Ten years before the publication of Darwin's "Origin of Species," Emerson wrote in his book, "Nature," (1849): "I feel the centipede in me—cayman, carp, eagle and fox." He speaks of the worm "striving to be man," and of "an occult relation between the very scorpions and man." He was a naturalist, regardless of sacred writings or creeds; and discerned in Nature "that ineffable Essence which we call Spirit." He speaks of Nature as "the apparition of God." "The world," he writes, "is a divine dream from which we may presently awake to the glories and certainties of day." Emerson's transcendentalism is expressed when he speaks of Nature as "the organ through which the universal spirit speaks to the individual and strives to lead back the individual to it." He has the highest regard for the man Jesus; but calls the interpretation of the church the "noxious exaggeration about the person of Jesus. The soul knows no persons." The doctrine of mediation through Christ is classed as "this Eastern monarchy of Christianity."
"The richest romance," he writes, "the noblest fiction that was ever woven, lies enclosed in human life." In his Essay on History we read: "All inquiry into antiquity—all curiosity respecting the Pyramids, the excavated cities, Stonehenge, the Ohio Circles, Mexico, Memphis is the desire to do away with this wild, savage, and preposterous There or Then, and introduce in its place the Here and the Now. Belzom digs and measures in the mummy-pits and pyramids of Thebes, until he can see the end of the differcnce between the monstrous
