evidence: Like many Romantics, Emerson laments that the current age is reduced to a mechanical understanding of the world. Man at present, says Emerson, "works on the world with his understanding alone. He lives in it and masters it by a penny-wisdom" (55). Understanding, we recall, is regarded by most Romantics as a categorizing faculty, able to divide up the world in a mechanical way but unable to reach the unifying vision of reason or imagination. In such a view of the world, says Emerson, the "axis of vision is not coincident with the axis of things . . . The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is because man is disunited with himself." The problem of "restoring to the world original and eternal beauty is solved by the redemption of the soul" (56). By altering ourselves, by transforming the spirit that moves within us, we will transform the world of nature, since the latter is moved and molded by spirit (57).