Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THROUGHOUT his treatment of nature Emerson relates his subject to soul. His themes of symbolism and correlation of mind and matter recognized the dependence of nature uponspirit o1jnind. His conception of the method of nature leads him to maintain the divine character of the energy which nature reveals in ceaseless operation in her realm. And his hope of the restoration of nature to her primary and eternal beauty is based upon his belief in the purification of the soul as the means to effect the change. It was natural, then, as he was at work on his first book, Nature, that he should have contemplated the writing of another essay which he was to entitle Spirit. His plan as later developed did not, however, assign this new idea to a second essay but found a place for it in the original work. The seventh chapter of Nature is thus entitled "Spirit," the theme of which is indicated in its openingparagraph: "And all the uses of nature admit of being summed in one, which yields the activity of man an infinite scope. Through all its kingdoms, to the suburbs and outskirts of things, it is faithful to the cause whence it had its origin. It always speaks of Spirit." In Emerson's conception of spirit, then, is to be found his final teaching on the meaning of existence; in revealing the nature of soul all his deepest thinking ends. His favorite authors were rich in schemes of speculation on this subject. Plato had placed the metaphysics of the soul on a commanding eminence in his Phcedo, Phcedrus, Republic and Timceus. Plotinus had left a group of Enneads that carried the speculations of Plato into the high realm of rational mysticism in which the soul of man is in actual contact with the soul of the highest principle of all things, the One; and in his theories of a univ...