At the outset of “Nature,” Emerson argues for overturning the retrospective tendencies of his age and instead proposes that his contemporaries should focus on their “original relation to the universe” (15). They should thus nurture a religion that arrives “by revelation to us” rather than the one put forth in the scriptures of organized religion (15). As Emerson points out the intellectual and spiritual richness of his own age, he shows that the United States, with its relatively new civilization and philosophical tradition, is just as fitting a place for enlightenment as the historic Eastern scenes of the scriptures. He thus turns to the subject of nature, an entity that, unlike culture, this new civilization has in abundance. Natural wonders such as woods, stars, and sunsets are available for all to study and learn from, regardless of their level of education.

Emerson identifies different uses of nature, including commodity, beauty, language, and discipline. Through each of these uses, we can understand a different aspect of man’s relationship to nature. Whether Emerson discusses man’s cultivation of land as the use of nature as a commodity or man’s linguistic tendency to pass “a ray of relation” between other natural beings and himself (29), it is clear that Emerson puts man at the center of God’s natural world.