Nature

Nature is a book-length essay written by Ralph Waldo Emerson, published by James Munroe and Company in 1836.^[1] In the essay Emerson put forth the foundation of transcendentalism, a belief system that espouses a non-traditional appreciation of nature.^[2] Transcendentalism suggests that the divine, or God, suffuses nature, and suggests that reality can be understood by studying nature.^[3] Emerson's visit to the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris inspired a set of lectures he later delivered in Boston which were then published.

Within the essay, Emerson divides nature into four usages: Commodity, Beauty, Language and Discipline. These distinctions define the ways by which humans use nature for their basic needs, their desire for delight, their communication with one another and their understanding of the world.^[4] Emerson followed the success of Nature with a speech, "The American Scholar", which together with his previous lectures laid the foundation for transcendentalism and his literary career.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803 - April 27, 1882), [7] who went by his middle name Waldo, [8] was an American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, abolitionist, and poet who led the transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society. Friedrich Nietzsche considered him "the most gifted of the Americans" and Walt Whitman referred to him as his "master".Emerson gradually moved away from the religious and social beliefs of his contemporaries, formulating and expressing the philosophy of transcendentalism in his 1836 essay "Nature". Following this work, he gave a speech entitled "The American Scholar" in 1837, which Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. considered to be America's "intellectual Declaration of Independence."[9]Emerson wrote most of his important essays as lectures first and then revised them for print. His first two collections of essays, Essays: First Series (1841) and Essays: Second Series (1844), represent the core of his thinking. They include the well-known essays "Self-Reliance", [10] "The Over-Soul", "Circles", "The Poet", and "Experience." Together with "Nature", [11] these essays made the decade from the mid-1830s to the mid-1840s Emerson's most fertile period. Emerson wrote on a number of subjects, never espousing fixed philosophical tenets, but developing certain ideas such as individuality, freedom, the ability for mankind to realize almost anything, and the relationship between the soul and the surrounding world. Emerson's "nature" was more philosophical than naturalistic: "Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul." Emerson is one of several figures who "took a more pantheist or pandeist approach by rejecting views of God as separate from the world."