Spiritualization, hastened by inspired insight, will heal the fragmentization that plagues us. Emerson writes in "Prospects": "The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is because man is disunited with himself. He cannot be a naturalist, until he satisfies all the demands of the spirit." By drawing upon our latent spiritual capabilities and seeking evidence of God's order in nature, we will make sense of the universe.
Throughout Nature, Emerson uses analogy and imagery to advance the conceptof universal unity. In Chapter I, he suggests, through the analogy of the landscape, the transformation of particulate information into a whole. Regarded from a transcendent, "poetical" point of view, the many individual forms that comprise the landscape become less distinct and form an integrated totality. (In addition to the poet, the painter, the sculptor, the musician, and the architect are all particularly sensitive to perceiving wholes.)
Emerson also uses the imagery of the circle extensively to convey the all-encompassing, perfect self-containment of the universe. For example, in "Beauty," he describes the way in which the structure of the eye and the laws of light conspire to create perspective:
By the mutual action of [the eye's] structure and of the laws of light, perspective is produced, which integrates every mass of objects, of what character soever, into a well colored and shaded globe, so that where the particular objects are mean and unaffecting, the landscape which they compose, is round and symmetrical.
In discussing the similarities between natural objects and between natural laws in "Discipline," Emerson reiterates and expands the image, making it more complex and comprehensive:
It is like a great circle on a sphere, comprising all possible circles; which, however, may be drawn, and comprise it, in like manner. Every such truth is the absolute Ens [that is, being or entity] seen from one side. But it has innumerable sides.
The circle is thus not only all-encompassing, but allows multiple approaches to the whole.
Emerson develops the idea of each particle of nature as a microcosm reflecting the whole, and as such a point of access to the universal. In "Discipline," he writes of "the Unity of Nature, — the Unity in Variety," and goes on to state:
. . . a leaf, a drop, a crystal, a moment of time is related to the whole, and partakes of the perfection of the whole. Each particle is a microcosm, and faithfully renders the likeness of the world.
The idea of microcosm is important in Emerson's approach to nature, as it is in Thoreau's. Because the parts represent the whole in miniature, it is consequently not necessary to see all of the parts to understand the whole. Through an insight akin to revelation, man may understand the "big picture" from just one example in nature. We need not be slaves to detail to understand the meaning that detail conveys.
