The Book of Nature

Abstract

In May of 1834, in a lecture before the Boston Natural History Society, the fourth in a series on scientific subjects, Emerson publicly asserted in miniature the theme that would underlie his life’s work: ‘We are possessed with a conviction that Nature means something, that the flower, the animals, the sea, the rock have some relation to us which is not understood which if known would make them more significant’ (EL1, 78). Though to be ‘possessed with a conviction’ hardly connoted an open scientific mindset, it was to science that Emerson first turned in the wake of his resignation from Boston’s Second Church, in the summer of 1832, in order to rethink his relationship with nature. Indeed, it was nature’s ‘relation to us’ that had become essential to Emerson’s interpretation of its significance and which needed to be ‘understood’. When in early November of 1833 he was preparing the first lecture in the series, he developed the point with reference to his favourite scientist: ‘Bacon said that man is the minister & interpreter of nature: he is so in more respects than one. He is not only to explain the sense of each passage but the scope & argument of the whole book’ (JMN4, 95). Emerson had already decided that he could not be a good minister of the church when within the church, thus to continue to be a minister and interpreter he had to find a new public role and in 1833 he moved from the ministry to the lecture platform.