Soul & Nature

While listening to Podcast 8, it became clear that Emerson is much more than just a writer.  He is a philosopher and a transcendentalist who basically created the movement in America.  It is suggested that since he was mainly raised by females and lacked a major male figure in his life, he sees the world differently.  Emerson is known distinctly for dividing life into two separate, and also vague, parts.  One part is the soul.  Soul, by common definition means the principle of life, feeling, thought, and action in humans, regarded as a distinct entity separate from the body, and commonly held to be separable in existence from the body; the spiritual part of humans as distinct from the physical part. The second is everything else.  Everything else seems like such a vague term, which it is, but it stands for the visible mind of God.  In other words everything else is what we consider nature.  In this case nature isn't what we typically think of, so we have to expand our thinking of what nature is.  The real purpose of nature is the reveal truths about our own souls.