Religion, Science, and Individualism Theme Analysis

Individualism lies at the heart of Transcendentalism, so it’s also central to “Nature,” which is a founding document of the movement. For Emerson—and other Transcendentalist thinkers—spirituality is crucial to understanding the universe, and spirituality and nature are intimately connected. So, he advocates for a spiritual worldview that’s based on highly subjective, personal experiences in nature. In the essay, Emerson stresses that people shouldn’t look to authority figures, organized religion, history, or science for explanations about the world and about God. Rather, people must turn to their own intuition and firsthand experiences in nature and draw their own conclusions.

Emerson isolates several common—but largely unhelpful—ways of understanding the world and the divine. He suggests that society primarily relies on “tradition, and a religion by revelation to us” to understand the universe and God. By this, he seems to be saying that people look to traditional practices and beliefs, dogma, sacred writings, and/or religious authority figures for answers about God and how the world works. Most people cling to previous generations’ experiences with and insights about the divine, they use those revelations to guide their understanding rather than having their own first-hand experiences and forming their own insights. (Emerson doesn’t go into detail about previous generations’ experiences, but an example might be the narratives in the Bible that recount someone’s experiences with the divine, like the stories about Moses in the Book of Exodus.) But to Emerson, history and tradition are stale, outdated, and unhelpful—they’re “dry bones of the past” in a “faded wardrobe.” In contrast, he writes that ”There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.” With this, he’s saying that the “dry bones of the past” (history and tradition) can’t help us understand “new lands, new men, [and] new thoughts”—instead, people must connect with God and with nature in a new way by exploring such things for themselves and forming their own approach to spirituality.

Similar to society’s emphasis on religion and tradition, many people rely on science’s objective observation and calculated measurements to understand the world. But Emerson argues that this is a one-sided approach for discovery—it over-focuses on mere observation and doesn’t leave room for insights gained through intuition. Instead, Emerson advocates for an individualized approach to spirituality that’s grounded in personal experience in nature. Rather than revering authority figures and the knowledge they share, Emerson praises solitude and the insights that often accompany it. Throughout the essay, he writes of the insights that came to him when he was alone in the countryside (e.g., realizing that nature has the capacity to fix all of his problems) and stresses that the reader must carve out time to be alone in nature, too. With distractions and other people’s influence stripped away, a person can form a one-on-one connection with nature—and consequently with God, whose spirit is imbued in nature. Emerson suggests that there’s a special kind of spiritual clarity that comes from being alone in the wilderness, as he writes that “in the woods, we return to reason and faith” (when Emerson uses the word reason in his essay, he’s referring to “intuition”). By referring to intuition and faith, which are abstract and emotional, Emerson frames nature as a hub for discovering spiritual truths—much like a church or other religious center might be.

From Emerson’s perspective, it’s not equations, scientific facts, or religious doctrine that will help a person understand the world—real understanding comes from “untaught sallies of the spirit,” or sudden spiritual insights. Importantly, these insights are “untaught” and highly personal; they must come from the individual and not from an outside source like a sacred scripture or scientific journal. According to Emerson, a truly wise person knows that sometimes, dreams can teach a person more than scientific experiments can, and a thoughtful guess can be more valuable than a proven fact.