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Chapter 4: Language
Themes
and Colors
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
Nature is a discipline—meaning that nature is a field of study, and it’s also a teacher. Every aspect of nature has something to teach and can educate a person’s Understanding and Reason.
Throughout the essay, Emerson uses Understanding to mean the process of learning intellectual truths or facts through mere observation. And by Reason, he’s actually referring to something closer to the process of using one’s intuition to grasp spiritual or moral truths from nature.
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First, Emerson examines how nature teaches people intellectual truths. In our day-to-day lives, we learn lessons about how natural objects are different from or similar to one another, as well as lessons about order and generality. Emerson uses debt and property as examples of natural objects that are instructive, and he suggests that those who suffer the most from debt are the ones who need to learn from it the most.
Since Emerson defined Nature so broadly in the introduction (Nature with a capital -N refers to everything that’s not the Soul), he then categories debt and property as natural objects.
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Every interaction we have with the world also teaches us about how we can shape nature according to our human will. This is because nature is meant to serve mankind, just like “the ass on which the Saviour rode.”
Nature, as the “ally of Religion,” also teaches moral lessons—even prophets and religious figures like David and Jesus have turned to nature for moral instruction. Moral truth is imbued in nature (Emerson suggests that a farm is like a silent gospel), but the amount of moral influence nature has is different for each person.
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Emerson then underscores the “Unity of Nature,” and he references the lesson underpinning the Greek myth of the prophet Proteus. Every element of nature (e.g., a leaf or a raindrop), Emerson explains, is part of a broader whole and is like a microcosm (a small-scale representation) of that whole. Even elements of nature that seem dissimilar are still related and imbued with the universal Spirit, or God. To illustrate this point, Emerson uses the example of a circle that has “innumerable sides.”
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Extending the concept of unity to words and actions, Emerson suggests that “Words are finite organs of the infinite mind” and can corrupt truth. But action—and particularly a good, moral action—is the “perfection and publication of thought” and connects with the whole of nature. Emerson suggests that words and actions are what set people apart from (and allow them to domineer over) other elements of nature.
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