Emerson published his first iteration of the "Nature" essay in 1836, after his first break with the congregation of the Unitarian church in which he was fitfully preaching. While he never abandoned religious traditions, even Puritan ones, it is clear that he formed a theology expressed in these essays which was grounded in observation and attention to the real world -- from "Nature".
This book is a renaissance--it is poetry, painting, and thinking, and becoming a hoped for thing. He understood humanity as part of Nature, sharing with it, a potential for improvement. That description of "beings" drawn from the animal parts enriching nature, rather than wasting it or trying to ignore it, is the beatific transcendental reality: "Only as far as the masters of the world have called in nature to their aid, can they reach the height of magnificence. This is the meaning of their hanging gardens, villas, ...parks and preserves".
Emerson's view of the world was "scientific" -- it cut away ALL superstition, or "Faith-based" myths. He recognizes a mathematical basis for physical reality which is indifferent to belief: Nature brooks no "super" Natural. "The ...moon, plant, gas, crystal, are concrete geometry and numbers". He anticipates the Big Bang theory by 100 years, eliminating any concept of Creator, but describing "...that famous aboriginal push" as a process that "propagates itself through all the balls of the system; through every atom of every ball; through all the races of creatures, and through the history and performance of every individual".
At the same time, he never leaves the "divine", the reality of a spiritual existence. Even the simplest intelligence, even the time-worn processes of bare existence, can be described with no other word but "divine". What is striking is the calm fearlessness of his light. He does not fear scientific progress, nor the most lurid claims of the religious.
The essays stand up remarkably after 2 centuries, in part because Emerson limits his prophesy to trying to draw helpful conclusions from the real rather than the imagined. Emerson anticipated Einstein's discovery that Energy is but Matter in another form by 80 years: "Compound it how she will, star, sand, fire, water, tree, man, it is still one stuff."
He also avoided the tendency, which has only increased since the Physiocrats surrounding Newton, of predicting action as if Nature was a Machine. Emerson was entirely comfortable with what Heisenberg described as the Uncertainty Principle -- which predicts that both speed and location cannot be predicted. He would be comfortable with quarks and the quantum.
Emerson also anticipated Darwin's 1959 theory of evolution by natural selection. Like Darwin, Emerson also investigated the newly-discovered antiquities of our planet, and read the painfully perdured progression: "Now we learn what patient periods must round themselves before the rock is formed, then before the rock is broken, and the first lichen race has disintegrated the thinnest external plate into soil, and opened the door for the remote Flora, Fauna, Ceres, and Pomona, to come in. How far off yet is the trilobite! how far the quadruped! how inconceivably remote is man!"
Of course, the current culture has not yet caught up with Emerson. David Bohm's speculation that the universe is a "holographic projection" certainly reflects the prophetic descriptions of Emerson: "From any one object the parts and properties of any other may be predicted". Emerson suggested that the world is the result of a computational process, an algorithm playing itself out in a "code" we have not yet divined, but for which everything is a key.
For Emerson, this is what gives meaning, burstingly, to everything. Nature is not God, but Nature is a precipitate of a divine working essence. He concludes the work: "Every moment instructs, and every object; for wisdom is infused into every form. It has been poured into us as blood; it convlused us as pain; it slid into us as pleasure; it enveloped us in dull, melancholy days, or in days of cheerful labor; we did not guess its essence until after a long time." Humankind arrived after a long time and our guesses are closing in on the infinity of Nature. ( )