Circles

Nature centres into balls,
And her proud ephemerals,
Fast to surface and outside,
Scan the profile of the sphere;
Knew that what theat signified,
A new genesis were here.

"We are all our lifetime reading the copious sense of this first of forms".
"St. Ausgustine described the nature of God as a circle whose centre was everywhere, and its circumference nowhere".

Like St. Augustine, Emerson studied Plato and what Plato came up with is aptly named Plato's Theory of Forms. After reading Emerson's essay it dawned on me that he was refering to Plato's form theory ( I did a paper on it once). Take a ball for instance, basketball baseball any ball, and look past it, now what you see is just a cirlce. Take away it color or properties, seperate it from that object, the ball, and consider it by itself and you are contemplating a form. Now you are just thinking about the roundness or circle. Plato believed that this property existed apart from the balls, in a different mode of existence than the balls. The form is not just the idea of roundness you have in your mind, it exists independently of the balls whether someone thinks of them or not they are there.
Nature centres into balls. We can think that makes balls(circles) and life revolves around these circles. We can contemplate the meaning of life and come to no concrete conclusion, because life is just a circle. It is there if you think about it or not. You can scan the profile of the shpere and make no conclusions about what you think because the sphere is never concluded.
St. Augustine described the nature of God as a circle, he is everywhere and yet no where. We have to contemplate this cirlce and come to a conclusion as to wheter or not God really exists. Plato explained this as transcendent. A form does not exist in space in that it can be in many places at once, even if one does not believe in the existance of God the form still exists.
Emerson gave up the ministry as an antiquated profession and that people worship in the dead forms of their forefathers. He thought that people will still worship reguardless of what he had to say on sunday. People will still worship in a way that their forfather worshiped or not, the circle is still there to contemplate.