Divine Library is a free online public library that includes free eBook downloads and free audio books.

We work with New Thought Seekers and Sharers around the world insuring that all New Thought Texts in the Public Domain are available for you to read on the web for free, forever!

"Unlike so many, we do not peddle the word of God for profit."
~ 2 Corinthians 2:17

Navigate through this book by clicking Next Page or Previous Page below the text of the page & jump directly to chapters using the chapter numbers above the text.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Serving New Thought is pleased to present

Ralph Waldo Emerson's

Nature, Addresses, and Lectures

Book page numbers, along with the number to the left of the .htm extension match the page numbers of the original books to ensure easy use in citations for research papers and books


Introduction - Nature - Commodity - Beauty - Language - Discipline - Idealism - Spirit - Prospects - The American Scholar - Divinity College, Cambridge - Literary Ethics - The Method of Nature - Man the Reformer - Lecture on the Times - The Transcendentalist - The Young American - Contents -


Chapter 4 - Language - p. 31

LANGUAGE is a third use which Nature subserves to man. Nature is the vehicle of thought, and in a simple, double, and three-fold degree.

  • 1. Words are signs of natural facts.
  • 2. Particular natural facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts.
  • 3. 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

page scan

31


PREVIOUS PAGE - NEXT PAGE

Support New Thought Library so that we can continue our work 
of putting all public domain New Thought texts at your fingertips for free!