Matter and Spirit
Emerson asserts throughout Nature the primacy of spirit over matter. Nature's purpose is as a representation of the divine to promote human insight into the laws of the universe, and thus to bring man closer to God. Emerson writes of nature in "Spirit" as "the organ through which the universal spirit speaks to the individual, and strives to lead back the individual to it." He explores the relationship between matter and spirit extensively in "Language," in which he discusses the correspondence between material and moral laws, and in "Idealism," in which he presents the concept of nature as a projection by God on the human mind, as opposed to a concrete reality.
Emerson's discussion in "Language" is based on three premises: that words — even those used to describe intellectual or spiritual states — originated in nature, in an elemental interaction between mind and matter; that not only do words represent nature, but, because nature is an expression of the divine, the natural facts that words represent are symbolic of spiritual truth; and that the whole of nature — not just individual natural facts — symbolizes the whole of spiritual truth. Emerson writes,
The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind. The laws of moral nature answer to those of matter as face to face in a glass.
Because the laws of the material world correspond to higher laws in the spiritual world, man may "by degrees" comprehend the universal through his familiarity with its expression in nature. Emerson states that the symbolism of matter renders "every form significant to its hidden life and final cause." Moral law, as he suggests in "Discipline," "lies at the centre of nature and radiates to the circumference." At the end of "Language," Emerson works toward the ideal theory in presenting all the particulars of nature as preexisting "in necessary Ideas in the mind of God, and are what they are by preceding affections, in the world of spirit." He writes that a fact is "the end or last issue of spirit. The visible creation is the terminus or the circumference of the invisible world." Matter thus issues from and is secondary to spirit.
