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About this book
As a philosophical essay, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature considers how the natural world can disclose spiritual truth and shape human thought. For readers interested in joining observation to reflection, its central claim is that the world becomes meaningful through the mind. Moonlight deliberately sought as a spectacle can disappoint, Emerson suggests, while light encountered on an ordinary walk carries a different force. From a leaf or crystal to a Gothic church, he looks for patterns linking particular forms to a larger order, arguing that the study of nature is incomplete when it ignores human ideas.
