therefore can become better only by an act of divine mercy), Emerson believes that as a man grows in excellence he becomes more like his natural self. It is common to hear the expression, when one is deeply stirred, as by sublime music or a moving discourse: "That fairly lifted me out of myself." Emerson would have said that such influences lift us into ourselves.
THE OVER-SOUL
For one of Emerson's most fundamental and frequently recurring ideas[1] is that of a "great nature in which we rest as the earth lies in the soft arms of the atmosphere," an "Over-Soul, within which every man's particular being is contained and made one with all other," which "evermore tends to pass into our thought and hand and become wisdom and virtue and power and beauty."[2] This is the incentive—the sublime incentive of approaching the perfection which is ours by nature and by divine intention—that Emerson holds out when he asks us to submit us to ourselves to all instructive influences. These instructive influences, according to Emerson, are chiefly Nature, the Past, and Society. Let us notice how Emerson bids us use these influences to help us into our higher selves.
NATURE
Nature, which he says[3] "is loved by what is best in us," is all about us, inviting our perception of its remotest and most cosmic principles by surrounding us with its simpler manifestations. "A man does not tie his shoe without recognizing laws which bind the farthest regions of nature."[4] Thus man "carries the world in his head."[5] Whether he be a great scientist, proving by his discovery of a sweeping physical law that he has some such constructive sense as that which guides the universe, or whether he be a poet beholding trees as "imperfect men," who "seem to bemoan their imprisonment, rooted in the ground,"[6] he is being brought into his own by perceiving "the virtue and pungency of the influence on the mind of material objects, whether inorganic or organized."[7]
