Emerson does not address curriculum committees, legislatures, or conventions. Significant change for him means individual change, and it is always and only to the individual that he speaks. Here, on his chosen ground, Emerson is incomparable, and forever within reach of the solitary reader. What Emerson himself sought through a lifetime of reading was original power, force, or energy. His eye was caught by whatever was striking, breathtaking, or moving; whatever startled, goaded, or enticed. (He would have loved the suggestion in a recent children’s book that when you are tired of counting to ten the same old way, you can vary it, thus: ounce, dice, trice, quartz, quince, sago, serpent, oxygen, nitrogen, denim.) He was concerned all his life with the soul’s access to the sources of power. His lifelong interest in the processes of nature, in the growth and emergence of individual selfhood, in the continuing fact and miracle of creation, and in the immanence of the divine in everything, are all efforts to locate and celebrate power. What drew him was not physical power or political or economic power. He expressly repudiates the exercise of power over others. What he cares about is moral and spiritual energy. One kind of power is the power to take over the running of our own lives. Another is that force in nature that “through the green fuse drives the flower.”

At bottom, the power of the individual to seize his own life and the creative power of nature are the same power: this is Emerson’s most important religious insight. It is not anthropomorphism, but theomorphism. If the mind common to the universe is revealed to each individual through his or her own mind, so, also, the forces that shape us shape the stars as well. As Virginia Woolf so quickly saw, what Emerson did “was to assert that he could not be rejected because he held the universe within him. Each man, by finding out what he feels, discovers the laws of the universe; the essential thing, therefore, is to be as conscious of yourself as possible.”

NATURE

(1836)

INTRODUCTION

A subtle chain of countless rings

The next unto the farthest brings;

The eye reads omens where it goes,

And speaks all languages the rose;

And, striving to be man, the worm

Mounts through all the spires of form.

OUR AGE is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us, by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.