Emerson now tackles the difficult question of subjective truth and the impossibility of verifying the truth of external reality. It is not possible to prove absolutely that what our senses perceive is real. The average person — Emerson uses the carpenter as one example of such a person — doesn't want to know that what he thinks is real might be an illusion. However, whether or not nature exists as something distinct from ourselves remains definitively unanswerable.
After declaring that it makes no difference whether external reality exists or not, Emerson begins his discussion of idealism. His first point concerns visual changes and distortions caused by mechanical apparatuses, or by our physically changing the way we interact with our environment. These changes and distortions emphasize the separation between ourselves and nature, a separation that produces wonder and provides us with a sense of our own stability. We come to believe that although the world around us changes, in part due to our causing it to, we stay constant. As Emerson notes, "We are not built like a ship to be tossed, but like a house to stand."
Emerson exalts the poet as producing the most ideal — and, therefore, the most real — forms inspired by nature. When creating a poem, the poet actually manipulates nature. Figuratively speaking, objects "shrink" and "expand" according to the poet's needs: Some objects become more important symbolically than the poet's audience might have originally thought, or an object as large and magnificent as a mountain might be used by the poet to symbolize an idea that we consider not very important. Emerson uses Shakespeare's figurative language as an example, quoting from some of his sonnets and from his play The Tempest. He cites Shakespeare's metaphor of time as a chest out of which a lover cannot escape to get to the beloved. Whereas we usually view time as non-constrictive, here Shakespeare uses it as an object that restricts.
