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1836
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". . . the
universe is composed of Nature and the Soul." Emerson the philosopher | Emerson the Person | excerpt, analysis of | motif examined
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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.
To go into solitude, a man needs to
retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I
read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let
him look at the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds, will
separate between him and what he touches. One might think the atmosphere was
made transparent with this design, to give man, in the heavenly bodies, the
perpetual presence of the sublime. Seen in the streets of cities, how great
they are! If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would
men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of
the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys
of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.
The stars awaken a certain reverence,
because though always present, they are inaccessible; but all natural objects
make a kindred impression, when the mind is open to their influence. Nature
never wears a mean appearance. Neither does the wisest man extort her secret,
and lose his curiosity by finding out all her perfection. Nature never became
a toy to a wise spirit. The flowers, the animals, the mountains, reflected
the wisdom of his best hour, as much as they had delighted the simplicity of
his childhood.
When we speak of nature in this
manner, we have a distinct but most poetical sense in the mind. We mean the
integrity of impression made by manifold natural objects. It is this which
distinguishes the stick of timber of the wood-cutter, from the tree of the
poet. The charming landscape which I saw this morning, is indubitably made up
of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and
Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is a
property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all
the parts, that is, the poet. This is the best part of these men's farms, yet
to this their warranty-deeds give no title.
To speak truly, few adult persons can
see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very
superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines
into the eye and the heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose
inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained
the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood. His intercourse with
heaven and earth, becomes part of his daily food. In the presence of nature,
a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows. Nature says,
-- he is my creature, and maugre all his impertinent griefs, he shall be glad
with me. Not the sun or the summer alone, but every hour and season yields
its tribute of delight; for every hour and change corresponds to and
authorizes a different state of the mind, from breathless noon to grimmest
midnight. Nature is a setting that fits equally well a comic or a mourning
piece. In good health, the air is a cordial of incredible virtue. Crossing a
bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without
having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed
a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear. In the woods too, a
man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever
of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth. Within these
plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is
dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand
years. In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing
can befall me in life, -- no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,)
which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, -- my head bathed by
the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, -- all mean egotism
vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the
currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle
of God. The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental: to
be brothers, to be acquaintances, -- master or servant, is then a trifle and
a disturbance. I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty. In the
wilderness, I find something more dear and connate than in streets or
villages. In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of
the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature.
The greatest delight which the fields
and woods minister, is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and
the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to
them. The waving of the boughs in the storm, is new to me and old. It takes
me by surprise, and yet is not unknown. Its effect is like that of a higher
thought or a better emotion coming over me, when I deemed I was thinking
justly or doing right.
Yet it is certain that the power to
produce this delight, does not reside in nature, but in man, or in a harmony
of both. It is necessary to use these pleasures with great temperance. For,
nature is not always tricked in holiday attire, but the same scene which
yesterday breathed perfume and glittered as for the frolic of the nymphs, is
overspread with melancholy today. Nature always wears the colors of the
spirit. To a man laboring under calamity, the heat of his own fire hath
sadness in it. Then, there is a kind of contempt of the landscape felt by him
who has just lost by death a dear friend. The sky is less grand as it shuts
down over less worth in the population.
Whoever considers the final cause of
the world, will discern a multitude of uses that result. They all admit of
being thrown into one of the following classes; Commodity; Beauty; Language;
and Discipline.
Under the general name of Commodity,
I rank all those advantages which our senses owe to nature. This, of course,
is a benefit which is temporary and mediate, not ultimate, like its service
to the soul. Yet although low, it is perfect in its kind, and is the only use
of nature which all men apprehend. The misery of man appears like childish
petulance, when we explore the steady and prodigal provision that has been
made for his support and delight on this green ball which floats him through
the heavens. What angels invented these splendid ornaments, these rich
conveniences, this ocean of air above, this ocean of water beneath, this
firmament of earth between? this zodiac of lights, this tent of dropping
clouds, this striped coat of climates, this fourfold year? Beasts, fire,
water, stones, and corn serve him. The field is at once his floor, his
work-yard, his play-ground, his garden, and his bed.
"More servants wait on man Than he 'll take notice of." ------ Nature, in its ministry to man, is
not only the material, but is also the process and the result. All the parts
incessantly work into each other's hands for the profit of man. The wind sows
the seed; the sun evaporates the sea; the wind blows the vapor to the field;
the ice, on the other side of the planet, condenses rain on this; the rain
feeds the plant; the plant feeds the animal; and thus the endless
circulations of the divine charity nourish man.
The useful arts are reproductions or
new combinations by the wit of man, of the same natural benefactors. He no
longer waits for favoring gales, but by means of steam, he realizes the fable
of Aeolus's bag, and carries the two and thirty winds in the boiler of his
boat. To diminish friction, he paves the road with iron bars, and, mounting a
coach with a ship-load of men, animals, and merchandise behind him, he darts
through the country, from town to town, like an eagle or a swallow through
the air. By the aggregate of these aids, how is the face of the world
changed, from the era of Noah to that of Napoleon! The private poor man hath
cities, ships, canals, bridges, built for him. He goes to the post-office,
and the human race run on his errands; to the book-shop, and the human race
read and write of all that happens, for him; to the court-house, and nations
repair his wrongs. He sets his house upon the road, and the human race go
forth every morning, and shovel out the snow, and cut a path for him.
But there is no need of specifying
particulars in this class of uses. The catalogue is endless, and the examples
so obvious, that I shall leave them to the reader's reflection, with the
general remark, that this mercenary benefit is one which has respect to a farther
good. A man is fed, not that he may be fed, but that he may work. A nobler want of man is served by
nature, namely, the love of Beauty.
The ancient Greeks called the world
{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 become s an
object of the intellect. Beside the relation of things to virtue, they have a
relation to thought. The intellect searches out the absolute order of things
as they stand in the mind of God, and without the colors of affection. The
intellectual and the active powers seem to succeed each other, and the
exclusive activity of the one, generates the exclusive activity of the other.
There is something unfriendly in each to the other, but they are like the
alternate periods of feeding and working in animals; each prepares and will
be followed by the other. Therefore does beauty, which, in relation to
actions, as we have seen, comes unsought, and comes because it is unsought,
remain for the apprehension and pursuit of the intellect; and then again, in
its turn, of the active power. Nothing divine dies. All good is eternally
reproductive. The beauty of nature reforms itself in the mind, and not for
barren contemplation, but for new creation.
All men are in some degree impressed
by the face of the world; some men even to delight. This love of beauty is
Taste. Others have the same love in such excess, that, not content with
admiring, they seek to embody it in new forms. The creation of beauty is Art. The production of a work of art
throws a light upon the mystery of humanity. A work of art is an abstract or
epitome of the world. It is the result or expression of nature, in miniature.
For, although the works of nature are innumerable and all different, the
result or the expression of them all is similar and single. Nature is a sea
of forms radically alike and even unique. A leaf, a sun-beam, a landscape,
the ocean, make an analogous impression on the mind. What is common to them
all, -- that perfectness and harmony, is beauty. The standard of beauty is
the entire circuit of natural forms, -- the totality of nature; which the
Italians expressed by defining beauty "il piu nell' uno." Nothing
is quite beautiful alone: nothing but is beautiful in the whole. A single
object is only so far beautiful as it suggests this universal grace. The
poet, the painter, the sculptor, the musician, the architect, seek each to
concentrate this radiance of the world on one point, and each in his several
work to satisfy the love of beauty which stimulates him to produce. Thus is
Art, a nature passed through the alembic of man. Thus in art, does nature
work through the will of a man filled with the beauty of her first works. The world thus exists to the soul to
satisfy the desire of beauty. This element I call an ultimate end. No reason
can be asked or given why the soul seeks beauty. Beauty, in its largest and
profoundest sense, is one expression for the universe. God is the all-fair.
Truth, and goodness, and beauty, are but different faces of the same All. But
beauty in nature is not ultimate. It is the herald of inward and eternal
beauty, and is not alone a solid and satisfactory good. It must stand as a
part, and not as yet the last or highest expression of the final cause of
Nature.
Language is a third use which Nature
subserves to man. Nature is the vehble, and threefold degree. 1. Words are signs of natural facts. 2. Particular natural facts are
symbols of particular spiritual facts. 3. Nature is the symbol of spirit. 1. Words are signs of natural facts.
The use of natural history is to give us aid in supernatural history: the use
of the outer creation, to give us language for the beings and changes of the
inward creation. Every word which is used to express a moral or intellectual
fact, if traced to its root, is found to be borrowed from some material
appearance. Right means straight; wrong means twisted. Spirit primarily means wind; transgression, the crossing of a line; supercilious,
the raising of the eyebrow. We say
the heart to express emotion, the head to denote thought; and thought and emotion are words borrowed from sensible things, and now
appropriated to spiritual nature. Most of the process by which this
transformation is made, is hidden from us in the remote time when language
was framed; but the same tendency may be daily observed in children. Children
and savages use only nouns or names of things, which they convert into verbs,
and apply to analogous mental acts. 2. But this origin of all words that
convey a spiritual import, -- so conspicuous a fact in the history of
language, -- is our least debt to nature. It is not words only that are
emblematic; it is things which are emblematic. Every natural fact is a symbol
of some spiritual fact. Every appearance in nature corresponds to some state
of the mind, and that state of the mind can only be described by presenting
that natural appearance as its picture. An enraged man is a lion, a cunning
man is a fox, a firm man is a rock, a learned man is a torch. A lamb is
innocence; a snake is subtle spite; flowers express to us the delicate
affections. Light and darkness are our familiar expression for knowledge and
ignorance; and heat for love. Visible distance behind and before us, is
respectively our image of memory and hope.
Who looks upon a river in a
meditative hour, and is not reminded of the flux of all things? Throw a stone
into the stream, and the circles that propagate themselves are the beautiful
type of all influence. Man is conscious of a universal soul within or behind
his individual life, wherein, as in a firmament, the natures of Justice,
Truth, Love, Freedom, arise and shine. This universal soul, he calls Reason:
it is not mine, or thine, or his, but we are its; we are its property and
men. And the blue sky in which the private earth is buried, the sky with its
eternal calm, and full of everlasting orbs, is the type of Reason. That
which, intellectually considered, we call Reason, considered in relation to
nature, we call Spirit. Spirit is the Creator. Spirit hath life in itself.
And man in all ages and countries, embodies it in his language, as the
FATHER. It is easily seen that there is
nothing lucky or capricious in these analogies, but that they are constant,
and pervade nature. These are not the dreams of a few poets, here and there,
but man is an analogist, and studies relations in all objects. He is placed
in the centre of beings, and a ray of relation passes from every other being
to him. And neither can man be understood without these objects, nor these
objects without man. All the facts in natural history taken by themselves,
have no value, but are barren, like a single sex. But marry it to human
history, and it is full of life. Whole Floras, all Linnaeus' and Buffon's
volumes, are dry catalogues of facts; but the most trivial of these facts,
the habit of a plant, the organs, or work, or noise of an insect, applied to
the illustration of a fact in intellectual philosophy, or, in any way
associated to human nature, affects us in the most lively and agreeable
manner. The seed of a plant, -- to what affecting analogies in the nature of
man, is that little fruit made use of, in all discourse, up to the voice of
Paul, who calls the human corpse a seed, -- "It is sown a natural body;
it is raised a spiritual body." The motion of the earth round its axis,
and round the sun, makes the day, and the year. These are certain amounts of
brute light and heat. But is there no intent of an analogy between man's life
and the seasons? And do the seasons gain no grandeur or pathos from that analogy?
The instincts of the ant are very unimportant, considered as the ant's; but
the moment a ray of relation is seen to extend from it to man, and the little
drudge is seen to be a monitor, a little body with a mighty heart, then all
its habits, even that said to be recently observed, that it never sleeps,
become sublime. Because of this radical
correspondence between visible things and human thoughts, savages, who have
only what is necessary, converse in figures. As we go back in history,
language becomes more picturesque, until its infancy, when it is all poetry;
or all spiritual facts are represented by natural symbols. The same symbols
are found to make the original elements of all languages. It has moreover
been observed, that the idioms of all languages approach each other in
passages of the greatest eloquence and power. And as this is the first
language, so is it the last. This immediate dependence of language upon
nature, this conversion of an outward phenomenon into a type of somewhat in
human life, never loses its power to affect us. It is this which gives that
piquancy to the conversation of a strong-natured farmer or back-woodsman,
which all men relish.
A man's power to connect his thought
with its proper symbol, and so to utter it, depends on the simplicity of his
character, that is, upon his love of truth, and his desire to communicate it
without loss. The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of
language. When simplicity of character and the sovereignty of ideas is broken
up by the prevalence of secondary desires, the desire of riches, of pleasure,
of power, and of praise, -- and duplicity and falsehood take place of
simplicity and truth, the power over nature as an interpreter of the will, is
in a degree lost; new imagery ceases to be created, and old words are
perverted to stand for things which are not; a paper currency is employed,
when there is no bullion in the vaults. In due time, the fraud is manifest,
and words lose all power to stimulate the understanding or the affections.
Hundreds of writers may be found in every long-civilized nation, who for a
short time believe, and make others believe, that they see and utter truths,
who do not of themselves clothe one thought in its natural garment, but who
feed unconsciously on the language created by the primary writers of the
country, those, namely, who hold primarily on nature.
But wise men pierce this rotten
diction and fasten words again to visible things; so that picturesque
language is at once a commanding certificate that he who employs it, is a man
in alliance with truth and God. The moment our discourse rises above the
ground line of familiar facts, and is inflamed with passion or exalted by
thought, it clothes itself in images. A man conversing in earnest, if he
watch his intellectual processes, will find that a material image, more or
less luminous, arises in his mind, cotemporaneous with every thought, which
furnishes the vestment of the thought. Hence, good writing and brilliant
discourse are perpetual allegories. This imagery is spontaneous. It is the
blending of experience with the present action of the mind. It is proper
creation. It is the working of the Original Cause through the instruments he
has already made.
These facts may suggest the advantage
which the country-life possesses for a powerful mind, over the artificial and
curtailed life of cities. We know more from nature than we can at will
communicate. Its light flows into the mind evermore, and we forget its
presence. The poet, the orator, bred in the woods, whose senses have been
nourished by their fair and appeasing changes, year after year, without
design and without heed, -- shall not lose their lesson altogether, in the
roar of cities or the broil of politics. Long hereafter, amidst agitation and
terror in national councils, -- in the hour of revolution, -- these solemn
images shall reappear in their morning lustre, as fit symbols and words of
the thoughts which the passing events shall awaken. At the call of a noble
sentiment, again the woods wave, the pines murmur, the river rolls and
shines, and the cattle low upon the mountains, as he saw and heard them in
his infancy. And with these forms, the spells of persuasion, the keys of
power are put into his hands.
3. We are thus assisted by natural
objects in the expression of particular meanings. But how great a language to
convey such pepper-corn informations! Did it need such noble races of
creatures, this profusion of forms, this host of orbs in heaven, to furnish
man with the dictionary and grammar of his municipal speech? Whilst we use
this grand cipher to expedite the affairs of our pot and kettle, we feel that
we have not yet put it to its use, neither are able. We are like travellers
using the cinders of a volcano to roast their eggs. Whilst we see that it
always stands ready to clothe what we would say, we cannot avoid the
question, whether the characters are not significant of themselves. Have
mountains, and waves, and skies, no significance but what we consciously give
them, when we employ them as emblems of our thoughts? The world is
emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a
metaphor of the human mind. The laws of moral nature answer to those of
matter as face to face in a glass. "The visible world and the relation
of its parts, is the dial plate of the invisible." The axioms of physics
translate the laws of ethics. Thus, "the whole is greater than its
part;" "reaction is equal to action;" "the smallest
weight may be made to lift the greatest, the difference of weight being
compensated by time;" and many the like propositions, which have an
ethical as well as physical sense. These propositions have a much more
extensive and universal sense when applied to human life, than when confined
to technical use.
In like manner, the memorable words
of history, and the proverbs of nations, consist usually of a natural fact,
selected as a picture or parable of a moral truth. Thus; A rolling stone
gathers no moss; A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush; A cripple in
the right way, will beat a racer in the wrong; Make hay while the sun shines;
'T is hard to carry a full cup even; Vinegar is the son of wine; The last
ounce broke the camel's back; Long-lived trees make roots first; -- and the
like. In their primary sense these are trivial facts, but we repeat them for
the value of their analogical import. What is true of proverbs, is true of
all fables, parables, and allegories. This relation between the mind and
matter is not fancied by some poet, but stands in the will of God, and so is
free to be known by all men. It appears to men, or it does not appear. When
in fortunate hours we ponder this miracle, the wise man doubts, if, at all
other times, he is not blind and deaf; ------ "Can these things be,
And overcome us like a summer's cloud,
Without our special wonder?"
for the universe becomes transparent,
and the light of higher laws than its own, shines through it. It is the
standing problem which has exercised the wonder and the study of every fine
genius since the world began; from the era of the Egyptians and the Brahmins,
to that of Pythagoras, of Plato, of Bacon, of Leibnitz, of Swedenborg. There
sits the Sphinx at the road-side, and from age to age, as each prophet comes
by, he tries his fortune at reading her riddle. There seems to be a necessity
in spirit to manifest itself in material forms; and day and night, river and
storm, beast and bird, acid and alkali, preexist in necessary Ideas in the
mind of God, and are what they are by virtue of preceding affections, in the
world of spirit. A Fact is the end or last issue of spirit. The visible
creation is the terminus or the circumference of the invisible world.
"Material objects," said a French philosopher, "are
necessarily kinds of scoriae of the substantial thoughts of the Creator,
which must always preserve an exact relation to their first origin; in other
words, visible nature must have a spiritual and moral side." This doctrine is abstruse, and though
the images of "garment," "scoriae," "mirror,"
&c., may stimulate the fancy, we must summon the aid of subtler and more
vital expositors to make it plain. "Every scripture is to be interpreted
by the same spirit which gave it forth," -- is the fundamental law of
criticism. A life in harmony with nature, the love of truth and of virtue,
will purge the eyes to understand her text. By degrees we may come to know
the primitive sense of the permanent objects of nature, so that the world
shall be to us an open book, and every form significant of its hidden life
and final cause.
A new interest surprises us, whilst,
under the view now suggested, we contemplate the fearful extent and multitude
of objects; since "every object rightly seen, unlocks a new faculty of
the soul." That which was unconscious truth, becomes, when interpreted
and defined in an object, a part of the domain of knowledge, -- a new weapon
in the magazine of power. In view of the significance of
nature, we arrive at once at a new fact, that nature is a discipline. This
use of the world includes the preceding uses, as parts of itself.
Space, time, society, labor, climate,
food, locomotion, the animals, the mechanical forces, give us sincerest
lessons, day by day, whose meaning is unlimited. They educate both the
Understanding and the Reason. Every property of matter is a school for the
understanding, -- its solidity or resistance, its inertia, its extension, its
figure, its divisibility. The understanding adds, divides, combines,
measures, and finds nutriment and room for its activity in this worthy scene.
Meantime, Reason transfers all these lessons into its own world of thought,
by perceiving the analogy that marries Matter and Mind. 1. Nature is a discipline of the
understanding in intellectual truths. Our dealing with sensible objects is a
constant exercise in the necessary lessons of difference, of likeness, of
order, of being and seeming, of progressive arrangement; of ascent from
particular to general; of combination to one end of manifold forces.
Proportioned to the importance of the organ to be formed, is the extreme care
with which its tuition is provided, -- a care pretermitted in no single case.
What tedious training, day after day, year after year, never ending, to form
the common sense; what continual reproduction of annoyances, inconveniences,
dilemmas; what rejoicing over us of little men; what disputing of prices,
what reckonings of interest, -- and all to form the Hand of the mind; -- to
instruct us that "good thoughts are no better than good dreams, unless
they be executed!" The same good office is performed by
Property and its filial systems of debt and credit. Debt, grinding debt,
whose iron face the widow, the orphan, and the sons of genius fear and hate;
-- debt, which consumes so much time, which so cripples and disheartens a great
spirit with cares that seem so base, is a preceptor whose lessons cannot be
forgone, and is needed most by those who suffer from it most. Moreover,
property, which has been well compared to snow, -- "if it fall level
to-day, it will be blown into drifts to-morrow," -- is the surface
action of internal machinery, like the index on the face of a clock. Whilst
now it is the gymnastics of the understanding, it is hiving in the foresight
of the spirit, experience in profounder laws. The whole character and fortune of
the individual are affected by the least inequalities in the culture of the
understanding; for example, in the perception of differences. Therefore is
Space, and therefore Time, that man may know that things are not huddled and
lumped, but sundered and individual. A bell and a plough have each their use,
and neither can do the office of the other. Water is good to drink, coal to
burn, wool to wear; but wool cannot be drunk, nor water spun, nor coal eaten.
The wise man shows his wisdom in separation, in gradation, and his scale of
creatures and of merits is as wide as nature. The foolish have no range in
their scale, but suppose every man is as every other man. What is not good
they call the worst, and what is not hateful, they call the best. In like manner, what good heed,
nature forms in us! She pardons no mistakes. Her yea is yea, and her nay,
nay.
The first steps in Agriculture,
Astronomy, 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. 2. Sensible objects conform to the
premonitions of Reason and reflect the conscience. All things are moral; and
in their boundless changes have an unceasing reference to spiritual nature.
Therefore is nature glorious with form, color, and motion, that every globe
in the remotest heaven; every chemical change from the rudest crystal up to
the laws of life; every change of vegetation from the first principle of
growth in the eye of a leaf, to the tropical forest and antediluvian
coal-mine; every animal function from the sponge up to Hercules, shall hint
or thunder to man the laws of right and wrong, and echo the Ten Commandments.
Therefore is nature ever the ally of Religion: lends all her pomp and riches
to the religious sentiment. Prophet and priest, David, Isaiah, Jesus, have
drawn deeply from this source. This ethical character so penetrates the bone
and marrow of nature, as to seem the end for which it was made. Whatever
private purpose is answered by any member or part, this is its public and
universal function, and is never omitted. Nothing in nature is exhausted in
its first use. When a thing has served an end to the uttermost, it is wholly
new for an ulterior service. In God, every end is converted into a new means.
Thus the use of commodity, regarded by itself, is mean and squalid. But it is
to the mind an education in the doctrine of Use, namely, that a thing is good
only so far as it serves; that a conspiring of parts and efforts to the
production of an end, is essential to any being. The first and gross
manifestation of this truth, is our inevitable and hated training in values
and wants, in corn and meat.
It has already been illustrated, that
every natural process is a version of a moral sentence. The moral law lies at
the centre of nature and radiates to the circumference. It is the pith and
marrow of every substance, every relation, and every process. All things with
which we deal, preach to us. What is a farm but a mute gospel? The chaff and
the wheat, weeds and plants, blight, rain, insects, sun, -- it is a sacred
emblem from the first furrow of spring to the last stack which the snow of
winter overtakes in the fields. But the sailor, the shepherd, the miner, the
merchant, in their several resorts, have each an experience precisely
parallel, and leading to the same conclusion: because all organizations are
radically alike. Nor can it be doubted that this moral sentiment which thus
scents the air, grows in the grain, and impregnates the waters of the world,
is caught by man and sinks into his soul. The moral influence of nature upon
every individual is that amount of truth which it illustrates to him. Who can
estimate this? Who can guess how much firmness the sea-beaten rock has taught
the fisherman? how much tranquillity has been reflected to man from the azure
sky, over whose unspotted deeps the winds forevermore drive flocks of stormy
clouds, and leave no wrinkle or stain? how much industry and providence and
affection we have caught from the pantomime of brutes? What a searching
preacher of self-command is the varying phenomenon of Health! Herein is especially apprehended the
unity of Nature, -- the unity in variety, -- which meets us everywhere. All
the endless variety of things make an identical impression. Xenophanes
complained in his old age, that, look where he would, all things hastened
back to Unity. He was weary of seeing the same entity in the tedious variety
of forms. The fable of Proteus has a cordial truth. A leaf, a drop, a
crystal, a moment of time is related to the whole, and partakes of the
perfection of the whole. Each particle is a microcosm, and faithfully renders
the likeness of the world. Not only resemblances exist in things
whose analogy is obvious, as when we detect the type of the human hand in the
flipper of the fossil saurus, but also in objects wherein there is great
superficial unlikeness. Thus architecture is called "frozen music,"
by De Stael and Goethe. Vitruvius thought an architect should be a musician.
"A Gothic church," said Coleridge, "is a petrified
religion." Michael Angelo maintained, that, to an architect, a knowledge
of anatomy is essential. In Haydn's oratorios, the notes present to the
imagination not only motions, as, of the snake, the stag, and the elephant,
but colors also; as the green grass. The law of harmonic sounds reappears in
the harmonic colors. The granite is differenced in its laws only by the more
or less of heat, from the river that wears it away. The river, as it flows,
resembles the air that flows over it; the air resembles the light which
traverses it with more subtile currents; the light resembles the heat which
rides with it through Space. Each creature is only a modification of the
other; the likeness in them is more than the difference, and their radical
law is one and the same. A rule of one art, or a law of one organization,
holds true throughout nature. So intimate is this Unity, that, it is easily
seen, it lies under the undermost garment of nature, and betrays its source
in Universal Spirit. For, it pervades Thought also. Every universal truth
which we express in words, implies or supposes every other truth. Omne verum vero consonat. It is like a
great circle on a sphere, comprising all possible circles; which, however,
may be drawn, and comprise it, in like manner. Every such truth is the
absolute Ens seen from one side. But it has innumerable sides. The central Unity is still more
conspicuous in actions. Words are finite organs of the infinite mind. They
cannot cover the dimensions of what is in truth. They break, chop, and
impoverish it. An action is the perfection and publication of thought. A
right action seems to fill the eye, and to be related to all nature.
"The wise man, in doing one thing, does all; or, in the one thing he
does rightly, he sees the likeness of all which is done rightly." Words and actions are not the
attributes of brute nature. They introduce us to the human form, of which all
other organizations appear to be degradations. When this appears among so
many that surround it, the spirit prefers it to all others. It says, `From
such as this, have I drawn joy and knowledge; in such as this, have I found
and beheld myself; I will speak to it; it can speak again; it can yield me
thought already formed and alive.' In fact, the eye, -- the mind, -- is
always accompanied by these forms, male and female; and these are
incomparably the richest informations of the power and order that lie at the
heart of things. Unfortunately, every one of them bears the marks as of some
injury; is marred and superficially defective. Nevertheless, far different
from the deaf and dumb nature around them, these all rest like fountain-pipes
on the unfathomed sea of thought and virtue whereto they alone, of all
organizations, are the entrances. It were a pleasant inquiry to follow
into detail their ministry to our education, but where would it stop? We are
associated in adolescent and adult life with some friends, who, like skies
and waters, are coextensive with our idea; who, answering each to a certain
affection of the soul, satisfy our desire on that side; whom we lack power to
put at such focal distance from us, that we can mend or even analyze them. We
cannot choose but love them. When much intercourse with a friend has supplied
us with a standard of excellence, and has increased our respect for the
resources of God who thus sends a real person to outgo our ideal; when he
has, moreover, become an object of thought, and, whilst his character retains
all its unconscious effect, is converted in the mind into solid and sweet
wisdom, -- it is a sign to us that his office is closing, and he is commonly
withdrawn from our sight in a short time. Thus is the unspeakable but
intelligible and practicable meaning of the world conveyed to man, the
immortal pupil, in every object of sense. To this one end of Discipline, all
parts of nature conspire. A noble doubt perpetually suggests
itself, whether this end be not the Final Cause of the Universe; and whether
nature outwardly exists. It is a sufficient account of that Appearance we
call the World, that God will teach a human mind, and so makes it the
receiver of a certain number of congruent sensations, which we call sun and
moon, man and woman, house and trade. In my utter impotence to test the
authenticity of the report of my senses, to know whether the impressions they
make on me correspond with outlying objects, what difference does it make,
whether Orion is up there in heaven, or some god paints the image in the firmament
of the soul? The relations of parts and the end of the whole remaining the
same, what is the difference, whether land and sea interact, and worlds
revolve and intermingle without number or end, -- deep yawning under deep,
and galaxy balancing galaxy, throughout absolute space, -- or, whether,
without relations of time and space, the same appearances are inscribed in
the constant faith of man? Whether nature enjoy a substantial existence
without, or is only in the apocalypse of the mind, it is alike useful and
alike venerable to me. Be it what it may, it is ideal to me, so long as I
cannot try the accuracy of my senses. The frivolous make themselves merry
with the Ideal theory, 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 strong based promontory Have I made shake, and by the spurs plucked up The pine and cedar. Prospero calls for music to soothe
the frantic Alonzo, and his companions; A solemn air, and the best comforter To an unsettled fancy, cure thy brains Now useless, boiled within thy skull. Again; The charm dissolves apace, And, as the morning steals upon the night, Melting the darkness, so their rising senses Begin to chase the ignorant fumes that mantle Their clearer reason. Their understanding Begins to swell: and the approaching tide Will shortly fill the reasonable shores That now lie foul and muddy. The
perception of real affinities between events, (that is to say, of ideal
affinities, for those only are real,) enables the poet thus to make free with
the most imposing forms and phenomena of the world, and to assert the
predominance of the soul. 3. Whilst
thus the poet animates nature with his own thoughts, he differs from the
philosopher only herein, that the one proposes Beauty as his main end; the
other Truth. But the philosopher, not less than the poet, postpones the
apparent order and relations of things to the empire of thought. "The
problem of philosophy," according to Plato, "is, for all that
exists conditionally, to find a ground unconditioned and absolute." It
proceeds on the faith that a law determines all phenomena, which being known,
the phenomena can be predicted. That law, when in the mind, is an idea. Its
beauty is infinite. The true philosopher and the true poet are one, and a
beauty, which is truth, and a truth, which is beauty, is the aim of both. Is
not the charm of one of Plato's or Aristotle's definitions, strictly like
that of the Antigone of Sophocles? It is, in both cases, that a spiritual
life has been imparted to nature; that the solid seeming block of matter has
been pervaded and dissolved by a thought; that this feeble human being has
penetrated the vast masses of nature with an informing soul, and recognised
itself in their harmony, that is, seized their law. In physics, when this is
attained, the memory disburthens itself of its cumbrous catalogues of
particulars, and carries centuries of observation in a single formula. Thus even
in physics, the material is degraded before the spiritual. The astronomer,
the geometer, rely on their irrefragable analysis, and disdain the results of
observation. The sublime remark of Euler on his law of arches, "This
will be found contrary to all experience, yet is true;" had already
transferred nature into the mind, and left matter like an outcast corpse.
4.
Intellectual science has been observed to beget invariably a doubt of the
existence of matter. Turgot said, "He that has never doubted the
existence of matter, may be assured he has no aptitude for metaphysical
inquiries." It fastens the attention upon immortal necessary uncreated
natures, that is, upon Ideas; and in their presence, we feel that the outward
circumstance is a dream and a shade. Whilst we wait in this Olympus of gods,
we think of nature as an appendix to the soul. We ascend into their region,
and know that these are the thoughts of the Supreme Being. "These are
they who were set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth
was. When he prepared the heavens, they were there; when he established the
clouds above, when he strengthened the fountains of the deep. Then they were
by him, as one brought up with him. Of them took he counsel." Their
influence is proportionate. As objects of science, they are accessible to few
men. Yet all men are capable of being raised by piety or by passion, into
their region. And no man touches these divine natures, without becoming, in
some degree, himself divine. Like a new soul, they renew the body. We become
physically nimble and lightsome; we tread on air; life is no longer irksome,
and we think it will never be so. No man fears age or misfortune or death, in
their serene company, for he is transported out of the district of change.
Whilst we behold unveiled the nature of Justice and Truth, we learn the
difference between the absolute and the conditional or relative. We apprehend
the absolute. As it were, for the first time, we exist. We become immortal,
for we learn that time and space are relations of matter; that, with a
perception of truth, or a virtuous will, they have no affinity. 5. Finally,
religion and ethics, which may be fitly called, -- the practice of ideas, or
the introduction of ideas into life, -- have an analogous effect with all
lower culture, in degrading nature and suggesting its dependence on spirit.
Ethics and religion differ herein; that the one is the system of human duties
commencing from man; the other, from God. Religion includes the personality
of God; Ethics does not. They are one to our present design. They both put
nature under foot. The first and last lesson of religion is, "The things
that are seen, are temporal; the things that are unseen, are eternal."
It puts an affront upon nature. It does that for the unschooled, which
philosophy does for Berkeley and Viasa. The uniform language that may be
heard in the churches of the most ignorant sects, is,------"Contemn the
unsubstantial shows of the world; they are vanities, dreams, shadows,
unrealities; seek the realities of religion." The devotee flouts nature.
Some theosophists have arrived at a certain hostility and indignation towards
matter, as the Manichean and Plotinus. They distrusted in themselves any
looking back to these flesh-pots of Egypt. Plotinus was ashamed of his body.
In short, they might all say of matter, what Michael Angelo said of external
beauty, "it is the frail and weary weed, in which God dresses the soul,
which he has called into time." It appears
that motion, poetry, physical and intellectual science, and religion, all
tend to affect our convictions of the reality of the external world. But I
own there is something ungrateful in expanding too curiously the particulars
of the general proposition, that all culture tends to imbue us with idealism.
I have no hostility to nature, but a child's love to it. I expand and live in
the warm day like corn and melons. Let us speak her fair. I do not wish to
fling stones at my beautiful mother, nor soil my gentle nest. I only wish to
indicate the true position of nature in regard to man, wherein to establish
man, all right education tends; as the ground which to attain is the object
of human life, that is, of man's connection with nature. Culture inverts the
vulgar views of nature, and brings the mind to call that apparent, which it
uses to call real, and that real, which it uses to call visionary. Children,
it is true, believe in the external world. The belief that it appears only,
is an afterthought, but with culture, this faith will as surely arise on the
mind as did the first. The
advantage of the ideal theory over the popular faith, is this, that it
presents the world in precisely that view which is most desirable to the
mind. It is, in fact, the view which Reason, both speculative and practical,
that is, philosophy and virtue, take. For, seen in the light of thought, the
world always is phenomenal; and virtue subordinates it to the mind. Idealism
sees the world in God. It beholds the whole circle of persons and things, of
actions and events, of country and religion, not as painfully accumulated, atom
after atom, act after act, in an aged creeping Past, but as one vast picture,
which God paints on the instant eternity, for the contemplation of the soul.
Therefore the soul holds itself off from a too trivial and microscopic study
of the universal tablet. It respects the end too much, to immerse itself in
the means. It sees something more important in Christianity, than the
scandals of ecclesiastical history, or the niceties of criticism; and, very
incurious concerning persons or miracles, and not at all disturbed by chasms
of historical evidence, it accepts from God the phenomenon, as it finds it,
as the pure and awful form of religion in the world. It is not hot and
passionate at the appearance of what it calls its own good or bad fortune, at
the union or opposition of other persons. No man is its enemy. It accepts
whatsoever befalls, as part of its lesson. It is a watcher more than a doer,
and it is a doer, only that it may the better watch. It is essential to a true theory of
nature and of man, that it should contain somewhat progressive. Uses that are
exhausted or that may be, and facts that end in the statement, cannot be all
that is true of this brave lodging wherein man is harbored, and wherein all
his faculties find appropriate and endless exercise. And all the uses of
nature admit of being summed in one, which yields the activity of man an
infinite scope. Through all its kingdoms, to the suburbs and outskirts of
things, it is faithful to the cause whence it had its origin. It always
speaks of Spirit. It suggests the absolute. It is a perpetual effect. It is a
great shadow pointing always to the sun behind us. The aspect of nature is devout. Like
the figure of Jesus, she stands with bended head, and hands folded upon the
breast. The happiest man is he who learns from nature the lesson of worship.
Of that ineffable essence which we
call Spirit, he that thinks most, will say least. We can foresee God in the
coarse, and, as it were, distant phenomena of matter; but when we try to define
and describe himself, both language and thought desert us, and we are as
helpless as fools and savages. That essence refuses to be recorded in
propositions, but when man has worshipped him intellectually, the noblest
ministry of nature is to stand as the apparition of God. It is the organ
through which the universal spirit speaks to the individual, and strives to
lead back the individual to it. When we consider Spirit, we see that
the views already presented do not include the whole circumference of man. We
must add some related thoughts. Three problems are put by nature to
the mind; What is matter? Whence is it? and Whereto? The first of these
questions only, the ideal theory answers. Idealism saith: matter is a
phenomenon, not a substance. Idealism acquaints us with the total disparity
between the evidence of our own being, and the evidence of the world's being.
The one is perfect; the other, incapable of any assurance; the mind is a part
of the nature of things; the world is a divine dream, from which we may
presently awake to the glories and certainties of day. Idealism is a
hypothesis to account for nature by other principles than those of carpentry
and chemistry. Yet, if it only deny the existence of matter, it does not
satisfy the demands of the spirit. It leaves God out of me. It leaves me in
the splendid labyrinth of my perceptions, to wander without end. Then the
heart resists it, because it balks the affections in denying substantive
being to men and women. Nature is so pervaded with human life, that there is
something of humanity in all, and in every particular. But this theory makes
nature foreign to me, and does not account for that consanguinity which we
acknowledge to it.
Let it stand, then, in the present
state of our knowledge, merely as a useful introductory hypothesis, serving
to apprize us of the eternal distinction between the soul and the world.
But when, following the invisible
steps of thought, we come to inquire, Whence is matter? and Whereto? many
truths arise to us out of the recesses of consciousness. We learn that the
highest is present to the soul of man, that the dread universal essence,
which is not wisdom, or love, or beauty, or power, but all in one, and each
entirely, is that for which all things exist, and that by which they are;
that spirit creates; that behind nature, throughout nature, spirit is
present; one and not compound, it does not act upon us from without, that is,
in space and time, but spiritually, or through ourselves: therefore, that
spirit, that is, the Supreme Being, does not build up nature around us, but
puts it forth through us, as the life of the tree puts forth new branches and
leaves through the pores of the old. As a plant upon the earth, so a man
rests upon the bosom of God; he is nourished by unfailing fountains, and
draws, at his need, inexhaustible power. Who can set bounds to the
possibilities of man? Once inhale the upper air, being admitted to behold the
absolute natures of justice and truth, and we learn that man has access to
the entire mind of the Creator, is himself the creator in the finite. This
view, which admonishes me where the sources of wisdom and power lie, and
points to virtue as to "The golden key Which opes the palace of eternity," carries upon its face the highest
certificate of truth, because it animates me to create my own world through
the purification of my soul. The world proceeds from the same
spirit as the body of man. It is a remoter and inferior incarnation of God, a
projection of God in the unconscious. But it differs from the body in one
important respect. It is not, like that, now subjected to the human will. Its
serene order is inviolable by us. It is, therefore, to us, the present
expositor of the divine mind. It is a fixed point whereby we may measure our
departure. As we degenerate, the contrast between us and our house is more
evident. We are as much strangers in nature, as we are aliens from God. We do
not understand the notes of birds. The fox and the deer run away from us; the
bear and tiger rend us. We do not know the uses of more than a few plants, as
corn and the apple, the potato and the vine. Is not the landscape, every
glimpse of which hath a grandeur, a face of him? Yet this may show us what
discord is between man and nature, for you cannot freely admire a noble
landscape, if laborers are digging in the field hard by. The poet finds
something ridiculous in his delight, until he is out of the sight of men.
In inquiries respecting the laws of
the world and the frame of things, the highest reason is always the truest.
That which seems faintly possible -- it is so refined, is often faint and dim
because it is deepest seated in the mind among the eternal verities.
Empirical science is apt to cloud the sight, and, by the very knowledge of
functions and processes, to bereave the student of the manly contemplation of
the whole. The savant becomes unpoetic. But the best read naturalist who
lends an entire and devout attention to truth, will see that there remains
much to learn of his relation to the world, and that it is not to be learned
by any addition or subtraction or other comparison of known quantities, but
is arrived at by untaught sallies of the spirit, by a continual
self-recovery, and by entire humility. He will perceive that there are far
more excellent qualities in the student than preciseness and infallibility;
that a guess is often more fruitful than an indisputable affirmation, and
that a dream may let us deeper into the secret of nature than a hundred
concerted experiments. For, the problems to be solved are
precisely those which the physiologist and the naturalist omit to state. It
is not so pertinent to man to know all the individuals of the animal kingdom,
as it is to know whence and whereto is this tyrannizing unity in his
constitution, which evermore separates and classifies things, endeavoring to
reduce the most diverse to one form. When I behold a rich landscape, it is
less to my purpose to recite correctly the order and superposition of the
strata, than to know why all thought of multitude is lost in a tranquil sense
of unity. I cannot greatly honor minuteness in details, so long as there is
no hint to explain the relation between things and thoughts; no ray upon the
metaphysics of conchology, of botany, of the arts, to show the relation of
the forms of flowers, shells, animals, architecture, to the mind, and build
science upon ideas. In a cabinet of natural history, we become sensible of a
certain occult recognition and sympathy in regard to the most unwieldly and
eccentric forms of beast, fish, and insect. The American who has been
confined, in his own country, to the sight of buildings designed after
foreign models, is surprised on entering York Minster or St. Peter's at Rome,
by the feeling that these structures are imitations also, -- faint copies of
an invisible archetype. Nor has science sufficient humanity, so long as the
naturalist overlooks that wonderful congruity which subsists between man and
the world; of which he is lord, not because he is the most subtile inhabitant,
but because he is its head and heart, and finds something of himself in every
great and small thing, in every mountain stratum, in every new law of color,
fact of astronomy, or atmospheric influence which observation or analysis lay
open. A perception of this mystery inspires the muse of George Herbert, the
beautiful psalmist of the seventeenth century. The following lines are part
of his little poem on Man. "Man is all symmetry, Full of proportions, one limb to another, And to all the world besides. Each part may call the farthest, brother; For head with foot hath private amity, And both with moons and tides. "Nothing hath got so far But man hath caught and kept it as
his prey; His eyes dismount the highest star; He is in little all the sphere. Herbs gladly cure our flesh, because
that they Find their acquaintance there. "For us, the winds do blow,
The earth doth rest, heaven move, and fountains flow;
Nothing
we see, but means our good,
As our delight, or as our treasure;
The whole is either our cupboard of food,
Or cabinet of
pleasure. "The stars have us to bed:
Night draws the curtain; which the sun withdraws.
Music and
light attend our head.
All things unto our flesh are kind,
In
their descent and being; to our mind,
In their ascent and cause. "More servants wait on man
Than he'll take notice of. In every path,
He treads down that
which doth befriend him
When sickness makes him pale and wan.
Oh mighty love! Man is one world, and hath
Another to attend him." The perception of this class of
truths makes the attraction which draws men to science, but the end is lost
sight of in attention to the means. In view of this half-sight of science, we
accept the sentence of Plato, that, "poetry comes nearer to vital truth
than history." Every surmise and vaticination of the mind is entitled to
a certain respect, and we learn to prefer imperfect theories, and sentences,
which contain glimpses of truth, to digested systems which have no one
valuable suggestion. A wise writer will feel that the ends of study and
composition are best answered by announcing undiscovered regions of thought,
and so communicating, through hope, new activity to the torpid spirit. I shall therefore conclude this essay
with some traditions of man and nature, which a certain poet sang to me; and
which, as they have always been in the world, and perhaps reappear to every
bard, may be both history and prophecy. `The foundations of man are not in
matter, but in spirit. But the element of spirit is eternity. To it,
therefore, the longest series of events, the oldest chronologies are young
and recent. In the cycle of the universal man, from whom the known
individuals proceed, centuries are points, and all history is but the epoch
of one degradation. `We distrust and deny inwardly our
sympathy with nature. We own and disown our relation to it, by turns. We are,
like Nebuchadnezzar, dethroned, bereft of reason, and eating grass like an
ox. But who can set limits to the remedial force of spirit? `A man is a god in ruins. When men
are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, as
gently as we awake from dreams. Now, the world would be insane and rabid, if
these disorganizations should last for hundreds of years. It is kept in check
by death and infancy. Infancy is the perpetual Messiah, which comes into the
arms of fallen men, and pleads with them to return to paradise. `Man is the dwarf of himself. Once he
was permeated and dissolved by spirit. He filled nature with his overflowing
currents. Out from him sprang the sun and moon; from man, the sun; from
woman, the moon. The laws of his mind, the periods of his actions externized
themselves into day and night, into the year and the seasons. But, having
made for himself this huge shell, his waters retired; he no longer fills the
veins and veinlets; he is shrunk to a drop. He sees, that the structure still
fits him, but fits him colossally. Say, rather, once it fitted him, now it
corresponds to him from far and on high. He adores timidly his own work. Now
is man the follower of the sun, and woman the follower of the moon. Yet
sometimes he starts in his slumber, and wonders at himself and his house, and
muses strangely at the resemblance betwixt him and it. He perceives that if
his law is still paramount, if still he have elemental power, if his word is
sterling yet in nature, it is not conscious power, it is not inferior but
superior to his will. It is Instinct.' Thus my Orphic poet sang. At present, man applies to nature but
half his force. He works on the world with his understanding alone. He lives
in it, and masters it by a penny-wisdom; and he that works most in it, is but
a half-man, and whilst his arms are strong and his digestion good, his mind
is imbruted, and he is a selfish savage. His relation to nature, his power
over it, is through the understanding; as by manure; the economic use of
fire, wind, water, and the mariner's needle; steam, coal, chemical
agriculture; the repairs of the human body by the dentist and the surgeon.
This is such a resumption of power, as if a banished king should buy his
territories inch by inch, instead of vaulting at once into his throne.
Meantime, in the thick darkness, there are not wanting gleams of a better
light, -- occasional examples of the action of man upon nature with his
entire force, -- with reason as well as understanding. Such examples are; the
traditions of miracles in the earliest antiquity of all nations; the history
of Jesus Christ; the achievements of a principle, as in religious and
political revolutions, and in the abolition of the Slave-trade; the miracles
of enthusiasm, as those reported of Swedenborg, Hohenlohe, and the Shakers;
many obscure and yet contested facts, now arranged under the name of Animal
Magnetism; prayer; eloquence; self-healing; and the wisdom of children. These
are examples of Reason's momentary grasp of the sceptre; the exertions of a
power which exists not in time or space, but an instantaneous in-streaming
causing power. The difference between the actual and the ideal force of man
is happily figured by the schoolmen, in saying, that the knowledge of man is
an evening knowledge, vespertina
cognitio, but that of God is a morning knowledge, matutina cognitio.
The problem of restoring to the world
original and eternal beauty, is solved by the redemption of the soul. The
ruin or the blank, that we see when we look at nature, is in our own eye. The
axis of vision is not coincident with the axis of things, and so they appear
not transparent but opake. The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies
broken and in heaps, is, because man is disunited with himself. He cannot be
a naturalist, until he satisfies all the demands of the spirit. Love is as
much its demand, as perception. Indeed, neither can be perfect without the
other. In the uttermost meaning of the words, thought is devout, and devotion
is thought. Deep calls unto deep. But in actual life, the marriage is not
celebrated. There are innocent men who worship God after the tradition of
their fathers, but their sense of duty has not yet extended to the use of all
their faculties. And there are patient naturalists, but they freeze their
subject under the wintry light of the understanding. Is not prayer also a
study of truth, -- a sally of the soul into the unfound infinite? No man ever
prayed heartily, without learning something. But when a faithful thinker,
resolute to detach every object from personal relations, and see it in the
light of thought, shall, at the same time, kindle science with the fire of
the holiest affections, then will God go forth anew into the creation.
It will not need, when the mind is
prepared for study, to search for objects. The invariable mark of wisdom is
to see the miraculous in the common. What is a day? What is a year? What is
summer? What is woman? What is a child? What is sleep? To our blindness,
these things seem unaffecting. We make fables to hide the baldness of the
fact and conform it, as we say, to the higher law of the mind. But when the
fact is seen under the light of an idea, the gaudy fable fades and shrivels.
We behold the real higher law. To the wise, therefore, a fact is true poetry,
and the most beautiful of fables. These wonders are brought to our own door.
You also are a man. Man and woman, and their social life, poverty, labor,
sleep, fear, fortune, are known to you. Learn that none of these things is
superficial, but that each phenomenon has its roots in the faculties and
affections of the mind. Whilst the abstract question occupies your intellect,
nature brings it in the concrete to be solved by your hands. It were a wise
inquiry for the closet, to compare, point by point, especially at remarkable
crises in life, our daily history, with the rise and progress of ideas in the
mind.
So shall we come to look at the world with new eyes. It shall answer the endless inquiry of the intellect, -- What
is truth? and of the affections, -- What is good? by yielding itself passive
to the educated Will. Then shall come to pass what my poet said; `Nature is
not fixed but fluid. Spirit alters, moulds, makes it. The immobility or
bruteness of nature, is the absence of spirit; to pure spirit, it is fluid,
it is volatile, it is obedient. Every spirit builds itself a house; and
beyond its house a world; and beyond its world, a heaven. Know then, that the
world exists for you. For you is the phenomenon perfect. What we are, that
only can we see. All that Adam had, all that Caesar could, you have and can
do. Adam called his house, heaven and earth; Caesar called his house, Rome;
you perhaps call yours, a cobler's trade; a hundred acres of ploughed land;
or a scholar's garret. Yet line for line and point for point, your dominion
is as great as theirs, though without fine names. Build, therefore, your own
world. As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that
will unfold its great proportions. A correspondent revolution in things will
attend the influx of the spirit. So fast will disagreeable appearances,
swine, spiders, snakes, pests, madhouses, prisons, enemies, vanish; they are
temporary and shall be no more seen. The sordor and filths of nature, the sun
shall dry up, and the wind exhale. As when the summer comes from the south;
the snow-banks melt, and the face of the earth becomes green before it, so
shall the advancing spirit create its ornaments along its path, and carry
with it the beauty it visits, and the song which enchants it; it shall draw
beautiful faces, warm hearts, wise discourse, and heroic acts, around its
way, until evil is no more seen. The kingdom of man over nature, which cometh
not with observation, -- a dominion such as now is beyond his dream of God,
-- he shall enter without more wonder than the blind man feels who is
gradually restored to perfect sight.'
Source: http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/transcendentalism/authors/emerson/essays/naturetext.html#1
Links:
Emerson the philosopher | excerpt, analysis of | motif examined George Perkins Marsh | Darwin | Thoreau
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