth, and goodness, and beauty, are but different faces of the same All" (30). Values such as justice, truth, love, and freedom are embodiment of a universal soul called Reason. Nature is just an emblem of Reason, when opposed to Reason, is called Spirit, and Spirit is the Creator. Spirit is permanently alive, and all human beings carry it with them in their language, art, and spiritualism. Nature can furthermore be bonded to discipline in realizing intellectual truths. As laws and dicta are established, nature "offers all its kingdoms to man as the raw material which he may mould into what is useful. Man is never weary of working it up" (50-51). It is patent throughout his analysis that Emerson is affected by idealism, particularly via his own posture as an intellect. In his mind, the real challenge for a poet lies in his ability to relate to affinities between ideal occurrences, this will lead him to readily imbibe natural phenomena, and hence affirm the preponderance of the irrefragable Spirit. "The things that are seen, are temporal--;-- the things that are unseen, are eternal" (72). Nature is revealed to be a phenomenon rather than a substance. Idealism demarcates the boundary between human existence and the world s existence. The first is optimal, yet the former needs evidence.
Nature is similar to the human body. It’s an incarnation of God, an inception of God in the unconscious. And so, we begin to view the world from new lenses, and nature will ultimately answer the queries of the intellect--;-- of truth and morality. "The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is, because, man is disunited with himself. He cannot be a naturalist, until he satisfies all the demands of the spirit. Love is as much its demand, as perception" (91).

Sources
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Nature.” The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Volume 1. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1979.

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