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Title: Nature

Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson

Release date: July 17, 2009 [eBook #29433]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/29433

Credits: Produced by Ruth Hart

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NATURE ***

NATURE
BY

R. W. EMERSON

A subtle chain of countless rings
The next unto the farthest brings;
The eye reads omens where it goes,
And speaks all languages the rose;
And, striving to be man, the worm
Mounts through all the spires of form.

NEW EDITION

BOSTON & CAMBRIDGE:
JAMES MUNROE AND COMPANY
M DCCC XLIX.

Entered, according to the Act of Congress, in the year 1849
By JAMES MUNROE AND COMPANY,
in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts.

BOSTON:
THURSTON, TORRY AND COMPANY,
31 Devonshire Street.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION 1
CHAPTER I. NATURE 8
CHAPTER II. COMMODITY 10
CHAPTER III. BEAUTY 13

CHAPTER IV. LANGUAGE 23
CHAPTER V. DISCIPLINE 34
CHAPTER VI. IDEALISM 45
CHAPTER VII. SPIRIT 59
CHAPTER VIII. PROSPECTS 64

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.

NATURE.

CHAPTER I.

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.'

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