ABSTRACT
In Nature and his later works, Ralph Waldo Emerson examines the process whereby the mind circumscribes and limits itself as part of its dialectic of growth - limits itself through the acceptance of non-being and death as boundary. As Stanley Cavell observes, in Emerson's writing the mind draws a circle, posits a belief, and then abandons it for another one in an "onwardness" which imitates the process of thinking itself. The important thing is that mind through the process of its appropriation of nature - discovers at the same time its own power of construction. Many of the points can be made more concrete by comparing Emerson's Nature with a book that influenced it greatly - Sampson Reed's Observations of the Growth of the Mind. Reed's own preface to the third edition of his Observations on the Growth of the Mind is especially revealing in this respect.
