Nature, published anonymously by Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1836, is widely regarded as the founding text of American Transcendentalism, a movement holding that direct spiritual insight, available to any individual through intuition and immersion in the natural world, matters more than inherited religious doctrine or institutional authority. Emerson argues that nature functions as a direct teacher and a source of spiritual truth accessible to anyone willing to observe it attentively and without the mediation of custom, tradition or received opinion, a stance that placed him in deliberate tension with the more doctrinally structured Protestant Christianity of his own New England background.
The essay develops its argument in a series of short sections addressing nature's roles as commodity, beauty, language and discipline, building toward Emerson's claim that nature and spirit are ultimately continuous rather than separate, and that a properly attentive individual can access universal spiritual truth through the natural world without needing scripture, clergy or inherited creed to mediate that access.
Emerson wrote Nature during a period of personal transition, several years after resigning his position as a Unitarian minister over disagreements with the church's administration of communion, and the essay's argument for direct, unmediated spiritual experience over inherited institutional religion is often read against that biographical background as a working out, in philosophical form, of the reasons behind his own earlier departure from formal ministry.