Why does Emerson say The use of nature history is to give us aid in supernatural history. The use of the outer creation, to give us language for...

This
passage comes from the fourth section of s major essay (1836). This essay is one of the
defining documents of the nineteenth-century American literary, intellectual, and spiritual
movement known as . Indeed, the quote you have selected demonstrates the essence of
Transcendentalist ideas.

Transcendentalists believed that spiritual truths
extend throughout all of creation, and that those truths can be grasped by an individual persons
intuition alone. That is, individuals can realize the truth simply by contemplating
nature/creation, without the aid of anything elseindependent of science, organized religion,
etc. To put it another way that gets at the name of the movement, spiritual truth
transcends creation.

With that in mind, we can turn back
to the quote from Nature. The fourth section of Nature is titled Language, and in it,
Emerson focuses on how the words we use everyday point to truth.

Lets take
the first part: The use of natural history is to give us aid in supernatural history. Its
perhaps surprising to say that natural history (another way of describing science) points to
spiritual or super-natural ideas. But Emerson says this is absolutely clear from the language we
use. He provides specific examples of words, looking at them etymologically. For instance, he
says, the word spirit originally meant simply wind, and transgression originally meant
to cross a line in a completely literal sense. All of the ideas we have about spiritual ideas
like spirit, Emerson says, are rooted in our experience of the material world (phenomena like
wind). Since observation of the material world is also key to science/natural history, this
means that experiencing nature, no matter the reason, ultimately leads to spiritual
truth.

To put it another way, this means, once again, that truth transcends
the different ways we approach nature or purposes we have for observing it. The second half of
the quote can now be understood to say essentially the same thing as the first half: the use
of the outer creation, to give us language for the beings and changes of the inward creation.
Experiencing and describing nature (a.k.a. outer creation) gives us, in a very literal sense,
the words that in the end turn into the language we use to talk about the mind, soul, or spirit
(a.k.a. inward creation).

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