Nature (1836) is the short, visionary essay with which Ralph Waldo Emerson launched American Transcendentalism. In it he argues that the natural world is a living symbol of spirit, and that by attending to nature the individual can recover a direct, unmediated relationship with the divine. “In the woods,” he writes, “we return to reason and faith.”
Moving through chapters on commodity, beauty, language, and spirit, Emerson develops a philosophy in which the self and the cosmos are profoundly united, and the famous image of the “transparent eyeball” expresses his sense of merging with the whole. Compact yet inexhaustible, Nature became a manifesto for a generation of American writers and thinkers. It remains a foundational text of American literature and one of the most influential essays ever written on the meaning of the natural world.