Nature E-Book

R. Waldo Emerson

• Herausgeber: eKitap Projesi
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Seitenzahl: 82

Beschreibung

Ralph Waldo Emerson, was born at Boston in 1803 into a distinguished family of New England Unitarian ministers. His was the eighth generation to enter the ministry in a dynasty that reached back to the earliest days of Puritan America. Despite the death of his father when Emerson was only eleven, he was able to be educated at Boston Latin School and then Harvard, from which he graduated in 1821.

After several years of reluctant school teaching, he returned to the Harvard Divinity School, entering the Unitarian ministry during a period of robust ecclesiastic debate. By 1829 Emerson was married and well on his way to a promising career in the church through his appointment to an important congregation in Boston. However, his career in the ministry did not last long. Following the death of his first wife, Ellen, his private religious doubts led him to announce his resignation to his congregation, claiming he was unable to preach a doctrine he no longer believed and that "to be a good minister it was necessary to leave the ministry."
With the modest legacy left him from his first wife, Emerson was able to devote himself to study and travel. In Europe he met many of the important Romantic writers whose ideas on art, philosophy, and literature were transforming the writing of the Nineteenth Century. He also continued to explore his own ideas in a series of voluminous journals which he had kept from his earliest youth and from which virtually all of his literary creation would be generated. Taking up residence in Concord, Massachusetts, Emerson devoted himself to study, writing and a series of public lectures in the growing lyceum movement. From these lyceum addresses Emerson developed and then in 1836 published his most important work, Nature. Its publication also coincided with his organizing role in the Transcendental Club, a group of leading New England educators, clergy, and intellectuals interested in idealistic religion, philosophy, and literature.

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Nature

[Illustrated]

By

R. Waldo Emerson

Illustrated by Murat Ukray

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ISBN: 978-615-5564-321

* * * * *

NATURE

BY

R. W. EMERSON

A subtle chain of countless ringsThe next unto the farthest brings;The eye reads omens where it goes,And speaks all languages the rose;And, striving to be man, the wormMounts through all the spires of form.

NEW EDITION

Table of Contents

Nature [Illustrated]

About Author: R. W. Emerson

Introduction

Chapter I: Nature

Chapter II: Commodity

Chapter III: Beauty

Chapter IV: Language

Chapter V: Discipline

Chapter VI: Idealism

Chapter VII: Spirit

Chapter VIII: Prospects

About Author: R. W. Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson, was born at Boston in 1803 into a distinguished family of New England Unitarian ministers.His was the eighth generation to enter the ministry in a dynasty that reached back to the earliest days ofPuritan America.Despite the death of his father when Emerson was only eleven, he was able to be educated at Boston Latin School and then Harvard, from which he graduated in 1821.

After several years of reluctant school teaching, he returned to the Harvard Divinity School, entering the Unitarian ministry during a period of robust ecclesiastic debate.By 1829 Emerson was married and well on his way to a promising career in the church through his appointment to animportant congregation in Boston.However, his career in the ministry did not last long.Following the death of his first wife, Ellen, his private religious doubts led him to announce his resignation to his congregation, claiming he was unable to preach a doctrine he no longer believed and that "to be a good minister it was necessary to leave the ministry."

With the modest legacy left him from his first wife, Emerson was able to devote himself to study and travel.In Europe he met many of the important Romantic writers whose ideas on art, philosophy, and literature were transforming the writing of the Nineteenth Century.He also continued to explore his own ideas in a series of voluminous journals which he had kept from his earliest youth and from which virtually all of his literary creation would be generated. Taking up residence in Concord, Massachusetts, Emerson devoted himself to study, writing and a series of public lectures in the growing lyceum movement.From these lyceum addresses Emerson developed and then in 1836 published his most important work,Nature.Its publication also coincided with his organizing role in the Transcendental Club, a group of leading New England educators, clergy, and intellectuals interested in idealistic religion, philosophy, and literature.

The impact of Emerson's Nature was enormous, soon making it the manifesto of the growing movement of Transcendentalism.In its often seemingly random and loosely organized essays, Emerson articulated the core beliefs of the Transcendentalists: the unity of all things within the consciousness of an "Over-Soul," the divinity within each human being, and the ability of the individual to transcend worldly reality through Nature.In its "Introduction," he argued modern people accepted the world through the dead traditions of the past, but that through Nature man might "enjoy an original relation to the universe."Ultimately, what Emerson proposed in the book was that what is conventionally thought of as religious salvation is achieved not through adherence to stiff doctrine, but through the immediacy of experience in life. Nature also established Emerson as America's leading intellectual, a role he was to fulfill for the rest of his life.

Over the next twenty years Emerson lectured widely and published a series of essays that articulated American views of art, philosophy, and literature including The American Scholar,"Self-Reliance," "The Over-Soul," "The Poet," and "Experience."In these essays, Emerson is credited with establishing an American literary "Declaration of Independence" complete with a philosophic framework that respected native notions of self-reliance, common sense, and democracy.

His ideas were not without controversy.For instance, invited to speak to the graduating class of the Harvard Divinity School in 1838, Emerson delivered an address which virtually ostracized him from the more conservative New England clergy, many of whom had until that time embraced him.In what is commonly called The Divinity School Address, Emerson challenged the notion that spiritual truth is received solely through Scripture.Instead, he insisted upon a return to original spiritual experience which could not "be received second hand," and that the role of the ministry was to invest humanity with "new hope and new revelation."

Emerson also became recognized as a major poet during this period, though his poetry is little more than versification of the ideas more directly stated in his prose works.His most popular poem is also among his earliest, "Concord Hymn" (1837) commemorating "the shot heard round the world" of the American Revolution.Many of his poems endure as significant contributions to American Romanticism, particularly those like "The Rhodora" (1839) and "The Snow-Storm"(1841).Other poems like "Hamatreya" (1847) and "Brahma" (1857) demonstrate intellectual Emerson's debt to Hindu and Eastern mysticism.

Despite the fact that he spent much of his life as a public man, Emerson was by nature shy and reserved.As a result he gained a reputation as remote and coolly aloof.In spite of this public perception, Emerson took great interest in his family.His second marriage to Lydia Jackson (called Lidian) in 1835 was successful, even though it would be at times strained largely as result of Emerson's frequent absences as he toured on the lecture circuit. 

Nonetheless, Emerson took great comfort in his family, especially his four children.The death of his oldest son, Waldo, in 1842 created another emotional crisis similar to that of his first wife.Though he never abandoned the essential idealistic optimism of his earlier writing, his enthusiasm became much more muted in his later life. As he aged, Emerson was perceived as too conservative and out of touch in his views, his voice drowned out by the harsh rhetoric of the nation then entering the climactic changes it would endure as a result of the Civil War.Nonetheless, Emerson continued to remain an important critic of his age until his death in 1882.

Introduction

OUR age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.

Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable. We must trust the perfection of the creation so far, as to believe that whatever curiosity the order of things has awakened in our minds, the order of things can satisfy. Every man's condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth. In like manner, nature is already, in its forms and tendencies, describing its own design. Let us interrogate the great apparition, that shines so peacefully around us. Let us inquire, to what end is nature?

All science has one aim, namely, to find a theory of nature. We have theories of races and of functions, but scarcely yet a remote approach to an idea of creation. We are now so far from the road to truth, that religious teachers dispute and hate each other, and speculative men are esteemed unsound and frivolous. But to a sound judgment, the most abstract truth is the most practical. Whenever a true theory appears, it will be its own evidence. Its test is, that it will explain all phenomena. Now many are thought not only unexplained but inexplicable; as language, sleep, madness, dreams, beasts, sex.

Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul. Strictly speaking, therefore, all that is separate from us, all which Philosophy distinguishes as the NOT ME, that is, both nature and art, all other men and my own body, must be ranked under this name, NATURE. In enumerating the values of nature and casting up their sum, I shall use the word in both senses;—in its common and in its philosophical import. In inquiries so general as our present one, the inaccuracy is not material; no confusion of thought will occur. Nature, in the common sense, refers to essences unchanged by man; space, the air, the river, the leaf. Art is applied to the mixture of his will with the same things, as in a house, a canal, a statue, a picture. But his operations taken together are so insignificant, a little chipping, baking, patching, and washing, that in an impression so grand as that of the world on the human mind, they do not vary the result.

Chapter I: Nature