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