Emerson's exaltation of the individual was based upon his view of the integral connection between God, man, and nature. Man is capable of much — imagination, insight, morality, and more — but all of his aptitudes derive from his intimate relationship with a larger, higher entity than himself. Emerson expressed the essential oneness of man with the divine in his essay "The Over-Soul":
We know that all spiritual being is in man. . . . [A]s there is no screen or ceiling between our heads and the infinite heavens, so there is no bar or wall in the soul, where man, the effect, ceases, and God, the cause, begins. The walls are taken away. We lie open on one side to the deeps of spiritual nature, to the attributes of God.
The divine is accessible because God communicates directly to man. Moreover, the influence of the divine on each individual grants the unlimited possibility of higher development, "the infinite enlargement of the heart with a power of growth." The individual may approach ever closer to the perfection of God: "Ineffable is the union of man and God in every act of the soul. The simplest person, who in his integrity worships God, becomes God; yet forever and ever the influx of this better and universal self is new and unsearchable." Self-improvement — moral and spiritual elevation toward the divine — is unbounded, growth an open-ended process.
Nature, which, as Emerson wrote in "Idealism" (Chapter VII of Nature), "is made to conspire with spirit to emancipate us," forms a third part of the equation between the divine, the human, and the material. It is a key element in man's realization of his relationship with God: "The world proceeds from the same spirit as the body of man. It is a remoter and inferior incarnation of God, a projection of God in the unconscious." Man's understanding of the importance and meaning of nature is essential to his achieving the insight into God that is available to all. The failure to recognize nature results in distance from God: "As we degenerate, the contrast between us and our house is more evident. We are as much strangers in nature, as we are aliens from God." The channels of interaction between man, God, and nature must remain unobstructed for the universal to express itself in the particular mind and existence of the individual.
