Back Ralph Waldo Emerson
Chapters (42)
  1. Cover Page
  2. Title Page
  3. Foreword by Robert D. Richardson Jr.
  4. NATURE (1836)
  5. Introduction
  6. CHAPTER I
  7. CHAPTER II
  8. CHAPTER III
  9. CHAPTER IV
  10. CHAPTER V
  11. CHAPTER VI
  12. CHAPTER VII
  13. CHAPTER VIII
  14. EARLY ESSAYS AND LECTURES
  15. Pray Without Ceasing (1826)
  16. Ethics (1837)
  17. The American Scholar (1837)
  18. Cherokee Letter (1838)
  19. The Divinity School Address (1838)
  20. From ESSAYS, FIRST SERIES (1841)
  21. History
  22. Self-Reliance
  23. The Over-Soul
  24. Circles
  25. From ESSAYS, SECOND SERIES (1844)
  26. The Poet
  27. Experience
  28. Politics
  29. From REPRESENTATIVE MEN (1850)
  30. Uses of Great Men
  31. Montaigne; or, the Skeptic
  32. LATER ESSAYS AND LECTURES
  33. Emancipation in the British West Indies (1844)
  34. Woman (1855)
  35. Thoreau (1862)
  36. POEMS
  37. Concord Hymn
  38. Additional Reading
  39. Note on the Text
  40. Ask Your Bookseller for these Bantam Classics
  41. About the Author
  42. Copyright

The sovereignty of this nature whereof we speak is made known by its independency of those limitations which circumscribe us on every hand. The soul circumscribes all things. As I have said, it contradicts all experience. In like manner it abolishes time and space. The influence of the senses has in most men overpowered the mind to that degree that the walls of time and space have come to look real and insurmountable; and to speak with levity of these limits is, in the world, the sign of insanity. Yet time and space are but inverse measures of the force of the soul. The spirit sports with time,—

“Can crowd eternity into an hour,

Or stretch an hour to eternity.”