Nature: 1844 Edition

"Nature is always consistent, though she feigns to contravene her own laws. She keeps her laws, and seems to transcend them. She arms and equips an animal to find its place and living in the earth, and, at the same time, she arms and equips another animal to destroy it."

-Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature

Nature (1844), by Ralph Waldo Emerson, is the second of two essays with the same title, the first authored in 1936. In this later commentary, two ideas fundamental to his transcendental philosophy are discussed: first, that a purely scientific understanding of our physical being does not preclude a spiritual existence; and second, that nature embodies a divine intelligence.