Nature

"He will perceive that there are far more excellent qualities in the student than preciseness and infallibility; that a guess is often more fruitful than an indisputable affirmation, and that a dream may let us deeper into the secret of nature than a hundred concerted experiments": Here Emerson is talking about the contrast between the tangible and the intangible aspects of the world in which we live. There is more than truth, than the ability to spit back numbers. An attempt at something unknown can lead to answers beyond the question itself, and so a lack of knowledge can be even more powerful than knowledge in its own way. And, the final, beautiful sentence tells us that imagination, ambition, the mad ramblings of the mind attempting to give form to life will always show us more of true nature than science, or math, or any concrete examination of the natural world. This line really puts forth an idea that much of his writing seeks to convey, and in simpler, more understandable prose that is for its accessibility more beautiful than his endless explanations could ever be. Emerson is telling us that nature is not found in data about the natural world, in numbers cataloguing dry facts about animals or plants, but in the seemingly insane tendencies of the human mind to seek out answers that cannot be answered, to dream while sleeping rather than falling into oblivion, to guess at the world around us when we do not know where the real answers to our questions lie.