Jessie Kindig at The Point:
Here is Transcendentalism at its best, my favorite part, running wild with the imitative impulse. Like the German Romantic thinkers of whom they were quite fond, New England’s transcendentalists sought a kinship between body and mind, between the rational and the passionate, between—as Goethe’s science writing began to chart—the patterns of nature and the patterns of the human body and soul. In his famous 1836 essay “Nature,” Emerson alluded to the “occult relation between man and the vegetable”; in Thoreau’s journal from 1840, he concluded, “So the forest is full of attitudes, which give it character. In its infinite postures I see my own erectness, or humbleness—or sneaking.”
As our veins branch so too do trees branch, as tides rise and ebb so too our blood beats; to accept nature is to become ourselves more fully, for already, we are of it. This was also a theology. Nature, Emerson says, is the route through which Man reaches God, because Nature is a metaphor for God. Nature is the tool and the occasion, Emerson says, not the revelation: “The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.” Maybe.
more here.
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