From nature to experience

"In his first major work, Nature, Ralph Waldo Emerson hymned the praises of nature as an enduring source of spiritual tonic and moral power. Yet, as he later wrote in his essay "Experience," Emerson came to doubt that nature could provide solid ground for the spirit's dwelling. Emerson and other nineteenth-century thinkers turned to experience to provide anchors for values and paths to God. In the decades after the Civil War, the primacy of experience became the premise and the promise of pragmatism, the one genuinely indigenous philosophical movement America has ever produced." "Roger Lundin explores this shift from nature to experience as the source of moral and cultural authority in America. Drawing on the resources of Protestant theology, he examines one of America's central intellectual traditions and shows the crucial possibilities it puts forth as well as the vexing problems it confronts. In the end, where the pragmatic tradition concludes that experience must generate the very light that will lead us out of its own darkness, From Nature to Experience returns to religion for illumination and truth." "A story of nineteenth-century sources and twenty-first-century consequences, this work brings together literature, history, philosophy, and theology to form a truly original critique of American culture."--Jacket.