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Chapter 1: Nature
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Nature, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Unity and Interconnectedness
The Transformative Power of Nature
Religion, Science, and Individualism
Reason, Understanding, and Truth
Summary
Analysis
Emerson explains that, in the coming chapters, he will tackle each element of nature’s relationship with humankind: “Commodity; Beauty; Language; and Discipline.” By “Commodity,” he’s referring to nature’s practical, immediate, “low” uses rather than the grander, more spiritual ways that nature affects the Soul. Of all of the elements of nature outlined above, Emerson writes that commodity is the only one that all people grasp.
This chapter marks the beginning of Emerson’s investigation into each main element of nature’s relationship with humankind, ordered from lowest to highest importance. His hierarchy is somewhat similar to the concept of psychologist Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Just as the foundational level of Maslow’s pyramid (psychological needs like food, water, sleep, warmth) are crucial to mere survival but don’t satisfy psychological needs (e.g., friendship or respect), so too is commodity the most basic way that people connect and use nature but doesn’t extend beyond survival.
Themes
Earth was created to “support and delight” humankind. And because of this, Emerson thinks that when people are miserable, it reads like ungrateful “childish petulance.” Indeed, all parts of nature work together to take care of humankind. For instance, the wind spreads seeds into fields, the rain nourishes the seeds and helps them grow into plants, the plants then feed animals, and so on.
Though Emerson has stressed that people who love nature are childlike, here, he suggests that people who don’t grasp the full extent to which nature sustains human life are childish. In other words, Emerson praises having a childlike spirit of openness, curiosity, and delight. But he criticizes moodiness, irritability, and selfishness—the negative qualities children can have. He suggests that people who don’t recognize how thoroughly nature sustains life appear ungrateful and naïve, like a child having a tantrum.
Themes
These days, a person doesn’t have to wait for a gust of wind to fill their ship’s sails and carry the ship forward on the sea. That person can power their ship by steam, and “realize[] the fable of Aeolus’s bag.” Between “the era of Noah to that of Napoleon,” Emerson writes, people have discovered countless ways to use nature to their benefit.
Aeolus’s bag is a reference to Homer’s Odyssey. In the epic, Greek god Aeolus—keeper of the winds—gives Odysseus a bag of wind that he can use to guide his ship back home to Ithaca, which he’s been away from for years. Throughout the Odyssey, Odysseus is at the mercy of the gods and the Fates, but what Emerson is saying here is that by capitalizing on nature’s resources, people can essentially control their own fate—or at least control their own ships. The reference to steam power is also a nod to the American Industrial Revolution, which was going on while Emerson was writing. He suggests that between biblical times (he references Noah from the Book of Genesis) and his contemporary time (the 19th century), people have made great strides in approaching nature as a commodity and shaping it for their own uses.
Themes
Literary Devices
