The Method of Nature (1849)

AUTHOR: Emerson, Ralph Waldo

PUBLICATION:  Nature, Addresses and Lectures. Centenary Edition: The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Vol. I. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1903-1904. 189-224.
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/emerson/4957107.0001.001/1:13?rgn=div1;view=fulltext

The volume was first published in 1849. “The Method of Nature” was initially a lecture: "Address to the Society of the Adelphi, in Waterville College, Maine, August 11, 1841."

KEYWORDS: food, land usage, environmentalism, slavery, Abolition, labor rights, Transcendentalism

SUMMARY (Ridvan Askin, edited Deborah Madsen):

Emerson is critical of the ethical motivation of contemporary reform movements that are concerned with everyday travails instead of the infinite! Reform should be invested in self-reliance rather than particulars like diet, anti-government activism, or the division of labor: “He who aims at progress should aim at an infinite, not at a special benefit. The reforms whose fame now fills the land with Temperance, Anti-Slavery, Non-Resistance, No Government, Equal Labor, fair and generous as each appears, are poor bitter things when prosecuted for themselves as an end. ... Tell me not how great your project is, the civil liberation of the world, its conversion into a Christian church, the establishment of public education, cleaner diet, a new division of labor and of land, laws of love for laws of property;—I say to you plainly there is no end to which your practical faculty can aim, so sacred or so large, that, if pursued for itself, will not at last become carrion and an offence to the nostril. The imaginative faculty of the soul must be fed with objects immense and eternal” (214-216).