Reason and Understanding
From the beginning to the end of Nature, Emerson stresses the particular importance of the intuitive type of comprehension, which he calls "Reason," in the terminology of English Romantic poetry. Reason is required to penetrate the universal laws and the divine mind. At the beginning of the Introduction, he calls for "a poetry and philosophy of insight" and "a religion by revelation" — his first references to intuition in the essay. Kantian "Reason" is linked with spiritual truth, Lockean "Understanding" with the laws of nature. Because Nature is a kind of manual for spiritualization, Reason holds a higher place in it than Understanding. Although Understanding is essential for the perception of material laws and in its application promotes a progressively broader vision, it does not by itself lead man to God.
In "Beauty," "Language," and "Discipline," Emerson examines Reason's revelation to man of the larger picture behind the multiplicity of details in the material world. In "Beauty," he describes the stimulation of the human intellect by natural beauty. He offers artistic creativity as the extreme love of and response to natural beauty. Art is developed in the essay as an insightful synthesis of parts into a whole, as are such other expressions of human creativity as poetry and architecture. The intuitively inspired formation of this sense of wholeness is similar to the comprehension of universal law, the ultimate goal advocated in Nature. In "Language," he describes the symbolism of original language as based on natural fact, and the integral relationship between language, nature, and spirit. He identifies Reason as the faculty that provides apprehension of spirit through natural symbols, and connects spirit with the universal soul itself:
Man is conscious of a universal soul within or behind his individual life. . . . This universal soul, he calls Reason: it is not mine or thine or his, but we are its; we are its property and men. And the blue sky in which the private earth is buried, the sky with its eternal calm, and full of everlasting orbs, is the type of Reason. That which, intellectually considered, we call Reason, considered in relation to nature, we call Spirit. Spirit is the Creator. Spirit hath life in itself. And man in all ages and countries, embodies it in his language. . . .
Reason, which imparts both vision into the absolute and also creative force as well, is thus presented more as God's reaching out into man than as an active capacity solely within man.
