"A MANIFESTO OF TRANSCENDENTALISM": FIRST EDITION OF EMERSON'S FIRST BOOK, NATURE

EMERSON, Ralph Waldo. Nature. Boston: James Munroe, 1836. Octavo, original blind- and gilt-stamped brown cloth. $3300.

First edition of Emerson's first book.

"Home from Europe in early October 1833, Emerson turned decisively from the religious, churchmanlike preoccupations in which he had been raised to a new concern with the problems posed by science and natural history. As he moved to Concord in the fall of 1834 he was working on a book he had been thinking about for some time, to be called simply Nature… Nature was no modest little exercise in nature writing. In ambition as well as title it rivals Lucretius' De Rerum Natura… Emerson's real purpose in Nature is radicalism itself, and his argument, resting on a rejection of historical Christianity, is not far from that of Thomas Paine when the latter wrote 'that which is now called natural philosophy, embracing the whole circle of science… is the true theology.' Nature showed Emerson's remarkable openness to science. He and his friends recognized no `two culture' split between literature and science; they believed that to study nature and to know oneself came at last to the same thing, which it was the purpose of literature to express. Nature is also a manifesto of transcendentalism, the American version of German philosophical idealism which had as a pair of cornerstones the belief that ideas lay behind and corresponded to material objects and the belief that intuition was a valid mode of knowing and was necessary as a counterbalance to experience… [Emerson insists] is Nature on a line of thought as old as classical Stoicism: that the individual, in searching for a reliable ethical standpoint, for an answer to the question of how one should live one's life, had to turn not to God, not to the polis or state, and not to society, but to nature for a useable answer. Stoicism taught, and Emerson was teaching, that the laws of nature were the same as the laws of human nature and that man could base a good life, a just life, on nature" (from Henry Thoreau, A Life of the Mind, Robert Richardson, 1986). Second state, with page 94 correctly numbered. BAL 5181. Myerson A3.1.a.

Foxing to text, expert restoration to cloth, gilt bright. A very good copy.