Previous
Chapter 5: Discipline
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
Next, Emerson examines external reality, questioning whether the world we perceive with our senses is actually real, or if it’s just an illusion. But Emerson suggests that it doesn’t really matter if nature truly exists or is just an illusion that exists in people’s minds. Either way, nature is still “useful” and “venerable.”
Emerson makes deep, philosophical arguments throughout “Nature,” but there’s one particular philosophical question that he doesn’t care to know the answer to: whether or not there is an external reality. To Emerson, all that matters is that we do perceive nature with our senses. Even if this perception is just an illusion, we nevertheless can use and learn from nature.
Active
Themes
Quiz
Test Yourself
Most people take comfort in permanence, including the permanence of humankind and that of natural laws. After all, humankind generally believes that it’s “not built like a ship to be tossed, but like a house to stand.” In other words, people see themselves as separate from nature. But still, Emerson points out, this doesn’t answer the question of nature’s “absolute existence.” The only way for a person to really see things clearly (and shed their faith in permanence) is if they use Reason.
While most people see themselves as “a house to stand” (that is, fairly permanent) Emerson will later side with a poet who suggests that nature is actually the house, while we are the residents who come and go.
Active
Themes
Quiz
Test Yourself
Emerson suggests that looking at nature from a different physical perspective—like seeing the shoreline from a ship or hot air balloon—makes the world look “pictorial” and fills us with both delight and wonder.
Poets are skilled at manipulating perspective in this way. Through words and literary devices, the poet “unfixes the land and the sea” and shapes the natural world into symbols. Emerson cites Shakespeare’s Tempest as an example of poetry that uses natural imagery and symbolism skillfully.
Active
Themes
Quiz
Test Yourself
Get the entire Nature LitChart as a printable PDF.
"My students can't get enough of your charts and their results have gone through the roof." -Graham S.
Emerson points out that the poet’s goal is to illuminate beauty, while the philosopher’s goal is to illuminate truth. Quoting Plato, Emerson underscores that philosophy’s biggest shortcoming is that it, too, subscribes to the idea of permanence. He suggests that the “true poet” and the “true philosopher” are two iterations of the same being, and that truth and beauty are also two sides of the same coin.
Emerson then discusses “intellectual science.” According to Emerson, science encourages people to doubt external reality, and it is focused on abstract ideas rather than physical things. He suggests that religion and ethics also focus on abstract ideas as opposed to observation. (Emerson differentiates religion and ethics by saying that, unlike ethics, “Religion includes the personality of God.”) Religion encourages its practitioners to focus on the “unseen,” “eternal” things.
Active
Themes
Quiz
Test Yourself
Poetry, science, religion, and ethics all influence our understanding of external reality. Emerson suggests that a person who uses Reason adopts the perspective of philosophical idealism by default. Idealism, Emerson writes, “sees the world in God” and acknowledges the divine unity of all things. The person who employs idealism has a more nuanced perspective of Christianity. Such a person doesn’t get distracted by historical inaccuracies, scandals in the Church, or even miracles; instead, this person “accepts from God the phenomenon […] as the pure and awful form of religion in the world.”
Active
Themes
Quiz
Test Yourself
