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    Nature
    Nature
    Nature
    Ebook63 pages1 hour

    Nature

    By Ralph Waldo Emerson

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    In Nature, Emerson writes about the extraordinary power of nature as a way of bringing the divine into our lives. The essay stresses the importance of being an individual, resisting the comfort of conformity, and creating an art of living in harmony with nature.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherEnhanced Media Publishing
    Release dateJun 11, 2017
    ISBN9781387028566
    Author

    Ralph Waldo Emerson

    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) was an essayist, poet, and philosopher. The founder of the Transcendentalist movement that dominated American letters during the mid-nineteenth century, he mentored Thoreau and Whitman, and defined the shape of American literature for a generation.

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    Reviews for Nature

    3.5/5

    62 ratings4 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Wonderful limited edition, 35/50.The essay remains puzzling and unconvincing, to me, but we struggle for the sublime, anyway.Finished at La Push on birthday trip.
    • 4/5
      "Build, therefore, your own world. As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea of the mind, that will unfold its great proportions"

      I think I'll need to reread this every autumn.
    • 5/5
      Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature is a testimony of a Transcendentalist with a faith in nature. In this treatise Emerson presented nature as paramount in people’s lives. With captivating descriptions he showed how natural phenomena always played a vital role in our lives. Every aspect of nature was presented as important to mankind’s thinking and actions. Our mind, body, and soul are guided by nature. People shouldn’t make the mistake of thinking that nature was separate from them, for they are intricately interrelated with it. Emerson’s prose was rather poetic. He was able to blend nature’s beauty with these natural gifts. To this end he was most successful in bringing life to a Pantheistic view of the world. To Emerson, “nature was all in all,” and embraced every aspect of life.
    • 1/5
      I found Emerson to be naive. His understanding of science was evidently pre Darwinian. He seems to think that the world was made for us and he does not understand the fact that we are creatures of nature. Basically most of what he says is incorrect.

    Book preview

    Nature - Ralph Waldo Emerson

    Sophists

    Nature by Ralph Waldo Emerson. First published in 1836. This edition published 2017 by Enhanced Media. All rights reserved.

    ––––––––

    ISBN: 978-1-387-02856-6.

    A subtle chain of countless rings

    The next unto the farthest brings;

    The eye reads omens where it goes,

    And speaks all languages the rose;

    And, striving to be man, the worm

    Mounts through all the spires of form.

    Introduction

    ––––––––

    OUR age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchers 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 speculative men are esteemed unsound and frivolous. But to a sound judgment, the most abstract truth is the most practical. Whenever a true theory appears, it will be its own evidence. Its test is, that it will explain all phenomena. Now many are thought not only unexplained but inexplicable; as language, sleep, madness, dreams, beasts, sex.

    Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul. Strictly speaking, therefore, all that is separate from us, all which Philosophy distinguishes as the NOT ME, that is, both nature and art, all other men and my own body, must be ranked under this name, NATURE. In enumerating the values of nature and casting up their sum, I shall use the word in both senses;—in its common and in its philosophical import. In inquiries so general as our present one, the inaccuracy is not material; no confusion of thought will occur. 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.

    CHAPTER I

    NATURE

    ––––––––

    TO go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds, 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 would men 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.

    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

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