Nature

Commodity is the lowest use of nature: everything it gives the body, from food and warmth to wind that turns the mill. Emerson calls it a mercenary benefit and does not dwell on it, because it points past itself. A man is fed, he writes, not that he may be fed, but that he may work. Nature serves the body so that the body can serve something higher.

It is Emerson's claim that visible things and human thoughts match, so that each thing in nature can stand for a state of the mind. A lamb is innocence and a snake is subtle spite. That is why early language is all pictures and poetry, and why a writer who fastens words back to visible things speaks with more force than one who repeats worn phrases.

Because it educates. Space, time, labour, climate, food, the animals and the mechanical forces give daily lessons whose meaning has no limit, Emerson writes. They train the understanding, which learns order, measure and difference, and they train the reason, which sees the moral law behind them. Every natural process, on this view, is a version of a moral sentence.

Idealism is the view that the world may exist only as it appears to a mind, not as matter on its own. Emerson treats it as a noble doubt worth holding, because it loosens the grip of things and lets a person see nature as spirit's work. He stops short of denying matter outright, since that would leave the mind alone with its perceptions and leave God out.

Spirit is the one power behind both nature and the person, and for Emerson it works from the inside. It does not build nature around us, he writes, but puts it forth through us, as the life of a tree puts out new leaves through the old. So a person in contact with it does not merely look at the world but helps produce it.