“Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same. She casts
the same thoughts into troops of forms, as a poet makes twenty fables with one
moral. Beautifully shines a spirit through the bruteness and toughness of matter.”
From the Introduction by Walt McLaughlin
Ralph Waldo Emerson was the first American thinker to acknowledge the self-evident
realities of the physical world, thus giving rise to a philosophy deeply rooted
in nature. Thoreau came later, as did George Perkins Marsh, John Muir, and John
Burroughs. In his slender volume, Nature, Emerson presented ideas that altered
humankind’s perception of the wild. The impact of those ideas is still
being felt today, yet most people are not aware of that book or Emerson’s
heavy, naturalistic bent. Most see Emerson as a quaint poet, lecturer, and essayist
of yesteryear and nothing more.
The Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle once said that the prophet
and the poet are much the same. Both explore what he called “the sacred
mystery of the Universe.” No doubt Emerson stumbled across this notion
in his youth when he first read Carlyle. No doubt Emerson aspired to be that
kind of poet, seizing upon the laws at work in the universe, then conveying
them to others.
“Here we are impressed with the inexhaustible riches of nature. 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, and the upheaving principle of life everywhere
incipient, in the very rock aping organized forms. Not a form so grotesque,
so savage, nor so beautiful but is an expression of some property inherent in
man the observer, — an occult relation between the very scorpions and
man. I feel the centipede in me, — cayman, carp, eagle, and fox. I am
moved by strange sympathies; I say continually 'I will be a naturalist.'”
“No art can exceed the mellow beauty of one square rod of ground in the
woods this afternoon. The noise of the locust, the bee, and the pine; the light,
the insect forms, butterflies, cankerworms hanging, balloon-spiders swinging,
devils-needles cruising, chirping grasshoppers; the tints and forms of the leaves
and trees, — not a flower but its form seems a type, not a capsule but
is an elegant seedbox, — then the myriad asters, polygalas, and golden-rods,
and through the bush the far pines, and overhead the eternal sky.”
In his slender book, Nature, Emerson outlined a philosophy that would soon
be known as American Transcendentalism — a curious fusion of European
Idealism and Romanticism with Yankee common sense. More to the point, Emerson
shows in this book how any discourse on truth, God, or reality is essentially
an inquiry into the natural world. Even human nature is but a facet of nature.
Hence, a thorough understanding of the laws of nature is key to understanding
everything else. Truth, love, morality, beauty, the physical world — it
all comes together in nature.
-Walt McLaughlin
“Nothing divine dies. All good is eternally reproductive.
The beauty of nature reforms itself in the mind, and not for barren contemplation,
but for new creation.”
