Lesson Plan in Teaching Essay

Level: Third Year

I. Objectives:
A. Identify meaning of words through structural analysis.
B. Point out the rhetorical devices used by the author that reveal his tone and attitude.
C. Point out the imagery used in the text.
D. Gain an awareness and general understanding what text structures are

II. Subject Matter:

Topic: “Nature” by Ralph Waldo Emerson

III. Teaching / Learning Sequence

A. Motivation
Imagine if one day all the earth’s flowers fail to bloom, do you think the earth
would still be a good place to live in?

B. Unlocking of Difficulties
Identify the prefixes and suffixes in the italized words. Then look up the meaning of
the rootword and use the words in your own sentences.
1. The atmosphere was made transparent.
2. The stars awaken a certain reverence.
3. The stars are inaccessible.
4. Aal natural objectmake a kindred impression.
5. The charming landscape is indubitaly made up of some twenty or thirty farms.
6. I have enjoyeda perfect exhilaration.
7. Despite all his impertinent griefs, he shall be glad with me
8. We mean the integrity of impression made by manifold natural objects.

C. Getting a general impression

1. Wht is the plot overview of the essay Nature by Ralph WaldoEmerson
2. What is Emerson’s belief towads universal understanding?

D. Understanding the content

1. In which lines does Ralph Waldo Emerson state his preference for a nature setting to
a village or a city?
2. What distinction does Emerson make between Nature in the philosophical and
common senses?
3. The poet becomes a “transparent eyeball” when he entranced by nature around him,
but who actually does the “transparent eyeball” represent?
4. What season do you suppose nature “dresses in holiday attire?” Winter? Spring?
Summer? Fall? Defend your answer.
5. In what way is man not solitary when he reads, even when he is alone? What is the
message of this line?Does Emersoncoach the reader to appreciate the solitude over
distractions and human company?
6. What do you think is his message as he observes seeing plots of farm owned by
 different people but no one owns the landscape?
7. Occult means nothing more than “ the hidden.” So what do you think is the occult
Is the occult relation between man and vegetable?
8. One writer says that all children are artists at birth, but the daily business rub most of
them their sensitivity. The same thread of thoughtis contained in this peice.Which
lines echo the same line of thinking?
9. What does Emerson's "Nature" teach us about ourselves?
E. Inferring the author’s personality, through the style, tone and language
1. What is the author’s purpose in writing the essay? Who do you think is the
intended audience? Why?
2. What is the tone of the essay? Read the lines that suggest tone.
3. Based on the idea presented, what type of person is the author?

F. Rhetorical devices
1. What is Emerson's style as well as his literary techniques in his essay "Nature"?
2. The essay usessome very poerful imagery.Cite them.

G. Analyzing structures of the text

1. Reread the essay and complete the following table.

Paragraph Topic Sentence/Main Idea

number
Introductory Paragraph

Body

Conclusion

2. Write a brief summary of the essay. Use the above table as your guidelines.

IV. Assignment
Writing exercise
Every season yieldsits tribute of delight. In other cooler climates where there are four
seasons, spring yield flowers,fall, the changing color of the leaves, winter, everything is white
from near or far, and summer, the season of the sun. In the Philippines, there are only two
seasons. But can you think a particular tributes of delightof our tropical seasons: summer and
rains? Enumerate those you can think of.What of its gifts do you like so well? What do you think
nature teaches us?Write your own Ralph Waldo Emerson essay about it, your own reflections on
nature.

Submitted by: Melba V. Orcales

MAT-ELA

Submitted to: Prof. Papango

1. What exactly does Emerson mean in Nature when he writes, "Every man's’
condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put" (440)? How
does this comment relate to his thesis about nature?

2. What distinction does Emerson make between Nature in the philosophical and
common senses? Does Emerson's’s insistence that this distinction is unimportant still
make sense in today's’ world? Why or why not?

3. What does Emerson mean when he says he becomes "a transparent eye-ball" (442)?

4. How does Emerson's essay combine philosophical and poetic insight?

Nature is an essay written by Ralph Waldo Emerson, published anonymously in 1836. It is in
this essay that the foundation of transcendentalism is put forth, a belief system that espouses
a non-traditional appreciation of nature. Recent advances in zoology, botany, and geology
confirmed Emerson's intuitions about the intricate relationships of Nature at large. C

What is Emerson's main point in the essay from

Nature?

Personifies nature

what are literary techniques that emerson used in his essay of nature?

Emerson discusses the harmony and unity between man and nature throughout this essay. He
believes that the world is divided into two parts: the self (the soul) and the outside world (which...

1. Gain an awareness and general understanding what text structures are

2. Learn what clues they can use to identify the text structure of a piece of writing

What is Emerson's style as well as his literary techniques in his essay "Nature"?
Accessibility of Universal Understanding

Nature expresses Emerson's belief that each individual must develop a personal understanding of the
universe. Emerson makes clear in the Introduction that men should break away from reliance on
secondhand information, upon the wisdom of the past, upon inherited and institutionalized knowledge:
Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and
criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why
should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and
philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of
theirs?

According to Emerson, people in the past had an intimate and immediate relationship with God and
nature, and arrived at their own understanding of the universe. All the basic elements that they
required to do so exist at every moment in time. Emerson continues in the Introduction, "The sun
shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new
thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship."

Emerson's rejection of received wisdom is reinforced by his repeated references throughout Nature to
perception of familiar things, to seeing things anew. For Emerson (and for Thoreau as well), each
moment provides an opportunity to learn from nature and to approach an understanding of universal
order through it. The importance of the present moment, of spontaneous and dynamic interactions
with the universe, of the possibilities of the here and now, render past observations and schemes
irrelevant. Emerson focuses on the accessibility of the laws of the universe to every individual through
a combination of nature and his own inner processes. In "Language," for example, he states that the
relation between spirit and matter "is not fancied by some poet, but stands in the will of God, and so
is free to be known by all men." In his discussion of "intellectual science" in "Idealism," he writes that
"all men are capable of being raised by piety or by passion" into higher realms of thought. And at the
end of the essay, in "Prospects," he exhorts, "Know then, that the world exists for you. For you is the
phenomenon perfect." Each man is capable of using the natural world to achieve spiritual
understanding. Just as men in the past explored universal relations for themselves, so may each of us,
great and small, in the present: "All that Adam had, all that Caesar could, you have and can do."

In "Discipline," Emerson discusses the ways in which each man may understand nature and God —
through rational, logical "Understanding" and through intuitive "Reason." Although the mystical,
revelatory intuition leads to the highest spiritual truth, understanding, too, is useful in gaining a
particular kind of knowledge. But whichever mental process illuminates a given object of attention at a
given time, insight into universal order always takes place in the mind of the individual, through his
own experience of nature and inner powers of receptiveness.

Unity of God, Man, and Nature

Throughout Nature, Emerson calls for a vision of the universe as an all-encompassing whole,
embracing man and nature, matter and spirit, as interrelated expressions of God. This unity is referred
to as the Oversoul elsewhere in Emerson's writings. The purpose of the new, direct understanding of
nature that he advocates in the essay is, ultimately, the perception of the totality of the universal
whole. At present, Emerson suggests, we have a fragmented view of the world. We cannot perceive
our proper place in it because we have lost a sense of the unifying spiritual element that forms the
common bond between the divine, the human, and the material. But if we approach nature properly,
we may transcend our current focus on isolated parts and gain insight into the whole. Emerson does
not offer a comprehensive scheme of the components and workings of God's creation. Instead, he
recommends an approach by which we may each arrive at our own vision of totality.

Emerson asserts and reasserts the underlying unity of distinct, particulate expressions of the divine.
In the Introduction, he emphasizes man's and nature's parallel positions as manifestations of the
universal order, and consequently as means of understanding that order. He elaborates upon the
origins in God of both man and nature in "Discipline," in which he discusses evidence of essential unity
in the similarities between various natural objects and between the various laws that govern them:

Each creature is only a modification of the other; the likeness in them is more than the difference, and
their radical law is one and the same. Hence it is, that a rule of one art, or a law of one organization,
holds true throughout nature. So intimate is this Unity, that, it is easily seen, it lies under the
undermost garment of nature, and betrays its source in universal Spirit.

Our striving to comprehend nature more spiritually will illuminate natural order and the relationships
within it as manifestations of God. In "Idealism," Emerson stresses the advantages of the ideal theory
of nature (the approach to nature as a projection by God onto the human mind rather than as a
concrete reality). Idealism makes God an integral element in our understanding of nature, and
provides a comprehensively inclusive view:

Idealism sees the world in God. It beholds the whole circle of persons and things, of actions and
events, of country and religion, not as painfully accumulated, atom after atom, act after act, in an
aged creeping Past, but as one vast picture, which God paints on the instant eternity, for the
contemplation of the soul.

Spiritualization, hastened by inspired insight, will heal the fragmentization that plagues us. Emerson
writes in "Prospects": "The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is because
man is disunited with himself. He cannot be a naturalist, until he satisfies all the demands of the
spirit." By drawing upon our latent spiritual capabilities and seeking evidence of God's order in nature,
we will make sense of the universe.

Throughout Nature, Emerson uses analogy and imagery to advance the conceptof universal unity. In
Chapter I, he suggests, through the analogy of the landscape, the transformation of particulate
information into a whole. Regarded from a transcendent, "poetical" point of view, the many individual
forms that comprise the landscape become less distinct and form an integrated totality. (In addition to
the poet, the painter, the sculptor, the musician, and the architect are all particularly sensitive to
perceiving wholes.)

Emerson also uses the imagery of the circle extensively to convey the all-encompassing, perfect self-
containment of the universe. For example, in "Beauty," he describes the way in which the structure of
the eye and the laws of light conspire to create perspective:
By the mutual action of [the eye's] structure and of the laws of light, perspective is produced, which
integrates every mass of objects, of what character soever, into a well colored and shaded globe, so
that where the particular objects are mean and unaffecting, the landscape which they compose, is
round and symmetrical.

In discussing the similarities between natural objects and between natural laws in "Discipline,"
Emerson reiterates and expands the image, making it more complex and comprehensive:

It is like a great circle on a sphere, comprising all possible circles; which, however, may be drawn, and
comprise it, in like manner. Every such truth is the absolute Ens [that is, being or entity] seen from
one side. But it has innumerable sides.

The circle is thus not only all-encompassing, but allows multiple approaches to the whole.

Emerson develops the idea of each particle of nature as a microcosm reflecting the whole, and as such
a point of access to the universal. In "Discipline," he writes of "the Unity of Nature, — the Unity in
Variety," and goes on to state:

. . . a leaf, a drop, a crystal, a moment of time is related to the whole, and partakes of the perfection
of the whole. Each particle is a microcosm, and faithfully renders the likeness of the world.

The idea of microcosm is important in Emerson's approach to nature, as it is in Thoreau's. Because the
parts represent the whole in miniature, it is consequently not necessary to see all of the parts to
understand the whole. Through an insight akin to revelation, man may understand the "big picture"
from just one example in nature. We need not be slaves to detail to understand the meaning that
detail conveys.

Reason and Understanding

From the beginning to the end of Nature, Emerson stresses the particular importance of the intuitive
type of comprehension, which he calls "Reason," in the terminology of English Romantic poetry.
Reason is required to penetrate the universal laws and the divine mind. At the beginning of the
Introduction, he calls for "a poetry and philosophy of insight" and "a religion by revelation" — his first
references to intuition in the essay. Kantian "Reason" is linked with spiritual truth, Lockean
"Understanding" with the laws of nature. Because Nature is a kind of manual for spiritualization,
Reason holds a higher place in it than Understanding. Although Understanding is essential for the
perception of material laws and in its application promotes a progressively broader vision, it does not
by itself lead man to God.

In "Beauty," "Language," and "Discipline," Emerson examines Reason's revelation to man of the larger
picture behind the multiplicity of details in the material world. In "Beauty," he describes the
stimulation of the human intellect by natural beauty. He offers artistic creativity as the extreme love
of and response to natural beauty. Art is developed in the essay as an insightful synthesis of parts into
a whole, as are such other expressions of human creativity as poetry and architecture. The intuitively
inspired formation of this sense of wholeness is similar to the comprehension of universal law, the
ultimate goal advocated in Nature. In "Language," he describes the symbolism of original language as
based on natural fact, and the integral relationship between language, nature, and spirit. He identifies
Reason as the faculty that provides apprehension of spirit through natural symbols, and connects spirit
with the universal soul itself:

Man is conscious of a universal soul within or behind his individual life. . . . This universal soul, he calls
Reason: it is not mine or thine or his, but we are its; we are its property and men. And the blue sky in
which the private earth is buried, the sky with its eternal calm, and full of everlasting orbs, is the type
of Reason. That which, intellectually considered, we call Reason, considered in relation to nature, we
call Spirit. Spirit is the Creator. Spirit hath life in itself. And man in all ages and countries, embodies it
in his language. . . .

Reason, which imparts both vision into the absolute and also creative force as well, is thus presented
more as God's reaching out into man than as an active capacity solely within man.

In "Prospects," Emerson implores his readers to trust in Reason as a means of approaching universal
truth. He writes of matutina cognitio — morning knowledge — as the knowledge of God, as opposed
to vespertina cognitio — evening knowledge, or the knowledge of man. (This concept of morning
knowledge is echoed in Thoreau's writings in the heightened awareness that Thoreau presents in
connection with the morning hours. It is a spiritual, enhanced, spontaneous insight into higher truth.)
In "Prospects," Emerson puts forward examples of intuition at work — the "traditions of miracles," the
life of Jesus, transforming action based on principle (such as the abolition of slavery), the "miracles of
enthusiasm, as those . . . of Swedenborg, Hohenlohe, and the Shakers," "animal magnetism"
(hypnosis), "prayer; eloquence; self-healing; and the wisdom of children." These examples make
evident the "instantaneous in-streaming causing power" that constitutes Reason.

Emerson explores at length the difference between Understanding and Reason. Both serve to instruct
man. However, Understanding is tied to matter and leads to common sense rather than to the
broadest vision. Emerson grants that as man advances in his grasp of natural laws, he comes closer to
understanding the laws of creation. But Reason is essential to transport man out of the material world
into the spiritual. In "Idealism," Emerson asserts that intuition works against acceptance of concrete
reality as ultimate reality, thereby promoting spiritualization.

In "Spirit," Emerson presents the notion of the mystical and intuitively understood "universal essence"
(a potent, comprehensive life force) which, expressed in man through nature's agency, confers
tremendous power:

Who can set bounds to the possibilities of man? Once inhale the upper air, being admitted to behold
the absolute natures of justice and truth, and we learn that man has access to the entire mind of the
Creator, is himself the creator in the finite.

Reason provides perception of God's creation and a direct link with God, and reinforces the divine
within man. It bestows on man an exalted status in the world. And man's identification with God, his
elevation through vision, underlies Emerson's sense of nature as a tool for human development. Man
is second only to God in the universal scheme. The material world exists for him.

Relationship of Man and Nature

Both man and nature are expressions of the divine, Emerson declares in Nature. Man, in his physical
existence, is a part of the material world. But throughout the essay, Emerson refers to man's
separateness from nature through his intellectual and spiritual capacities. Man and nature share a
special relationship. Each is essential to understanding the other. However, Emerson makes clear that
man enjoys the superior position. In his higher abilities, he represents an endpoint of evolution.
Moreover, man has particular powers over nature. Nature was made to serve man's physical and,
more significantly, intellectual and spiritual needs.

In the poem with which Emerson prefaced the 1849 second edition of Nature, man's place as a
developmental pinnacle is conveyed in the lines, "And, striving to be man, the worm / Mounts through
all the spires of form." In "Language," he emphasizes the centrality of man, conferred by the inner
qualities of mind and spirit

. . . man is an analogist, and studies relations in all objects. He is placed in the centre of beings, and a
ray of relation passes from every other being to him. And neither can man be understood without
these objects, nor these objects without man.

Man's ascendancy over nature is powerfully expressed in the final passage of the essay:

The kingdom of man over nature, which cometh not with observation, — a dominion such as now is
beyond his dream of God, — he shall enter without more wonder than the blind man feels who is
gradually restored to perfect sight.

Indeed, although Transcendentalism is sometimes perceived as a simple celebration of nature, the

relationship that Emerson and other Transcendentalists suggested was considerably more complex.

In Chapter I, Emerson describes nature's elevation of man's mood, and the particular sympathy with
and joy in nature that man feels. But he adds that nature by itself is not capable of producing human
reaction. It requires man's inner processes to become meaningful: "Yet it is certain that the power to
produce this delight, does not reside in nature, but in man, or in a harmony of both." And in "Beauty,"
focusing on nature's existence to satisfy man's need for beauty, he states that nature is not in and of
itself a final end:

But beauty in nature is not ultimate. It is the herald of inward and eternal beauty, and is not alone a
solid and satisfactory good. It must therefore stand as a part and not as yet the last or highest
expression of the final cause of Nature.

Nature's meaning resides in its role as a medium of communication between God and man.

Emerson stresses throughout Nature that nature exists to serve man, and explains the ways in which
it does so. In "Commodity," he enumerates the basic material uses of nature by man. He then goes on
to point out the fact that man harnesses nature to enhance its material usefulness. In "Beauty,"
Emerson discusses the power of natural beauty to restore man when exhausted, to give him simple
pleasure, to provide a suitable backdrop to his glorious deeds, and to stimulate his intellect, which
may ultimately lead him to understand universal order. Man's artistic expression is inspired by the
perception and translation in his mind of the beauty of nature.

In "Language," Emerson details language's uses as a vehicle of thought and, ultimately, through its
symbolism and the symbolism of the things it stands for, as an aid to comprehension and articulation
of spiritual as well as material truth. A person effectively expresses himself, Emerson notes, in
proportion to the natural vigor of his language. Nature both exists for and intensifies man's
capabilities.

In "Discipline," he introduces human will, which, working through the intellect, emphasizes aspects of
nature that the mind requires and disregards those that the mind does not need. Thus man imposes
himself on nature, makes it what he wants it to be. Emerson writes,

Nature is thoroughly mediate. It is made to serve. It receives the dominion of man as meekly as the
ass on which the Saviour rode. It offers all its kingdoms to man as the material which he may mould
into what is useful.

Emerson develops this idea in "Idealism," in discussing the poet's elevation of soul over matter in
"subordinating nature for the purpose of expression" — giving emphasis and drawing connections as
suits the message he wishes to convey. Nature is thus "fluid," "ductile and flexible," changeable by
man.

Matter and Spirit

Emerson asserts throughout Nature the primacy of spirit over matter. Nature's purpose is as a
representation of the divine to promote human insight into the laws of the universe, and thus to bring
man closer to God. Emerson writes of nature in "Spirit" as "the organ through which the universal
spirit speaks to the individual, and strives to lead back the individual to it." He explores the
relationship between matter and spirit extensively in "Language," in which he discusses the
correspondence between material and moral laws, and in "Idealism," in which he presents the concept
of nature as a projection by God on the human mind, as opposed to a concrete reality.

Emerson's discussion in "Language" is based on three premises: that words — even those used to
describe intellectual or spiritual states — originated in nature, in an elemental interaction between
mind and matter; that not only do words represent nature, but, because nature is an expression of
the divine, the natural facts that words represent are symbolic of spiritual truth; and that the whole of
nature — not just individual natural facts — symbolizes the whole of spiritual truth. Emerson writes,

The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors because the whole of nature is a metaphor of
the human mind. The laws of moral nature answer to those of matter as face to face in a glass.

Because the laws of the material world correspond to higher laws in the spiritual world, man may "by
degrees" comprehend the universal through his familiarity with its expression in nature. Emerson
states that the symbolism of matter renders "every form significant to its hidden life and final cause."
Moral law, as he suggests in "Discipline," "lies at the centre of nature and radiates to the
circumference." At the end of "Language," Emerson works toward the ideal theory in presenting all the
particulars of nature as preexisting "in necessary Ideas in the mind of God, and are what they are by
preceding affections, in the world of spirit." He writes that a fact is "the end or last issue of spirit. The
visible creation is the terminus or the circumference of the invisible world." Matter thus issues from
and is secondary to spirit.

In "Idealism" and "Spirit," Emerson takes a philosophical leap in asking whether nature exists
separately, or whether it is only an image created in man's mind by God. Although he says that the
answer cannot be known, and that it makes no difference in man's use of nature, he suggests that
idealism is preferable to viewing nature as concrete reality because it constitutes "that view which is
most desirable to the mind." Emerson supports the ideal theory by pointing to the ways in which
poetry, philosophy, science, religion, and ethics subordinate matter to higher truth. But he also
acknowledges that idealism is hard to accept from the commonsensical point of view — the view of
those who trust in rationality over intuition. "The broker, the wheelwright, the carpenter, the toll-man,
are much displeased at the intimation," he writes at the beginning of "Idealism." Correspondence
provides a bridge between matter and spirit. In denying the actual existence of matter, idealism goes
much farther.

In various ways in Nature, Emerson appears to suggest that the natural world does, in fact, exist
separately from spirit. For instance, he carefully distinguishes between man's inner qualities and his
physical existence, between the "ME" and the "NOT ME," which includes one's own body. His
progressive argument is marred by this seeming contradiction, and by his hesitancy to state outright
that nature is an ideal, even while he discusses it as such. He only goes so far as to say that idealism
offers a satisfactory way of looking at nature. But he does not want to sidetrack his reader by
attempting to prove that which cannot be proven.

Emerson concludes the essay by asking his readers to open themselves to spiritual reality by trusting
in intuitive reason. He writes,

. . . there are far more excellent qualities in the student than preciseness and infallibility; . . . a guess
is often more fruitful than an indisputable affirmation, and . . . a dream may let us deeper into the
secret of nature than a hundred concerted experiments.

Through receptivity to intuition, we may rise above narrow common sense and transcend
preoccupation with material fact per se.

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What Does Emerson's "Nature" Teach Us About

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"In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befal me in life - no
disgrace, no calamity (leaving me my eyes) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground
- my head

bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinte space, - all mean egoism vanishes. I become a
transparent eyeball. I am nothing. I see all. The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me;
I am a part or particle of God" first chapeter of Nature R. W. Emerson

What is Emerson saying? What does he mean by "a transparent eyeball"? Emerson wants us to
realize that we are a part of God. We are a transparent eyeball that sees everything. We are a intricate
part of a bigger design, and only in nature can one realize this. It is only in nature that we are left
with nothing, but faith. Faith that we will forever be protected whether it is by God or nature. Nature
tends to give us a sense of peace and tranquility that can only come from God.

"The presence of a higher, namely, of the spiritual element is essential to its perfection. The high and
divine beauty which can be loved without effeminacy, is that which is found in combination with the
human will and never separate, Beauty is the mark God sets upon virtue. Every natural action is
graceful." Chapter 3 of Nature

Again we are a part of God. Everything we do or that is done in nature has beauty and grace, simply
because it all comes from God. "The presence of a higher, namely, of a spiritual element is essential
to its perfection." We are "perfect" to say the least, because God is present in our lives. The
combination of our will and God's love makes us beautiful. There is not a thing in life that is "ugly" to
God. He sees us all as having beauty. Without God in our lives we are nothing. Emerson emphasises
throughout the essay to not only find ourselves through nature but also realize that we are a portion
of God. We are a part of God and He is a part of us.