More commonly, Emerson refers positively to man-made items with a spiritual or emotional connection. Such is the case in "The Over-Soul" when he compares the human being with a religious building, a temple: "A man is the facade of a temple wherein all wisdom and all good abide." This is a rewriting of a familiar Christian figure of speech: the human person as a "temple" of the Holy Spirit. Although Emerson's Unitarianism precluded belief in a divine "Holy Spirit," his transcendentalism tended to transfer the spirit's divinity to the animating "Over-Soul" of all nature.
Among some of Emerson's most arresting images of fragmentation are those pertaining to clothes and textiles. Many times these images admonish us to question old, or accepted rules, and to "try on" new ways of thinking. His conclusion in "The Over-Soul" proposes an optimistic forecast of the future, as most of his writings tend to end on an optimistic note. He is confident that, in the future, the ideal human "will weave no longer a spotted life of shreds and patches, but he will live with a divine unity."
The metaphor of clothing and rags also appears frequently in Emerson's statements about writing and style. In a long and elaborately developed comparison in Nature, he contrasts the artificial style of imitative writers with the natural style of true poets. Imitative writers are those who "do not of themselves clothe one thought in its natural garment, but who feed unconsciously on the language created by the primary writers of the country, those, namely, who hold primarily on nature." Contrasted to these imitators are the true poets, who "pierce this rotten diction and fasten words again to visible things . . . The moment our discourse rises above the ground line of familiar facts and is inflamed with passion or exalted by thought, it clothes itself in images." In addition to using images that promote a more natural, and hence preferable, style of writing, Emerson asserts a few paragraphs later that nature itself provides the best images — that is, the most appropriate dress — for writing: "[Because nature] always stands ready to clothe what we would say, we cannot avoid the question whether the characters are not significant of themselves."
