Interesting Literature

A Summary and Analysis of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ‘Nature’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Nature’ is an 1836 essay by the American writer and thinker Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82). In this essay, Emerson explores the relationship between nature and humankind, arguing that if we approach nature with a poet’s eye, and a pure spirit, we will find the wonders of nature revealed to us.

You can read ‘Nature’ in full here . Below, we summarise Emerson’s argument and offer an analysis of its meaning and context.

Emerson begins his essay by defining nature, in philosophical terms, as anything that is not our individual souls. So our bodies, as well as all of the natural world, but also all of the world of art and technology, too, are ‘nature’ in this philosophical sense of the world. He urges his readers not to rely on tradition or history to help them to understand the world: instead, they should look to nature and the world around them.

In the first chapter, Emerson argues that nature is never ‘used up’ when the right mind examines it: it is a source of boundless curiosity. No man can own the landscape: it belongs, if it belongs to anyone at all, to ‘the poet’. Emerson argues that when a man returns to nature he can rediscover his lost youth, that wide-eyed innocence he had when he went among nature as a boy.

Emerson states that when he goes among nature, he becomes a ‘transparent eyeball’ because he sees nature but is himself nothing: he has been absorbed or subsumed into nature and, because God made nature, God himself. He feels a deep kinship and communion with all of nature. He acknowledges that our view of nature depends on our own mood, and that the natural world reflects the mood we are feeling at the time.

In the second chapter, Emerson focuses on ‘commodity’: the name he gives to all of the advantages which our senses owe to nature. Emerson draws a parallel with the ‘useful arts’ which have built houses and steamships and whole towns: these are the man-made equivalents of the natural world, in that both nature and the ‘arts’ are designed to provide benefit and use to mankind.

The third chapter then turns to ‘beauty’, and the beauty of nature comprises several aspects, which Emerson outlines. First, the beauty of nature is a restorative : seeing the sky when we emerge from a day’s work can restore us to ourselves and make us happy again. The human eye is the best ‘artist’ because it perceives and appreciates this beauty so keenly. Even the countryside in winter possesses its own beauty.

The second aspect of beauty Emerson considers is the spiritual element. Great actions in history are often accompanied by a beautiful backdrop provided by nature. The third aspect in which nature should be viewed is its value to the human intellect . Nature can help to inspire people to create and invent new things. Everything in nature is a representation of a universal harmony and perfection, something greater than itself.

In his fourth chapter, Emerson considers the relationship between nature and language. Our language is often a reflection of some natural state: for instance, the word right literally means ‘straight’, while wrong originally denoted something ‘twisted’. But we also turn to nature when we wish to use language to reflect a ‘spiritual fact’: for example, that a lamb symbolises innocence, or a fox represents cunning. Language represents nature, therefore, and nature in turn represents some spiritual truth.

Emerson argues that ‘the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.’ Many great principles of the physical world are also ethical or moral axioms: for example, ‘the whole is greater than its part’.

In the fifth chapter, Emerson turns his attention to nature as a discipline . Its order can teach us spiritual and moral truths, but it also puts itself at the service of mankind, who can distinguish and separate (for instance, using water for drinking but wool for weaving, and so on). There is a unity in nature which means that every part of it corresponds to all of the other parts, much as an individual art – such as architecture – is related to the others, such as music or religion.

The sixth chapter is devoted to idealism . How can we sure nature does actually exist, and is not a mere product within ‘the apocalypse of the mind’, as Emerson puts it? He believes it doesn’t make any practical difference either way (but for his part, Emerson states that he believes God ‘never jests with us’, so nature almost certainly does have an external existence and reality).

Indeed, we can determine that we are separate from nature by changing out perspective in relation to it: for example, by bending down and looking between our legs, observing the landscape upside down rather than the way we usually view it. Emerson quotes from Shakespeare to illustrate how poets can draw upon nature to create symbols which reflect the emotions of the human soul. Religion and ethics, by contrast, degrade nature by viewing it as lesser than divine or moral truth.

Next, in the seventh chapter, Emerson considers nature and the spirit . Spirit, specifically the spirit of God, is present throughout nature. In his eighth and final chapter, ‘Prospects’, Emerson argues that we need to contemplate nature as a whole entity, arguing that ‘a dream may let us deeper into the secret of nature than a hundred concerted experiments’ which focus on more local details within nature.

Emerson concludes by arguing that in order to detect the unity and perfection within nature, we must first perfect our souls. ‘He cannot be a naturalist until he satisfies all the demands of the spirit’, Emerson urges. Wisdom means finding the miraculous within the common or everyday. He then urges the reader to build their own world, using their spirit as the foundation. Then the beauty of nature will reveal itself to us.

In a number of respects, Ralph Waldo Emerson puts forward a radically new attitude towards our relationship with nature. For example, although we may consider language to be man-made and artificial, Emerson demonstrates that the words and phrases we use to describe the world are drawn from our observation of nature. Nature and the human spirit are closely related, for Emerson, because they are both part of ‘the same spirit’: namely, God. Although we are separate from nature – or rather, our souls are separate from nature, as his prefatory remarks make clear – we can rediscover the common kinship between us and the world.

Emerson wrote ‘Nature’ in 1836, not long after Romanticism became an important literary, artistic, and philosophical movement in Europe and the United States. Like Wordsworth and the Romantics before him, Emerson argues that children have a better understanding of nature than adults, and when a man returns to nature he can rediscover his lost youth, that wide-eyed innocence he had when he went among nature as a boy.

And like Wordsworth, Emerson argued that to understand the world, we should go out there and engage with it ourselves, rather than relying on books and tradition to tell us what to think about it. In this connection, one could undertake a comparative analysis of Emerson’s ‘Nature’ and Wordsworth’s pair of poems ‘ Expostulation and Reply ’ and ‘ The Tables Turned ’, the former of which begins with a schoolteacher rebuking Wordsworth for sitting among nature rather than having his nose buried in a book:

‘Why, William, on that old gray stone, ‘Thus for the length of half a day, ‘Why, William, sit you thus alone, ‘And dream your time away?

‘Where are your books?—that light bequeathed ‘To beings else forlorn and blind! ‘Up! up! and drink the spirit breathed ‘From dead men to their kind.

Similarly, for Emerson, the poet and the dreamer can get closer to the true meaning of nature than scientists because they can grasp its unity by viewing it holistically, rather than focusing on analysing its rock formations or other more local details. All of this is in keeping with the philosophy of Transcendentalism , that nineteenth-century movement which argued for a kind of spiritual thinking instead of scientific thinking based narrowly on material things.

Emerson, along with Henry David Thoreau, was the most famous writer to belong to the Transcendentalist movement, and ‘Nature’ is fundamentally a Transcendentalist essay, arguing for an intuitive and ‘poetic’ engagement with nature in the round rather than a coldly scientific or empirical analysis of its component parts.

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Ralph Waldo Emerson

what is the nature essay

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Emerson opens his 1836 edition of his essay “Nature” with an epigraph from the philosopher Plotinus, suggesting that nature is a reflection of humankind. The rest of his essay focuses on the relationship between people and nature.

In the Introduction, Emerson suggests that rather than relying on religion and tradition to understand the world, people should spend time in nature and intuit answers for themselves. But people shouldn’t just observe nature—they should also actively consider “to what end is nature” (that is, what nature means or does). To Emerson, all forms of science try to answer this question and find a “theory of nature.” And though it might sound unscientific, Emerson thinks that seeking “abstract truth” through firsthand experience in nature is the best way to craft such a theory.

Emerson then defines some of the terms that he’ll use throughout the rest of the essay: Nature/nature, the Soul, and art. First, he suggests that the universe is comprised of two parts: Nature and the Soul. He uses Nature (capital “N”) in the philosophical sense to refer to everything that is “NOT ME”—that is, everything that isn’t the Soul. Emerson then breaks down Nature into smaller parts: nature (lowercase “n”), art, other people, and our own physical bodies. The common use of the word nature (lowercase “n”) refers to the natural world—non-manmade things like trees and the wind. But when people combine their human will with elements of the natural world, they create art.

In Chapter 1, Emerson advocates for spending time alone in nature. By looking up at the stars, a person transcends this world and comes in contact with the sublime . Most people take the stars for granted, since they shine nightly. But if a person opens him- or herself up to nature’s influence and adopts an attitude of childlike curiosity, nature will captivate and awe them. Part of seeing nature clearly is realizing that it is one integrated whole. To illustrate this point, Emerson recalls looking out at the land and seeing between 20 and 30 farms. And while each farm is separate from the next, and a different man owns each one, all of the farms form one unified landscape. Most people struggle to view nature holistically like this, but poets, children, and people who love nature all can.

Emerson explains that when he’s in the woods, he turns into a “ transparent eyeball ” that allows him to see everything. In this state, Emerson connects with God and even becomes part of God. Likewise, when people connect with nature, they’re also connecting with themselves, because “Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.” If a person feels somber, for instance, nature will look and feel somber, too.

In Chapter 2, Emerson focuses on nature as a commodity, or the ways in which nature is useful and valuable to humankind. While nature’s status as a commodity is less important than all of its other qualities (which each successive chapter will cover), Emerson nevertheless underscores that all of nature’s various forms (e.g., fire, stones, vegetables, animals) work together to support human life.

In Chapter 3, Emerson turns to beauty—the idea that something can produce delight in the viewer in and of itself, and not for the usefulness it can provide. Living and working in society can sap people of their vitality, so being immersed in nature’s beauty invigorates the soul. Emerson points out that every season has its own unique kind of beauty—even the depths of winter are beautiful in their own way. Part of what makes nature so beautiful, though, is that it’s imbued with the divine. Beauty also stimulates the intellect and generates creativity. The creation of beauty is called art, and all art is either the product of nature or the expression of it.

Emerson explores how nature shapes language in Chapter 4. All words represent natural objects, which in turn represent spiritual truths. (For example, “a cunning man is a fox, […] a learned man is a torch.”) Emerson argues that people who have been corrupted by their various desires use corrupted language. But a person with good character, who’s grown up close to nature, has a skillful grasp of language and is more creative.

In Chapter 5, Emerson suggests that nature is a discipline: every aspect of it teaches us moral, spiritual, and intellectual truths. But Emerson points out that nature is also meant to serve humankind. In this chapter, he also underscores nature’s unity: even though nature takes many forms, they’re all interconnected.

Chapter 6 is about idealism. Here, Emerson contemplates how it’s impossible to prove that anything is real. But to Emerson, it doesn’t really matter whether there is an external reality or whether everything we perceive to be real is just an illusion. He suggests that most people consider themselves as permanent, while nature is in flux, but this isn’t necessarily the case. Through words and particularly through symbols, the poet is the one who is able help the reader see the world from new angles and perspectives. In contrast, both religion and ethics disregard, demonize, or undervalue nature.

In Chapter 7, Emerson suggests that nature is a manifestation of God’s Spirit, or the Supreme Being, and that nature is the means through which God connects with people. Emerson then questions what kind of matter nature is made out of, where this matter came from, and why. In this section, Emerson suggests that people are simultaneously separate from nature and part of it.

The essay’s final chapter centers around how to best study nature. Different branches of science (e.g., geology) use observations, measurements, and calculations to study nature, and they also isolate different elements of nature (like rocks and minerals) to study instead of considering those parts within the larger whole of nature. Emerson advocates for a more holistic, intuitive approach to studying nature. But he suggests that there is value in the kind of observation that scientists use (he calls this observation “Understanding”), because people need to understand, or observe, the world before they can use their intuition to interpret those observations (he calls intuition “Reason”).

Closing his essay, Emerson suggests that we once lived in a utopian society where humankind and nature lived in harmonious unity. But over time, we stopped paying attention to the spiritual truths that nature teaches, and we grew distant from nature. To remedy this, people must spend time in nature and use their intuition to understand it—this will unify humankind with nature again.

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Essay On Nature | Nature Essay for Students and Children in 500 Words

February 13, 2024 by Prasanna

Essay On Nature: An Essay on Nature helps the students to understand the implications of the natural world. From the various flora and fauna to the expansive biomes, nature has a lot to offer. However, ever since humans and showed up, the planet has started to change drastically. Nature seems to be getting sparser every year, animals disappear, and trees get cut down only to be replaced by skyscrapers.

Hence, it is crucial to enable students to understand that nature should be conserved. And there is no better way to do it than to write an essay on nature. Furthermore, the earlier that students are educated about the plight of nature, the better the chances that future generations act on the matter. Read on about Essay on Nature Conservation, Importance of Nature, Beauty of Nature and for School Children and Kids. Explore the “do’s” and “don’ts” when writing an essay on nature:

You can also find more  Essay Writing  articles on events, persons, sports, technology and many more.

Essay On Nature – Important Points to Note

When writing an essay on nature, or any essay for that matter, remember the following:

  • Before starting the essay, do your research. This will help you create quality content.
  • Write an introductory paragraph for the essay
  • Reduce the use of jargons unless the topic is very technical
  • Write in points wherever possible
  • Break up the content into digestible chunks
  • Use dates, names and factual figures
  • End the essay with a conclusion
  • Read through the essay to find and remove grammatical issues or factual errors.

“Look deep into Nature and then you will understand everything Better” – Nature Essay

Essay on Nature

Essay On Nature – Sample 1 (250 Words)

Nature, in its broadest sense, is a term that refers to the physical world and life in general. It encompasses all life on earth, including humans. However, it does not include human activities. The term nature is derived from the Latin word, “Natura”, which translates to “essential qualities” or “innate disposition.” Nature seems to be getting sparser every year, animals disappear, and trees get cut down only to be replaced by skyscrapers

As stated above, nature includes not just life, but a host of other non-living physical entities. These include the atmosphere, climate, weather, water and even abstract factors like the aesthetic beauty of nature. Nature did not arise spontaneously; hence if we were to make an accurate timeline, it would encompass billion of years of progress and evolution.

The earth is thought to have formed when gravity pulled the stellar gas, dust and debris together, eventually forming a planet. And like the other terrestrial planets in the solar system, the earth is made up of a central core and a rocky mantle. But before the earth got to this stage, scientists believe that the earth’s surface was entirely covered by hot molten rock or magma. Only after a few billion years did it start cooling down, creating the solid crust that we are familiar with today.

Just like the non-living components of nature, life did not arise instantaneously. It took billions of years for the earliest precursors of life to show up. However, these “organisms” were nothing more than a self-replicating molecule. However, from this precursor, life has evolved into the multitude of lifeforms that we see today. Today, the complex interaction between living things and non-living things contributes to the concept of nature.

500 Words Nature Essay

Nature can be understood as a “phenomena” that encompasses the physical world and the life which interacts with it. It includes humans and every other form of life present on the planet. The word nature has its roots in Latin. It is derived from the word “Natura” which means “essential qualities”. However, in ancient times, the word was a literal synonym for “birth”.

Today, the word “nature” refers to wildlife and geology. This means it includes the realm that includes all forms of life and the many processes associated with non-living objects. In most cases, nature also refers to the forests and the wildlife living within. Other definitions indicate places with the absence of human intervention as nature too.

The evolution of nature is not spontaneous; it took billions of years of geological time for its formation. According to scientists, the earth was formed nearly 4.54 billion years ago. Before this time, the earth was a giant, swirling mass of gas and debris orbiting the sun. The early earth was a completely different place. The atmosphere was completely devoid of oxygen, and there was no water on its surface. It was a hellish place with extremely high temperatures.

The landscape was littered with molten magma and thick plumes of toxic smoke. Life was nowhere in sight, and it would not emerge for several billion years more. As the earth cooled down, water condensed and fell as rain. However, it rained for such a long time that the basins and troughs began to fill up with water. This event created the very first oceans of the world. However, the earth was still devoid of life and oxygen was non-existent in the atmosphere.

One of the biggest unsolved mysteries today is the origin of life. There are fossils to support the earliest organisms, but nothing was known of how they came about. Scientists have put forth many speculations and hypotheses stating the origin of life. One of the most popular is the Deep-sea Hydrothermal Vents Theory. It states that the earliest precursors to life originated from underwater volcanic vents. These volcanic vents spewed out minerals that were abundant in many nutrients required for early life forms. However, this is just a speculation that there is no conclusive evidence supporting the same.

The first undisputed evidence of life emerged some 3.7 billion years ago. These were similar to today’s cyanobacteria – which were microscopic single-celled organisms. Since then, life has had billions of years to evolve. And when life emerged from the seas on to dry land, major evolutionary leaps were made. The first-ever land plants appeared followed by the invertebrates. Vertebrates made their way on to land much later, evolving into magnificent life forms such as the dinosaurs. On the geological timescale, we humans evolved only recently. The fossils of our earliest ancestors are over 200,000 years old.

Conclusion on Nature Essay

However, our technology and progress have had a detrimental effect on the planet. Our climates are changing and temperatures and rising. We are losing our polar icecaps, and as a result, ocean levels are rising. All these factors can cause destruction in the near future if we do not keep a check on our carbon footprint and deforestation. Essay on Nature In Hindi, Marathi, Telugu and Kannada will update soonly.

FAQ’s on Essay On Nature

Question 1. What is nature?

Answer: Nature encompasses the physical world and the life which interacts with it.

Question 2. What is the importance of nature?

Answer: Without nature, the natural balance in the ecosystem is lost. This can lead to many detrimental effects such as global warming, greenhouse effect, rising sea levels, increased natural calamities.

Question 3. How does nature help us?

Answer: Nature provides a lot of resources. Some of these resources are life-saving and others are of significant commercial value. It also keeps a check on the adverse effects of human activities.

Question 4. Are humans nature?

Answer: Humans and all other lifeforms are a part of nature. But human activities are not a part of nature.

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Introduction 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.

Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable. We must trust the perfection of the creation so far, as to believe that whatever curiosity the order of things has awakened in our minds, the order of things can satisfy. Every man's condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth. In like manner, nature is already, in its forms and tendencies, describing its own design. Let us interrogate the great apparition, that shines so peacefully around us. Let us inquire, to what end is nature?

All science has one aim, namely, to find a theory of nature. We have theories of races and of functions, but scarcely yet a remote approach to an idea of creation. We are now so far from the road to truth, that religious teachers dispute and hate each other, and speculative men are esteemed unsound and frivolous. But to a sound judgment, the most abstract truth is the most practical. Whenever a true theory appears, it will be its own evidence. Its test is, that it will explain all phenomena. Now many are thought not only unexplained but inexplicable; as language, sleep, madness, dreams, beasts, sex.

Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul. Strictly speaking, therefore, all that is separate from us, all which Philosophy distinguishes as the NOT ME, that is, both nature and art, all other men andmy own body, must be ranked under this name, NATURE. In enumerating the values of nature and casting up their sum, I shall use the word in both senses; -- in its common and in its philosophical import. In inquiries so general as our present one, the inaccuracy is not material; no confusion of thought will occur. Nature, in the common sense, refers to essences unchanged by man; space, the air, the river, the leaf. Art is applied to the mixture of his will with the same things, as in a house, a canal, a statue, a picture. But his operations taken together are so insignificant, a little chipping, baking, patching, and washing, that in an impression so grand as that of the world on the human mind, they do not vary the result. Chapter I NATURETo go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds, will separate between him and what he touches. One might think the atmosphere was made transparent with this design, to give man, in the heavenly bodies, the perpetual presence of the sublime. Seen in the streets of cities, how great they are! If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.

The stars awaken a certain reverence, because though always present, they are inaccessible; but all natural objects make a kindred impression, when the mind is open to their influence. Nature never wears a mean appearance. Neither does the wisest man extort her secret, and lose his curiosity by finding out all her perfection. Nature never became a toy to a wise spirit. The flowers, the animals, the mountains, reflected the wisdom of his best hour, as much as they had delighted the simplicity of his childhood.

When we speak of nature in this manner, we have a distinct but most poetical sense in the mind. We mean the integrity of impression made by manifold natural objects. It is this which distinguishes the stick of timber of the wood-cutter, from the tree of the poet. The charming landscape which I saw this morning, is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet. This is the best part of these men's farms, yet to this their warranty-deeds give no title.

To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood. His intercourse with heaven and earth, becomes part of his daily food. In the presence of nature, a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows. Nature says, -- he is my creature, and maugre all his impertinent griefs, he shall be glad with me. Not the sun or the summer alone, but every hour and season yields its tribute of delight; for every hour and change corresponds to and authorizes a different state of the mind, from breathless noon to grimmest midnight. Nature is a setting that fits equally well a comic or a mourning piece. In good health, the air is a cordial of incredible virtue. Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear. In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years. In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, -- no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, -- my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, -- all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God. The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental: to be brothers, to be acquaintances, -- master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance. I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty. In the wilderness, I find something more dear and connate than in streets or villages. In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature.

The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister, is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them. The waving of the boughs in the storm, is new to me and old. It takes me by surprise, and yet is not unknown. Its effect is like that of a higher thought or a better emotion coming over me, when I deemed I was thinking justly or doing right.

Yet it is certain that the power to produce this delight, does not reside in nature, but in man, or in a harmony of both. It is necessary to use these pleasures with great temperance. For, nature is not always tricked in holiday attire, but the same scene which yesterday breathed perfume and glittered as for the frolic of the nymphs, is overspread with melancholy today. Nature always wears the colors of the spirit. To a man laboring under calamity, the heat of his own fire hath sadness in it. Then, there is a kind of contempt of the landscape felt by him who has just lost by death a dear friend. The sky is less grand as it shuts down over less worth in the population. Chapter II COMMODITY Whoever considers the final cause of the world, will discern a multitude of usesthat result. They all admit of being thrown into one of the following classes; Commodity; Beauty; Language; and Discipline.

Under the general name of Commodity, I rank all those advantages which our senses owe to nature. This, of course, is a benefit which is temporary and mediate, not ultimate, like its service to the soul. Yet although low, it is perfect in its kind, and is the only use of nature which all men apprehend. The misery of man appears like childish petulance, when we explore the steady and prodigal provision that has been made for his support and delight on this green ball which floats him through the heavens. What angels invented these splendid ornaments, these rich conveniences, this ocean of air above, this ocean of water beneath, this firmament of earth between? this zodiac of lights, this tent of dropping clouds, this striped coat of climates, this fourfold year? Beasts, fire, water, stones, and corn serve him. The field is at once his floor, his work-yard, his play-ground, his garden, and his bed. Nature, in its ministry to man, is not only the material, but is also the process and the result. All the parts incessantly work into each other's hands for the profit of man. The wind sows the seed; the sun evaporates the sea; the wind blows the vapor to the field; the ice, on the other side of the planet, condenses rain on this; the rain feeds the plant; the plant feeds the animal; and thus the endless circulations of the divine charity nourish man.

The useful arts are reproductions or new combinations by the wit of man, of the same natural benefactors. He no longer waits for favoring gales, but by means of steam, he realizes the fable of Aeolus's bag, and carries the two and thirty winds in the boiler of his boat. To diminish friction, he paves the road with iron bars, and, mounting a coach with a ship-load of men, animals, and merchandise behind him, he darts through the country, from town to town, like an eagle or a swallow through the air. By the aggregate of these aids, how is the face of the world changed, from the era of Noah to that of Napoleon! The private poor man hath cities, ships, canals, bridges, built for him. He goes to the post-office, and the human race run on his errands; to the book-shop, and the human race read and write of all that happens, for him; to the court-house, and nations repair his wrongs. He sets his house upon the road, and the human race go forth every morning, and shovel out the snow, and cut a path for him.

But there is no need of specifying particulars in this class of uses. The catalogue is endless, and the examples so obvious, that I shall leave them to the reader's reflection, with the general remark, that this mercenary benefit is one which has respect to a farther good. A man is fed, not that he may be fed, but that he may work. Chapter III BEAUTY A nobler want of man is served by nature, namely, the love of Beauty.

The ancient Greeks called the world {kosmos}, beauty. Such is the constitution of all things, or such the plastic power of the human eye, that the primary forms, as the sky, the mountain, the tree, the animal, give us a delight in and for themselves; a pleasure arising from outline, color, motion, and grouping. This seems partly owing to the eye itself. The eye is the best of artists. By the mutual action of its structure and of the laws of light, perspective is produced, which integrates every mass of objects, of what character soever, into a well colored and shaded globe, so that where the particular objects are mean and unaffecting, the landscape which they compose, is round and symmetrical. And as the eye is the best composer, so light is the first of painters. There is no object so foul that intense light will not make beautiful. And the stimulus it affords to the sense, and a sort of infinitude which it hath, like space and time, make all matter gay. Even the corpse has its own beauty. But besides this general grace diffused over nature, almost all the individual forms are agreeable to the eye, as is proved by our endless imitations of some of them, as the acorn, the grape, the pine-cone, the wheat-ear, the egg, the wings and forms of most birds, the lion's claw, the serpent, the butterfly, sea-shells, flames, clouds, buds, leaves, and the forms of many trees, as the palm.

For better consideration, we may distribute the aspects of Beauty in a threefold manner.

1. First, the simple perception of natural forms is a delight. The influence of the forms and actions in nature, is so needful to man, that, in its lowest functions, it seems to lie on the confines of commodity and beauty. To the body and mind which have been cramped by noxious work or company, nature is medicinal and restores their tone. The tradesman, the attorney comes out of the din and craft of the street, and sees the sky and the woods, and is a man again. In their eternal calm, he finds himself. The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon. We are never tired, so long as we can see far enough.

But in other hours, Nature satisfies by its loveliness, and without any mixture of corporeal benefit. I see the spectacle of morning from the hill-top over against my house, from day-break to sun-rise, with emotions which an angel might share. The long slender bars of cloud float like fishes in the sea of crimson light. From the earth, as a shore, I look out into that silent sea. I seem to partake its rapid transformations: the active enchantment reaches my dust, and I dilate and conspire with the morning wind. How does Nature deify us with a few and cheap elements! Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous. The dawn is my Assyria; the sun-set and moon-rise my Paphos, and unimaginable realms of faerie; broad noon shall be my England of the senses and the understanding; the night shall be my Germany of mystic philosophy and dreams.

Not less excellent, except for our less susceptibility in the afternoon, was the charm, last evening, of a January sunset. The western clouds divided and subdivided themselves into pink flakes modulated with tints of unspeakable softness; and the air had so much life and sweetness, that it was a pain to come within doors. What was it that nature would say? Was there no meaning in the live repose of the valley behind the mill, and which Homer or Shakspeare could not reform for me in words? The leafless trees become spires of flame in the sunset, with the blue east for their back-ground, and the stars of the dead calices of flowers, and every withered stem and stubble rimed with frost, contribute something to the mute music.

The inhabitants of cities suppose that the country landscape is pleasant only half the year. I please myself with the graces of the winter scenery, and believe that we are as much touched by it as by the genial influences of summer. To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty, and in the same field, it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again. The heavens change every moment, and reflect their glory or gloom on the plains beneath. The state of the crop in the surrounding farms alters the expression of the earth from week to week. The succession of native plants in the pastures and roadsides, which makes the silent clock by which time tells the summer hours, will make even the divisions of the day sensible to a keen observer. The tribes of birds and insects, like the plants punctual to their time, follow each other, and the year has room for all. By water-courses, the variety is greater. In July, the blue pontederia or pickerel-weed blooms in large beds in the shallow parts of our pleasant river, and swarms with yellow butterflies in continual motion. Art cannot rival this pomp of purple and gold. Indeed the river is a perpetual gala, and boasts each month a new ornament.

But this beauty of Nature which is seen and felt as beauty, is the least part. The shows of day, the dewy morning, the rainbow, mountains, orchards in blossom, stars, moonlight, shadows in still water, and the like, if too eagerly hunted, become shows merely, and mock us with their unreality. Go out of the house to see the moon, and 't is mere tinsel; it will not please as when its light shines upon your necessary journey. The beauty that shimmers in the yellow afternoons of October, who ever could clutch it? Go forth to find it, and it is gone: 't is only a mirage as you look from the windows of diligence.

2. The presence of a higher, namely, of the spiritual element is essential to its perfection. The high and divine beauty which can be loved without effeminacy, is that which is found in combination with the human will. Beauty is the mark God sets upon virtue. Every natural action is graceful. Every heroic act is also decent, and causes the place and the bystanders to shine. We are taught by great actions that the universe is the property of every individual in it. Every rational creature has all nature for his dowry and estate. It is his, if he will. He may divest himself of it; he may creep into a corner, and abdicate his kingdom, as most men do, but he is entitled to the world by his constitution. In proportion to the energy of his thought and will, he takes up the world into himself. "All those things for which men plough, build, or sail, obey virtue;" said Sallust. "The winds and waves," said Gibbon, "are always on the side of the ablest navigators." So are the sun and moon and all the stars of heaven. When a noble act is done, -- perchance in a scene of great natural beauty; when Leonidas and his three hundred martyrs consume one day in dying, and the sun and moon come each and look at them once in the steep defile of Thermopylae; when Arnold Winkelried, in the high Alps, under the shadow of the avalanche, gathers in his side a sheaf of Austrian spears to break the line for his comrades; are not these heroes entitled to add the beauty of the scene to the beauty of the deed? When the bark of Columbus nears the shore of America; -- before it, the beach lined with savages, fleeing out of all their huts of cane; the sea behind; and the purple mountains of the Indian Archipelago around, can we separate the man from the living picture? Does not the New World clothe his form with her palm-groves and savannahs as fit drapery? Ever does natural beauty steal in like air, and envelope great actions. When Sir Harry Vane was dragged up the Tower-hill, sitting on a sled, to suffer death, as the champion of the English laws, one of the multitude cried out to him, "You never sate on so glorious a seat." Charles II., to intimidate the citizens of London, caused the patriot Lord Russel to be drawn in an open coach, through the principal streets of the city, on his way to the scaffold. "But," his biographer says, "the multitude imagined they saw liberty and virtue sitting by his side." In private places, among sordid objects, an act of truth or heroism seems at once to draw to itself the sky as its temple, the sun as its candle. Nature stretcheth out her arms to embrace man, only let his thoughts be of equal greatness. Willingly does she follow his steps with the rose and the violet, and bend her lines of grandeur and grace to the decoration of her darling child. Only let his thoughts be of equal scope, and the frame will suit the picture. A virtuous man is in unison with her works, and makes the central figure of the visible sphere. Homer, Pindar, Socrates, Phocion, associate themselves fitly in our memory with the geography and climate of Greece. The visible heavens and earth sympathize with Jesus. And in common life, whosoever has seen a person of powerful character and happy genius, will have remarked how easily he took all things along with him, -- the persons, the opinions, and the day, and nature became ancillary to a man.

3. There is still another aspect under which the beauty of the world may be viewed, namely, as it become s an object of the intellect. Beside the relation of things to virtue, they have a relation to thought. The intellect searches out the absolute order of things as they stand in the mind of God, and without the colors of affection. The intellectual and the active powers seem to succeed each other, and the exclusive activity of the one, generates the exclusive activity of the other. There is something unfriendly in each to the other, but they are like the alternate periods of feeding and working in animals; each prepares and will be followed by the other. Therefore does beauty, which, in relation to actions, as we have seen, comes unsought, and comes because it is unsought, remain for the apprehension and pursuit of the intellect; and then again, in its turn, of the active power. Nothing divine dies. All good is eternally reproductive. The beauty of nature reforms itself in the mind, and not for barren contemplation, but for new creation.

All men are in some degree impressed by the face of the world; some men even to delight. This love of beauty is Taste. Others have the same love in such excess, that, not content with admiring, they seek to embody it in new forms. The creation of beauty is Art.

The production of a work of art throws a light upon the mystery of humanity. A work of art is an abstract or epitome of the world. It is the result or expression of nature, in miniature. For, although the works of nature are innumerable and all different, the result or the expression of them all is similar and single. Nature is a sea of forms radically alike and even unique. A leaf, a sun-beam, a landscape, the ocean, make an analogous impression on the mind. What is common to them all, -- that perfectness and harmony, is beauty. The standard of beauty is the entire circuit of natural forms, -- the totality of nature; which the Italians expressed by defining beauty "il piu nell' uno." Nothing is quite beautiful alone: nothing but is beautiful in the whole. A single object is only so far beautiful as it suggests this universal grace. The poet, the painter, the sculptor, the musician, the architect, seek each to concentrate this radiance of the world on one point, and each in his several work to satisfy the love of beauty which stimulates him to produce. Thus is Art, a nature passed through the alembic of man. Thus in art, does nature work through the will of a man filled with the beauty of her first works.

The world thus exists to the soul to satisfy the desire of beauty. This element I call an ultimate end. No reason can be asked or given why the soul seeks beauty. Beauty, in its largest and profoundest sense, is one expression for the universe. God is the all-fair. Truth, and goodness, and beauty, are but different faces of the same All. But beauty in nature is not ultimate. It is the herald of inward and eternal beauty, and is not alone a solid and satisfactory good. It must stand as a part, and not as yet the last or highest expression of the final cause of Nature. Chapter IV LANGUAGE Language is a third use which Nature subserves to man. Nature is the vehble, and threefold degree.

1. Words are signs of natural facts.

2. Particular natural facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts.

3. Nature is the symbol of spirit.

1. Words are signs of natural facts. The use of natural history is to give us aid in supernatural history: the use of the outer creation, to give us language for the beings and changes of the inward creation. Every word which is used to express a moral or intellectual fact, if traced to its root, is found to be borrowed from some material appearance. means ; means . primarily means ; , the crossing of a ; , the . We say the to express emotion, the to denote thought; and and re words borrowed from sensible things, and now appropriated to spiritual nature. Most of the process by which this transformation is made, is hidden from us in the remote time when language was framed; but the same tendency may be daily observed in children. Children and savages use only nouns or names of things, which they convert into verbs, and apply to analogous mental acts.

2. But this origin of all words that convey a spiritual import, -- so conspicuous a fact in the history of language, -- is our least debt to nature. It is not words only that are emblematic; it is things which are emblematic. Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact. Every appearance in nature corresponds to some state of the mind, and that state of the mind can only be described by presenting that natural appearance as its picture. An enraged man is a lion, a cunning man is a fox, a firm man is a rock, a learned man is a torch. A lamb is innocence; a snake is subtle spite; flowers express to us the delicate affections. Light and darkness are our familiar expression for knowledge and ignorance; and heat for love. Visible distance behind and before us, is respectively our image of memory and hope.

Who looks upon a river in a meditative hour, and is not reminded of the flux of all things? Throw a stone into the stream, and the circles that propagate themselves are the beautiful type of all influence. Man is conscious of a universal soul within or behind his individual life, wherein, as in a firmament, the natures of Justice, Truth, Love, Freedom, arise and shine. This universal soul, he calls Reason: it is not mine, or thine, or his, but we are its; we are its property and men. And the blue sky in which the private earth is buried, the sky with its eternal calm, and full of everlasting orbs, is the type of Reason. That which, intellectually considered, we call Reason, considered in relation to nature, we call Spirit. Spirit is the Creator. Spirit hath life in itself. And man in all ages and countries, embodies it in his language, as the FATHER.

It is easily seen that there is nothing lucky or capricious in these analogies, but that they are constant, and pervade nature. These are not the dreams of a few poets, here and there, but man is an analogist, and studies relations in all objects. He is placed in the centre of beings, and a ray of relation passes from every other being to him. And neither can man be understood without these objects, nor these objects without man. All the facts in natural history taken by themselves, have no value, but are barren, like a single sex. But marry it to human history, and it is full of life. Whole Floras, all Linnaeus' and Buffon's volumes, are dry catalogues of facts; but the most trivial of these facts, the habit of a plant, the organs, or work, or noise of an insect, applied to the illustration of a fact in intellectual philosophy, or, in any way associated to human nature, affects us in the most lively and agreeable manner. The seed of a plant, -- to what affecting analogies in the nature of man, is that little fruit made use of, in all discourse, up to the voice of Paul, who calls the human corpse a seed, -- "It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body." The motion of the earth round its axis, and round the sun, makes the day, and the year. These are certain amounts of brute light and heat. But is there no intent of an analogy between man's life and the seasons? And do the seasons gain no grandeur or pathos from that analogy? The instincts of the ant are very unimportant, considered as the ant's; but the moment a ray of relation is seen to extend from it to man, and the little drudge is seen to be a monitor, a little body with a mighty heart, then all its habits, even that said to be recently observed, that it never sleeps, become sublime.

Because of this radical correspondence between visible things and human thoughts, savages, who have only what is necessary, converse in figures. As we go back in history, language becomes more picturesque, until its infancy, when it is all poetry; or all spiritual facts are represented by natural symbols. The same symbols are found to make the original elements of all languages. It has moreover been observed, that the idioms of all languages approach each other in passages of the greatest eloquence and power. And as this is the first language, so is it the last. This immediate dependence of language upon nature, this conversion of an outward phenomenon into a type of somewhat in human life, never loses its power to affect us. It is this which gives that piquancy to the conversation of a strong-natured farmer or back-woodsman, which all men relish.

A man's power to connect his thought with its proper symbol, and so to utter it, depends on the simplicity of his character, that is, upon his love of truth, and his desire to communicate it without loss. The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language. When simplicity of character and the sovereignty of ideas is broken up by the prevalence of secondary desires, the desire of riches, of pleasure, of power, and of praise, -- and duplicity and falsehood take place of simplicity and truth, the power over nature as an interpreter of the will, is in a degree lost; new imagery ceases to be created, and old words are perverted to stand for things which are not; a paper currency is employed, when there is no bullion in the vaults. In due time, the fraud is manifest, and words lose all power to stimulate the understanding or the affections. Hundreds of writers may be found in every long-civilized nation, who for a short time believe, and make others believe, that they see and utter truths, who do not of themselves clothe one thought in its natural garment, but who feed unconsciously on the language created by the primary writers of the country, those, namely, who hold primarily on nature.

But wise men pierce this rotten diction and fasten words again to visible things; so that picturesque language is at once a commanding certificate that he who employs it, is a man in alliance with truth and God. The moment our discourse rises above the ground line of familiar facts, and is inflamed with passion or exalted by thought, it clothes itself in images. A man conversing in earnest, if he watch his intellectual processes, will find that a material image, more or less luminous, arises in his mind, cotemporaneous with every thought, which furnishes the vestment of the thought. Hence, good writing and brilliant discourse are perpetual allegories. This imagery is spontaneous. It is the blending of experience with the present action of the mind. It is proper creation. It is the working of the Original Cause through the instruments he has already made.

These facts may suggest the advantage which the country-life possesses for a powerful mind, over the artificial and curtailed life of cities. We know more from nature than we can at will communicate. Its light flows into the mind evermore, and we forget its presence. The poet, the orator, bred in the woods, whose senses have been nourished by their fair and appeasing changes, year after year, without design and without heed, -- shall not lose their lesson altogether, in the roar of cities or the broil of politics. Long hereafter, amidst agitation and terror in national councils, -- in the hour of revolution, -- these solemn images shall reappear in their morning lustre, as fit symbols and words of the thoughts which the passing events shall awaken. At the call of a noble sentiment, again the woods wave, the pines murmur, the river rolls and shines, and the cattle low upon the mountains, as he saw and heard them in his infancy. And with these forms, the spells of persuasion, the keys of power are put into his hands.

3. We are thus assisted by natural objects in the expression of particular meanings. But how great a language to convey such pepper-corn informations! Did it need such noble races of creatures, this profusion of forms, this host of orbs in heaven, to furnish man with the dictionary and grammar of his municipal speech? Whilst we use this grand cipher to expedite the affairs of our pot and kettle, we feel that we have not yet put it to its use, neither are able. We are like travellers using the cinders of a volcano to roast their eggs. Whilst we see that it always stands ready to clothe what we would say, we cannot avoid the question, whether the characters are not significant of themselves. Have mountains, and waves, and skies, no significance but what we consciously give them, when we employ them as emblems of our thoughts? The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind. The laws of moral nature answer to those of matter as face to face in a glass. "The visible world and the relation of its parts, is the dial plate of the invisible." The axioms of physics translate the laws of ethics. Thus, "the whole is greater than its part;" "reaction is equal to action;" "the smallest weight may be made to lift the greatest, the difference of weight being compensated by time;" and many the like propositions, which have an ethical as well as physical sense. These propositions have a much more extensive and universal sense when applied to human life, than when confined to technical use.

In like manner, the memorable words of history, and the proverbs of nations, consist usually of a natural fact, selected as a picture or parable of a moral truth. Thus; A rolling stone gathers no moss; A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush; A cripple in the right way, will beat a racer in the wrong; Make hay while the sun shines; 'T is hard to carry a full cup even; Vinegar is the son of wine; The last ounce broke the camel's back; Long-lived trees make roots first; -- and the like. In their primary sense these are trivial facts, but we repeat them for the value of their analogical import. What is true of proverbs, is true of all fables, parables, and allegories.

This relation between the mind and matter is not fancied by some poet, but stands in the will of God, and so is free to be known by all men. It appears to men, or it does not appear. When in fortunate hours we ponder this miracle, the wise man doubts, if, at all other times, he is not blind and deaf; for the universe becomes transparent, and the light of higher laws than its own, shines through it. It is the standing problem which has exercised the wonder and the study of every fine genius since the world began; from the era of the Egyptians and the Brahmins, to that of Pythagoras, of Plato, of Bacon, of Leibnitz, of Swedenborg. There sits the Sphinx at the road-side, and from age to age, as each prophet comes by, he tries his fortune at reading her riddle. There seems to be a necessity in spirit to manifest itself in material forms; and day and night, river and storm, beast and bird, acid and alkali, preexist in necessary Ideas in the mind of God, and are what they are by virtue of preceding affections, in the world of spirit. A Fact is the end or last issue of spirit. The visible creation is the terminus or the circumference of the invisible world. "Material objects," said a French philosopher, "are necessarily kinds of scoriae of the substantial thoughts of the Creator, which must always preserve an exact relation to their first origin; in other words, visible nature must have a spiritual and moral side."

This doctrine is abstruse, and though the images of "garment," "scoriae," "mirror," &c., may stimulate the fancy, we must summon the aid of subtler and more vital expositors to make it plain. "Every scripture is to be interpreted by the same spirit which gave it forth," -- is the fundamental law of criticism. A life in harmony with nature, the love of truth and of virtue, will purge the eyes to understand her text. By degrees we may come to know the primitive sense of the permanent objects of nature, so that the world shall be to us an open book, and every form significant of its hidden life and final cause.

A new interest surprises us, whilst, under the view now suggested, we contemplate the fearful extent and multitude of objects; since "every object rightly seen, unlocks a new faculty of the soul." That which was unconscious truth, becomes, when interpreted and defined in an object, a part of the domain of knowledge, -- a new weapon in the magazine of power. Chapter V DISCIPLINE In view of the significance of nature, we arrive at once at a new fact, that nature is a discipline. This use of the world includes the preceding uses, as parts of itself.

Space, time, society, labor, climate, food, locomotion, the animals, the mechanical forces, give us sincerest lessons, day by day, whose meaning is unlimited. They educate both the Understanding and the Reason. Every property of matter is a school for the understanding, -- its solidity or resistance, its inertia, its extension, its figure, its divisibility. The understanding adds, divides, combines, measures, and finds nutriment and room for its activity in this worthy scene. Meantime, Reason transfers all these lessons into its own world of thought, by perceiving the analogy that marries Matter and Mind.

1. Nature is a discipline of the understanding in intellectual truths. Our dealing with sensible objects is a constant exercise in the necessary lessons of difference, of likeness, of order, of being and seeming, of progressive arrangement; of ascent from particular to general; of combination to one end of manifold forces. Proportioned to the importance of the organ to be formed, is the extreme care with which its tuition is provided, -- a care pretermitted in no single case. What tedious training, day after day, year after year, never ending, to form the common sense; what continual reproduction of annoyances, inconveniences, dilemmas; what rejoicing over us of little men; what disputing of prices, what reckonings of interest, -- and all to form the Hand of the mind; -- to instruct us that "good thoughts are no better than good dreams, unless they be executed!"

The same good office is performed by Property and its filial systems of debt and credit. Debt, grinding debt, whose iron face the widow, the orphan, and the sons of genius fear and hate; -- debt, which consumes so much time, which so cripples and disheartens a great spirit with cares that seem so base, is a preceptor whose lessons cannot be forgone, and is needed most by those who suffer from it most. Moreover, property, which has been well compared to snow, -- "if it fall level to-day, it will be blown into drifts to-morrow," -- is the surface action of internal machinery, like the index on the face of a clock. Whilst now it is the gymnastics of the understanding, it is hiving in the foresight of the spirit, experience in profounder laws.

The whole character and fortune of the individual are affected by the least inequalities in the culture of the understanding; for example, in the perception of differences. Therefore is Space, and therefore Time, that man may know that things are not huddled and lumped, but sundered and individual. A bell and a plough have each their use, and neither can do the office of the other. Water is good to drink, coal to burn, wool to wear; but wool cannot be drunk, nor water spun, nor coal eaten. The wise man shows his wisdom in separation, in gradation, and his scale of creatures and of merits is as wide as nature. The foolish have no range in their scale, but suppose every man is as every other man. What is not good they call the worst, and what is not hateful, they call the best.

In like manner, what good heed, nature forms in us! She pardons no mistakes. Her yea is yea, and her nay, nay.

The first steps in Agriculture, Astronomy, Zoology, (those first steps which the farmer, the hunter, and the sailor take,) teach that nature's dice are always loaded; that in her heaps and rubbish are concealed sure and useful results.

How calmly and genially the mind apprehends one after another the laws of physics! What noble emotions dilate the mortal as he enters into the counsels of the creation, and feels by knowledge the privilege to BE! His insight refines him. The beauty of nature shines in his own breast. Man is greater that he can see this, and the universe less, because Time and Space relations vanish as laws are known.

Here again we are impressed and even daunted by the immense Universe to be explored. "What we know, is a point to what we do not know." Open any recent journal of science, and weigh the problems suggested concerning Light, Heat, Electricity, Magnetism, Physiology, Geology, and judge whether the interest of natural science is likely to be soon exhausted.

Passing by many particulars of the discipline of nature, we must not omit to specify two.

The exercise of the Will or the lesson of power is taught in every event. From the child's successive possession of his several senses up to the hour when he saith, "Thy will be done!" he is learning the secret, that he can reduce under his will, not only particular events, but great classes, nay the whole series of events, and so conform all facts to his character. Nature is thoroughly mediate. It is made to serve. It receives the dominion of man as meekly as the ass on which the Saviour rode. It offers all its kingdoms to man as the raw material which he may mould into what is useful. Man is never weary of working it up. He forges the subtile and delicate air into wise and melodious words, and gives them wing as angels of persuasion and command. One after another, his victorious thought comes up with and reduces all things, until the world becomes, at last, only a realized will, -- the double of the man.

2. Sensible objects conform to the premonitions of Reason and reflect the conscience. All things are moral; and in their boundless changes have an unceasing reference to spiritual nature. Therefore is nature glorious with form, color, and motion, that every globe in the remotest heaven; every chemical change from the rudest crystal up to the laws of life; every change of vegetation from the first principle of growth in the eye of a leaf, to the tropical forest and antediluvian coal-mine; every animal function from the sponge up to Hercules, shall hint or thunder to man the laws of right and wrong, and echo the Ten Commandments. Therefore is nature ever the ally of Religion: lends all her pomp and riches to the religious sentiment. Prophet and priest, David, Isaiah, Jesus, have drawn deeply from this source. This ethical character so penetrates the bone and marrow of nature, as to seem the end for which it was made. Whatever private purpose is answered by any member or part, this is its public and universal function, and is never omitted. Nothing in nature is exhausted in its first use. When a thing has served an end to the uttermost, it is wholly new for an ulterior service. In God, every end is converted into a new means. Thus the use of commodity, regarded by itself, is mean and squalid. But it is to the mind an education in the doctrine of Use, namely, that a thing is good only so far as it serves; that a conspiring of parts and efforts to the production of an end, is essential to any being. The first and gross manifestation of this truth, is our inevitable and hated training in values and wants, in corn and meat.

It has already been illustrated, that every natural process is a version of a moral sentence. The moral law lies at the centre of nature and radiates to the circumference. It is the pith and marrow of every substance, every relation, and every process. All things with which we deal, preach to us. What is a farm but a mute gospel? The chaff and the wheat, weeds and plants, blight, rain, insects, sun, -- it is a sacred emblem from the first furrow of spring to the last stack which the snow of winter overtakes in the fields. But the sailor, the shepherd, the miner, the merchant, in their several resorts, have each an experience precisely parallel, and leading to the same conclusion: because all organizations are radically alike. Nor can it be doubted that this moral sentiment which thus scents the air, grows in the grain, and impregnates the waters of the world, is caught by man and sinks into his soul. The moral influence of nature upon every individual is that amount of truth which it illustrates to him. Who can estimate this? Who can guess how much firmness the sea-beaten rock has taught the fisherman? how much tranquillity has been reflected to man from the azure sky, over whose unspotted deeps the winds forevermore drive flocks of stormy clouds, and leave no wrinkle or stain? how much industry and providence and affection we have caught from the pantomime of brutes? What a searching preacher of self-command is the varying phenomenon of Health!

Herein is especially apprehended the unity of Nature, -- the unity in variety, -- which meets us everywhere. All the endless variety of things make an identical impression. Xenophanes complained in his old age, that, look where he would, all things hastened back to Unity. He was weary of seeing the same entity in the tedious variety of forms. The fable of Proteus has a cordial truth. A leaf, a drop, a crystal, a moment of time is related to the whole, and partakes of the perfection of the whole. Each particle is a microcosm, and faithfully renders the likeness of the world.

Not only resemblances exist in things whose analogy is obvious, as when we detect the type of the human hand in the flipper of the fossil saurus, but also in objects wherein there is great superficial unlikeness. Thus architecture is called "frozen music," by De Stael and Goethe. Vitruvius thought an architect should be a musician. "A Gothic church," said Coleridge, "is a petrified religion." Michael Angelo maintained, that, to an architect, a knowledge of anatomy is essential. In Haydn's oratorios, the notes present to the imagination not only motions, as, of the snake, the stag, and the elephant, but colors also; as the green grass. The law of harmonic sounds reappears in the harmonic colors. The granite is differenced in its laws only by the more or less of heat, from the river that wears it away. The river, as it flows, resembles the air that flows over it; the air resembles the light which traverses it with more subtile currents; the light resembles the heat which rides with it through Space. Each creature is only a modification of the other; the likeness in them is more than the difference, and their radical law is one and the same. A rule of one art, or a law of one organization, holds true throughout nature. So intimate is this Unity, that, it is easily seen, it lies under the undermost garment of nature, and betrays its source in Universal Spirit. For, it pervades Thought also. Every universal truth which we express in words, implies or supposes every other truth. It is like a great circle on a sphere, comprising all possible circles; which, however, may be drawn, and comprise it, in like manner. Every such truth is the absolute Ens seen from one side. But it has innumerable sides.

The central Unity is still more conspicuous in actions. Words are finite organs of the infinite mind. They cannot cover the dimensions of what is in truth. They break, chop, and impoverish it. An action is the perfection and publication of thought. A right action seems to fill the eye, and to be related to all nature. "The wise man, in doing one thing, does all; or, in the one thing he does rightly, he sees the likeness of all which is done rightly."

Words and actions are not the attributes of brute nature. They introduce us to the human form, of which all other organizations appear to be degradations. When this appears among so many that surround it, the spirit prefers it to all others. It says, `From such as this, have I drawn joy and knowledge; in such as this, have I found and beheld myself; I will speak to it; it can speak again; it can yield me thought already formed and alive.' In fact, the eye, -- the mind, -- is always accompanied by these forms, male and female; and these are incomparably the richest informations of the power and order that lie at the heart of things. Unfortunately, every one of them bears the marks as of some injury; is marred and superficially defective. Nevertheless, far different from the deaf and dumb nature around them, these all rest like fountain-pipes on the unfathomed sea of thought and virtue whereto they alone, of all organizations, are the entrances.

It were a pleasant inquiry to follow into detail their ministry to our education, but where would it stop? We are associated in adolescent and adult life with some friends, who, like skies and waters, are coextensive with our idea; who, answering each to a certain affection of the soul, satisfy our desire on that side; whom we lack power to put at such focal distance from us, that we can mend or even analyze them. We cannot choose but love them. When much intercourse with a friend has supplied us with a standard of excellence, and has increased our respect for the resources of God who thus sends a real person to outgo our ideal; when he has, moreover, become an object of thought, and, whilst his character retains all its unconscious effect, is converted in the mind into solid and sweet wisdom, -- it is a sign to us that his office is closing, and he is commonly withdrawn from our sight in a short time. Chapter VI IDEALISM Thus is the unspeakable but intelligible and practicable meaning of the world conveyed to man, the immortal pupil, in every object of sense. To this one end of Discipline, all parts of nature conspire.

A noble doubt perpetually suggests itself, whether this end be not the Final Cause of the Universe; and whether nature outwardly exists. It is a sufficient account of that Appearance we call the World, that God will teach a human mind, and so makes it the receiver of a certain number of congruent sensations, which we call sun and moon, man and woman, house and trade. In my utter impotence to test the authenticity of the report of my senses, to know whether the impressions they make on me correspond with outlying objects, what difference does it make, whether Orion is up there in heaven, or some god paints the image in the firmament of the soul? The relations of parts and the end of the whole remaining the same, what is the difference, whether land and sea interact, and worlds revolve and intermingle without number or end, -- deep yawning under deep, and galaxy balancing galaxy, throughout absolute space, -- or, whether, without relations of time and space, the same appearances are inscribed in the constant faith of man? Whether nature enjoy a substantial existence without, or is only in the apocalypse of the mind, it is alike useful and alike venerable to me. Be it what it may, it is ideal to me, so long as I cannot try the accuracy of my senses.

The frivolous make themselves merry with the Ideal theory, as if its consequences were burlesque; as if it affected the stability of nature. It surely does not. God never jests with us, and will not compromise the end of nature, by permitting any inconsequence in its procession. Any distrust of the permanence of laws, would paralyze the faculties of man. Their permanence is sacredly respected, and his faith therein is perfect. The wheels and springs of man are all set to the hypothesis of the permanence of nature. We are not built like a ship to be tossed, but like a house to stand. It is a natural consequence of this structure, that, so long as the active powers predominate over the reflective, we resist with indignation any hint that nature is more short-lived or mutable than spirit. The broker, the wheelwright, the carpenter, the toll-man, are much displeased at the intimation.

But whilst we acquiesce entirely in the permanence of natural laws, the question of the absolute existence of nature still remains open. It is the uniform effect of culture on the human mind, not to shake our faith in the stability of particular phenomena, as of heat, water, azote; but to lead us to regard nature as a phenomenon, not a substance; to attribute necessary existence to spirit; to esteem nature as an accident and an effect.

To the senses and the unrenewed understanding, belongs a sort of instinctive belief in the absolute existence of nature. In their view, man and nature are indissolubly joined. Things are ultimates, and they never look beyond their sphere. The presence of Reason mars this faith. The first effort of thought tends to relax this despotism of the senses, which binds us to nature as if we were a part of it, and shows us nature aloof, and, as it were, afloat. Until this higher agency intervened, the animal eye sees, with wonderful accuracy, sharp outlines and colored surfaces. When the eye of Reason opens, to outline and surface are at once added, grace and expression. These proceed from imagination and affection, and abate somewhat of the angular distinctness of objects. If the Reason be stimulated to more earnest vision, outlines and surfaces become transparent, and are no longer seen; causes and spirits are seen through them. The best moments of life are these delicious awakenings of the higher powers, and the reverential withdrawing of nature before its God.

Let us proceed to indicate the effects of culture. 1. Our first institution in the Ideal philosophy is a hint from nature herself.

Nature is made to conspire with spirit to emancipate us. Certain mechanical changes, a small alteration in our local position apprizes us of a dualism. We are strangely affected by seeing the shore from a moving ship, from a balloon, or through the tints of an unusual sky. The least change in our point of view, gives the whole world a pictorial air. A man who seldom rides, needs only to get into a coach and traverse his own town, to turn the street into a puppet-show. The men, the women, -- talking, running, bartering, fighting, -- the earnest mechanic, the lounger, the beggar, the boys, the dogs, are unrealized at once, or, at least, wholly detached from all relation to the observer, and seen as apparent, not substantial beings. What new thoughts are suggested by seeing a face of country quite familiar, in the rapid movement of the rail-road car! Nay, the most wonted objects, (make a very slight change in the point of vision,) please us most. In a camera obscura, the butcher's cart, and the figure of one of our own family amuse us. So a portrait of a well-known face gratifies us. Turn the eyes upside down, by looking at the landscape through your legs, and how agreeable is the picture, though you have seen it any time these twenty years!

In these cases, by mechanical means, is suggested the difference between the observer and the spectacle, -- between man and nature. Hence arises a pleasure mixed with awe; I may say, a low degree of the sublime is felt from the fact, probably, that man is hereby apprized, that, whilst the world is a spectacle, something in himself is stable.

2. In a higher manner, the poet communicates the same pleasure. By a few strokes he delineates, as on air, the sun, the mountain, the camp, the city, the hero, the maiden, not different from what we know them, but only lifted from the ground and afloat before the eye. He unfixes the land and the sea, makes them revolve around the axis of his primary thought, and disposes them anew. Possessed himself by a heroic passion, he uses matter as symbols of it. The sensual man conforms thoughts to things; the poet conforms things to his thoughts. The one esteems nature as rooted and fast; the other, as fluid, and impresses his being thereon. To him, the refractory world is ductile and flexible; he invests dust and stones with humanity, and makes them the words of the Reason. The Imagination may be defined to be, the use which the Reason makes of the material world. Shakspeare possesses the power of subordinating nature for the purposes of expression, beyond all poets. His imperial muse tosses the creation like a bauble from hand to hand, and uses it to embody any caprice of thought that is upper-most in his mind. The remotest spaces of nature are visited, and the farthest sundered things are brought together, by a subtle spiritual connection. We are made aware that magnitude of material things is relative, and all objects shrink and expand to serve the passion of the poet. Thus, in his sonnets, the lays of birds, the scents and dyes of flowers, he finds to be the of his beloved; time, which keeps her from him, is his ; the suspicion she has awakened, is her ; His passion is not the fruit of chance; it swells, as he speaks, to a city, or a state. In the strength of his constancy, the Pyramids seem to him recent and transitory. The freshness of youth and love dazzles him with its resemblance to morning. The wild beauty of this hyperbole, I may say, in passing, it would not be easy to match in literature.

This transfiguration which all material objects undergo through the passion of the poet, -- this power which he exerts to dwarf the great, to magnify the small, -- might be illustrated by a thousand examples from his Plays. I have before me the Tempest, and will cite only these few lines. Prospero calls for music to soothe the frantic Alonzo, and his companions; Again;

The perception of real affinities between events, (that is to say, of ideal affinities, for those only are real,) enables the poet thus to make free with the most imposing forms and phenomena of the world, and to assert the predominance of the soul.

3. Whilst thus the poet animates nature with his own thoughts, he differs from the philosopher only herein, that the one proposes Beauty as his main end; the other Truth. But the philosopher, not less than the poet, postpones the apparent order and relations of things to the empire of thought. "The problem of philosophy," according to Plato, "is, for all that exists conditionally, to find a ground unconditioned and absolute." It proceeds on the faith that a law determines all phenomena, which being known, the phenomena can be predicted. That law, when in the mind, is an idea. Its beauty is infinite. The true philosopher and the true poet are one, and a beauty, which is truth, and a truth, which is beauty, is the aim of both. Is not the charm of one of Plato's or Aristotle's definitions, strictly like that of the Antigone of Sophocles? It is, in both cases, that a spiritual life has been imparted to nature; that the solid seeming block of matter has been pervaded and dissolved by a thought; that this feeble human being has penetrated the vast masses of nature with an informing soul, and recognised itself in their harmony, that is, seized their law. In physics, when this is attained, the memory disburthens itself of its cumbrous catalogues of particulars, and carries centuries of observation in a single formula.

Thus even in physics, the material is degraded before the spiritual. The astronomer, the geometer, rely on their irrefragable analysis, and disdain the results of observation. The sublime remark of Euler on his law of arches, "This will be found contrary to all experience, yet is true;" had already transferred nature into the mind, and left matter like an outcast corpse.

4. Intellectual science has been observed to beget invariably a doubt of the existence of matter. Turgot said, "He that has never doubted the existence of matter, may be assured he has no aptitude for metaphysical inquiries." It fastens the attention upon immortal necessary uncreated natures, that is, upon Ideas; and in their presence, we feel that the outward circumstance is a dream and a shade. Whilst we wait in this Olympus of gods, we think of nature as an appendix to the soul. We ascend into their region, and know that these are the thoughts of the Supreme Being. "These are they who were set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was. When he prepared the heavens, they were there; when he established the clouds above, when he strengthened the fountains of the deep. Then they were by him, as one brought up with him. Of them took he counsel."

Their influence is proportionate. As objects of science, they are accessible to few men. Yet all men are capable of being raised by piety or by passion, into their region. And no man touches these divine natures, without becoming, in some degree, himself divine. Like a new soul, they renew the body. We become physically nimble and lightsome; we tread on air; life is no longer irksome, and we think it will never be so. No man fears age or misfortune or death, in their serene company, for he is transported out of the district of change. Whilst we behold unveiled the nature of Justice and Truth, we learn the difference between the absolute and the conditional or relative. We apprehend the absolute. As it were, for the first time, we exist. We become immortal, for we learn that time and space are relations of matter; that, with a perception of truth, or a virtuous will, they have no affinity.

5. Finally, religion and ethics, which may be fitly called, -- the practice of ideas, or the introduction of ideas into life, -- have an analogous effect with all lower culture, in degrading nature and suggesting its dependence on spirit. Ethics and religion differ herein; that the one is the system of human duties commencing from man; the other, from God. Religion includes the personality of God; Ethics does not. They are one to our present design. They both put nature under foot. The first and last lesson of religion is, "The things that are seen, are temporal; the things that are unseen, are eternal." It puts an affront upon nature. It does that for the unschooled, which philosophy does for Berkeley and Viasa. The uniform language that may be heard in the churches of the most ignorant sects, is,------"Contemn the unsubstantial shows of the world; they are vanities, dreams, shadows, unrealities; seek the realities of religion." The devotee flouts nature. Some theosophists have arrived at a certain hostility and indignation towards matter, as the Manichean and Plotinus. They distrusted in themselves any looking back to these flesh-pots of Egypt. Plotinus was ashamed of his body. In short, they might all say of matter, what Michael Angelo said of external beauty, "it is the frail and weary weed, in which God dresses the soul, which he has called into time."

It appears that motion, poetry, physical and intellectual science, and religion, all tend to affect our convictions of the reality of the external world. But I own there is something ungrateful in expanding too curiously the particulars of the general proposition, that all culture tends to imbue us with idealism. I have no hostility to nature, but a child's love to it. I expand and live in the warm day like corn and melons. Let us speak her fair. I do not wish to fling stones at my beautiful mother, nor soil my gentle nest. I only wish to indicate the true position of nature in regard to man, wherein to establish man, all right education tends; as the ground which to attain is the object of human life, that is, of man's connection with nature. Culture inverts the vulgar views of nature, and brings the mind to call that apparent, which it uses to call real, and that real, which it uses to call visionary. Children, it is true, believe in the external world. The belief that it appears only, is an afterthought, but with culture, this faith will as surely arise on the mind as did the first.

The advantage of the ideal theory over the popular faith, is this, that it presents the world in precisely that view which is most desirable to the mind. It is, in fact, the view which Reason, both speculative and practical, that is, philosophy and virtue, take. For, seen in the light of thought, the world always is phenomenal; and virtue subordinates it to the mind. Idealism sees the world in God. It beholds the whole circle of persons and things, of actions and events, of country and religion, not as painfully accumulated, atom after atom, act after act, in an aged creeping Past, but as one vast picture, which God paints on the instant eternity, for the contemplation of the soul. Therefore the soul holds itself off from a too trivial and microscopic study of the universal tablet. It respects the end too much, to immerse itself in the means. It sees something more important in Christianity, than the scandals of ecclesiastical history, or the niceties of criticism; and, very incurious concerning persons or miracles, and not at all disturbed by chasms of historical evidence, it accepts from God the phenomenon, as it finds it, as the pure and awful form of religion in the world. It is not hot and passionate at the appearance of what it calls its own good or bad fortune, at the union or opposition of other persons. No man is its enemy. It accepts whatsoever befalls, as part of its lesson. It is a watcher more than a doer, and it is a doer, only that it may the better watch. Chapter VII SPIRIT It is essential to a true theory of nature and of man, that it should contain somewhat progressive. Uses that are exhausted or that may be, and facts that end in the statement, cannot be all that is true of this brave lodging wherein man is harbored, and wherein all his faculties find appropriate and endless exercise. And all the uses of nature admit of being summed in one, which yields the activity of man an infinite scope. Through all its kingdoms, to the suburbs and outskirts of things, it is faithful to the cause whence it had its origin. It always speaks of Spirit. It suggests the absolute. It is a perpetual effect. It is a great shadow pointing always to the sun behind us.

The aspect of nature is devout. Like the figure of Jesus, she stands with bended head, and hands folded upon the breast. The happiest man is he who learns from nature the lesson of worship.

Of that ineffable essence which we call Spirit, he that thinks most, will say least. We can foresee God in the coarse, and, as it were, distant phenomena of matter; but when we try to define and describe himself, both language and thought desert us, and we are as helpless as fools and savages. That essence refuses to be recorded in propositions, but when man has worshipped him intellectually, the noblest ministry of nature is to stand as the apparition of God. It is the organ through which the universal spirit speaks to the individual, and strives to lead back the individual to it.

When we consider Spirit, we see that the views already presented do not include the whole circumference of man. We must add some related thoughts.

Three problems are put by nature to the mind; What is matter? Whence is it? and Whereto? The first of these questions only, the ideal theory answers. Idealism saith: matter is a phenomenon, not a substance. Idealism acquaints us with the total disparity between the evidence of our own being, and the evidence of the world's being. The one is perfect; the other, incapable of any assurance; the mind is a part of the nature of things; the world is a divine dream, from which we may presently awake to the glories and certainties of day. Idealism is a hypothesis to account for nature by other principles than those of carpentry and chemistry. Yet, if it only deny the existence of matter, it does not satisfy the demands of the spirit. It leaves God out of me. It leaves me in the splendid labyrinth of my perceptions, to wander without end. Then the heart resists it, because it balks the affections in denying substantive being to men and women. Nature is so pervaded with human life, that there is something of humanity in all, and in every particular. But this theory makes nature foreign to me, and does not account for that consanguinity which we acknowledge to it.

Let it stand, then, in the present state of our knowledge, merely as a useful introductory hypothesis, serving to apprize us of the eternal distinction between the soul and the world.

But when, following the invisible steps of thought, we come to inquire, Whence is matter? and Whereto? many truths arise to us out of the recesses of consciousness. We learn that the highest is present to the soul of man, that the dread universal essence, which is not wisdom, or love, or beauty, or power, but all in one, and each entirely, is that for which all things exist, and that by which they are; that spirit creates; that behind nature, throughout nature, spirit is present; one and not compound, it does not act upon us from without, that is, in space and time, but spiritually, or through ourselves: therefore, that spirit, that is, the Supreme Being, does not build up nature around us, but puts it forth through us, as the life of the tree puts forth new branches and leaves through the pores of the old. As a plant upon the earth, so a man rests upon the bosom of God; he is nourished by unfailing fountains, and draws, at his need, inexhaustible power. Who can set bounds to the possibilities of man? Once inhale the upper air, being admitted to behold the absolute natures of justice and truth, and we learn that man has access to the entire mind of the Creator, is himself the creator in the finite. This view, which admonishes me where the sources of wisdom and power lie, and points to virtue as to carries upon its face the highest certificate of truth, because it animates me to create my own world through the purification of my soul.

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. But it differs from the body in one important respect. It is not, like that, now subjected to the human will. Its serene order is inviolable by us. It is, therefore, to us, the present expositor of the divine mind. It is a fixed point whereby we may measure our departure. 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. We do not understand the notes of birds. The fox and the deer run away from us; the bear and tiger rend us. We do not know the uses of more than a few plants, as corn and the apple, the potato and the vine. Is not the landscape, every glimpse of which hath a grandeur, a face of him? Yet this may show us what discord is between man and nature, for you cannot freely admire a noble landscape, if laborers are digging in the field hard by. The poet finds something ridiculous in his delight, until he is out of the sight of men. Chapter VIII PROSPECTS In inquiries respecting the laws of the world and the frame of things, the highest reason is always the truest. That which seems faintly possible -- it is so refined, is often faint and dim because it is deepest seated in the mind among the eternal verities. Empirical science is apt to cloud the sight, and, by the very knowledge of functions and processes, to bereave the student of the manly contemplation of the whole. The savant becomes unpoetic. But the best read naturalist who lends an entire and devout attention to truth, will see that there remains much to learn of his relation to the world, and that it is not to be learned by any addition or subtraction or other comparison of known quantities, but is arrived at by untaught sallies of the spirit, by a continual self-recovery, and by entire humility. He will perceive that there are far more excellent qualities in the student than preciseness and infallibility; that a guess is often more fruitful than an indisputable affirmation, and that a dream may let us deeper into the secret of nature than a hundred concerted experiments.

For, the problems to be solved are precisely those which the physiologist and the naturalist omit to state. It is not so pertinent to man to know all the individuals of the animal kingdom, as it is to know whence and whereto is this tyrannizing unity in his constitution, which evermore separates and classifies things, endeavoring to reduce the most diverse to one form. When I behold a rich landscape, it is less to my purpose to recite correctly the order and superposition of the strata, than to know why all thought of multitude is lost in a tranquil sense of unity. I cannot greatly honor minuteness in details, so long as there is no hint to explain the relation between things and thoughts; no ray upon the metaphysics of conchology, of botany, of the arts, to show the relation of the forms of flowers, shells, animals, architecture, to the mind, and build science upon ideas. In a cabinet of natural history, we become sensible of a certain occult recognition and sympathy in regard to the most unwieldly and eccentric forms of beast, fish, and insect. The American who has been confined, in his own country, to the sight of buildings designed after foreign models, is surprised on entering York Minster or St. Peter's at Rome, by the feeling that these structures are imitations also, -- faint copies of an invisible archetype. Nor has science sufficient humanity, so long as the naturalist overlooks that wonderful congruity which subsists between man and the world; of which he is lord, not because he is the most subtile inhabitant, but because he is its head and heart, and finds something of himself in every great and small thing, in every mountain stratum, in every new law of color, fact of astronomy, or atmospheric influence which observation or analysis lay open. A perception of this mystery inspires the muse of George Herbert, the beautiful psalmist of the seventeenth century. The following lines are part of his little poem on Man.
"Nothing hath got so far
But man hath caught and kept it as his prey;
His eyes dismount the highest star;
He is in little all the sphere.
Herbs gladly cure our flesh, because that they
Find their acquaintance there.

"For us, the winds do blow,
The earth doth rest, heaven move, and fountains flow;
Nothing we see, but means our good,
As our delight, or as our treasure;
The whole is either our cupboard of food,
Or cabinet of pleasure.

"The stars have us to bed:
Night draws the curtain; which the sun withdraws.
Music and light attend our head.
All things unto our flesh are kind,
In their descent and being; to our mind,
In their ascent and cause.

"More servants wait on man
Than he'll take notice of. In every path,
He treads down that which doth befriend him
When sickness makes him pale and wan.
Oh mighty love! Man is one world, and hath
Another to attend him."

The perception of this class of truths makes the attraction which draws men to science, but the end is lost sight of in attention to the means. In view of this half-sight of science, we accept the sentence of Plato, that, "poetry comes nearer to vital truth than history." Every surmise and vaticination of the mind is entitled to a certain respect, and we learn to prefer imperfect theories, and sentences, which contain glimpses of truth, to digested systems which have no one valuable suggestion. A wise writer will feel that the ends of study and composition are best answered by announcing undiscovered regions of thought, and so communicating, through hope, new activity to the torpid spirit.

I shall therefore conclude this essay with some traditions of man and nature, which a certain poet sang to me; and which, as they have always been in the world, and perhaps reappear to every bard, may be both history and prophecy.

`The foundations of man are not in matter, but in spirit. But the element of spirit is eternity. To it, therefore, the longest series of events, the oldest chronologies are young and recent. In the cycle of the universal man, from whom the known individuals proceed, centuries are points, and all history is but the epoch of one degradation.

`We distrust and deny inwardly our sympathy with nature. We own and disown our relation to it, by turns. We are, like Nebuchadnezzar, dethroned, bereft of reason, and eating grass like an ox. But who can set limits to the remedial force of spirit?

`A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams. Now, the world would be insane and rabid, if these disorganizations should last for hundreds of years. It is kept in check by death and infancy. Infancy is the perpetual Messiah, which comes into the arms of fallen men, and pleads with them to return to paradise.

`Man is the dwarf of himself. Once he was permeated and dissolved by spirit. He filled nature with his overflowing currents. Out from him sprang the sun and moon; from man, the sun; from woman, the moon. The laws of his mind, the periods of his actions externized themselves into day and night, into the year and the seasons. But, having made for himself this huge shell, his waters retired; he no longer fills the veins and veinlets; he is shrunk to a drop. He sees, that the structure still fits him, but fits him colossally. Say, rather, once it fitted him, now it corresponds to him from far and on high. He adores timidly his own work. Now is man the follower of the sun, and woman the follower of the moon. Yet sometimes he starts in his slumber, and wonders at himself and his house, and muses strangely at the resemblance betwixt him and it. He perceives that if his law is still paramount, if still he have elemental power, if his word is sterling yet in nature, it is not conscious power, it is not inferior but superior to his will. It is Instinct.' Thus my Orphic poet sang.

At present, man applies to nature but half his force. He works on the world with his understanding alone. He lives in it, and masters it by a penny-wisdom; and he that works most in it, is but a half-man, and whilst his arms are strong and his digestion good, his mind is imbruted, and he is a selfish savage. His relation to nature, his power over it, is through the understanding; as by manure; the economic use of fire, wind, water, and the mariner's needle; steam, coal, chemical agriculture; the repairs of the human body by the dentist and the surgeon. This is such a resumption of power, as if a banished king should buy his territories inch by inch, instead of vaulting at once into his throne. Meantime, in the thick darkness, there are not wanting gleams of a better light, -- occasional examples of the action of man upon nature with his entire force, -- with reason as well as understanding. Such examples are; the traditions of miracles in the earliest antiquity of all nations; the history of Jesus Christ; the achievements of a principle, as in religious and political revolutions, and in the abolition of the Slave-trade; the miracles of enthusiasm, as those reported of Swedenborg, Hohenlohe, and the Shakers; many obscure and yet contested facts, now arranged under the name of Animal Magnetism; prayer; eloquence; self-healing; and the wisdom of children. These are examples of Reason's momentary grasp of the sceptre; the exertions of a power which exists not in time or space, but an instantaneous in-streaming causing power. The difference between the actual and the ideal force of man is happily figured by the schoolmen, in saying, that the knowledge of man is an evening knowledge, vespertina cognitio, but that of God is a morning knowledge, matutina cognitio.

The problem of restoring to the world original and eternal beauty, is solved by the redemption of the soul. The ruin or the blank, that we see when we look at nature, is in our own eye. The axis of vision is not coincident with the axis of things, and so they appear not transparent but opake. The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is, because man is disunited with himself. He cannot be a naturalist, until he satisfies all the demands of the spirit. Love is as much its demand, as perception. Indeed, neither can be perfect without the other. In the uttermost meaning of the words, thought is devout, and devotion is thought. Deep calls unto deep. But in actual life, the marriage is not celebrated. There are innocent men who worship God after the tradition of their fathers, but their sense of duty has not yet extended to the use of all their faculties. And there are patient naturalists, but they freeze their subject under the wintry light of the understanding. Is not prayer also a study of truth, -- a sally of the soul into the unfound infinite? No man ever prayed heartily, without learning something. But when a faithful thinker, resolute to detach every object from personal relations, and see it in the light of thought, shall, at the same time, kindle science with the fire of the holiest affections, then will God go forth anew into the creation.

It will not need, when the mind is prepared for study, to search for objects. The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common. What is a day? What is a year? What is summer? What is woman? What is a child? What is sleep? To our blindness, these things seem unaffecting. We make fables to hide the baldness of the fact and conform it, as we say, to the higher law of the mind. But when the fact is seen under the light of an idea, the gaudy fable fades and shrivels. We behold the real higher law. To the wise, therefore, a fact is true poetry, and the most beautiful of fables. These wonders are brought to our own door. You also are a man. Man and woman, and their social life, poverty, labor, sleep, fear, fortune, are known to you. Learn that none of these things is superficial, but that each phenomenon has its roots in the faculties and affections of the mind. Whilst the abstract question occupies your intellect, nature brings it in the concrete to be solved by your hands. It were a wise inquiry for the closet, to compare, point by point, especially at remarkable crises in life, our daily history, with the rise and progress of ideas in the mind.

So shall we come to look at the world with new eyes. It shall answer the endless inquiry of the intellect, -- What is truth? and of the affections, -- What is good? by yielding itself passive to the educated Will. Then shall come to pass what my poet said; `Nature is not fixed but fluid. Spirit alters, moulds, makes it. The immobility or bruteness of nature, is the absence of spirit; to pure spirit, it is fluid, it is volatile, it is obedient. Every spirit builds itself a house; and beyond its house a world; and beyond its world, a heaven. Know then, that the world exists for you. For you is the phenomenon perfect. What we are, that only can we see. All that Adam had, all that Caesar could, you have and can do. Adam called his house, heaven and earth; Caesar called his house, Rome; you perhaps call yours, a cobler's trade; a hundred acres of ploughed land; or a scholar's garret. Yet line for line and point for point, your dominion is as great as theirs, though without fine names. Build, therefore, your own world. As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its great proportions. A correspondent revolution in things will attend the influx of the spirit. So fast will disagreeable appearances, swine, spiders, snakes, pests, madhouses, prisons, enemies, vanish; they are temporary and shall be no more seen. The sordor and filths of nature, the sun shall dry up, and the wind exhale. As when the summer comes from the south; the snow-banks melt, and the face of the earth becomes green before it, so shall the advancing spirit create its ornaments along its path, and carry with it the beauty it visits, and the song which enchants it; it shall draw beautiful faces, warm hearts, wise discourse, and heroic acts, around its way, until evil is no more seen. The kingdom of man over nature, which cometh not with observation, -- a dominion such as now is beyond his dream of God, -- he shall enter without more wonder than the blind man feels who is gradually restored to perfect sight.'

           
           
       

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson left the ministry to pursue a career in writing and public speaking. Emerson became one of America's best known and best-loved 19th-century figures. More About Emerson

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"Every man has his own courage, and is betrayed because he seeks in himself the courage of other persons." – Ralph Waldo Emerson

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The Greatest Nature Essay Ever

what is the nature essay

. . . WOULD BEGIN WITH an image so startling and lovely and wondrous that you would stop riffling through the rest of the mail, take your jacket off, sit down at the table, adjust your spectacles, tell the dog to lie down , tell the kids to make their own sandwiches for heavenssake, that’s why god gave you hands , and read straight through the piece, marveling that you had indeed seen or smelled or heard exactly that, but never quite articulated it that way, or seen or heard it articulated that way, and you think, man, this is why I read nature essays, to be startled and moved like that, wow.

The next two paragraphs would smoothly and gently move you into a story, seemingly a small story, a light tale, easily accessed, something personal but not self-indulgent or self-absorbed on the writer’s part, just sort of a cheerful nutty everyday story maybe starring an elk or a mink or a child, but then there would suddenly be a sharp sentence where the dagger enters your heart and the essay spins on a dime like a skater, and you are plunged into waaay deeper water, you didn’t see it coming at all, and you actually shiver, your whole body shimmers, and much later, maybe when you are in bed with someone you love and you are trying to evade his or her icy feet, you think, my god, stories do have roaring power, stories are the most crucial and necessary food, how come we never hardly say that out loud?

Man, this is why I read nature essays, to be startled and moved like that, wow.

The next three paragraphs then walk inexorably toward a line of explosive Conclusions on the horizon like inky alps. Probably the sentences get shorter, more staccato. Terser. Blunter. Shards of sentences. But there’s no opinion or commentary, just one line fitting into another, each one making plain inarguable sense, a goat or even a senator could easily understand the sentences and their implications, and there’s no shouting, no persuasion, no eloquent pirouetting, no pronouncements and accusations, no sermons or homilies, just calm clean clear statements one after another, fitting together like people holding hands.

Then an odd paragraph, this is a most unusual and peculiar essay, for right here where you would normally expect those alpine Conclusions, some Advice, some Stern Instructions & Directions, there’s only the quiet murmur of the writer tiptoeing back to the story he or she was telling you in the second and third paragraphs. The story slips back into view gently, a little shy, holding its hat, nothing melodramatic, in fact it offers a few gnomic questions without answers, and then it gently slides away off the page and off the stage, it almost evanesces or dissolves, and it’s only later after you have read the essay three times with mounting amazement that you see quite how the writer managed the stagecraft there, but that’s the stuff of another essay for another time.

And finally the last paragraph. It turns out that the perfect nature essay is quite short, it’s a lean taut thing, an arrow and not a cannon, and here at the end there’s a flash of humor, and a hint or tone or subtext of sadness, a touch of rue, you can’t quite put your finger on it but it’s there, a dark thread in the fabric, and there’s also a shot of espresso hope, hope against all odds and sense, but rivetingly there’s no call to arms, no clarion brassy trumpet blast, no website to which you are directed, no hint that you, yes you, should be ashamed of how much water you use or the car you drive or the fact that you just turned the thermostat up to seventy, or that you actually have not voted in the past two elections despite what you told the kids and the goat. Nor is there a rimshot ending, a bang, a last twist of the dagger. Oddly, sweetly, the essay just ends with a feeling eerily like a warm hand brushed against your cheek, and you sit there, near tears, smiling, and then you stand up. Changed.

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Essay on Nature: In 100 Words, 200 Words, 300 Words

what is the nature essay

  • Updated on  
  • Oct 13, 2023

Essay on Nature

Nature is the intricate web of life that surrounds us, encompassing everything from the air we breathe to the majestic landscapes we admire. It includes the delicate balance of ecosystems, the diversity of flora and fauna, and the natural resources that sustain all living beings on Earth. Exploring the beauty and significance of nature is not only a pleasurable endeavour but also a crucial one, as it reminds us of our responsibility to protect and preserve our environment.

Table of Contents

  • 1 Tips to Write the Best Essay
  • 2 Essay on Nature in 100 Words
  • 3 Essay on Nature in 200 Words
  • 4 Essay on Nature in 300 Words

Tips to Write the Best Essay

Here are some tips to craft an exceptional essay:

  • Understand the Topic: Grasp the essence of the topic and its different aspects before you start writing.
  • Structure: Organize your essay coherently, with a clear introduction, body paragraphs, and a conclusion.
  • Thesis Statement: Formulate a strong thesis statement that summarizes the main point you want to convey.
  • Use Vivid Language: Employ descriptive language to bring the beauty of nature to life for your readers.
  • Supporting Evidence: Back up your points with facts, statistics, and examples to make your essay more convincing.
  • Variety of Ideas: Discuss different perspectives and dimensions of the topic to showcase a comprehensive understanding.
  • Proofread: Edit your essay for grammar, punctuation, and clarity before submitting it.

Essay on Nature in 100 Words

Nature is a precious gift, encompassing all living and non-living entities. It provides us with air, water, food, and shelter. The beauty of nature soothes our souls and brings us closer to the marvels of creation. However, human activities are threatening the delicate balance of ecosystems, leading to pollution, deforestation, and climate change. It’s our responsibility to protect and preserve nature for future generations to enjoy its wonders.

Essay on Nature in 200 Words

Nature is the ultimate source of inspiration and sustenance for all life forms on Earth. From the smallest microorganisms to the tallest trees, every aspect of nature plays a crucial role in maintaining the delicate balance of our planet. The diversity of flora and fauna, the intricate ecosystems, and the natural resources provide us with food, shelter, and even the air we breathe.

Despite its undeniable importance, human activities are wreaking havoc on nature. Deforestation, pollution, and excessive use of natural resources are causing irreparable damage to our environment. Climate change, triggered by human-induced factors, is resulting in extreme weather events and rising sea levels, endangering both human and animal habitats.

Preserving nature is not a choice; it’s a necessity. The responsibility to conserve nature lies in the hands of every individual. Planting trees, reducing waste, using sustainable resources, and raising awareness about the importance of nature are steps we can take to mitigate the damage.

Nature has provided us with boundless beauty and resources, but it’s up to us to ensure its survival. By respecting and nurturing the natural world, we can secure a healthier and more vibrant planet for current and future generations.

Essay on Nature in 300 Words

Nature is a symphony of vibrant life forms and dynamic ecosystems that create a harmonious and intricate web of existence. The lush greenery of forests, the tranquil blue of oceans, the diverse habitats of animals, and the breathtaking landscapes remind us of the sheer magnificence of the world we inhabit. It’s a world that offers us both solace and sustenance, making our survival intertwined with its preservation.

The ecosystem services provided by nature are immeasurable. The forests act as the lungs of the Earth, producing oxygen and absorbing carbon dioxide. Wetlands filter our water, providing us with clean and fresh sources of hydration. Bees and other pollinators enable the growth of crops, contributing to global food security.

However, the rampant disregard for nature’s delicate balance is leading to alarming consequences. The relentless deforestation for urbanization and agriculture is causing habitat loss, leading to the extinction of numerous species. The excessive emission of greenhouse gases is driving climate change, with rising temperatures and unpredictable weather patterns threatening vulnerable communities.

To ensure the well-being of our planet and future generations, conservation and sustainable practices are imperative. Afforestation and reforestation efforts must be intensified to restore lost ecosystems. Transitioning to renewable energy sources can reduce carbon emissions and mitigate climate change. Moreover, raising awareness and fostering a deep connection with nature can instil a sense of responsibility and inspire positive action.

In conclusion, nature is not merely a resource for human exploitation; it’s a complex and interconnected system that sustains life in all its forms. We must recognize our role as custodians of the environment and act with diligence to protect and preserve it. By embracing sustainable practices and fostering a profound respect for nature, we can secure a future where the world’s natural wonders continue to thrive.

Nature encompasses the entirety of the physical world and its components, including landscapes, flora, fauna, air, water, and ecosystems. It encompasses the natural environment and all living and non-living elements that shape and sustain life on Earth.

Nature is vital for our survival, providing resources like air, water, and food. It maintains ecological balance, supports biodiversity, and offers inspiration and solace. However, human activities threaten its delicate equilibrium, necessitating conservation efforts.

Saving nature requires planting trees, reducing waste, using sustainable resources, and raising awareness about its importance. Adopting renewable energy sources, practising responsible consumption, and fostering a connection with nature are crucial steps in its preservation.

We hope that this essay blog on Nature helps. For more amazing daily reads related to essay writing , stay tuned with Leverage Edu .

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Manasvi Kotwal

Manasvi's flair in writing abilities is derived from her past experience of working with bootstrap start-ups, Advertisement and PR agencies as well as freelancing. She's currently working as a Content Marketing Associate at Leverage Edu to be a part of its thriving ecosystem.

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Nature Essay in English for School Students

Despite nature's blessings, we forget that we are plundering her treasures. In Nature Essay, children can explore nature's abundance and variety.

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November 18, 2023

Nature Essay

Table of Contents

Nature Essay: Nature encompasses the interaction between physical surroundings and all living beings, including the atmosphere, climate, natural resources, ecosystem, flora, fauna, and humans. It is a precious gift from God to our planet, providing everything necessary for sustaining life. Often referred to as ‘Mother Nature’, she continuously nurtures us with her abundant offerings. From the food we eat and clothes we wear to our homes, nature provides it all. Everywhere we look presents a glimpse of nature’s beauty – trees, flowers, landscapes, insects, sunlight, breeze – all elements of our environment. Simply put, our environment is nature itself. And it has existed since long before the dawn of humanity.

Nature Essay in 100 words in English

Our planet, Earth, is undeniably stunning with its pristine and alluring nature abundant in lush greenery. It generously provides us with all the necessary resources for our sustenance. From clean water to breathe, nourishing food to eat, and land to call home – nature truly is our closest companion. However, we must appreciate and cherish nature’s blessings without disrupting its delicate balance. Let us take responsibility for preserving its peacefulness and cleanliness, preventing destruction so we may continue relishing its wonders indefinitely. After all, nature is a precious gift bestowed upon us by God for enjoyment, not harm.

Nature Essay in 150 words

The natural world is a source of immense beauty and joy, providing us with a healthy environment in which to live. It offers diverse flowers, birds, animals, plants, sky, land, rivers, seas, forests, air, mountains, valleys, and hills. This wondrous creation is the work of God, and it sustains our well-being.

These gifts from nature should be cherished and protected; we must not harm or exploit them for our gain. We are responsible for maintaining the balance of the ecosystem and preserving nature’s originality. Our surroundings offer us endless opportunities for enjoyment, and we must keep it clean and free from destruction. Sadly, many human activities in today’s world disregard this responsibility and have caused great harm to nature. However, we must all strive to uphold the beauty of our natural environment.

Nature Essay in 200 words

Nature is the encompassing beauty that surrounds us. We have the privilege to witness and appreciate it in every passing moment, from its vibrant transformations to its soothing sounds and sensations. It is essential to embrace nature’s gifts by stepping out for a morning walk, breathing in fresh air and basking in its magnificence. Throughout the day, we can marvel at how nature continuously changes, like when the sun rises, painting everything in a bright orange glow, and as it sets, casting a dark orange hue before turning into a soft dusk.

Despite nature’s abundant resources, we fail to reciprocate and instead continue to deplete its assets for our selfish desires. With the constant stream of technological advancements, we often overlook the environmental impact. We must take action to preserve our dwindling natural resources to ensure the sustainability of life on this planet. Neglecting this responsibility puts future generations at risk. Let us recognise and appreciate the value of nature and work towards preserving its natural state.

Nature Essay in 250 words

Nature is a precious and invaluable gift bestowed upon us by God for our life on Earth. It facilitates daily living by providing essential resources, and we should express gratitude for its role as a nurturing mother figure. Sitting peacefully in an early morning garden allows us to appreciate nature’s soothing sounds and captivating scenery. However, seeing this gift gradually diminishing due to human ignorance and technological advancement is disheartening.

Like a loving mother, nature always nourishes us and never causes harm. Walking in nature’s embrace early in the morning strengthens our physical health. It protects us from various dangerous illnesses such as diabetes, heart diseases, high blood pressure, liver problems, digestive issues, infections, and brain diseases. The gentle melodies of birds chirping, the rustling of the breeze, and the sound of fresh air and running water in the river contribute to our well-being. 

Nature Essay in 300 words

The natural world is an essential and inseparable aspect of our existence. We have all been graced with God’s steadfast love in the magnificent form of nature. It would be a shame to overlook the joy and wonder nature offers. Artists, poets, writers, and painters have long been drawn to depict the beauty of nature in their works. This divine creation is a precious gift bestowed upon us by God. Nature encompasses everything around us: from water and air to land and sky, fire and rivers, forests and animals, birds and plants, sun and moon, stars and sea, lakes and rain, thunder and storms. It is a vibrant display of both living beings and inanimate objects.

The natural world holds its strength and distinctiveness given by a higher power. It takes on various shapes and shades that shift with time – from morning to noon; for example, the sea transforms from a brilliant blue to a deep emerald green. Similarly, the sky undergoes a colourful transformation throughout the day: a soft pink sunrise, vibrant blue midday, fiery orange sunset, and dusky purple twilight. The changing nature also influences our emotions – feelings of contentment and optimism in sunny or rainy seasons and joy under moonlight, yet fatigue can set in during peak sunlight.

The transformative power of nature can affect our mood and behaviour. It can also aid in the recovery of patients when a pleasant environment is provided. Therefore, we must maintain a clean and conserved natural environment for the well-being of not only ourselves but also future generations. We must refrain from damaging actions such as deforestation or polluting our oceans and rivers, as well as contributing to adverse effects like the depletion of the ozone layer or global warming through selfish activities. We must become fully aware of our impact on nature and try to preserve its natural state for its ability to sustain life on Earth indefinitely.

Nature Essay in 400 words

The forces of nature, including the environment, offer us constant protection and sustenance. We are wholly dependent on air, land, water, fire, and the sky for our survival on this planet. Nature encompasses all living things, such as plants and animals, as well as natural phenomena like rivers, forests, rain, lakes, birds, oceans, thunderstorms, the sun and the moon. The weather conditions in our surroundings shape the atmosphere and physical features like mountains and deserts. Despite being a source of nourishment for us, nature also holds immense power to cause destruction.

In modern society, people have less time to appreciate nature. Amid a growing population, we often overlook the benefits of connecting with nature for our well-being. As a result, we rely on technological devices to maintain our health and fitness. However, it is undeniable that nature can rejuvenate and sustain us in the long term. Countless writers have praised the beauty and advantages of nature in their works. Nature has a powerful effect on our mental well-being and can even aid in healing physical ailments. Unfortunately, we are witnessing a gradual decline in our natural surroundings due to technological advancements. It is now more important than ever to raise awareness and take action towards preserving our precious resources.

We have never been tired of seeing how beautiful God created everything. Still, we have forgotten that we are also responsible for nature, especially the relationship between nature and humans. After a long day of crush, it looks like such a beautiful scene in the morning with the sunrise, the sounds of birds, the sounds of lakes and rivers, and the happy gatherings of friends in the evening in the garden. But we should have enjoyed the beauty of nature in fulfilling our duties towards our families.

On our vacations, we often spend the entire day indoors, whether watching TV, reading the news, playing games, or using the computer. However, we must remember that there are many fascinating things to do outside in nature. Unfortunately, we tend to leave all our lights on and unnecessarily use electricity at home, contributing to global warming. Additionally, our actions, such as cutting down trees and forests, release excess amounts of CO2 into the environment and contribute to the damaging effects of greenhouse gases and global warming.

If we want to be happy and healthy always, we should try our best to stop our foolish and selfish activities and save our planet and its beautiful nature. We should keep ecosystems in balance by not cutting trees and forests, conserving energy and water, and so on. Since we are the ultimate users of nature, we should care for it as much as we can.

Nature Essay FAQs

Nature refers to the natural world around us, encompassing everything from landscapes and living organisms to the elements. It includes the flora, fauna, and the physical environment in which they exist.

Nature plays a crucial role in our lives, providing essential resources like air, water, and food. Additionally, spending time in nature has proven benefits for mental and physical well-being, fostering a connection to the environment and promoting a sense of tranquillity.

Nature encompasses various elements, including landscapes, plants, animals, weather patterns, and geological features. It encompasses the entirety of the physical world, both living and non-living, outside human-made environments.

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Essay on Conservation of Nature for Students and Children

500+ words essay on conservation of nature.

Nature has provided us numerous gifts such as air , water, land, sunlight , minerals, plants, and animals. All these gifts of nature make our earth a place worth living. Existence on Earth would not be possible without any of these. Now, while these natural resources are present on Earth in plenty. Unfortunately, the necessity of most of these has increased extremely over the centuries due to growth in the human population.

essay on conservation of nature

What is Conservation of Nature?

Conservation of nature means the preservation of forests, land, water bodies, and minerals, fuels, natural gases, etc. And to make sure that all these continue to be available in abundance. Thus all these natural resources make life worth living on Earth. Life would not be imaginable without air, water, sunlight as well as other natural resources present on the earth.

Thus, it is essential to conserve these resources in order to retain the environment integral. Here is a look at the types of natural resources existing on Earth and the ways to conserve these:

Types of Natural Resources:

  • Renewable Resources : These are resources such as air, water, and sunlight that refill naturally.
  • Non-Renewable Resources: These are resources like fossil fuels and minerals that do not restock reform very slowly.
  • Biotic: These originate from living beings and organic material like plants and animals.
  • Abiotic: These come from non-living things and non-organic material. These comprise air, water, and land as well as metals like iron, copper, and silver.

Natural resources are also categories such as actual resources, reserve resources, stock resources and potential resources based on their development stage.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

How to Conserve Nature and Its Resources?

Many of the natural resources are being used at a faster rate as compared to their speed of production. There is so a necessity for conservation of nature and the natural resources it offers. Here are some of the ways in which these resources can be conserved:

Reduce Water Consumption

Water is available in abundance on Earth . This is one of the reasons people do not consider much before using it. However, if we keep using it at this speed. In the future, we may not be left with as much of it. Therefore, simple things such as turn off the tap while brushing or reuse the leftover water to water the plants can help in this direction.

Reduce Usage of Electricity

Use only as much energy as you require. It is thus advised to limit the usage of electricity. Simple habits such as turning off the lights before parting your room, turn off the electric appliances after use.  Switching to energy-saving fluorescent or LED bulbs can make a change.

Restrict Usage of Paper

Paper manufacturing depends only on trees. Increasing the use of paper means encouraging deforestation . This is one of the key reasons for concern is in today’s time Always ensure you use only as much paper as necessary. Stop taking print outs and use e-copies instead to do your bit.

Use Newer Agricultural Methods

The government must aware the methods such as mixed cropping, crop rotation. Also, the government should teach the minimum use of pesticides, insecticides. Appropriate use of manures , bio-fertilizers, and organic fertilizers to the farmers.

Spread Awareness

Spreading awareness about the conservation of nature is always a necessary step. It can be achieved only when more and more people understand its importance and the ways in which they can help. Besides this, it is essential to plant more and more tress. It is necessary to contribute towards lowering air pollution. We must use shared transport and employing rainwater harvesting systems to conserve nature.

Nature comprises of everything that surrounds us. The trees, forests, rivers, rivulets, soil, air all are the part of nature. Keeping nature and its resources integral. So, it is very important for the continuation of life on earth. It would be difficult to imagine life on earth, which has a spoiled natural environment.

Therefore, taking appropriate steps to conserve nature in its untouched form. It must be a priority for the human race. Only human beings with their power and ability can save nature in its purest forms.

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What Role Does Nature Play in Your Life?

what is the nature essay

By Jeremy Engle

  • April 19, 2019

What are your experiences with nature?

How often do you take a leisurely stroll through the grass, a garden or the woods? How often do you stop to look at, touch or smell a flower?

How do you feel when you are alone in nature? Do you find it relaxing, invigorating, healing?

In “ The Healing Power of Gardens ,” Oliver Sacks, a neurologist who died in 2015, wrote:

As a writer, I find gardens essential to the creative process; as a physician, I take my patients to gardens whenever possible. All of us have had the experience of wandering through a lush garden or a timeless desert, walking by a river or an ocean, or climbing a mountain and finding ourselves simultaneously calmed and reinvigorated, engaged in mind, refreshed in body and spirit. The importance of these physiological states on individual and community health is fundamental and wide-ranging. In 40 years of medical practice, I have found only two types of non-pharmaceutical “therapy” to be vitally important for patients with chronic neurological diseases: music and gardens.

The essay continues:

I have lived in New York City for 50 years, and living here is sometimes made bearable for me only by its gardens. This has been true for my patients, too. When I worked at Beth Abraham, a hospital just across the road from the New York Botanical Garden, I found that there was nothing long-shut-in patients loved more than a visit to the garden — they spoke of the hospital and the garden as two different worlds. I cannot say exactly how nature exerts its calming and organizing effects on our brains, but I have seen in my patients the restorative and healing powers of nature and gardens, even for those who are deeply disabled neurologically. In many cases, gardens and nature are more powerful than any medication. My friend Lowell has moderately severe Tourette’s syndrome. In his usual busy, city environment, he has hundreds of tics and verbal ejaculations each day — grunting, jumping, touching things compulsively. I was therefore amazed one day when we were hiking in a desert to realize that his tics had completely disappeared. The remoteness and uncrowdedness of the scene, combined with some ineffable calming effect of nature, served to defuse his ticcing, to “normalize” his neurological state, at least for a time. An elderly lady with Parkinson’s disease, whom I met in Guam, often found herself frozen, unable to initiate movement — a common problem for those with parkinsonism. But once we led her out into the garden, where plants and a rock garden provided a varied landscape, she was galvanized by this, and could rapidly, unaided, climb up the rocks and down again. I have a number of patients with very advanced dementia or Alzheimer’s disease, who may have very little sense of orientation to their surroundings. They have forgotten, or cannot access, how to tie their shoes or handle cooking implements. But put them in front of a flower bed with some seedlings, and they will know exactly what to do — I have never seen such a patient plant something upside down.

The essay concludes:

Clearly, nature calls to something very deep in us. Biophilia, the love of nature and living things, is an essential part of the human condition. Hortophilia, the desire to interact with, manage and tend nature, is also deeply instilled in us. The role that nature plays in health and healing becomes even more critical for people working long days in windowless offices, for those living in city neighborhoods without access to green spaces, for children in city schools or for those in institutional settings such as nursing homes. The effects of nature’s qualities on health are not only spiritual and emotional but physical and neurological. I have no doubt that they reflect deep changes in the brain’s physiology, and perhaps even its structure.

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Home — Essay Samples — Environment — Biodiversity — The Beauty of Nature

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The Beauty of Nature

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Published: Mar 16, 2024

Words: 727 | Pages: 2 | 4 min read

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The aesthetic appeal of nature, the healing power of nature, the importance of biodiversity, the role of nature in human creativity.

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what is the nature essay

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Essay on Nature for Children and Students

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Nature Essay: Nature is an integral part of our lives. But even while we appreciate the blessings she bestows on us, we forget that we are plundering her treasures and thereby denying our children the pleasure of enjoying nature in all her abundance and variety.

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Find very simple and easy to understand essay on nature. Bring some creativity in the education of your lovely kids, children and students who are studying in nursery, KG, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10. Nature is the most important thing for our life and our kids should know about this. So motivate their learning through following nature essay.

Long and Short Essay on Nature in English

Nature essay in 100 words.

We live on the most beautiful planet, Earth which has very clean and attractive nature full of greenery. Nature is our best friend which provides us all the resources to live here. It gives us water to drink, pure air to breathe, food to eat, land to stay, animals, plants for our other uses, etc for our betterment. We should fully enjoy the nature without disturbing its ecological balance. We should care our nature, make it peaceful, keep it clean and prevent it from the destruction so that we can enjoy our nature forever. Nature is a most precious gift given by the God to us to enjoy but not to harm.

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Nature Essay in 150 words

Nature is the most beautiful and attractive surrounding around us which make us happy and provide us natural environment to live healthy. Our nature provides us variety of beautiful flowers, attractive birds, animals, green plants, blue sky, land, running rivers, sea, forests, air, mountains, valleys, hills and many more things. Our God has created a beautiful nature for the healthy living of us. All the things we use for our living are the assets of nature which we should not spoil and damage.

We should not destroy the originality of the nature and should not imbalance the ecosystem cycle. Our nature provides us beautiful environment to live and enjoy so it is our responsibility to keep it clean and away from all the damages. In the modern era, many selfish and bad activities of the human being have disturbed the nature to a great extent. But we all should try to maintain our nature’s beauty.

Nature Essay in 200 words

The nature is everything around us which surrounds us with beautiful environment. We see and enjoy it every moment. We observe natural changes in it, hear it and feel it everywhere. We should take full advantage of the nature and go out of home for the morning walk daily to breathe pure air and enjoy morning beauty of nature. All though the day it changes it beauty like in the morning when sun rises everything looks bright orange and then yellowish. In the evening when sun sets it again becomes dark orange and then light dark.

The nature has everything for us but we do not have anything for it even we are destroying its property day by day to just fulfill our selfish wishes. In the modern technological world lots of inventions are getting launched daily without its advantage and disadvantage to the nature. It is our responsibility to save the declining assets of our nature to make possible the existence of life forever on the earth. If we do not take any step towards nature conservation, we are keeping our future generations at danger. We should understood its worth and value and try to maintain its natural shape.

Nature Essay in 250 words

Nature is the most precious and valuable gift to us from the God to live our life here on the earth. Nature makes our life easy by providing all the required resources for daily living. We should thankful to our nature for helping, caring and nurturing us like a mother. We can enjoy the sweet sound and scenery of the nature if we peacefully sit in the early morning in the garden. Our nature is adorned with lots of scenic beauty which we can enjoy anytime. Earth has geographical beauty and known as the city of garden or heaven. But it is sad to say that such beautiful gifts of God are declining day by day due to the technological advancement and high level of ignorance of the human beings.

Nature is like our real mother which never harms us but always nourishes us. Walking in the lap of nature in the early morning makes us healthy and strong as well as keeps us away from many lethal diseases like diabetes, chronic heart diseases, high blood pressure, liver problem, digestive system ailments, infections, brain disease, etc. It is good for our health to hear the soft sound of the birds, rattle of the breeze, sound of running fresh air, sound of running water in the river, etc in the early morning. Most of the poets, writers and people used to of yoga and meditation are seen in the early morning in the garden to re-energize their body, mind and soul.

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Nature Essay in 300 words

Nature is the most important and integral part of the lives of everyone. Everyone has been blessed with the true love of God in the form of beautiful nature. We should never miss the pleasure of enjoying the nature. Nature has been the most favourite topic of the works of many famous poets, writers, painters and artists. Nature is the beautiful creation of the God which he blessed to us as a precious gift. Nature is everything which surrounds us like water, air, land, sky, fire, river, forests, animals, birds, plants, sun, moon, stars, sea, lake, rain, thunder, storm, etc. Nature is very colourful and has both living and non-living things in its lap.

Everything in the nature has their own power and uniqueness provided by the God. It has its many forms which are changing by season to season and even from minute to minute such as sea looks bright blue in the morning but by noon it looks emerald green colour. Sky changes its colour all through the day from pale pink at sunrise, dazzling blue in late morning, bright orange in evening at sunset and purple by twilight. Our mood also gets changed according to the nature such as happy and hopeful at sun shine, rainy season and spring season. We feel heartily happy at moonlight and little bored and tired in high sun light.

Nature has some powerful transformative power which changes our mood and behaviour accordingly. Nature has power to recover the patients from their diseases if they are provided with the required and pleasant environment. Nature is very essential for our healthy life so we should keep it clean and conserve it for our future generations. We should cut trees and forests, should not despoil the ocean, rivers, should not make hole in ozone layer, should not increase green house effect, global warming and many more through our selfish activities. We should get fully aware about our nature and try our best to keep it natural so that it can nourish life on the earth forever.

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Nature Essay in 400 words

Nature is the natural environment which surrounds us, cares us and nourishes us every moment. It provides us a protective layer around us to prevent from the damages. We are not able to survive on the earth without nature like air, land, water, fire and sky. Nature includes everything around us like plants, animals, river, forests, rain, lake, birds, sea, thunder, sun, moon, weather, atmosphere, mountain, desserts, hills, ice, etc. Every form of nature is very powerful which has ability to nourish as well as destroy us.

Now a day, everyone has less time to enjoy nature. In the increasing crowd we forgot to enjoy nature and improve health. We started using technological instruments for our health fitness. However it is very true that nature has power to nourish us and fit us forever. Most of the writers have described the real beauty and advantage of the nature in their writings. Nature has ability to make our mind tension free and cure our diseases. Because of technological advancement in the life of human being, our nature is declining gradually which needs a high level of awareness to keep it in balance and to conserve natural assets.

God has created everything very beautifully seeing which our eyes can never be tired. But we forgot that we too have some responsibility towards our nature to relationship between nature and human beings. How beautiful scenery it looks in morning with sunrise, songs of birds, sounds of lakes, rivers, air and happy gatherings of friends in the evening in garden after a long day of crush. But we forgot to enjoy the beauty of the nature in just fulfilling our duties towards our families.

Sometimes during our holidays we spend our whole day by watching TV, reading news paper, playing indoor games or on the computer but we forgot that outside the door we can do something interesting in the lap of nature ad natural environment. Unnecessarily we left on all the lights of home, we use electricity without need which ultimately increases the heat in the environment called global warming. Our other activities like cutting trees and forests increase the amount of CO2 gas in the environment causing green house effect and global warming.

If we want to be happy and healthy always we should try our best to save our planet and its beautiful nature by stopping our foolish and selfish activities. In order to keep ecosystem in balance we should not cut trees, forests, practice energy and water conservation and many more. Ultimately we are the real user of the nature so we should really take care of it.

Essay on Nature FAQs

What is the nature essay.

A nature essay is a written piece about the natural world, often describing its beauty and significance.

What is nature in simple English?

Nature, in simple terms, refers to the outdoors, including plants, animals, and the environment around us.

What is nature 5 points?

Nature comprises trees, rivers, animals, mountains, and the sky. It's where we find beauty and life.

What is the beauty of nature?

The beauty of nature is seen in its landscapes, from colorful sunrises to lush forests, evoking awe and serenity.

What can I write about the beauty of nature?

You can write about breathtaking sunrises, calming lakes, diverse wildlife, and the peace nature brings.

How do you describe a nature walk?

A nature walk is a leisurely stroll in the outdoors, appreciating the scenery and observing plants and animals.

What is the purpose of a nature walk?

The purpose of a nature walk is to connect with nature, enjoy its tranquility, and learn about the environment.

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What is Nature Writing?

Definition and Examples

  • An Introduction to Punctuation
  • Ph.D., Rhetoric and English, University of Georgia
  • M.A., Modern English and American Literature, University of Leicester
  • B.A., English, State University of New York

Nature writing is a form of creative nonfiction in which the natural environment (or a narrator 's encounter with the natural environment) serves as the dominant subject.

"In critical practice," says Michael P. Branch, "the term 'nature writing' has usually been reserved for a brand of nature representation that is deemed literary, written in the speculative personal voice , and presented in the form of the nonfiction essay . Such nature writing is frequently pastoral or romantic in its philosophical assumptions, tends to be modern or even ecological in its sensibility, and is often in service to an explicit or implicit preservationist agenda" ("Before Nature Writing," in Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism , ed. by K. Armbruster and K.R. Wallace, 2001).

Examples of Nature Writing:

  • At the Turn of the Year, by William Sharp
  • The Battle of the Ants, by Henry David Thoreau
  • Hours of Spring, by Richard Jefferies
  • The House-Martin, by Gilbert White
  • In Mammoth Cave, by John Burroughs
  • An Island Garden, by Celia Thaxter
  • January in the Sussex Woods, by Richard Jefferies
  • The Land of Little Rain, by Mary Austin
  • Migration, by Barry Lopez
  • The Passenger Pigeon, by John James Audubon
  • Rural Hours, by Susan Fenimore Cooper
  • Where I Lived, and What I Lived For, by Henry David Thoreau

Observations:

  • "Gilbert White established the pastoral dimension of nature writing in the late 18th century and remains the patron saint of English nature writing. Henry David Thoreau was an equally crucial figure in mid-19th century America . . .. "The second half of the 19th century saw the origins of what we today call the environmental movement. Two of its most influential American voices were John Muir and John Burroughs , literary sons of Thoreau, though hardly twins. . . . "In the early 20th century the activist voice and prophetic anger of nature writers who saw, in Muir's words, that 'the money changers were in the temple' continued to grow. Building upon the principles of scientific ecology that were being developed in the 1930s and 1940s, Rachel Carson and Aldo Leopold sought to create a literature in which appreciation of nature's wholeness would lead to ethical principles and social programs. "Today, nature writing in America flourishes as never before. Nonfiction may well be the most vital form of current American literature, and a notable proportion of the best writers of nonfiction practice nature writing." (J. Elder and R. Finch, Introduction, The Norton Book of Nature Writing . Norton, 2002)

"Human Writing . . . in Nature"

  • "By cordoning nature off as something separate from ourselves and by writing about it that way, we kill both the  genre and a part of ourselves. The best writing in this genre is not really 'nature writing' anyway but human writing that just happens to take place in nature. And the reason we are still talking about [Thoreau's] Walden 150 years later is as much for the personal story as the pastoral one: a single human being, wrestling mightily with himself, trying to figure out how best to live during his brief time on earth, and, not least of all, a human being who has the nerve, talent, and raw ambition to put that wrestling match on display on the printed page. The human spilling over into the wild, the wild informing the human; the two always intermingling. There's something to celebrate." (David Gessner, "Sick of Nature." The Boston Globe , Aug. 1, 2004)

Confessions of a Nature Writer

  • "I do not believe that the solution to the world's ills is a return to some previous age of mankind. But I do doubt that any solution is possible unless we think of ourselves in the context of living nature "Perhaps that suggests an answer to the question what a 'nature writer' is. He is not a sentimentalist who says that 'nature never did betray the heart that loved her.' Neither is he simply a scientist classifying animals or reporting on the behavior of birds just because certain facts can be ascertained. He is a writer whose subject is the natural context of human life, a man who tries to communicate his observations and his thoughts in the presence of nature as part of his attempt to make himself more aware of that context. 'Nature writing' is nothing really new. It has always existed in literature. But it has tended in the course of the last century to become specialized partly because so much writing that is not specifically 'nature writing' does not present the natural context at all; because so many novels and so many treatises describe man as an economic unit, a political unit, or as a member of some social class but not as a living creature surrounded by other living things." (Joseph Wood Krutch, "Some Unsentimental Confessions of a Nature Writer." New York Herald Tribune Book Review , 1952)
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Save Nature Essay

what is the nature essay

Introduction

We are always happy to get gifts from others, as they make us feel special and valued. Nature is such a gift given to us that it must be treated equally like any other gift. We might think that since nature and its resources are available for free, we can utilise them in whichever way we want. This approach towards nature is not good, and this is what is discussed in this save our nature essay.

The minute we step out of our homes, we are entering the space of nature, and everything we see around us forms a part of it. The plants, trees, flowers, sky, soil, water, sun, insects, and wind all fall under nature. Therefore, we must keep our nature as beautiful as it is.

Importance of Saving Nature

Even though nature has a significant role in supporting our lives, each component has a specific role in maintaining the balance of nature. While we get food to eat, air to breathe and water to drink from nature, we also enjoy the natural beauty and sounds as they lift our moods. Nature provides us with many resources, and we return its kindness by overexploiting and harming nature. Thus, as people living on Earth, we need to be conscious of our actions on surroundings that disrupt its natural flow.

Human activities are the main villain that harms nature. Earlier, it was not evident the dangerous effects of human exploitation on nature. When we think that we have only cut down a single tree, which might not damage nature, remember that there would be hundreds of others who think like you. So, one tree becomes hundreds, thousands and millions. At this pace, nature will soon exhaust its resources, and we will be suffering from various natural disasters and diseases. To put it simply, our mere existence would be threatened. This is why we need to preserve nature. In this how to save nature essay, we explore a few ways to coexist with nature.

Ways to Save Nature

We must be mindful of the fact that though nature has infinite resources, they will soon get depleted if we use them carelessly. As people started moving to cities, this led to the clearance of land and deforestation. The impact is environmental threats, such as green gas emissions, global warming, extinction of natural flora and fauna, etc. And the price we will have to pay will be huge.

To save ourselves from natural calamities and protect nature, let us move towards sustainable practices. By using eco-friendly products and discarding plastic and other non-degradable materials, we are doing a huge favour to our nature. We can also join our hands to reduce pollution by segregating wastes, using public transport and avoiding the use of pesticides. This save our nature essay from BYJU’S will be helpful for children to understand that if we take care of these trivial things, we can ensure the long life of nature.

You can explore more essays similar to the save nature essay on BYJU’S website to enhance kids’ learning experience. Also, access a wide range of kid-friendly learning resources on the website.

What is meant by nature?

The things that we see around us, which are not made by humans, constitute nature. It includes all living and nonliving things like air, water, sun, wind, animals, trees, mountains, oceans, etc.

What are some of the ways to save nature?

We can save nature if we stop over utilising the resources given to us by nature. We must preserve our environment as it is and not loot its materials. Moreover, we must take an environment-friendly approach, which must be reflected in our actions.

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Rights of Nature: a 21st century legal revolution

Profile photograph of Paul Powlesland

Anthropocentrism is one of the most destructive ideas in human history. The notion that humans are separate from nature and that nature is a dead resource merely to be used for human ends is at the root of many of the crises now engulfing the world, from climate change, deforestation, catastrophic declines in biodiversity and many more. Sadly, English lawyers had a big hand in imbuing this idea within our both the common law legal system and in our dominant worldview.

Drawing on the biblical injunction of human dominion over nature in Genessis, Blackstone in his Commentaries states, “The Earth therefore and all things therein, are the general property of all mankind, exclusive of other beings from the immediate gift of the creator”. This ‘despotic dominion’ view of human ownership of nature is sadly one of the most entrenched principles in the common law and it has been exported around the world under the auspices of common law legal theory and governance, causing immense harm and damage.

Rights of Nature

It is an urgent necessity for humanity to begin to see nature as more than merely something to be extracted from or dumped into. Instead, we must begin to see it as a living system with its own rights and interests and to incorporate that idea into our legal, political, economic and social systems. How do we begin to deal with a problem so all-encompassing? Environmental law has clearly shown itself to be insufficient for the task, approaching the problem as it does from the same theory that nature is a resource to be used for human ends, but with some management of that resource. What we need is an idea that goes to the route of the problem: both the philosophical and jurisprudential underpinning of the law. In the last 20 years, the ecosystem of interventions we need to implement that idea have begun to be formed around the world, being given the title of ‘Rights of Nature’.

One of the most well-known instances of substantive Rights of Nature is in Ecuador, with Article 71 of the Ecuadorean Constitution stating:

“Nature, or Pacha Mama, where life is reproduced and occurs, has the right to integral respect for its existence and for the maintenance and regeneration of its life cycles, structure, functions and evolutionary processes.”

What is perhaps most exciting about the example of Ecuador is that it is not merely a high-sounding constitutional principle with little practical effect. These Rights of Nature provisions have been argued, and upheld, in dozens of cases before the Ecuadorian courts, most famously in the Los Cedros case, where the Ecuadorian Constitutional Court cancelled mining licences that would have destroyed an ecologically rich cloud forest and thus infringe its constitutional rights. 

Translating into a UK context

Although such substantive Rights of Nature provisions show that the doctrine is legally possible, they will clearly need translating to a UK constitutional context. This is where barristers could have an important role in drawing the substantive Rights of Nature for a UK context and shaping an Act of Parliament. This could look like a Human Rights Act-style framework for nature, which embeds the Rights of Nature across all of our laws, with reasonable and proportionality tests reflecting the fact that balancing the interests of humans and nature will be of greater importance in industrialised, highly populated countries like the UK.

Legal personhood

Another key aspect of Rights of Nature is legal personhood. It is perhaps a testimony to the ingenuity of English lawyers that we managed to devise legal rights and legal personhood for completely fictitious entities like companies before natural entities like trees and rivers which existed long before humans even came to these islands and which we fundamentally rely on for our own existence.

Giving legal personality to trees or rivers might sound strange at first, but it is already a legal reality including in Europe, where the Mar Menor was granted rights and legal personhood by way of legislation in 2022, after a citizens referendum. Perhaps most interesting, given the similarity of the New Zealand legal system to our own, is the Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River Claims Settlement) Act 2017. In this Act, the New Zealand Parliament recognised the sacredness of the Whanganui River to Māori people and granted the river legal personhood, self-ownership and a guardianship body to represent the interests of the river and uphold its rights.

It is increasingly clear that the nature rights may well be to the 21 st century what human rights were to the 20 th century and we now have many examples from around the world about what Rights of Nature can look like. We now need the ingenuity of English lawyers to translate these ideas into our legal system in order halt the destruction of nature and create a new legal system designed to protect and enrich the natural world and all life.

Watch the 21st Annual Law Reform Lecture: Reimagining law for the Earth

Read barrister Fiona Peterson's 'Reflections on the Law Reform Lecture'

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  • 29 August 2024

Humanity’s newest brain gains are most at risk from ageing

  • Smriti Mallapaty

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Coloured CT scan highlighting the blood vessels in a human brain.

In humans, the largest declines in grey matter in the brain — a sign of ageing — occurred in the frontal cortex. Credit: Samunella/Science Photo Library

In the more than six million years since people and chimpanzees split from their common ancestor, human brains have rapidly amassed tissue that helps decision-making and self-control. But the same regions are also the most at risk of deterioration during ageing, finds a study 1 that compared images of chimp brains with scans of human brains.

Previous studies have shown that regions of the human brain that are the last to mature, such as parts of the frontal lobe, are the first to show signs of ageing 2 , a theory known as ‘last in, first out’. The latest study shows that some of those regions that mature later, and are most susceptible to ageing, also evolved most recently in humans.

what is the nature essay

How pregnancy transforms the brain to prepare it for parenthood

The results tend to support the “important hypothesis that our cortical expansion came at the price of age-related decline”, says Rogier Mars, a neuroscientist at the University of Oxford, UK. The results were published in Science Advances on 28 August.

Researchers created data-driven maps of human and chimp ( Pan troglodytes ) brains using noninvasive magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans . They analysed scans from 189 chimps between the ages of 9 and 50, and 480 people between the ages of 20 and 74.

Overall, they found that the brains of the two species were generally symmetrical across both hemispheres and had many similar clusters of anatomical structures, especially in areas of the prefrontal cortex. This region is involved in complex cognitive functions, such as language, working memory, time perception and decision-making, says study co-author Felix Hoffstaedter, a big-data neuroscientist at the Research Centre Jülich, who is based in Bonn, Germany. Damage to this region is linked to Alzheimer’s disease and several types of dementia, he says.

The researchers then measured how much grey matter in the brain shrank over time — a sign of ageing — in chimps up to the age of 50, and in humans up to the equivalent age of 58. In humans, they found the largest declines in the frontal cortex, including the prefrontal cortex, whereas chimps experienced the largest declines in a central structure involved in habit-forming and reward behaviours, called the striatum. Regions of the brain involved with visual processing and motor skills were less susceptible to ageing in both species.

Rapid growth

Finally, the researchers assessed which regions of the human brain had expanded most compared with the chimp brain and compared scans of human and chimp brains of equivalent age and sex. The speediest evolutionary growth had occurred in areas of the prefrontal cortex — one of the regions most susceptible to ageing. A structure hidden deep in the brain and involved in processing emotions and bodily signals, called the insula, also showed rapid evolutionary growth and increased risk from ageing.

“Evolutionarily, the latest, greatest changes”, says Hoffstaedter, are “where the ageing is happening the most”.

The researchers also compared chimps with olive baboons ( Papio anubis ) and rhesus macaques ( Macaca mulatta ). Here, they found no such link between the areas of the brain that had experienced rapid evolutionary expansion and those that went through accelerated ageing, suggesting that this feature could be unique to human brain evolution.

Mars says it would be interesting to look at age-related changes beyond grey-matter decline, including changes in the connections between brain regions and gene expression profiles.

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-02784-w

Vickery, S. et al. Sci. Adv. 10 , eado2733 (2024).

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Douaud, G. et al. PNAS 111 , 17648-17653 (2014).

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