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Title: Nature
Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson
Date: 1836
Language: en
Topics: nature, transcendentalism
Source: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/29433

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nature

INTRODUCTION.

OUR age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It

writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations

beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should

not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not

we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a

religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? Embosomed

for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through

us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to

nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the

living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun

shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are

new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws

and worship.

Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable. We must

trust the perfection of the creation so far, as to believe that whatever

curiosity the order of things has awakened in our minds, the order of

things can satisfy. Every man's condition is a solution in hieroglyphic

to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life, before he

apprehends it as truth. In like manner, nature is already, in its forms

and tendencies, describing its own design. Let us interrogate the great

apparition, that shines so peacefully around us. Let us inquire, to what

end is nature?

All science has one aim, namely, to find a theory of nature. We have

theories of races and of functions, but scarcely yet a remote approach

to an idea of creation. We are now so far from the road to truth, that

religious teachers dispute and hate each other, and speculative men are

esteemed unsound and frivolous. But to a sound judgment, the most

abstract truth is the most practical. Whenever a true theory appears, it

will be its own evidence. Its test is, that it will explain all

phenomena. Now many are thought not only unexplained but inexplicable;

as language, sleep, madness, dreams, beasts, sex.

Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the

Soul. Strictly speaking, therefore, all that is separate from us, all

which Philosophy distinguishes as the NOT ME, that is, both nature and

art, all other men and my own body, must be ranked under this name,

NATURE. In enumerating the values of nature and casting up their sum, I

shall use the word in both senses;—in its common and in its

philosophical import. In inquiries so general as our present one, the

inaccuracy is not material; no confusion of thought will occur. Nature,

in the common sense, refers to essences unchanged by man; space, the

air, the river, the leaf. Art is applied to the mixture of his will with

the same things, as in a house, a canal, a statue, a picture. But his

operations taken together are so insignificant, a little chipping,

baking, patching, and washing, that in an impression so grand as that of

the world on the human mind, they do not vary the result.

CHAPTER I. NATURE.

TO go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as

from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody

is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. The

rays that come from those heavenly worlds, will separate between him and

what he touches. One might think the atmosphere was made transparent

with this design, to give man, in the heavenly bodies, the perpetual

presence of the sublime. Seen in the streets of cities, how great they

are! If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would

men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance

of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these

envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.

The stars awaken a certain reverence, because though always present,

they are inaccessible; but all natural objects make a kindred

impression, when the mind is open to their influence. Nature never wears

a mean appearance. Neither does the wisest man extort her secret, and

lose his curiosity by finding out all her perfection. Nature never

became a toy to a wise spirit. The flowers, the animals, the mountains,

reflected the wisdom of his best hour, as much as they had delighted the

simplicity of his childhood.

When we speak of nature in this manner, we have a distinct but most

poetical sense in the mind. We mean the integrity of impression made by

manifold natural objects. It is this which distinguishes the stick of

timber of the wood-cutter, from the tree of the poet. The charming

landscape which I saw this morning, is indubitably made up of some

twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning

the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is a

property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate

all the parts, that is, the poet. This is the best part of these men's

farms, yet to this their warranty-deeds give no title.

To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not

see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun

illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the

heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward

senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the

spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood. His intercourse with

heaven and earth, becomes part of his daily food. In the presence of

nature, a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows.

Nature says,—he is my creature, and maugre all his impertinent griefs,

he shall be glad with me. Not the sun or the summer alone, but every

hour and season yields its tribute of delight; for every hour and change

corresponds to and authorizes a different state of the mind, from

breathless noon to grimmest midnight. Nature is a setting that fits

equally well a comic or a mourning piece. In good health, the air is a

cordial of incredible virtue. Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles,

at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any

occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect

exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear. In the woods too, a man

casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever

of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth. Within

these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial

festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them

in a thousand years. In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There

I feel that nothing can befall me in life,—no disgrace, no calamity,

(leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare

ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite

space,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am

nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate

through me; I am part or particle of God. The name of the nearest friend

sounds then foreign and accidental: to be brothers, to be

acquaintances,—master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance. I

am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty. In the wilderness, I

find something more dear and connate than in streets or villages. In the

tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of the horizon,

man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature.

The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister, is the

suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not

alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them. The waving of

the boughs in the storm, is new to me and old. It takes me by surprise,

and yet is not unknown. Its effect is like that of a higher thought or a

better emotion coming over me, when I deemed I was thinking justly or

doing right.

Yet it is certain that the power to produce this delight, does not

reside in nature, but in man, or in a harmony of both. It is necessary

to use these pleasures with great temperance. For, nature is not always

tricked in holiday attire, but the same scene which yesterday breathed

perfume and glittered as for the frolic of the nymphs, is overspread

with melancholy today. Nature always wears the colors of the spirit. To

a man laboring under calamity, the heat of his own fire hath sadness in

it. Then, there is a kind of contempt of the landscape felt by him who

has just lost by death a dear friend. The sky is less grand as it shuts

down over less worth in the population.

CHAPTER II. COMMODITY.

WHOEVER considers the final cause of the world, will discern a multitude

of uses that result. They all admit of being thrown into one of the

following classes; Commodity; Beauty; Language; and Discipline.

Under the general name of Commodity, I rank all those advantages which

our senses owe to nature. This, of course, is a benefit which is

temporary and mediate, not ultimate, like its service to the soul. Yet

although low, it is perfect in its kind, and is the only use of nature

which all men apprehend. The misery of man appears like childish

petulance, when we explore the steady and prodigal provision that has

been made for his support and delight on this green ball which floats

him through the heavens. What angels invented these splendid ornaments,

these rich conveniences, this ocean of air above, this ocean of water

beneath, this firmament of earth between? this zodiac of lights, this

tent of dropping clouds, this striped coat of climates, this fourfold

year? Beasts, fire, water, stones, and corn serve him. The field is at

once his floor, his work-yard, his play-ground, his garden, and his bed.

"More servants wait on man

Than he'll take notice of."—

Nature, in its ministry to man, is not only the material, but is also

the process and the result. All the parts incessantly work into each

other's hands for the profit of man. The wind sows the seed; the sun

evaporates the sea; the wind blows the vapor to the field; the ice, on

the other side of the planet, condenses rain on this; the rain feeds the

plant; the plant feeds the animal; and thus the endless circulations of

the divine charity nourish man.

The useful arts are reproductions or new combinations by the wit of man,

of the same natural benefactors. He no longer waits for favoring gales,

but by means of steam, he realizes the fable of Aeolus's bag, and

carries the two and thirty winds in the boiler of his boat. To diminish

friction, he paves the road with iron bars, and, mounting a coach with a

ship-load of men, animals, and merchandise behind him, he darts through

the country, from town to town, like an eagle or a swallow through the

air. By the aggregate of these aids, how is the face of the world

changed, from the era of Noah to that of Napoleon! The private poor man

hath cities, ships, canals, bridges, built for him. He goes to the

post-office, and the human race run on his errands; to the book-shop,

and the human race read and write of all that happens, for him; to the

court-house, and nations repair his wrongs. He sets his house upon the

road, and the human race go forth every morning, and shovel out the

snow, and cut a path for him.

But there is no need of specifying particulars in this class of uses.

The catalogue is endless, and the examples so obvious, that I shall

leave them to the reader's reflection, with the general remark, that

this mercenary benefit is one which has respect to a farther good. A man

is fed, not that he may be fed, but that he may work.

CHAPTER III. BEAUTY.

A NOBLER want of man is served by nature, namely, the love of Beauty.

The ancient Greeks called the world κοσμος, beauty. Such is the

constitution of all things, or such the plastic power of the human eye,

that the primary forms, as the sky, the mountain, the tree, the animal,

give us a delight in and for themselves; a pleasure arising from

outline, color, motion, and grouping. This seems partly owing to the eye

itself. The eye is the best of artists. By the mutual action of its

structure and of the laws of light, perspective is produced, which

integrates every mass of objects, of what character soever, into a well

colored and shaded globe, so that where the particular objects are mean

and unaffecting, the landscape which they compose, is round and

symmetrical. And as the eye is the best composer, so light is the first

of painters. There is no object so foul that intense light will not make

beautiful. And the stimulus it affords to the sense, and a sort of

infinitude which it hath, like space and time, make all matter gay. Even

the corpse has its own beauty. But besides this general grace diffused

over nature, almost all the individual forms are agreeable to the eye,

as is proved by our endless imitations of some of them, as the acorn,

the grape, the pine-cone, the wheat-ear, the egg, the wings and forms of

most birds, the lion's claw, the serpent, the butterfly, sea-shells,

flames, clouds, buds, leaves, and the forms of many trees, as the palm.

For better consideration, we may distribute the aspects of Beauty in a

threefold manner.

1. First, the simple perception of natural forms is a delight. The

influence of the forms and actions in nature, is so needful to man,

that, in its lowest functions, it seems to lie on the confines of

commodity and beauty. To the body and mind which have been cramped by

noxious work or company, nature is medicinal and restores their tone.

The tradesman, the attorney comes out of the din and craft of the

street, and sees the sky and the woods, and is a man again. In their

eternal calm, he finds himself. The health of the eye seems to demand a

horizon. We are never tired, so long as we can see far enough.

But in other hours, Nature satisfies by its loveliness, and without any

mixture of corporeal benefit. I see the spectacle of morning from the

hill-top over against my house, from day-break to sun-rise, with

emotions which an angel might share. The long slender bars of cloud

float like fishes in the sea of crimson light. From the earth, as a

shore, I look out into that silent sea. I seem to partake its rapid

transformations: the active enchantment reaches my dust, and I dilate

and conspire with the morning wind. How does Nature deify us with a few

and cheap elements! Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp

of emperors ridiculous. The dawn is my Assyria; the sun-set and

moon-rise my Paphos, and unimaginable realms of faerie; broad noon shall

be my England of the senses and the understanding; the night shall be my

Germany of mystic philosophy and dreams.

Not less excellent, except for our less susceptibility in the afternoon,

was the charm, last evening, of a January sunset. The western clouds

divided and subdivided themselves into pink flakes modulated with tints

of unspeakable softness; and the air had so much life and sweetness,

that it was a pain to come within doors. What was it that nature would

say? Was there no meaning in the live repose of the valley behind the

mill, and which Homer or Shakspeare could not reform for me in words?

The leafless trees become spires of flame in the sunset, with the blue

east for their back-ground, and the stars of the dead calices of

flowers, and every withered stem and stubble rimed with frost,

contribute something to the mute music.

The inhabitants of cities suppose that the country landscape is pleasant

only half the year. I please myself with the graces of the winter

scenery, and believe that we are as much touched by it as by the genial

influences of summer. To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has

its own beauty, and in the same field, it beholds, every hour, a picture

which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again. The

heavens change every moment, and reflect their glory or gloom on the

plains beneath. The state of the crop in the surrounding farms alters

the expression of the earth from week to week. The succession of native

plants in the pastures and roadsides, which makes the silent clock by

which time tells the summer hours, will make even the divisions of the

day sensible to a keen observer. The tribes of birds and insects, like

the plants punctual to their time, follow each other, and the year has

room for all. By water-courses, the variety is greater. In July, the

blue pontederia or pickerel-weed blooms in large beds in the shallow

parts of our pleasant river, and swarms with yellow butterflies in

continual motion. Art cannot rival this pomp of purple and gold. Indeed

the river is a perpetual gala, and boasts each month a new ornament.

But this beauty of Nature which is seen and felt as beauty, is the least

part. The shows of day, the dewy morning, the rainbow, mountains,

orchards in blossom, stars, moonlight, shadows in still water, and the

like, if too eagerly hunted, become shows merely, and mock us with their

unreality. Go out of the house to see the moon, and 't is mere tinsel;

it will not please as when its light shines upon your necessary journey.

The beauty that shimmers in the yellow afternoons of October, who ever

could clutch it? Go forth to find it, and it is gone: 't is only a

mirage as you look from the windows of diligence.

2. The presence of a higher, namely, of the spiritual element is

essential to its perfection. The high and divine beauty which can be

loved without effeminacy, is that which is found in combination with the

human will. Beauty is the mark God sets upon virtue. Every natural

action is graceful. Every heroic act is also decent, and causes the

place and the bystanders to shine. We are taught by great actions that

the universe is the property of every individual in it. Every rational

creature has all nature for his dowry and estate. It is his, if he will.

He may divest himself of it; he may creep into a corner, and abdicate

his kingdom, as most men do, but he is entitled to the world by his

constitution. In proportion to the energy of his thought and will, he

takes up the world into himself. "All those things for which men plough,

build, or sail, obey virtue;" said Sallust. "The winds and waves," said

Gibbon, "are always on the side of the ablest navigators." So are the

sun and moon and all the stars of heaven. When a noble act is

done,—perchance in a scene of great natural beauty; when Leonidas and

his three hundred martyrs consume one day in dying, and the sun and moon

come each and look at them once in the steep defile of Thermopylae; when

Arnold Winkelried, in the high Alps, under the shadow of the avalanche,

gathers in his side a sheaf of Austrian spears to break the line for his

comrades; are not these heroes entitled to add the beauty of the scene

to the beauty of the deed? When the bark of Columbus nears the shore of

America;—before it, the beach lined with savages, fleeing out of all

their huts of cane; the sea behind; and the purple mountains of the

Indian Archipelago around, can we separate the man from the living

picture? Does not the New World clothe his form with her palm-groves and

savannahs as fit drapery? Ever does natural beauty steal in like air,

and envelope great actions. When Sir Harry Vane was dragged up the

Tower-hill, sitting on a sled, to suffer death, as the champion of the

English laws, one of the multitude cried out to him, "You never sate on

so glorious a seat." Charles II., to intimidate the citizens of London,

caused the patriot Lord Russel to be drawn in an open coach, through the

principal streets of the city, on his way to the scaffold. "But," his

biographer says, "the multitude imagined they saw liberty and virtue

sitting by his side." In private places, among sordid objects, an act of

truth or heroism seems at once to draw to itself the sky as its temple,

the sun as its candle. Nature stretcheth out her arms to embrace man,

only let his thoughts be of equal greatness. Willingly does she follow

his steps with the rose and the violet, and bend her lines of grandeur

and grace to the decoration of her darling child. Only let his thoughts

be of equal scope, and the frame will suit the picture. A virtuous man

is in unison with her works, and makes the central figure of the visible

sphere. Homer, Pindar, Socrates, Phocion, associate themselves fitly in

our memory with the geography and climate of Greece. The visible heavens

and earth sympathize with Jesus. And in common life, whosoever has seen

a person of powerful character and happy genius, will have remarked how

easily he took all things along with him,—the persons, the opinions, and

the day, and nature became ancillary to a man.

3. There is still another aspect under which the beauty of the world may

be viewed, namely, as it becomes an object of the intellect. Beside the

relation of things to virtue, they have a relation to thought. The

intellect searches out the absolute order of things as they stand in the

mind of God, and without the colors of affection. The intellectual and

the active powers seem to succeed each other, and the exclusive activity

of the one, generates the exclusive activity of the other. There is

something unfriendly in each to the other, but they are like the

alternate periods of feeding and working in animals; each prepares and

will be followed by the other. Therefore does beauty, which, in relation

to actions, as we have seen, comes unsought, and comes because it is

unsought, remain for the apprehension and pursuit of the intellect; and

then again, in its turn, of the active power. Nothing divine dies. All

good is eternally reproductive. The beauty of nature reforms itself in

the mind, and not for barren contemplation, but for new creation.

All men are in some degree impressed by the face of the world; some men

even to delight. This love of beauty is Taste. Others have the same love

in such excess, that, not content with admiring, they seek to embody it

in new forms. The creation of beauty is Art.

The production of a work of art throws a light upon the mystery of

humanity. A work of art is an abstract or epitome of the world. It is

the result or expression of nature, in miniature. For, although the

works of nature are innumerable and all different, the result or the

expression of them all is similar and single. Nature is a sea of forms

radically alike and even unique. A leaf, a sun-beam, a landscape, the

ocean, make an analogous impression on the mind. What is common to them

all,—that perfectness and harmony, is beauty. The standard of beauty is

the entire circuit of natural forms,—the totality of nature; which the

Italians expressed by defining beauty "il piu nell' uno." Nothing is

quite beautiful alone: nothing but is beautiful in the whole. A single

object is only so far beautiful as it suggests this universal grace. The

poet, the painter, the sculptor, the musician, the architect, seek each

to concentrate this radiance of the world on one point, and each in his

several work to satisfy the love of beauty which stimulates him to

produce. Thus is Art, a nature passed through the alembic of man. Thus

in art, does nature work through the will of a man filled with the

beauty of her first works.

The world thus exists to the soul to satisfy the desire of beauty. This

element I call an ultimate end. No reason can be asked or given why the

soul seeks beauty. Beauty, in its largest and profoundest sense, is one

expression for the universe. God is the all-fair. Truth, and goodness,

and beauty, are but different faces of the same All. But beauty in

nature is not ultimate. It is the herald of inward and eternal beauty,

and is not alone a solid and satisfactory good. It must stand as a part,

and not as yet the last or highest expression of the final cause of

Nature.

CHAPTER IV. LANGUAGE.

LANGUAGE is a third use which Nature subserves to man. Nature is the

vehicle, and threefold degree.

1. Words are signs of natural facts.

2. Particular natural facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts.

3. Nature is the symbol of spirit.

1. Words are signs of natural facts. The use of natural history is to

give us aid in supernatural history: the use of the outer creation, to

give us language for the beings and changes of the inward creation.

Every word which is used to express a moral or intellectual fact, if

traced to its root, is found to be borrowed from some material

appearance. Right means straight; wrong means twisted. Spirit primarily

means wind; transgression, the crossing of a line; supercilious, the

raising of the eyebrow. We say the heart to express emotion, the head to

denote thought; and thought and emotion are words borrowed from sensible

things, and now appropriated to spiritual nature. Most of the process by

which this transformation is made, is hidden from us in the remote time

when language was framed; but the same tendency may be daily observed in

children. Children and savages use only nouns or names of things, which

they convert into verbs, and apply to analogous mental acts.

2. But this origin of all words that convey a spiritual import,—so

conspicuous a fact in the history of language,—is our least debt to

nature. It is not words only that are emblematic; it is things which are

emblematic. Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact. Every

appearance in nature corresponds to some state of the mind, and that

state of the mind can only be described by presenting that natural

appearance as its picture. An enraged man is a lion, a cunning man is a

fox, a firm man is a rock, a learned man is a torch. A lamb is

innocence; a snake is subtle spite; flowers express to us the delicate

affections. Light and darkness are our familiar expression for knowledge

and ignorance; and heat for love. Visible distance behind and before us,

is respectively our image of memory and hope.

Who looks upon a river in a meditative hour, and is not reminded of the

flux of all things? Throw a stone into the stream, and the circles that

propagate themselves are the beautiful type of all influence. Man is

conscious of a universal soul within or behind his individual life,

wherein, as in a firmament, the natures of Justice, Truth, Love,

Freedom, arise and shine. This universal soul, he calls Reason: it is

not mine, or thine, or his, but we are its; we are its property and men.

And the blue sky in which the private earth is buried, the sky with its

eternal calm, and full of everlasting orbs, is the type of Reason. That

which, intellectually considered, we call Reason, considered in relation

to nature, we call Spirit. Spirit is the Creator. Spirit hath life in

itself. And man in all ages and countries, embodies it in his language,

as the FATHER.

It is easily seen that there is nothing lucky or capricious in these

analogies, but that they are constant, and pervade nature. These are not

the dreams of a few poets, here and there, but man is an analogist, and

studies relations in all objects. He is placed in the centre of beings,

and a ray of relation passes from every other being to him. And neither

can man be understood without these objects, nor these objects without

man. All the facts in natural history taken by themselves, have no

value, but are barren, like a single sex. But marry it to human history,

and it is full of life. Whole Floras, all Linnaeus' and Buffon's

volumes, are dry catalogues of facts; but the most trivial of these

facts, the habit of a plant, the organs, or work, or noise of an insect,

applied to the illustration of a fact in intellectual philosophy, or, in

any way associated to human nature, affects us in the most lively and

agreeable manner. The seed of a plant,—to what affecting analogies in

the nature of man, is that little fruit made use of, in all discourse,

up to the voice of Paul, who calls the human corpse a seed,—"It is sown

a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body." The motion of the earth

round its axis, and round the sun, makes the day, and the year. These

are certain amounts of brute light and heat. But is there no intent of

an analogy between man's life and the seasons? And do the seasons gain

no grandeur or pathos from that analogy? The instincts of the ant are

very unimportant, considered as the ant's; but the moment a ray of

relation is seen to extend from it to man, and the little drudge is seen

to be a monitor, a little body with a mighty heart, then all its habits,

even that said to be recently observed, that it never sleeps, become

sublime.

Because of this radical correspondence between visible things and human

thoughts, savages, who have only what is necessary, converse in figures.

As we go back in history, language becomes more picturesque, until its

infancy, when it is all poetry; or all spiritual facts are represented

by natural symbols. The same symbols are found to make the original

elements of all languages. It has moreover been observed, that the

idioms of all languages approach each other in passages of the greatest

eloquence and power. And as this is the first language, so is it the

last. This immediate dependence of language upon nature, this conversion

of an outward phenomenon into a type of somewhat in human life, never

loses its power to affect us. It is this which gives that piquancy to

the conversation of a strong-natured farmer or back-woodsman, which all

men relish.

A man's power to connect his thought with its proper symbol, and so to

utter it, depends on the simplicity of his character, that is, upon his

love of truth, and his desire to communicate it without loss. The

corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language. When

simplicity of character and the sovereignty of ideas is broken up by the

prevalence of secondary desires, the desire of riches, of pleasure, of

power, and of praise,—and duplicity and falsehood take place of

simplicity and truth, the power over nature as an interpreter of the

will, is in a degree lost; new imagery ceases to be created, and old

words are perverted to stand for things which are not; a paper currency

is employed, when there is no bullion in the vaults. In due time, the

fraud is manifest, and words lose all power to stimulate the

understanding or the affections. Hundreds of writers may be found in

every long-civilized nation, who for a short time believe, and make

others believe, that they see and utter truths, who do not of themselves

clothe one thought in its natural garment, but who feed unconsciously on

the language created by the primary writers of the country, those,

namely, who hold primarily on nature.

But wise men pierce this rotten diction and fasten words again to

visible things; so that picturesque language is at once a commanding

certificate that he who employs it, is a man in alliance with truth and

God. The moment our discourse rises above the ground line of familiar

facts, and is inflamed with passion or exalted by thought, it clothes

itself in images. A man conversing in earnest, if he watch his

intellectual processes, will find that a material image, more or less

luminous, arises in his mind, cotemporaneous with every thought, which

furnishes the vestment of the thought. Hence, good writing and brilliant

discourse are perpetual allegories. This imagery is spontaneous. It is

the blending of experience with the present action of the mind. It is

proper creation. It is the working of the Original Cause through the

instruments he has already made.

These facts may suggest the advantage which the country-life possesses

for a powerful mind, over the artificial and curtailed life of cities.

We know more from nature than we can at will communicate. Its light

flows into the mind evermore, and we forget its presence. The poet, the

orator, bred in the woods, whose senses have been nourished by their

fair and appeasing changes, year after year, without design and without

heed,—shall not lose their lesson altogether, in the roar of cities or

the broil of politics. Long hereafter, amidst agitation and terror in

national councils,—in the hour of revolution,—these solemn images shall

reappear in their morning lustre, as fit symbols and words of the

thoughts which the passing events shall awaken. At the call of a noble

sentiment, again the woods wave, the pines murmur, the river rolls and

shines, and the cattle low upon the mountains, as he saw and heard them

in his infancy. And with these forms, the spells of persuasion, the keys

of power are put into his hands.

3. We are thus assisted by natural objects in the expression of

particular meanings. But how great a language to convey such pepper-corn

informations! Did it need such noble races of creatures, this profusion

of forms, this host of orbs in heaven, to furnish man with the

dictionary and grammar of his municipal speech? Whilst we use this grand

cipher to expedite the affairs of our pot and kettle, we feel that we

have not yet put it to its use, neither are able. We are like travellers

using the cinders of a volcano to roast their eggs. Whilst we see that

it always stands ready to clothe what we would say, we cannot avoid the

question, whether the characters are not significant of themselves. Have

mountains, and waves, and skies, no significance but what we consciously

give them, when we employ them as emblems of our thoughts? The world is

emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature

is a metaphor of the human mind. The laws of moral nature answer to

those of matter as face to face in a glass. "The visible world and the

relation of its parts, is the dial plate of the invisible." The axioms

of physics translate the laws of ethics. Thus, "the whole is greater

than its part;" "reaction is equal to action;" "the smallest weight may

be made to lift the greatest, the difference of weight being compensated

by time;" and many the like propositions, which have an ethical as well

as physical sense. These propositions have a much more extensive and

universal sense when applied to human life, than when confined to

technical use.

In like manner, the memorable words of history, and the proverbs of

nations, consist usually of a natural fact, selected as a picture or

parable of a moral truth. Thus; A rolling stone gathers no moss; A bird

in the hand is worth two in the bush; A cripple in the right way, will

beat a racer in the wrong; Make hay while the sun shines; 'T is hard to

carry a full cup even; Vinegar is the son of wine; The last ounce broke

the camel's back; Long-lived trees make roots first;—and the like. In

their primary sense these are trivial facts, but we repeat them for the

value of their analogical import. What is true of proverbs, is true of

all fables, parables, and allegories.

This relation between the mind and matter is not fancied by some poet,

but stands in the will of God, and so is free to be known by all men. It

appears to men, or it does not appear. When in fortunate hours we ponder

this miracle, the wise man doubts, if, at all other times, he is not

blind and deaf;

—"Can these things be,

And overcome us like a summer's cloud,

Without our special wonder?"

for the universe becomes transparent, and the light of higher laws than

its own, shines through it. It is the standing problem which has

exercised the wonder and the study of every fine genius since the world

began; from the era of the Egyptians and the Brahmins, to that of

Pythagoras, of Plato, of Bacon, of Leibnitz, of Swedenborg. There sits

the Sphinx at the road-side, and from age to age, as each prophet comes

by, he tries his fortune at reading her riddle. There seems to be a

necessity in spirit to manifest itself in material forms; and day and

night, river and storm, beast and bird, acid and alkali, preexist in

necessary Ideas in the mind of God, and are what they are by virtue of

preceding affections, in the world of spirit. A Fact is the end or last

issue of spirit. The visible creation is the terminus or the

circumference of the invisible world. "Material objects," said a French

philosopher, "are necessarily kinds of scoriae of the substantial

thoughts of the Creator, which must always preserve an exact relation to

their first origin; in other words, visible nature must have a spiritual

and moral side."

This doctrine is abstruse, and though the images of "garment,"

"scoriae," "mirror," &c., may stimulate the fancy, we must summon the

aid of subtler and more vital expositors to make it plain. "Every

scripture is to be interpreted by the same spirit which gave it

forth,"—is the fundamental law of criticism. A life in harmony with

nature, the love of truth and of virtue, will purge the eyes to

understand her text. By degrees we may come to know the primitive sense

of the permanent objects of nature, so that the world shall be to us an

open book, and every form significant of its hidden life and final

cause.

A new interest surprises us, whilst, under the view now suggested, we

contemplate the fearful extent and multitude of objects; since "every

object rightly seen, unlocks a new faculty of the soul." That which was

unconscious truth, becomes, when interpreted and defined in an object, a

part of the domain of knowledge,—a new weapon in the magazine of power.

CHAPTER V. DISCIPLINE.

IN view of the significance of nature, we arrive at once at a new fact,

that nature is a discipline. This use of the world includes the

preceding uses, as parts of itself.

Space, time, society, labor, climate, food, locomotion, the animals, the

mechanical forces, give us sincerest lessons, day by day, whose meaning

is unlimited. They educate both the Understanding and the Reason. Every

property of matter is a school for the understanding,—its solidity or

resistance, its inertia, its extension, its figure, its divisibility.

The understanding adds, divides, combines, measures, and finds nutriment

and room for its activity in this worthy scene. Meantime, Reason

transfers all these lessons into its own world of thought, by perceiving

the analogy that marries Matter and Mind.

1. Nature is a discipline of the understanding in intellectual truths.

Our dealing with sensible objects is a constant exercise in the

necessary lessons of difference, of likeness, of order, of being and

seeming, of progressive arrangement; of ascent from particular to

general; of combination to one end of manifold forces. Proportioned to

the importance of the organ to be formed, is the extreme care with which

its tuition is provided,—a care pretermitted in no single case. What

tedious training, day after day, year after year, never ending, to form

the common sense; what continual reproduction of annoyances,

inconveniences, dilemmas; what rejoicing over us of little men; what

disputing of prices, what reckonings of interest,—and all to form the

Hand of the mind;—to instruct us that "good thoughts are no better than

good dreams, unless they be executed!"

The same good office is performed by Property and its filial systems of

debt and credit. Debt, grinding debt, whose iron face the widow, the

orphan, and the sons of genius fear and hate;—debt, which consumes so

much time, which so cripples and disheartens a great spirit with cares

that seem so base, is a preceptor whose lessons cannot be forgone, and

is needed most by those who suffer from it most. Moreover, property,

which has been well compared to snow,—"if it fall level to-day, it will

be blown into drifts to-morrow,"—is the surface action of internal

machinery, like the index on the face of a clock. Whilst now it is the

gymnastics of the understanding, it is hiving in the foresight of the

spirit, experience in profounder laws.

The whole character and fortune of the individual are affected by the

least inequalities in the culture of the understanding; for example, in

the perception of differences. Therefore is Space, and therefore Time,

that man may know that things are not huddled and lumped, but sundered

and individual. A bell and a plough have each their use, and neither can

do the office of the other. Water is good to drink, coal to burn, wool

to wear; but wool cannot be drunk, nor water spun, nor coal eaten. The

wise man shows his wisdom in separation, in gradation, and his scale of

creatures and of merits is as wide as nature. The foolish have no range

in their scale, but suppose every man is as every other man. What is not

good they call the worst, and what is not hateful, they call the best.

In like manner, what good heed, nature forms in us! She pardons no

mistakes. Her yea is yea, and her nay, nay.

The first steps in Agriculture, Astronomy, Zoölogy, (those first steps

which the farmer, the hunter, and the sailor take,) teach that nature's

dice are always loaded; that in her heaps and rubbish are concealed sure

and useful results.

How calmly and genially the mind apprehends one after another the laws

of physics! What noble emotions dilate the mortal as he enters into the

counsels of the creation, and feels by knowledge the privilege to BE!

His insight refines him. The beauty of nature shines in his own breast.

Man is greater that he can see this, and the universe less, because Time

and Space relations vanish as laws are known.

Here again we are impressed and even daunted by the immense Universe to

be explored. "What we know, is a point to what we do not know." Open any

recent journal of science, and weigh the problems suggested concerning

Light, Heat, Electricity, Magnetism, Physiology, Geology, and judge

whether the interest of natural science is likely to be soon exhausted.

Passing by many particulars of the discipline of nature, we must not

omit to specify two.

The exercise of the Will or the lesson of power is taught in every

event. From the child's successive possession of his several senses up

to the hour when he saith, "Thy will be done!" he is learning the

secret, that he can reduce under his will, not only particular events,

but great classes, nay the whole series of events, and so conform all

facts to his character. Nature is thoroughly mediate. It is made to

serve. It receives the dominion of man as meekly as the ass on which the

Saviour rode. It offers all its kingdoms to man as the raw material

which he may mould into what is useful. Man is never weary of working it

up. He forges the subtile and delicate air into wise and melodious

words, and gives them wing as angels of persuasion and command. One

after another, his victorious thought comes up with and reduces all

things, until the world becomes, at last, only a realized will,—the

double of the man.

2. Sensible objects conform to the premonitions of Reason and reflect

the conscience. All things are moral; and in their boundless changes

have an unceasing reference to spiritual nature. Therefore is nature

glorious with form, color, and motion, that every globe in the remotest

heaven; every chemical change from the rudest crystal up to the laws of

life; every change of vegetation from the first principle of growth in

the eye of a leaf, to the tropical forest and antediluvian coal-mine;

every animal function from the sponge up to Hercules, shall hint or

thunder to man the laws of right and wrong, and echo the Ten

Commandments. Therefore is nature ever the ally of Religion: lends all

her pomp and riches to the religious sentiment. Prophet and priest,

David, Isaiah, Jesus, have drawn deeply from this source. This ethical

character so penetrates the bone and marrow of nature, as to seem the

end for which it was made. Whatever private purpose is answered by any

member or part, this is its public and universal function, and is never

omitted. Nothing in nature is exhausted in its first use. When a thing

has served an end to the uttermost, it is wholly new for an ulterior

service. In God, every end is converted into a new means. Thus the use

of commodity, regarded by itself, is mean and squalid. But it is to the

mind an education in the doctrine of Use, namely, that a thing is good

only so far as it serves; that a conspiring of parts and efforts to the

production of an end, is essential to any being. The first and gross

manifestation of this truth, is our inevitable and hated training in

values and wants, in corn and meat.

It has already been illustrated, that every natural process is a version

of a moral sentence. The moral law lies at the centre of nature and

radiates to the circumference. It is the pith and marrow of every

substance, every relation, and every process. All things with which we

deal, preach to us. What is a farm but a mute gospel? The chaff and the

wheat, weeds and plants, blight, rain, insects, sun,—it is a sacred

emblem from the first furrow of spring to the last stack which the snow

of winter overtakes in the fields. But the sailor, the shepherd, the

miner, the merchant, in their several resorts, have each an experience

precisely parallel, and leading to the same conclusion: because all

organizations are radically alike. Nor can it be doubted that this moral

sentiment which thus scents the air, grows in the grain, and impregnates

the waters of the world, is caught by man and sinks into his soul. The

moral influence of nature upon every individual is that amount of truth

which it illustrates to him. Who can estimate this? Who can guess how

much firmness the sea-beaten rock has taught the fisherman? how much

tranquillity has been reflected to man from the azure sky, over whose

unspotted deeps the winds forevermore drive flocks of stormy clouds, and

leave no wrinkle or stain? how much industry and providence and

affection we have caught from the pantomime of brutes? What a searching

preacher of self-command is the varying phenomenon of Health!

Herein is especially apprehended the unity of Nature,—the unity in

variety,—which meets us everywhere. All the endless variety of things

make an identical impression. Xenophanes complained in his old age,

that, look where he would, all things hastened back to Unity. He was

weary of seeing the same entity in the tedious variety of forms. The

fable of Proteus has a cordial truth. A leaf, a drop, a crystal, a

moment of time is related to the whole, and partakes of the perfection

of the whole. Each particle is a microcosm, and faithfully renders the

likeness of the world.

Not only resemblances exist in things whose analogy is obvious, as when

we detect the type of the human hand in the flipper of the fossil

saurus, but also in objects wherein there is great superficial

unlikeness. Thus architecture is called "frozen music," by De Stael and

Goethe. Vitruvius thought an architect should be a musician. "A Gothic

church," said Coleridge, "is a petrified religion." Michael Angelo

maintained, that, to an architect, a knowledge of anatomy is essential.

In Haydn's oratorios, the notes present to the imagination not only

motions, as, of the snake, the stag, and the elephant, but colors also;

as the green grass. The law of harmonic sounds reappears in the harmonic

colors. The granite is differenced in its laws only by the more or less

of heat, from the river that wears it away. The river, as it flows,

resembles the air that flows over it; the air resembles the light which

traverses it with more subtile currents; the light resembles the heat

which rides with it through Space. Each creature is only a modification

of the other; the likeness in them is more than the difference, and

their radical law is one and the same. A rule of one art, or a law of

one organization, holds true throughout nature. So intimate is this

Unity, that, it is easily seen, it lies under the undermost garment of

nature, and betrays its source in Universal Spirit. For, it pervades

Thought also. Every universal truth which we express in words, implies

or supposes every other truth. Omne verum vero consonat. It is like a

great circle on a sphere, comprising all possible circles; which,

however, may be drawn, and comprise it, in like manner. Every such truth

is the absolute Ens seen from one side. But it has innumerable sides.

The central Unity is still more conspicuous in actions. Words are finite

organs of the infinite mind. They cannot cover the dimensions of what is

in truth. They break, chop, and impoverish it. An action is the

perfection and publication of thought. A right action seems to fill the

eye, and to be related to all nature. "The wise man, in doing one thing,

does all; or, in the one thing he does rightly, he sees the likeness of

all which is done rightly."

Words and actions are not the attributes of brute nature. They introduce

us to the human form, of which all other organizations appear to be

degradations. When this appears among so many that surround it, the

spirit prefers it to all others. It says, 'From such as this, have I

drawn joy and knowledge; in such as this, have I found and beheld

myself; I will speak to it; it can speak again; it can yield me thought

already formed and alive.' In fact, the eye,—the mind,—is always

accompanied by these forms, male and female; and these are incomparably

the richest informations of the power and order that lie at the heart of

things. Unfortunately, every one of them bears the marks as of some

injury; is marred and superficially defective. Nevertheless, far

different from the deaf and dumb nature around them, these all rest like

fountain-pipes on the unfathomed sea of thought and virtue whereto they

alone, of all organizations, are the entrances.

It were a pleasant inquiry to follow into detail their ministry to our

education, but where would it stop? We are associated in adolescent and

adult life with some friends, who, like skies and waters, are

coextensive with our idea; who, answering each to a certain affection of

the soul, satisfy our desire on that side; whom we lack power to put at

such focal distance from us, that we can mend or even analyze them. We

cannot choose but love them. When much intercourse with a friend has

supplied us with a standard of excellence, and has increased our respect

for the resources of God who thus sends a real person to outgo our

ideal; when he has, moreover, become an object of thought, and, whilst

his character retains all its unconscious effect, is converted in the

mind into solid and sweet wisdom,—it is a sign to us that his office is

closing, and he is commonly withdrawn from our sight in a short time.

CHAPTER VI. IDEALISM.

THUS is the unspeakable but intelligible and practicable meaning of the

world conveyed to man, the immortal pupil, in every object of sense. To

this one end of Discipline, all parts of nature conspire.

A noble doubt perpetually suggests itself, whether this end be not the

Final Cause of the Universe; and whether nature outwardly exists. It is

a sufficient account of that Appearance we call the World, that God will

teach a human mind, and so makes it the receiver of a certain number of

congruent sensations, which we call sun and moon, man and woman, house

and trade. In my utter impotence to test the authenticity of the report

of my senses, to know whether the impressions they make on me correspond

with outlying objects, what difference does it make, whether Orion is up

there in heaven, or some god paints the image in the firmament of the

soul? The relations of parts and the end of the whole remaining the

same, what is the difference, whether land and sea interact, and worlds

revolve and intermingle without number or end,—deep yawning under deep,

and galaxy balancing galaxy, throughout absolute space,—or, whether,

without relations of time and space, the same appearances are inscribed

in the constant faith of man? Whether nature enjoy a substantial

existence without, or is only in the apocalypse of the mind, it is alike

useful and alike venerable to me. Be it what it may, it is ideal to me,

so long as I cannot try the accuracy of my senses.

The frivolous make themselves merry with the Ideal theory, if its

consequences were burlesque; as if it affected the stability of nature.

It surely does not. God never jests with us, and will not compromise the

end of nature, by permitting any inconsequence in its procession. Any

distrust of the permanence of laws, would paralyze the faculties of man.

Their permanence is sacredly respected, and his faith therein is

perfect. The wheels and springs of man are all set to the hypothesis of

the permanence of nature. We are not built like a ship to be tossed, but

like a house to stand. It is a natural consequence of this structure,

that, so long as the active powers predominate over the reflective, we

resist with indignation any hint that nature is more short-lived or

mutable than spirit. The broker, the wheelwright, the carpenter, the

toll-man, are much displeased at the intimation.

But whilst we acquiesce entirely in the permanence of natural laws, the

question of the absolute existence of nature still remains open. It is

the uniform effect of culture on the human mind, not to shake our faith

in the stability of particular phenomena, as of heat, water, azote; but

to lead us to regard nature as a phenomenon, not a substance; to

attribute necessary existence to spirit; to esteem nature as an accident

and an effect.

To the senses and the unrenewed understanding, belongs a sort of

instinctive belief in the absolute existence of nature. In their view,

man and nature are indissolubly joined. Things are ultimates, and they

never look beyond their sphere. The presence of Reason mars this faith.

The first effort of thought tends to relax this despotism of the senses,

which binds us to nature as if we were a part of it, and shows us nature

aloof, and, as it were, afloat. Until this higher agency intervened, the

animal eye sees, with wonderful accuracy, sharp outlines and colored

surfaces. When the eye of Reason opens, to outline and surface are at

once added, grace and expression. These proceed from imagination and

affection, and abate somewhat of the angular distinctness of objects. If

the Reason be stimulated to more earnest vision, outlines and surfaces

become transparent, and are no longer seen; causes and spirits are seen

through them. The best moments of life are these delicious awakenings of

the higher powers, and the reverential withdrawing of nature before its

God.

Let us proceed to indicate the effects of culture. 1. Our first

institution in the Ideal philosophy is a hint from nature herself.

Nature is made to conspire with spirit to emancipate us. Certain

mechanical changes, a small alteration in our local position apprizes us

of a dualism. We are strangely affected by seeing the shore from a

moving ship, from a balloon, or through the tints of an unusual sky. The

least change in our point of view, gives the whole world a pictorial

air. A man who seldom rides, needs only to get into a coach and traverse

his own town, to turn the street into a puppet-show. The men, the

women,—talking, running, bartering, fighting,—the earnest mechanic, the

lounger, the beggar, the boys, the dogs, are unrealized at once, or, at

least, wholly detached from all relation to the observer, and seen as

apparent, not substantial beings. What new thoughts are suggested by

seeing a face of country quite familiar, in the rapid movement of the

rail-road car! Nay, the most wonted objects, (make a very slight change

in the point of vision,) please us most. In a camera obscura, the

butcher's cart, and the figure of one of our own family amuse us. So a

portrait of a well-known face gratifies us. Turn the eyes upside down,

by looking at the landscape through your legs, and how agreeable is the

picture, though you have seen it any time these twenty years!

In these cases, by mechanical means, is suggested the difference between

the observer and the spectacle,—between man and nature. Hence arises a

pleasure mixed with awe; I may say, a low degree of the sublime is felt

from the fact, probably, that man is hereby apprized, that, whilst the

world is a spectacle, something in himself is stable.

2. In a higher manner, the poet communicates the same pleasure. By a few

strokes he delineates, as on air, the sun, the mountain, the camp, the

city, the hero, the maiden, not different from what we know them, but

only lifted from the ground and afloat before the eye. He unfixes the

land and the sea, makes them revolve around the axis of his primary

thought, and disposes them anew. Possessed himself by a heroic passion,

he uses matter as symbols of it. The sensual man conforms thoughts to

things; the poet conforms things to his thoughts. The one esteems nature

as rooted and fast; the other, as fluid, and impresses his being

thereon. To him, the refractory world is ductile and flexible; he

invests dust and stones with humanity, and makes them the words of the

Reason. The Imagination may be defined to be, the use which the Reason

makes of the material world. Shakspeare possesses the power of

subordinating nature for the purposes of expression, beyond all poets.

His imperial muse tosses the creation like a bauble from hand to hand,

and uses it to embody any caprice of thought that is upper-most in his

mind. The remotest spaces of nature are visited, and the farthest

sundered things are brought together, by a subtle spiritual connection.

We are made aware that magnitude of material things is relative, and all

objects shrink and expand to serve the passion of the poet. Thus, in his

sonnets, the lays of birds, the scents and dyes of flowers, he finds to

be the shadow of his beloved; time, which keeps her from him, is his

chest; the suspicion she has awakened, is her ornament;

The ornament of beauty is Suspect,

A crow which flies in heaven's sweetest air.

His passion is not the fruit of chance; it swells, as he speaks, to a

city, or a state.

No, it was builded far from accident;

It suffers not in smiling pomp, nor falls

Under the brow of thralling discontent;

It fears not policy, that heretic,

That works on leases of short numbered hours,

But all alone stands hugely politic.

In the strength of his constancy, the Pyramids seem to him recent and

transitory. The freshness of youth and love dazzles him with its

resemblance to morning.

Take those lips away

Which so sweetly were forsworn;

And those eyes,—the break of day,

Lights that do mislead the morn.

The wild beauty of this hyperbole, I may say, in passing, it would not

be easy to match in literature.

This transfiguration which all material objects undergo through the

passion of the poet,—this power which he exerts to dwarf the great, to

magnify the small,—might be illustrated by a thousand examples from his

Plays. I have before me the Tempest, and will cite only these few lines.

ARIEL. The strong based promontory

Have I made shake, and by the spurs plucked up

The pine and cedar.

Prospero calls for music to soothe the frantic Alonzo, and his

companions;

A solemn air, and the best comforter

To an unsettled fancy, cure thy brains

Now useless, boiled within thy skull.

Again;

The charm dissolves apace,

And, as the morning steals upon the night,

Melting the darkness, so their rising senses

Begin to chase the ignorant fumes that mantle

Their clearer reason.

Their understanding

Begins to swell: and the approaching tide

Will shortly fill the reasonable shores

That now lie foul and muddy.

The perception of real affinities between events, (that is to say, of

ideal affinities, for those only are real,) enables the poet thus to

make free with the most imposing forms and phenomena of the world, and

to assert the predominance of the soul.

3. Whilst thus the poet animates nature with his own thoughts, he

differs from the philosopher only herein, that the one proposes Beauty

as his main end; the other Truth. But the philosopher, not less than the

poet, postpones the apparent order and relations of things to the empire

of thought. "The problem of philosophy," according to Plato, "is, for

all that exists conditionally, to find a ground unconditioned and

absolute." It proceeds on the faith that a law determines all phenomena,

which being known, the phenomena can be predicted. That law, when in the

mind, is an idea. Its beauty is infinite. The true philosopher and the

true poet are one, and a beauty, which is truth, and a truth, which is

beauty, is the aim of both. Is not the charm of one of Plato's or

Aristotle's definitions, strictly like that of the Antigone of

Sophocles? It is, in both cases, that a spiritual life has been imparted

to nature; that the solid seeming block of matter has been pervaded and

dissolved by a thought; that this feeble human being has penetrated the

vast masses of nature with an informing soul, and recognised itself in

their harmony, that is, seized their law. In physics, when this is

attained, the memory disburthens itself of its cumbrous catalogues of

particulars, and carries centuries of observation in a single formula.

Thus even in physics, the material is degraded before the spiritual. The

astronomer, the geometer, rely on their irrefragable analysis, and

disdain the results of observation. The sublime remark of Euler on his

law of arches, "This will be found contrary to all experience, yet is

true;" had already transferred nature into the mind, and left matter

like an outcast corpse.

4. Intellectual science has been observed to beget invariably a doubt of

the existence of matter. Turgot said, "He that has never doubted the

existence of matter, may be assured he has no aptitude for metaphysical

inquiries." It fastens the attention upon immortal necessary uncreated

natures, that is, upon Ideas; and in their presence, we feel that the

outward circumstance is a dream and a shade. Whilst we wait in this

Olympus of gods, we think of nature as an appendix to the soul. We

ascend into their region, and know that these are the thoughts of the

Supreme Being. "These are they who were set up from everlasting, from

the beginning, or ever the earth was. When he prepared the heavens, they

were there; when he established the clouds above, when he strengthened

the fountains of the deep. Then they were by him, as one brought up with

him. Of them took he counsel."

Their influence is proportionate. As objects of science, they are

accessible to few men. Yet all men are capable of being raised by piety

or by passion, into their region. And no man touches these divine

natures, without becoming, in some degree, himself divine. Like a new

soul, they renew the body. We become physically nimble and lightsome; we

tread on air; life is no longer irksome, and we think it will never be

so. No man fears age or misfortune or death, in their serene company,

for he is transported out of the district of change. Whilst we behold

unveiled the nature of Justice and Truth, we learn the difference

between the absolute and the conditional or relative. We apprehend the

absolute. As it were, for the first time, we exist. We become immortal,

for we learn that time and space are relations of matter; that, with a

perception of truth, or a virtuous will, they have no affinity.

5. Finally, religion and ethics, which may be fitly called,—the practice

of ideas, or the introduction of ideas into life,—have an analogous

effect with all lower culture, in degrading nature and suggesting its

dependence on spirit. Ethics and religion differ herein; that the one is

the system of human duties commencing from man; the other, from God.

Religion includes the personality of God; Ethics does not. They are one

to our present design. They both put nature under foot. The first and

last lesson of religion is, "The things that are seen, are temporal; the

things that are unseen, are eternal." It puts an affront upon nature. It

does that for the unschooled, which philosophy does for Berkeley and

Viasa. The uniform language that may be heard in the churches of the

most ignorant sects, is,—"Contemn the unsubstantial shows of the world;

they are vanities, dreams, shadows, unrealities; seek the realities of

religion." The devotee flouts nature. Some theosophists have arrived at

a certain hostility and indignation towards matter, as the Manichean and

Plotinus. They distrusted in themselves any looking back to these

flesh-pots of Egypt. Plotinus was ashamed of his body. In short, they

might all say of matter, what Michael Angelo said of external beauty,

"it is the frail and weary weed, in which God dresses the soul, which he

has called into time."

It appears that motion, poetry, physical and intellectual science, and

religion, all tend to affect our convictions of the reality of the

external world. But I own there is something ungrateful in expanding too

curiously the particulars of the general proposition, that all culture

tends to imbue us with idealism. I have no hostility to nature, but a

child's love to it. I expand and live in the warm day like corn and

melons. Let us speak her fair. I do not wish to fling stones at my

beautiful mother, nor soil my gentle nest. I only wish to indicate the

true position of nature in regard to man, wherein to establish man, all

right education tends; as the ground which to attain is the object of

human life, that is, of man's connection with nature. Culture inverts

the vulgar views of nature, and brings the mind to call that apparent,

which it uses to call real, and that real, which it uses to call

visionary. Children, it is true, believe in the external world. The

belief that it appears only, is an afterthought, but with culture, this

faith will as surely arise on the mind as did the first.

The advantage of the ideal theory over the popular faith, is this, that

it presents the world in precisely that view which is most desirable to

the mind. It is, in fact, the view which Reason, both speculative and

practical, that is, philosophy and virtue, take. For, seen in the light

of thought, the world always is phenomenal; and virtue subordinates it

to the mind. Idealism sees the world in God. It beholds the whole circle

of persons and things, of actions and events, of country and religion,

not as painfully accumulated, atom after atom, act after act, in an aged

creeping Past, but as one vast picture, which God paints on the instant

eternity, for the contemplation of the soul. Therefore the soul holds

itself off from a too trivial and microscopic study of the universal

tablet. It respects the end too much, to immerse itself in the means. It

sees something more important in Christianity, than the scandals of

ecclesiastical history, or the niceties of criticism; and, very

incurious concerning persons or miracles, and not at all disturbed by

chasms of historical evidence, it accepts from God the phenomenon, as it

finds it, as the pure and awful form of religion in the world. It is not

hot and passionate at the appearance of what it calls its own good or

bad fortune, at the union or opposition of other persons. No man is its

enemy. It accepts whatsoever befalls, as part of its lesson. It is a

watcher more than a doer, and it is a doer, only that it may the better

watch.

CHAPTER VII. SPIRIT.

IT is essential to a true theory of nature and of man, that it should

contain somewhat progressive. Uses that are exhausted or that may be,

and facts that end in the statement, cannot be all that is true of this

brave lodging wherein man is harbored, and wherein all his faculties

find appropriate and endless exercise. And all the uses of nature admit

of being summed in one, which yields the activity of man an infinite

scope. Through all its kingdoms, to the suburbs and outskirts of things,

it is faithful to the cause whence it had its origin. It always speaks

of Spirit. It suggests the absolute. It is a perpetual effect. It is a

great shadow pointing always to the sun behind us.

The aspect of nature is devout. Like the figure of Jesus, she stands

with bended head, and hands folded upon the breast. The happiest man is

he who learns from nature the lesson of worship.

Of that ineffable essence which we call Spirit, he that thinks most,

will say least. We can foresee God in the coarse, and, as it were,

distant phenomena of matter; but when we try to define and describe

himself, both language and thought desert us, and we are as helpless as

fools and savages. That essence refuses to be recorded in propositions,

but when man has worshipped him intellectually, the noblest ministry of

nature is to stand as the apparition of God. It is the organ through

which the universal spirit speaks to the individual, and strives to lead

back the individual to it.

When we consider Spirit, we see that the views already presented do not

include the whole circumference of man. We must add some related

thoughts.

Three problems are put by nature to the mind; What is matter? Whence is

it? and Whereto? The first of these questions only, the ideal theory

answers. Idealism saith: matter is a phenomenon, not a substance.

Idealism acquaints us with the total disparity between the evidence of

our own being, and the evidence of the world's being. The one is

perfect; the other, incapable of any assurance; the mind is a part of

the nature of things; the world is a divine dream, from which we may

presently awake to the glories and certainties of day. Idealism is a

hypothesis to account for nature by other principles than those of

carpentry and chemistry. Yet, if it only deny the existence of matter,

it does not satisfy the demands of the spirit. It leaves God out of me.

It leaves me in the splendid labyrinth of my perceptions, to wander

without end. Then the heart resists it, because it balks the affections

in denying substantive being to men and women. Nature is so pervaded

with human life, that there is something of humanity in all, and in

every particular. But this theory makes nature foreign to me, and does

not account for that consanguinity which we acknowledge to it.

Let it stand, then, in the present state of our knowledge, merely as a

useful introductory hypothesis, serving to apprize us of the eternal

distinction between the soul and the world.

But when, following the invisible steps of thought, we come to inquire,

Whence is matter? and Whereto? many truths arise to us out of the

recesses of consciousness. We learn that the highest is present to the

soul of man, that the dread universal essence, which is not wisdom, or

love, or beauty, or power, but all in one, and each entirely, is that

for which all things exist, and that by which they are; that spirit

creates; that behind nature, throughout nature, spirit is present; one

and not compound, it does not act upon us from without, that is, in

space and time, but spiritually, or through ourselves: therefore, that

spirit, that is, the Supreme Being, does not build up nature around us,

but puts it forth through us, as the life of the tree puts forth new

branches and leaves through the pores of the old. As a plant upon the

earth, so a man rests upon the bosom of God; he is nourished by

unfailing fountains, and draws, at his need, inexhaustible power. Who

can set bounds to the possibilities of man? Once inhale the upper air,

being admitted to behold the absolute natures of justice and truth, and

we learn that man has access to the entire mind of the Creator, is

himself the creator in the finite. This view, which admonishes me where

the sources of wisdom and power lie, and points to virtue as to

"The golden key

Which opes the palace of eternity,"

carries upon its face the highest certificate of truth, because it

animates me to create my own world through the purification of my soul.

The world proceeds from the same spirit as the body of man. It is a

remoter and inferior incarnation of God, a projection of God in the

unconscious. But it differs from the body in one important respect. It

is not, like that, now subjected to the human will. Its serene order is

inviolable by us. It is, therefore, to us, the present expositor of the

divine mind. It is a fixed point whereby we may measure our departure.

As we degenerate, the contrast between us and our house is more evident.

We are as much strangers in nature, as we are aliens from God. We do not

understand the notes of birds. The fox and the deer run away from us;

the bear and tiger rend us. We do not know the uses of more than a few

plants, as corn and the apple, the potato and the vine. Is not the

landscape, every glimpse of which hath a grandeur, a face of him? Yet

this may show us what discord is between man and nature, for you cannot

freely admire a noble landscape, if laborers are digging in the field

hard by. The poet finds something ridiculous in his delight, until he is

out of the sight of men.

CHAPTER VIII. PROSPECTS.

IN inquiries respecting the laws of the world and the frame of things,

the highest reason is always the truest. That which seems faintly

possible—it is so refined, is often faint and dim because it is deepest

seated in the mind among the eternal verities. Empirical science is apt

to cloud the sight, and, by the very knowledge of functions and

processes, to bereave the student of the manly contemplation of the

whole. The savant becomes unpoetic. But the best read naturalist who

lends an entire and devout attention to truth, will see that there

remains much to learn of his relation to the world, and that it is not

to be learned by any addition or subtraction or other comparison of

known quantities, but is arrived at by untaught sallies of the spirit,

by a continual self-recovery, and by entire humility. 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.

For, the problems to be solved are precisely those which the

physiologist and the naturalist omit to state. It is not so pertinent to

man to know all the individuals of the animal kingdom, as it is to know

whence and whereto is this tyrannizing unity in his constitution, which

evermore separates and classifies things, endeavoring to reduce the most

diverse to one form. When I behold a rich landscape, it is less to my

purpose to recite correctly the order and superposition of the strata,

than to know why all thought of multitude is lost in a tranquil sense of

unity. I cannot greatly honor minuteness in details, so long as there is

no hint to explain the relation between things and thoughts; no ray upon

the metaphysics of conchology, of botany, of the arts, to show the

relation of the forms of flowers, shells, animals, architecture, to the

mind, and build science upon ideas. In a cabinet of natural history, we

become sensible of a certain occult recognition and sympathy in regard

to the most unwieldly and eccentric forms of beast, fish, and insect.

The American who has been confined, in his own country, to the sight of

buildings designed after foreign models, is surprised on entering York

Minster or St. Peter's at Rome, by the feeling that these structures are

imitations also,—faint copies of an invisible archetype. Nor has science

sufficient humanity, so long as the naturalist overlooks that wonderful

congruity which subsists between man and the world; of which he is lord,

not because he is the most subtile inhabitant, but because he is its

head and heart, and finds something of himself in every great and small

thing, in every mountain stratum, in every new law of color, fact of

astronomy, or atmospheric influence which observation or analysis lay

open. A perception of this mystery inspires the muse of George Herbert,

the beautiful psalmist of the seventeenth century. The following lines

are part of his little poem on Man.

"Man is all symmetry,

Full of proportions, one limb to another,

And to all the world besides.

Each part may call the farthest, brother;

For head with foot hath private amity,

And both with moons and tides.

"Nothing hath got so far

But man hath caught and kept it as his prey;

His eyes dismount the highest star;

He is in little all the sphere.

Herbs gladly cure our flesh, because that they

Find their acquaintance there.

"For us, the winds do blow,

The earth doth rest, heaven move, and fountains flow;

Nothing we see, but means our good,

As our delight, or as our treasure;

The whole is either our cupboard of food,

Or cabinet of pleasure.

"The stars have us to bed:

Night draws the curtain; which the sun withdraws.

Music and light attend our head.

All things unto our flesh are kind,

In their descent and being; to our mind,

In their ascent and cause.

"More servants wait on man

Than he'll take notice of. In every path,

He treads down that which doth befriend him

When sickness makes him pale and wan.

Oh mighty love! Man is one world, and hath

Another to attend him."

The perception of this class of truths makes the attraction which draws

men to science, but the end is lost sight of in attention to the means.

In view of this half-sight of science, we accept the sentence of Plato,

that, "poetry comes nearer to vital truth than history." Every surmise

and vaticination of the mind is entitled to a certain respect, and we

learn to prefer imperfect theories, and sentences, which contain

glimpses of truth, to digested systems which have no one valuable

suggestion. A wise writer will feel that the ends of study and

composition are best answered by announcing undiscovered regions of

thought, and so communicating, through hope, new activity to the torpid

spirit.

I shall therefore conclude this essay with some traditions of man and

nature, which a certain poet sang to me; and which, as they have always

been in the world, and perhaps reappear to every bard, may be both

history and prophecy.

'The foundations of man are not in matter, but in spirit. But the

element of spirit is eternity. To it, therefore, the longest series of

events, the oldest chronologies are young and recent. In the cycle of

the universal man, from whom the known individuals proceed, centuries

are points, and all history is but the epoch of one degradation.

'We distrust and deny inwardly our sympathy with nature. We own and

disown our relation to it, by turns. We are, like Nebuchadnezzar,

dethroned, bereft of reason, and eating grass like an ox. But who can

set limits to the remedial force of spirit?

'A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer,

and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams.

Now, the world would be insane and rabid, if these disorganizations

should last for hundreds of years. It is kept in check by death and

infancy. Infancy is the perpetual Messiah, which comes into the arms of

fallen men, and pleads with them to return to paradise.

'Man is the dwarf of himself. Once he was permeated and dissolved by

spirit. He filled nature with his overflowing currents. Out from him

sprang the sun and moon; from man, the sun; from woman, the moon. The

laws of his mind, the periods of his actions externized themselves into

day and night, into the year and the seasons. But, having made for

himself this huge shell, his waters retired; he no longer fills the

veins and veinlets; he is shrunk to a drop. He sees, that the structure

still fits him, but fits him colossally. Say, rather, once it fitted

him, now it corresponds to him from far and on high. He adores timidly

his own work. Now is man the follower of the sun, and woman the follower

of the moon. Yet sometimes he starts in his slumber, and wonders at

himself and his house, and muses strangely at the resemblance betwixt

him and it. He perceives that if his law is still paramount, if still he

have elemental power, if his word is sterling yet in nature, it is not

conscious power, it is not inferior but superior to his will. It is

Instinct.' Thus my Orphic poet sang.

At present, man applies to nature but half his force. He works on the

world with his understanding alone. He lives in it, and masters it by a

penny-wisdom; and he that works most in it, is but a half-man, and

whilst his arms are strong and his digestion good, his mind is imbruted,

and he is a selfish savage. His relation to nature, his power over it,

is through the understanding; as by manure; the economic use of fire,

wind, water, and the mariner's needle; steam, coal, chemical

agriculture; the repairs of the human body by the dentist and the

surgeon. This is such a resumption of power, as if a banished king

should buy his territories inch by inch, instead of vaulting at once

into his throne. Meantime, in the thick darkness, there are not wanting

gleams of a better light,—occasional examples of the action of man upon

nature with his entire force,—with reason as well as understanding. Such

examples are; the traditions of miracles in the earliest antiquity of

all nations; the history of Jesus Christ; the achievements of a

principle, as in religious and political revolutions, and in the

abolition of the Slave-trade; the miracles of enthusiasm, as those

reported of Swedenborg, Hohenlohe, and the Shakers; many obscure and yet

contested facts, now arranged under the name of Animal Magnetism;

prayer; eloquence; self-healing; and the wisdom of children. These are

examples of Reason's momentary grasp of the sceptre; the exertions of a

power which exists not in time or space, but an instantaneous

in-streaming causing power. The difference between the actual and the

ideal force of man is happily figured by the schoolmen, in saying, that

the knowledge of man is an evening knowledge, vespertina cognitio, but

that of God is a morning knowledge, matutina cognitio.

The problem of restoring to the world original and eternal beauty, is

solved by the redemption of the soul. The ruin or the blank, that we see

when we look at nature, is in our own eye. The axis of vision is not

coincident with the axis of things, and so they appear not transparent

but opake. The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in

heaps, is, because man is disunited with himself. He cannot be a

naturalist, until he satisfies all the demands of the spirit. Love is as

much its demand, as perception. Indeed, neither can be perfect without

the other. In the uttermost meaning of the words, thought is devout, and

devotion is thought. Deep calls unto deep. But in actual life, the

marriage is not celebrated. There are innocent men who worship God after

the tradition of their fathers, but their sense of duty has not yet

extended to the use of all their faculties. And there are patient

naturalists, but they freeze their subject under the wintry light of the

understanding. Is not prayer also a study of truth,—a sally of the soul

into the unfound infinite? No man ever prayed heartily, without learning

something. But when a faithful thinker, resolute to detach every object

from personal relations, and see it in the light of thought, shall, at

the same time, kindle science with the fire of the holiest affections,

then will God go forth anew into the creation.

It will not need, when the mind is prepared for study, to search for

objects. The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the

common. What is a day? What is a year? What is summer? What is woman?

What is a child? What is sleep? To our blindness, these things seem

unaffecting. We make fables to hide the baldness of the fact and conform

it, as we say, to the higher law of the mind. But when the fact is seen

under the light of an idea, the gaudy fable fades and shrivels. We

behold the real higher law. To the wise, therefore, a fact is true

poetry, and the most beautiful of fables. These wonders are brought to

our own door. You also are a man. Man and woman, and their social life,

poverty, labor, sleep, fear, fortune, are known to you. Learn that none

of these things is superficial, but that each phenomenon has its roots

in the faculties and affections of the mind. Whilst the abstract

question occupies your intellect, nature brings it in the concrete to be

solved by your hands. It were a wise inquiry for the closet, to compare,

point by point, especially at remarkable crises in life, our daily

history, with the rise and progress of ideas in the mind.

So shall we come to look at the world with new eyes. It shall answer the

endless inquiry of the intellect,—What is truth? and of the

affections,—What is good? by yielding itself passive to the educated

Will. Then shall come to pass what my poet said; 'Nature is not fixed

but fluid. Spirit alters, moulds, makes it. The immobility or bruteness

of nature, is the absence of spirit; to pure spirit, it is fluid, it is

volatile, it is obedient. Every spirit builds itself a house; and beyond

its house a world; and beyond its world, a heaven. Know then, that the

world exists for you. For you is the phenomenon perfect. What we are,

that only can we see. All that Adam had, all that Caesar could, you have

and can do. Adam called his house, heaven and earth; Caesar called his

house, Rome; you perhaps call yours, a cobler's trade; a hundred acres

of ploughed land; or a scholar's garret. Yet line for line and point for

point, your dominion is as great as theirs, though without fine names.

Build, therefore, your own world. As fast as you conform your life to

the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its great proportions. A

correspondent revolution in things will attend the influx of the spirit.

So fast will disagreeable appearances, swine, spiders, snakes, pests,

madhouses, prisons, enemies, vanish; they are temporary and shall be no

more seen. The sordor and filths of nature, the sun shall dry up, and

the wind exhale. As when the summer comes from the south; the snow-banks

melt, and the face of the earth becomes green before it, so shall the

advancing spirit create its ornaments along its path, and carry with it

the beauty it visits, and the song which enchants it; it shall draw

beautiful faces, warm hearts, wise discourse, and heroic acts, around

its way, until evil is no more seen. The kingdom of man over nature,

which cometh not with observation,—a dominion such as now is beyond his

dream of God,—he shall enter without more wonder than the blind man

feels who is gradually restored to perfect sight.'