Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Chronology
- Bibliographical note
- Selections from Nature: Introduction
- Selections from Nature: Language
- Journal entries: 1837
- The American Scholar
- The Divinity School Address
- Uriel
- Concord Hymn
- Letter to Martin Van Buren, President of the United States
- Self-Reliance
- Compensation
- Concerning Brook Farm
- Man the Reformer
- Politics
- Journal entries: 1840 and 1844
- Ode: Inscribed to W. H. Channing
- Address to the Citizens of Concord
- Webster and 1854
- Journal entry: 1851
- Woman. A Lecture Read Before the Woman's Rights Convention, September 20, 1855
- Napoleon; or, the Man of the World from Representative Men
- Speech at a Meeting for the Relief of the Family of John Brown
- John Brown. Speech at Salem
- Fate
- Power
- Journal entry: 1862
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE TEXTS IN THE HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT
Selections from Nature: Language
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Chronology
- Bibliographical note
- Selections from Nature: Introduction
- Selections from Nature: Language
- Journal entries: 1837
- The American Scholar
- The Divinity School Address
- Uriel
- Concord Hymn
- Letter to Martin Van Buren, President of the United States
- Self-Reliance
- Compensation
- Concerning Brook Farm
- Man the Reformer
- Politics
- Journal entries: 1840 and 1844
- Ode: Inscribed to W. H. Channing
- Address to the Citizens of Concord
- Webster and 1854
- Journal entry: 1851
- Woman. A Lecture Read Before the Woman's Rights Convention, September 20, 1855
- Napoleon; or, the Man of the World from Representative Men
- Speech at a Meeting for the Relief of the Family of John Brown
- John Brown. Speech at Salem
- Fate
- Power
- Journal entry: 1862
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE TEXTS IN THE HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT
Summary
Language is a third use which Nature subserves to man. Nature is the vehicle, and threefold degree.
Words are signs of natural facts.
Particular natural facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts.
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. Right means straight; wrong means twisted. Spirit primarily means wind; transgression, the crossing of a line; supercilious, the raising of the eyebrow. We say the heart to express emotion, the head to denote thought; and thought and emotion are 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.
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- Information
- Emerson: Political Writings , pp. 3 - 8Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008