Relationship of Man and Nature
Both man and nature are expressions of the divine, Emerson declares in Nature. Man, in his physical existence, is a part of the material world. But throughout the essay, Emerson refers to man's separateness from nature through his intellectual and spiritual capacities. Man and nature share a special relationship. Each is essential to understanding the other. However, Emerson makes clear that man enjoys the superior position. In his higher abilities, he represents an endpoint of evolution. Moreover, man has particular powers over nature. Nature was made to serve man's physical and, more significantly, intellectual and spiritual needs.
In the poem with which Emerson prefaced the 1849 second edition of Nature, man's place as a developmental pinnacle is conveyed in the lines, "And, striving to be man, the worm / Mounts through all the spires of form." In "Language," he emphasizes the centrality of man, conferred by the inner qualities of mind and spirit
. . . man is an analogist, and studies relations in all objects. He is placed in the centre of beings, and a ray of relation passes from every other being to him. And neither can man be understood without these objects, nor these objects without man.
Man's ascendancy over nature is powerfully expressed in the final passage of the essay:
The kingdom of man over nature, which cometh not with observation, — a dominion such as now is beyond his dream of God, — he shall enter without more wonder than the blind man feels who is gradually restored to perfect sight.
Indeed, although Transcendentalism is sometimes perceived as a simple celebration of nature, the relationship that Emerson and other Transcendentalists suggested was considerably more complex.
In Chapter I, Emerson describes nature's elevation of man's mood, and the particular sympathy with and joy in nature that man feels. But he adds that nature by itself is not capable of producing human reaction. It requires man's inner processes to become meaningful: "Yet it is certain that the power to produce this delight, does not reside in nature, but in man, or in a harmony of both." And in "Beauty," focusing on nature's existence to satisfy man's need for beauty, he states that nature is not in and of itself a final end:
But beauty in nature is not ultimate. It is the herald of inward and eternal beauty, and is not alone a solid and satisfactory good. It must therefore stand as a part and not as yet the last or highest expression of the final cause of Nature.
