Nature
An introduction to Nature
To selected criticism
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.
Introduction
Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the
fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The
foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we,
through their eyes . Why should not we also enjoy an original
relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and
philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by
revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? Embosomed for a
season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through
us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action
proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones
of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of
its faded wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also. There is more
wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new
thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.
Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable .
We must trust the perfection of the creation so far, as to
believe that whatever curiosity the order of things has awakened
in our minds, the order of things can satisfy. Every man's
condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he
would put. He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth.
In like manner, nature is already, in its forms and tendencies,
describing its own design. Let us interrogate the great
apparition, that shines so peacefully around us. Let us inquire,
to what end is nature?
All science has one aim, namely, to find a theory of nature.
We have theories of races and of functions, but scarcely yet a
remote approach to an idea of creation. We are now so far from
the road to truth, that religious teachers dispute and hate each
other, and speculative men are esteemed unsound and frivolous.
But to a sound judgment, the most abstract truth is the most
practical. Whenever a true theory appears, it will be its own
evidence. Its test is, that it will explain all phenomena. Now
many are thought not only unexplained but inexplicable; as
language, sleep, madness, dreams, beasts, sex.
Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of
Nature and the Soul. Strictly speaking, therefore, all that is
separate from us, all which Philosophy distinguishes as the NOT
ME, that is, both nature and art, all other men and my own body,
must be ranked under this name, NATURE. In enumerating the
values of nature and casting up their sum, I shall use the word
in both senses; -- in its common and in its philosophical
import. In inquiries so general as our present one, the
inaccuracy is not material; no confusion of thought will occur.
Nature, in the common sense, refers to essences unchanged by
man; space, the air, the river, the leaf. Art is applied to the
mixture of his will with the same things, as in a house, a
canal, a statue, a picture. But his operations taken together
are so insignificant , a little chipping, baking, patching, and
washing, that in an impression so grand as that of the world on
the human mind, they do not vary the result.
Chapter I NATURE
To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his
chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and
write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone,
let him look at the stars. The rays that come from those
heavenly worlds, will separate between him and what he touches.
One might think the atmosphere was made transparent with this
design, to give man, in the heavenly bodies, the perpetual
presence of the sublime. Seen in the streets of cities, how
great they are! If the stars should appear one night in a
thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve
for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which
had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty,
and light the universe with their admonishing smile.
The stars awaken a certain reverence, because though always
present, they are inaccessible; but all natural objects make a
kindred impression, when the mind is open to their influence.
Nature never wears a mean appearance. Neither does the wisest
man extort her secret, and lose his curiosity by finding out all
her perfection. Nature never became a toy to a wise spirit. The
flowers, the animals, the mountains, reflected the wisdom of his
best hour, as much as they had delighted the simplicity of his
childhood.
When we speak of nature in this manner, we have a distinct
but most poetical sense in the mind. We mean the integrity of
impression made by manifold natural objects. It is this which
distinguishes the stick of timber of the wood-cutter, from the
tree of the poet. The charming landscape which I saw this
morning, is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms.
Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland
beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is a property
in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate
all the parts, that is, the poet. This is the best part of these
men's farms, yet to this their warranty-deeds give no title.
To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most
persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very
superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man,
but shines into the eye and the heart of the child. The lover of
nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly
adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy
even into the era of manhood. His intercourse with heaven and
earth, becomes part of his daily food. In the presence of
nature, a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real
sorrows. Nature says, -- he is my creature, and maugre all his
impertinent griefs, he shall be glad with me. Not the sun or the
summer alone, but every hour and season yields its tribute of
delight; for every hour and change corresponds to and authorizes
a different state of the mind, from breathless noon to grimmest
midnight. Nature is a setting that fits equally well a comic or
a mourning piece. In good health, the air is a cordial of
incredible virtue. Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at
twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any
occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect
exhilaration.I am glad to the brink of fear. In the woods too, a
man casts off his years, as the snake his slough , and at what
period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is
perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God, a decorum and
sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest
sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years. In the
woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing
can befall me in life, -- no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me
my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare
ground, -- my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into
infinite space, -- all mean egotism vanishes. I become a
transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of
the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle
of God. The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and
accidental: to be brothers, to be acquaintances, -- master or
servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance. I am the lover of
uncontained and immortal beauty.In the wilderness, I find
something more dear and connate than in streets or villages. In
the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of
the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own
nature.
The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister, is
the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the
vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me,
and I to them. The waving of the boughs in the storm, is new to
me and old. It takes me by surprise, and yet is not unknown. Its
effect is like that of a higher thought or a better emotion
coming over me, when I deemed I was thinking justly or doing
right.
Yet it is certain that the power to produce this delight,
does not reside in nature, but in man, or in a harmony of both.
It is necessary to use these pleasures with great temperance.
For, nature is not always tricked in holiday attire, but the
same scene which yesterday breathed perfume and glittered as for
the frolic of the nymphs, is overspread with melancholy today.
Nature always wears the colors of the spirit . To a man laboring
under calamity, the heat of his own fire hath sadness in it.
Then, there is a kind of contempt of the landscape felt by him
who has just lost by death a dear friend. The sky is less grand
as it shuts down over less worth in the population.
Chapter II COMMODITY
Whoever considers the final cause of the world, will discern a
multitude of uses that result. They all admit of being thrown
into one of the following classes; Commodity; Beauty; Language;
and Discipline.
Under the general name of Commodity, I rank all those
advantages which our senses owe to nature. This, of course, is a
benefit which is temporary and mediate, not ultimate, like its
service to the soul. Yet although low, it is perfect in its
kind, and is the only use of nature which all men apprehend. The
misery of man appears like childish petulance, when we explore
the steady and prodigal provision that has been made for his
support and delight on this green ball which floats him through
the heavens. What angels invented these splendid ornaments,
these rich conveniences, this ocean of air above, this ocean of
water beneath, this firmament of earth between? this zodiac of
lights, this tent of dropping clouds, this striped coat of
climates, this fourfold year? Beasts, fire, water, stones, and
corn serve him. The field is at once his floor, his work-yard,
his play-ground, his garden, and his bed.
"More servants wait on man
Than he 'll take notice of." ------
Nature, in its ministry to man, is not only the material, but
is also the process and the result. All the parts incessantly
work into each other's hands for the profit of man. The wind
sows the seed; the sun evaporates the sea; the wind blows the
vapor to the field; the ice, on the other side of the planet,
condenses rain on this; the rain feeds the plant; the plant
feeds the animal; and thus the endless circulations of the
divine charity nourish man.
The useful arts are reproductions or new combinations by the wit
of man, of the same natural benefactors. He no longer waits for
favoring gales, but by means of steam, he realizes the fable of
Aeolus's bag, and carries the two and thirty winds in the boiler
of his boat. To diminish friction, he paves the road with iron
bars, and, mounting a coach with a ship-load of men, animals,
and merchandise behind him, he darts through the country, from
town to town, like an eagle or a swallow through the air. By the
aggregate of these aids, how is the face of the world changed,
from the era of Noah to that of Napoleon! The private poor man
hath cities, ships, canals, bridges, built for him. He goes to
the post-office, and the human race run on his errands; to the
book-shop, and the human race read and write of all that
happens, for him; to the court-house, and nations repair his
wrongs. He sets his house upon the road, and the human race go
forth every morning, and shovel out the snow, and cut a path for
him.
But there is no need of specifying particulars in this class
of uses. The catalogue is endless, and the examples so obvious,
that I shall leave them to the reader's reflection, with the
general remark, that this mercenary benefit is one which has
respect to a farther good. A man is fed, not that he may be fed,
but that he may work.
Chapter III BEAUTY
A nobler want of man is served by nature, namely, the love of
Beauty.
The ancient Greeks called the world {kosmos}, 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.
Thus is nature an interpreter, by whose means man converses
with his fellow men. 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 parts;" "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?"
[Macbeth, III,4,ll.110-112 ]
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, Zoology, (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. 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 same 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."
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, as
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 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 inquiry, 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,
andwe 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,"
[Milton, Comus, II, 13-14 ]
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 unwieldy 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, whicha 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 cobbler'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.'
