Nature

In the autumn of 1836 a slim anonymous volume titled Nature appeared on the shelves of a Boston bookseller. It contained no author's name and sold so slowly that the first printing of five hundred copies took twelve years to clear. By the time it did, the book had quietly become the founding document of American Transcendentalism.

Emerson had been an ordained Unitarian minister who resigned his pulpit in 1832 over his inability in conscience to administer the communion service. Nature is the first sustained statement of the philosophical position he had been reaching for through those quiet years: that the natural world is a living text, a 'scripture written every day on the air,' and that the human soul has the capacity, when it is in proper orientation, to read that text directly.

This edition reproduces the standard 1849 second-edition text — the one Emerson revised with the motto from Plotinus that gives the volume its philosophical compass. The Introduction and all eight chapters appear in full. A short editor's preface places the book in its biographical and intellectual context.