Explicit or implicit in nearly everything Emerson wrote is the conviction that nature bats last, that nature is the law, the final word, the supreme court. Others have believed - still believe - that the determining force in our lives is grace, or that it is the state - the polis, the community - or that it is the past. More recently it has been argued that the central force is economics or race or sex or genetics. Emerson's basic teaching is that the fundamental context of our lives is nature. Emerson's definition of nature is a broad one. Nature is the way things are. Philosophically, Emerson says, the universe is made up of nature and the soul, or nature and consciousness. Everything that is not me is nature; nature thus includes nature (in the common sense of the green world), art, all other persons, and my own body.