Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson - The Naturalist and The Poet E-Book

Ralph Waldo Emerson

• Herausgeber: Editora Dracaena
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Seitenzahl: 70

Beschreibung

Ralph Waldo Emerson was born on 25 of May 1803 in Boston and was a famous writer, American philosopher and poet. The Naturalist and The Poet was published in 1836 and is considered one of the most important works of Emerson and served as a major inspiration for writers like Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Henry David Thoreau in Walden, one of the most important American classics.

Leseprobe

Summary

Summary

The Naturalist

The Poet

The Naturalist

Delivered to the Boston Natural History Society, 7 May, 1934

Gentlemen,The Curators have honored me with the task of preparing an Address to the Society agreeably to the custom of its annual meetings. I shall use the occasion to consider a question which though it have not equal interest for all has great interest for many of us: What is the place of Natural History in Education? It is but a small portion of this society who have time to devote themselves exclusively to Natural History.Perhaps it is better we should not. But the question occurs to a man mainly engaged in far different pursuits whether it is wise to embark at all in a pursuit in which it is plain he must content himself with quite superficial knowledge; whether it is no waste of time to study a new and tedious classification. I shall treat this question not for the Natural Philosopher but for the Man, and offer you some thoughts upon the intellectual influences of Natural Science.I shall say what in my opinion is to excuse such persons as myself who without any hope of becoming masters of any department of natural science so as to attain the rank of original observers, do yet find a gratification in coming here to school, and in reading the general results of Naturalists and learning so much of the classifications of the sciences as shall enable us to understand their discoveries.That the study of Nature should occupy some place, that it will occupy some place in education, in spite of the worst perversion or total neglect, is certain. I knew a person who sailed from Boston to Charleston, S. C. and never saw the water.But nature takes care generally that we shall see the water and the snow, the forest, the swamp, the mountain, the eclipse, the comet, the northern lights, and all her commanding phenomena. The streets of towns cannot so completely hide the face of heaven and the face of the earth but that every generous and penetrating genius is generally found to have an interest in the works of Creation.The imagery in discourse which delights all men is that which is drawn from observation of natural processes. It is this which gives that piquancy to the conversation of a strong-minded farmer or backwoodsman which all men relish.But it is said that Man is the only object of interest to Man. I fully believe it. I believe that the constitution of man is the centre from which all our speculations depart. But it is the wonderful charm of external nature that man stands in a central connexion with it all; not at the head, but in the midst: and not an individual in the kingdom of organized life but sends out a ray of relation to him.So that all beings seem to serve such an use as that which is sought in comparative anatomy. We study our own structure magnified or simplified in each one. In a generous education certainly the Earth, which is the bountiful mother and nurse, the abode, the stimulus, the medicine, and the tomb of us all, will not, nor will our fellow-creatures in it, fail of our attention.These objects are the most ancient and permanent whereof we have any knowledge. If our restless curiosity lead us to unearth the buried cities and dig up the mummy pits and spell out the abraded characters on Egyptian stones, shall we see a less venerable antiquity in the clouds and the grass?An everlasting Now reigns in Nature that produces on our bushes the selfsame Rose which charmed the Roman and the Chaldaean. The grain and the vine, the ant and the moth are as long-descended. The slender violet hath preserved in the face of the sun and moon the humility of his line and the oldest work of man is an upstart by the side of the shells of the sea.But the antiquity of these objects is merely a claim upon the feelings.They have another claim upon the Understanding, which especially concerns us in this view of intellectual influences - they are perfect creatures. It is the result of all philosophy if it is not born with us - an assured optimism.When Lagrange and Laplace found out the periodicity of the errors of the heavenly bodies and thence the stability of the Solar System was the result unexpected by any mind? Whatever theology or philosophy we rest in, or labor after, the students of Nature have all agreed that in Nature nothing is false or unsuccessful. That which is aimed at is attained, and by means elegant and irresistible.The whole force of the Creation is concentrated upon every point.What agencies of electricity, gravity, light, affinity, combine to make every plant what it is, and in a manner so quiet that the presence of these tremendous powers is not ordinarily suspected. Woven in their loom every plant, every animal is finished and perfect as the world. A willow or an apple is a perfect being; so is a bee or a thrush.The best poem or statue or picture is not. This is the view which so much impressed the celebrated Goethe, whose life was a study of the Theory of Art, that he said "no man should be admitted into his Republic, who was not versed in Natural History."There is deep reason for the love of nature that has characterized the highest minds. The soul and the body of things are harmonized; therefore the deeper is a man's insight into the spiritual laws the more intense will be his love of the works of nature."The smallest production of nature," says Goethe,"has the circle of its completeness within itself and I have only need of eyes to see with, in order to discover the relative proportions. I am perfectly sure that within this circle however narrow, an entirely genuine existence is enclosed.A work of art, on the other hand, has its completeness out of itself.The Best lies in the idea of the artist which he seldom or never reaches: all the rest lies in certain conventional rules which are indeed derived from the nature of art and of mechanical processes but still are not so easy to decipher as the laws of living nature. In works of art there is much that is traditional; the works of nature are ever a freshly uttered Word of God." Perhaps it is the province of poetry rather than of prose to describe the effect upon the mind and heart of these nameless influence.Certainly he that has formed his ideas of adaptation of beauty on these models can have nothing mean in his estimate and hence Fourier said of Laplace in his eulogy before the French Academy, "What Laplace called great, was great." It is fit that man should look upon Nature with the eye of the Artist, to learn from the great Artist whose blood beats in our veins, whose taste is upspringing in our own perception of beauty, the laws by which our hands should work that we may build St. Peter'ses or paint Transfigurations or sing Iliads in worthy continuation of the architecture of the Andes, [of] the colors of the sky and the poem of life."And as we have said in the first place these individual forms are perfect, let us speak now of the secret of their composition.Nothing strikes me more in Nature than the effect of Composition, the contrast between the simplicity of the means and the gorgeousness of the result. Nature is particularly skilled in that rule of arithmetic called Permutation and Combination. Sometimes it is so amusing as to remind us of the French cook who could make forty dishes out of macaroni.A few elements has Nature converted into the countless variety of substances that fill the earth.Look at the grandeur of the prospect from a mountain top. It is composed of not many materials continually repeated in new unions.Composition is more important than the elegance of individual forms.Every artist knows that beyond its own beauty the object has an additional grace from relation to surrounding objects.