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Chapter 6: Idealism
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 returns to the “theory of nature.” He likens nature to Jesus and suggests that the happiest person is the one who’s learned “the lesson of worship” from nature. But Emerson cautions that it’s difficult to use language to accurately describe the divine spirit imbued in nature. Nature is the primary instrument through which God, or the universal spirit, communicates with individuals.
Earlier, Emerson likened humankind to Jesus and nature to the mule Jesus rode into Jerusalem, but here he links Jesus with nature. This could be an unintentional contradiction, but it could also be Emerson’s way of showing how humankind, nature, and the divine are intimately connected.
Themes
Literary Devices
Emerson raises three questions: “What is matter? Whence is it? and Whereto?” To him, idealism is a “hypothesis” of nature. He doesn’t find idealism useful if it fully rejects the existence of external reality (or matter), because such a perspective “leaves God out of me.”
Nature and humanity can’t be entirely separate (as idealism would hold) because, as Emerson noted earlier, people project their emotions onto nature. And because of this, there is a trace of humankind within nature; they aren’t wholly separate.
Themes
Literary Devices
Spirit underpins nature and runs throughout it. And spirit (which Emerson also calls “the Supreme Being”) also runs through humankind, similar to how a tree grows new leaves through its old branches. Both humankind and the world come from this spirit, which is an “inferior incarnation of God.” But this spirit, unlike humankind, isn’t “subjected to the human will.” Because nature is imbued with this spirit, when people are far away from nature, they’re consequently alienated from God.
In this passage, Emerson clearly outlines the consequences of everything being so tightly connected. He restates that divine is infused in nature, and that humankind is meant to live in unity with nature. But when people are physically and emotionally distant from nature (their present state, according to Emerson), humanity is consequently disconnected from God. It follows, then, that people must reconnect with nature in order to find spiritual wholeness again.
Themes
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