Emerson’s earliest reference to an essay on nature occurs in his journal for 1833. Three years later, in 1836, he anonymously published his now-famous Nature. It was his first major work, and it continues to be his best known. The essay met with good critical reception but with little support from the reading public. He reprinted it in his 1849 edition of Nature; Addresses, and Lectures.

The essay’s final chapter opens with reflections on how to study nature. According to Emerson, intuition is more preferable in trying to understand nature than are the calculated measurements of science and geology. Empirical science, based on detailed observation, studies individual objects, but it fails to place them back into their natural surroundings.

Attempting to penetrate the mystery of nature’s vital unity, Emerson’s language and concepts concerning a universal spirituality suggest mystical truths beyond the reach of ordinary understanding. Whenever we try to define what this spirit is that permeates nature, our comprehension fails us, but we still feel that nature has spiritual properties.

Emerson now tackles the difficult question of subjective truth and the impossibility of verifying the truth of external reality. It is not possible to prove absolutely that what our senses perceive is real. The average person—Emerson uses the carpenter as one example of such a person—doesn’t want to know that what he thinks is real might be an illusion.

Concerned initially with how we reflect on solitude, the stars, and the grandeur of nature, this chapter turns from the universal world, symbolized in the stars that Emerson views at night, and focuses on how we perceive objects around us. Emerson speaks of the landscape in which he walks and how he, as a poet, can best integrate all that he sees.

By claiming that people can come to know nature “by degrees,” Emerson now distinguishes which faculties people use in this process. He names these faculties Understanding and Reason, and he attempts to show the relationship between them.

In this fourth section, Emerson discusses the relationship between nature and language: Words represent objects in nature; these individual objects signify spiritual realities; and nature symbolizes spirituality.

This section introduces the idea that beauty is a part of nature that serves our needs. Following the chapter on commodity (a “physical necessity”), this discussion makes clear the notion that beauty is a nobler want of humanity than commodity, which everyone must have to survive. Beauty is not necessary for physical survival, but it is useful for its restorative powers.

Laying out the problem that he will attempt to solve in the essay, Emerson states that our energy and excitement in creating something new has been lost because we try to understand the world around us by using only theories and histories about nature rather than personally observing it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson 拉尔夫.沃尔多.爱默生

1.responsible for bringing Transcendentalism to New England

2.Emerson believed above all in individualism,independence of mind and self-reliance

3. works:Nature,Essays,The American Scholar, our intellectual Declaration of Independence