NATURE
BY
R. W. EMERSON
A subtle chain of countless rings
The next unto the farthest brings;
The eye reads omens where it goes,
And speaks all languages the rose;
And, striving to be man, the worm
Mounts through all the spires of form.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER I. NATURE
CHAPTER II. COMMODITY
CHAPTER III. BEAUTY
CHAPTER IV. LANGUAGE
CHAPTER V. DISCIPLINE
CHAPTER VI. IDEALISM
CHAPTER VII. SPIRIT
CHAPTER VIII. PROSPECTS
INTRODUCTION.
OUR age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It
writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing
generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their
eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the
universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of
insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and
not the history of theirs? Embosomed for a season in nature, whose
floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the
powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we
grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation
into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines to-day
also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands,
new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws
and worship.
Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable.
We must trust the perfection of the creation so far, as to believe that
whatever curiosity the order of things has awakened in our minds,
the order of things can satisfy. Every man's condition is a solution in
hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life,
before he apprehends it as truth. In like manner, nature is already, in
its forms and tendencies, describing its own design. Let us
interrogate the great apparition, that shines so peacefully around us.
Let us inquire, to what end is nature?
All science has one aim, namely, to find a theory of nature. We have
theories of races and of functions, but scarcely yet a remote
approach to an idea of creation. We are now so far from the road to
truth, that religious teachers dispute and hate each other, and
speculative men are esteemed unsound and frivolous. But to a sound
judgment, the most abstract truth is the most practical. Whenever a
true theory appears, it will be its own evidence. Its test is, that it will
explain all phenomena. Now many are thought not only unexplained
but inexplicable; as language, sleep, madness, dreams, beasts, sex.
Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and
the Soul. Strictly speaking, therefore, all that is separate from us, all
which Philosophy distinguishes as the NOT ME, that is, both nature
and art, all other men and my own body, must be ranked under this
name, NATURE. In enumerating the values of nature and casting up
their sum, I shall use the word in both senses;--in its common and in
its philosophical import. In inquiries so general as our present one,
the inaccuracy is not material; no confusion of thought will occur.
_Nature_, in the common sense, refers to essences unchanged by
man; space, the air, the river, the leaf. _Art_ is applied to the
mixture of his will with the same things, as in a house, a canal, a
statue, a picture. But his operations taken together are so
insignificant, a little chipping, baking, patching, and washing, that in
an impression so grand as that of the world on the human mind, they
do not vary the result.
NATURE.
CHAPTER I.
TO go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber
as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though
nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the
stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds, will separate
between him and what he touches. One might think the atmosphere
was made transparent with this design, to give man, in the heavenly
bodies, the perpetual presence of the sublime. Seen in the streets of
cities, how great they are! If the stars should appear one night in a
thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for
many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had
been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and
light the universe with their admonishing smile.
The stars awaken a certain reverence, because though always present,
they are inaccessible; but all natural objects make a kindred
impression, when the mind is open to their influence. Nature never
wears a mean appearance. Neither does the wisest man extort her
secret, and lose his curiosity by finding out all her perfection. Nature
never became a toy to a wise spirit. The flowers, the animals, the
mountains, reflected the wisdom of his best hour, as much as they
had delighted the simplicity of his childhood.
When we speak of nature in this manner, we have a distinct but most
poetical sense in the mind. We mean the integrity of impression
made by manifold natural objects. It is this which distinguishes the
stick of timber of the wood-cutter, from the tree of the poet. The
charming landscape which I saw this morning, is indubitably made
up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that,
and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the
landscape. There is a property in the horizon which no man has but
he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet. This is the
best part of these men's farms, yet to this their warranty-deeds give
no title.
To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do
not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun
illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the
heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and
outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has
retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood. His
intercourse with heaven and earth, becomes part of his daily food. In
the presence of nature, a wild delight runs through the man, in spite
of real sorrows. Nature says,--he is my creature, and maugre all his
impertinent griefs, he shall be glad with me. Not the sun or the
summer alone, but every hour and season yields its tribute of delight;
for every hour and change corresponds to and authorizes a different
state of the mind, from breathless noon to grimmest midnight.
Nature is a setting that fits equally well a comic or a mourning piece.
In good health, the air is a cordial of incredible virtue. Crossing a
bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky,
without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good
fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink
of fear. In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his
slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the
woods, is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God, a
decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the
guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years. In the
woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can
befall me in life,--no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,)
which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground,--my head
bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,--all mean
egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I
see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I
am part or particle of God. The name of the nearest friend sounds
then foreign and accidental: to be brothers, to be acquaintances,
--master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance. I am the lover of
uncontained and immortal beauty. In the wilderness, I find
something more dear and connate than in streets or villages. In the
tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of the horizon,
man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature.
The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister, is the
suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I
am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them.
The waving of the boughs in the storm, is new to me and old. It
takes me by surprise, and yet is not unknown. Its effect is like that of
a higher thought or a better emotion coming over me, when I
deemed I was thinking justly or doing right.
Yet it is certain that the power to produce this delight, does not
reside in nature, but in man, or in a harmony of both. It is necessary
to use these pleasures with great temperance. For, nature is not
always tricked in holiday attire, but the same scene which yesterday
breathed perfume and glittered as for the frolic of the nymphs, is
overspread with melancholy today. Nature always wears the colors
of the spirit. To a man laboring under calamity, the heat of his own
fire hath sadness in it. Then, there is a kind of contempt of the
landscape felt by him who has just lost by death a dear friend. The
sky is less grand as it shuts down over less worth in the population.
CHAPTER II.
COMMODITY.
WHOEVER considers the final cause of the world, will discern a
multitude of uses that result. They all admit of being thrown into one
of the following classes; Commodity; Beauty; Language; and
Discipline.
Under the general name of Commodity, I rank all those advantages
which our senses owe to nature. This, of course, is a benefit which is
temporary and mediate, not ultimate, like its service to the soul. Yet
although low, it is perfect in its kind, and is the only use of nature
which all men apprehend. The misery of man appears like childish
petulance, when we explore the steady and prodigal provision that
has been made for his support and delight on this green ball which
floats him through the heavens. What angels invented these splendid
ornaments, these rich conveniences, this ocean of air above, this
ocean of water beneath, this firmament of earth between? this zodiac
of lights, this tent of dropping clouds, this striped coat of climates,
this fourfold year? Beasts, fire, water, stones, and corn serve him.
The field is at once his floor, his work-yard, his play-ground, his
garden, and his bed.
"More servants wait on man
Than he'll take notice of."--
Nature, in its ministry to man, is not only the material, but is also the
process and the result. All the parts incessantly work into each
other's hands for the profit of man. The wind sows the seed; the sun
evaporates the sea; the wind blows the vapor to the field; the ice, on
the other side of the planet, condenses rain on this; the rain feeds the
plant; the plant feeds the animal; and thus the endless circulations of
the divine charity nourish man.
The useful arts are reproductions or new combinations by the wit of
man, of the same natural benefactors. He no longer waits for
favoring gales, but by means of steam, he realizes the fable of
Aeolus's bag, and carries the two and thirty winds in the boiler of his
boat. To diminish friction, he paves the road with iron bars,
and, mounting a coach with a ship-load of men, animals, and
merchandise behind him, he darts through the country, from town to
town, like an eagle or a swallow through the air. By the aggregate of
these aids, how is the face of the world changed, from the era of
Noah to that of Napoleon! The private poor man hath cities, ships,
canals, bridges, built for him. He goes to the post-office, and the
human race run on his errands; to the book-shop, and the human
race read and write of all that happens, for him; to the court-house,
and nations repair his wrongs. He sets his house upon the road, and
the human race go forth every morning, and shovel out the snow,
and cut a path for him.
But there is no need of specifying particulars in this class of uses.
The catalogue is endless, and the examples so obvious, that I shall
leave them to the reader's reflection, with the general remark, that
this mercenary benefit is one which has respect to a farther good. A
man is fed, not that he may be fed, but that he may work.
CHAPTER III.
BEAUTY.
A NOBLER want of man is served by nature, namely, the love of
Beauty.
The ancient Greeks called the world _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.
A man's power to connect his thought with its proper symbol, and so
to utter it, depends on the simplicity of his character, that is, upon
his love of truth, and his desire to communicate it without loss. The
corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language. When
simplicity of character and the sovereignty of ideas is broken up by
the prevalence of secondary desires, the desire of riches, of pleasure,
of power, and of praise,--and duplicity and falsehood take place of
simplicity and truth, the power over nature as an interpreter of the
will, is in a degree lost; new imagery ceases to be created, and old
words are perverted to stand for things which are not; a paper
currency is employed, when there is no bullion in the vaults. In due
time, the fraud is manifest, and words lose all power to stimulate the
understanding or the affections. Hundreds of writers may be found
in every long-civilized nation, who for a short time believe, and
make others believe, that they see and utter truths, who do not of
themselves clothe one thought in its natural garment, but who feed
unconsciously on the language created by the primary writers of the
country, those, namely, who hold primarily on nature.
But wise men pierce this rotten diction and fasten words again to
visible things; so that picturesque language is at once a commanding
certificate that he who employs it, is a man in alliance with truth and
God. The moment our discourse rises above the ground line of
familiar facts, and is inflamed with passion or exalted by thought, it
clothes itself in images. A man conversing in earnest, if he watch his
intellectual processes, will find that a material image, more or less
luminous, arises in his mind, cotemporaneous with every thought,
which furnishes the vestment of the thought. Hence, good writing
and brilliant discourse are perpetual allegories. This imagery is
spontaneous. It is the blending of experience with the present action
of the mind. It is proper creation. It is the working of the Original
Cause through the instruments he has already made.
These facts may suggest the advantage which the country-life
possesses for a powerful mind, over the artificial and curtailed life
of cities. We know more from nature than we can at will
communicate. Its light flows into the mind evermore, and we forget
its presence. The poet, the orator, bred in the woods, whose senses
have been nourished by their fair and appeasing changes, year after
year, without design and without heed,--shall not lose their lesson
altogether, in the roar of cities or the broil of politics. Long hereafter,
amidst agitation and terror in national councils,--in the hour of
revolution,--these solemn images shall reappear in their morning
lustre, as fit symbols and words of the thoughts which the passing
events shall awaken. At the call of a noble sentiment, again the
woods wave, the pines murmur, the river rolls and shines, and the
cattle low upon the mountains, as he saw and heard them in his
infancy. And with these forms, the spells of persuasion, the keys of
power are put into his hands.
3. We are thus assisted by natural objects in the expression of
particular meanings. But how great a language to convey such
pepper-corn informations! Did it need such noble races of creatures,
this profusion of forms, this host of orbs in heaven, to furnish man
with the dictionary and grammar of his municipal speech? Whilst
we use this grand cipher to expedite the affairs of our pot and kettle,
we feel that we have not yet put it to its use, neither are able. We are
like travellers using the cinders of a volcano to roast their eggs.
Whilst we see that it always stands ready to clothe what we would
say, we cannot avoid the question, whether the characters are not
significant of themselves. Have mountains, and waves, and skies, no
significance but what we consciously give them, when we employ
them as emblems of our thoughts? The world is emblematic. Parts of
speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of
the human mind. The laws of moral nature answer to those of matter
as face to face in a glass. "The visible world and the relation of its
parts, is the dial plate of the invisible." The axioms of physics
translate the laws of ethics. Thus, "the whole is greater than its part;"
"reaction is equal to action;" "the smallest weight may be made to
lift the greatest, the difference of weight being compensated by
time;" and many the like propositions, which have an ethical as well
as physical sense. These propositions have a much more extensive
and universal sense when applied to human life, than when confined
to technical use.
In like manner, the memorable words of history, and the proverbs of
nations, consist usually of a natural fact, selected as a picture or
parable of a moral truth. Thus; A rolling stone gathers no moss; A
bird in the hand is worth two in the bush; A cripple in the right way,
will beat a racer in the wrong; Make hay while the sun shines; 'T is
hard to carry a full cup even; Vinegar is the son of wine; The last
ounce broke the camel's back; Long-lived trees make roots first;
--and the like. In their primary sense these are trivial facts, but we
repeat them for the value of their analogical import. What is true of
proverbs, is true of all fables, parables, and allegories.
This relation between the mind and matter is not fancied by some
poet, but stands in the will of God, and so is free to be known by all
men. It appears to men, or it does not appear. When in fortunate
hours we ponder this miracle, the wise man doubts, if, at all other
times, he is not blind and deaf;
--"Can these things be,
And overcome us like a summer's cloud,
Without our special wonder?"
for the universe becomes transparent, and the light of higher laws
than its own, shines through it. It is the standing problem which has
exercised the wonder and the study of every fine genius since the
world began; from the era of the Egyptians and the Brahmins, to that
of Pythagoras, of Plato, of Bacon, of Leibnitz, of Swedenborg.
There sits the Sphinx at the road-side, and from age to age, as each
prophet comes by, he tries his fortune at reading her riddle. There
seems to be a necessity in spirit to manifest itself in material forms;
and day and night, river and storm, beast and bird, acid and alkali,
preexist in necessary Ideas in the mind of God, and are what they
are by virtue of preceding affections, in the world of spirit. A Fact is
the end or last issue of spirit. The visible creation is the terminus or
the circumference of the invisible world. "Material objects," said a
French philosopher, "are necessarily kinds of _scoriae_ of the
substantial thoughts of the Creator, which must always preserve an
exact relation to their first origin; in other words, visible nature must
have a spiritual and moral side."
This doctrine is abstruse, and though the images of "garment,"
"scoriae," "mirror," &c., may stimulate the fancy, we must summon
the aid of subtler and more vital expositors to make it plain. "Every
scripture is to be interpreted by the same spirit which gave it forth,"
--is the fundamental law of criticism. A life in harmony with nature,
the love of truth and of virtue, will purge the eyes to understand her
text. By degrees we may come to know the primitive sense of the
permanent objects of nature, so that the world shall be to us an open
book, and every form significant of its hidden life and final cause.
A new interest surprises us, whilst, under the view now suggested,
we contemplate the fearful extent and multitude of objects; since
"every object rightly seen, unlocks a new faculty of the soul." That
which was unconscious truth, becomes, when interpreted and
defined in an object, a part of the domain of knowledge,--a new
weapon in the magazine of power.
CHAPTER V.
DISCIPLINE.
IN view of the significance of nature, we arrive at once at a new fact,
that nature is a discipline. This use of the world includes the
preceding uses, as parts of itself.
Space, time, society, labor, climate, food, locomotion, the animals,
the mechanical forces, give us sincerest lessons, day by day, whose
meaning is unlimited. They educate both the Understanding and the
Reason. Every property of matter is a school for the understanding,
--its solidity or resistance, its inertia, its extension, its figure, its
divisibility. The understanding adds, divides, combines, measures,
and finds nutriment and room for its activity in this worthy scene.
Meantime, Reason transfers all these lessons into its own world of
thought, by perceiving the analogy that marries Matter and Mind.
1. Nature is a discipline of the understanding in intellectual truths.
Our dealing with sensible objects is a constant exercise in the
necessary lessons of difference, of likeness, of order, of being and
seeming, of progressive arrangement; of ascent from particular to
general; of combination to one end of manifold forces. Proportioned
to the importance of the organ to be formed, is the extreme care with
which its tuition is provided,--a care pretermitted in no single case.
What tedious training, day after day, year after year, never ending,
to form the common sense; what continual reproduction of
annoyances, inconveniences, dilemmas; what rejoicing over us of
little men; what disputing of prices, what reckonings of interest,
--and all to form the Hand of the mind;--to instruct us that "good
thoughts are no better than good dreams, unless they be executed!"
The same good office is performed by Property and its filial systems
of debt and credit. Debt, grinding debt, whose iron face the widow,
the orphan, and the sons of genius fear and hate;--debt, which
consumes so much time, which so cripples and disheartens a great
spirit with cares that seem so base, is a preceptor whose lessons
cannot be forgone, and is needed most by those who suffer from it
most. Moreover, property, which has been well compared to snow,
--"if it fall level to-day, it will be blown into drifts to-morrow,"--is
the surface action of internal machinery, like the index on the face of a
clock. Whilst now it is the gymnastics of the understanding, it is
hiving in the foresight of the spirit, experience in profounder laws.
The whole character and fortune of the individual are affected by the
least inequalities in the culture of the understanding; for example, in
the perception of differences. Therefore is Space, and therefore
Time, that man may know that things are not huddled and lumped,
but sundered and individual. A bell and a plough have each their use,
and neither can do the office of the other. Water is good to drink,
coal to burn, wool to wear; but wool cannot be drunk, nor water
spun, nor coal eaten. The wise man shows his wisdom in separation,
in gradation, and his scale of creatures and of merits is as wide as
nature. The foolish have no range in their scale, but suppose every
man is as every other man. What is not good they call the worst, and
what is not hateful, they call the best.
In like manner, what good heed, nature forms in us! She pardons no
mistakes. Her yea is yea, and her nay, nay.
The first steps in Agriculture, Astronomy, Zoölogy, (those first steps
which the farmer, the hunter, and the sailor take,) teach that nature's
dice are always loaded; that in her heaps and rubbish are concealed
sure and useful results.
How calmly and genially the mind apprehends one after another the
laws of physics! What noble emotions dilate the mortal as he enters
into the counsels of the creation, and feels by knowledge the
privilege to BE! His insight refines him. The beauty of nature shines
in his own breast. Man is greater that he can see this, and the
universe less, because Time and Space relations vanish as laws are
known.
Here again we are impressed and even daunted by the immense
Universe to be explored. "What we know, is a point to what we do
not know." Open any recent journal of science, and weigh the
problems suggested concerning Light, Heat, Electricity, Magnetism,
Physiology, Geology, and judge whether the interest of natural
science is likely to be soon exhausted.
Passing by many particulars of the discipline of nature, we must not
omit to specify two.
The exercise of the Will or the lesson of power is taught in every
event. From the child's successive possession of his several senses
up to the hour when he saith, "Thy will be done!" he is learning the
secret, that he can reduce under his will, not only particular events,
but great classes, nay the whole series of events, and so conform all
facts to his character. Nature is thoroughly mediate. It is made to
serve. It receives the dominion of man as meekly as the ass on
which the Saviour rode. It offers all its kingdoms to man as the raw
material which he may mould into what is useful. Man is never
weary of working it up. He forges the subtile and delicate air into
wise and melodious words, and gives them wing as angels of
persuasion and command. One after another, his victorious thought
comes up with and reduces all things, until the world becomes, at
last, only a realized will,--the double of the man.
2. Sensible objects conform to the premonitions of Reason and
reflect the conscience. All things are moral; and in their boundless
changes have an unceasing reference to spiritual nature. Therefore is
nature glorious with form, color, and motion, that every globe in the
remotest heaven; every chemical change from the rudest crystal up
to the laws of life; every change of vegetation from the first
principle of growth in the eye of a leaf, to the tropical forest and
antediluvian coal-mine; every animal function from the sponge up to
Hercules, shall hint or thunder to man the laws of right and wrong,
and echo the Ten Commandments. Therefore is nature ever the ally
of Religion: lends all her pomp and riches to the religious sentiment.
Prophet and priest, David, Isaiah, Jesus, have drawn deeply from
this source. This ethical character so penetrates the bone and marrow
of nature, as to seem the end for which it was made. Whatever
private purpose is answered by any member or part, this is its public
and universal function, and is never omitted. Nothing in nature is
exhausted in its first use. When a thing has served an end to the
uttermost, it is wholly new for an ulterior service. In God, every end
is converted into a new means. Thus the use of commodity, regarded
by itself, is mean and squalid. But it is to the mind an education in
the doctrine of Use, namely, that a thing is good only so far as it
serves; that a conspiring of parts and efforts to the production of an
end, is essential to any being. The first and gross manifestation of
this truth, is our inevitable and hated training in values and wants, in
corn and meat.
It has already been illustrated, that every natural process is a version
of a moral sentence. The moral law lies at the centre of nature and
radiates to the circumference. It is the pith and marrow of every
substance, every relation, and every process. All things with which
we deal, preach to us. What is a farm but a mute gospel? The chaff
and the wheat, weeds and plants, blight, rain, insects, sun,--it is a
sacred emblem from the first furrow of spring to the last stack which
the snow of winter overtakes in the fields. But the sailor, the
shepherd, the miner, the merchant, in their several resorts, have each
an experience precisely parallel, and leading to the same conclusion:
because all organizations are radically alike. Nor can it be doubted
that this moral sentiment which thus scents the air, grows in the
grain, and impregnates the waters of the world, is caught by man
and sinks into his soul. The moral influence of nature upon every
individual is that amount of truth which it illustrates to him. Who
can estimate this? Who can guess how much firmness the sea-beaten
rock has taught the fisherman? how much tranquillity has been
reflected to man from the azure sky, over whose unspotted deeps the
winds forevermore drive flocks of stormy clouds, and leave no
wrinkle or stain? how much industry and providence and affection
we have caught from the pantomime of brutes? What a searching
preacher of self-command is the varying phenomenon of Health!
Herein is especially apprehended the unity of Nature,--the unity in
variety,--which meets us everywhere. All the endless variety of
things make an identical impression. Xenophanes complained in his
old age, that, look where he would, all things hastened back to Unity.
He was weary of seeing the same entity in the tedious variety of
forms. The fable of Proteus has a cordial truth. A leaf, a drop, a
crystal, a moment of time is related to the whole, and partakes of the
perfection of the whole. Each particle is a microcosm, and faithfully
renders the likeness of the world.
Not only resemblances exist in things whose analogy is obvious, as
when we detect the type of the human hand in the flipper of the
fossil saurus, but also in objects wherein there is great superficial
unlikeness. Thus architecture is called "frozen music," by De Stael
and Goethe. Vitruvius thought an architect should be a musician. "A
Gothic church," said Coleridge, "is a petrified religion." Michael
Angelo maintained, that, to an architect, a knowledge of anatomy is
essential. In Haydn's oratorios, the notes present to the imagination
not only motions, as, of the snake, the stag, and the elephant, but
colors also; as the green grass. The law of harmonic sounds
reappears in the harmonic colors. The granite is differenced in its
laws only by the more or less of heat, from the river that wears it
away. The river, as it flows, resembles the air that flows over it; the
air resembles the light which traverses it with more subtile currents;
the light resembles the heat which rides with it through Space. Each
creature is only a modification of the other; the likeness in them is
more than the difference, and their radical law is one and the same.
A rule of one art, or a law of one organization, holds true throughout
nature. So intimate is this Unity, that, it is easily seen, it lies under
the undermost garment of nature, and betrays its source in Universal
Spirit. For, it pervades Thought also. Every universal truth which we
express in words, implies or supposes every other truth. _Omne
verum vero consonat_. It is like a great circle on a sphere,
comprising all possible circles; which, however, may be drawn, and
comprise it, in like manner. Every such truth is the absolute Ens
seen from one side. But it has innumerable sides.
The central Unity is still more conspicuous in actions. Words are
finite organs of the infinite mind. They cannot cover the dimensions
of what is in truth. They break, chop, and impoverish it. An action is
the perfection and publication of thought. A right action seems to fill
the eye, and to be related to all nature. "The wise man, in doing one
thing, does all; or, in the one thing he does rightly, he sees the
likeness of all which is done rightly."
Words and actions are not the attributes of brute nature. They
introduce us to the human form, of which all other organizations
appear to be degradations. When this appears among so many that
surround it, the spirit prefers it to all others. It says, 'From such as
this, have I drawn joy and knowledge; in such as this, have I found
and beheld myself; I will speak to it; it can speak again; it can yield
me thought already formed and alive.' In fact, the eye,--the mind,--is
always accompanied by these forms, male and female; and these are
incomparably the richest informations of the power and order that
lie at the heart of things. Unfortunately, every one of them bears the
marks as of some injury; is marred and superficially defective.
Nevertheless, far different from the deaf and dumb nature around
them, these all rest like fountain-pipes on the unfathomed sea of
thought and virtue whereto they alone, of all organizations, are the
entrances.
It were a pleasant inquiry to follow into detail their ministry to our
education, but where would it stop? We are associated in adolescent
and adult life with some friends, who, like skies and waters, are
coextensive with our idea; who, answering each to a certain
affection of the soul, satisfy our desire on that side; whom we lack
power to put at such focal distance from us, that we can mend or
even analyze them. We cannot choose but love them. When much
intercourse with a friend has supplied us with a standard of
excellence, and has increased our respect for the resources of God
who thus sends a real person to outgo our ideal; when he has,
moreover, become an object of thought, and, whilst his character
retains all its unconscious effect, is converted in the mind into solid
and sweet wisdom,--it is a sign to us that his office is closing, and he
is commonly withdrawn from our sight in a short time.
CHAPTER VI.
IDEALISM.
THUS is the unspeakable but intelligible and practicable meaning of
the world conveyed to man, the immortal pupil, in every object of
sense. To this one end of Discipline, all parts of nature conspire.
A noble doubt perpetually suggests itself, whether this end be not
the Final Cause of the Universe; and whether nature outwardly
exists. It is a sufficient account of that Appearance we call the
World, that God will teach a human mind, and so makes it the
receiver of a certain number of congruent sensations, which we call
sun and moon, man and woman, house and trade. In my utter
impotence to test the authenticity of the report of my senses, to
know whether the impressions they make on me correspond with
outlying objects, what difference does it make, whether Orion is up
there in heaven, or some god paints the image in the firmament of
the soul? The relations of parts and the end of the whole remaining
the same, what is the difference, whether land and sea interact, and
worlds revolve and intermingle without number or end,--deep
yawning under deep, and galaxy balancing galaxy, throughout
absolute space,--or, whether, without relations of time and space, the
same appearances are inscribed in the constant faith of man?
Whether nature enjoy a substantial existence without, or is only in
the apocalypse of the mind, it is alike useful and alike venerable to
me. Be it what it may, it is ideal to me, so long as I cannot try the
accuracy of my senses.
The frivolous make themselves merry with the Ideal theory, if its
consequences were burlesque; as if it affected the stability of nature.
It surely does not. God never jests with us, and will not compromise
the end of nature, by permitting any inconsequence in its procession.
Any distrust of the permanence of laws, would paralyze the faculties
of man. Their permanence is sacredly respected, and his faith therein
is perfect. The wheels and springs of man are all set to the
hypothesis of the permanence of nature. We are not built like a ship
to be tossed, but like a house to stand. It is a natural consequence of
this structure, that, so long as the active powers predominate over
the reflective, we resist with indignation any hint that nature is more
short-lived or mutable than spirit. The broker, the wheelwright, the
carpenter, the toll-man, are much displeased at the intimation.
But whilst we acquiesce entirely in the permanence of natural laws,
the question of the absolute existence of nature still remains open. It
is the uniform effect of culture on the human mind, not to shake our
faith in the stability of particular phenomena, as of heat, water, azote;
but to lead us to regard nature as a phenomenon, not a substance; to
attribute necessary existence to spirit; to esteem nature as an
accident and an effect.
To the senses and the unrenewed understanding, belongs a sort of
instinctive belief in the absolute existence of nature. In their view,
man and nature are indissolubly joined. Things are ultimates, and
they never look beyond their sphere. The presence of Reason mars
this faith. The first effort of thought tends to relax this despotism of
the senses, which binds us to nature as if we were a part of it, and
shows us nature aloof, and, as it were, afloat. Until this higher
agency intervened, the animal eye sees, with wonderful accuracy,
sharp outlines and colored surfaces. When the eye of Reason opens,
to outline and surface are at once added, grace and expression.
These proceed from imagination and affection, and abate somewhat
of the angular distinctness of objects. If the Reason be stimulated to
more earnest vision, outlines and surfaces become transparent, and
are no longer seen; causes and spirits are seen through them. The
best moments of life are these delicious awakenings of the higher
powers, and the reverential withdrawing of nature before its God.
Let us proceed to indicate the effects of culture. 1. Our first
institution in the Ideal philosophy is a hint from nature herself.
Nature is made to conspire with spirit to emancipate us. Certain
mechanical changes, a small alteration in our local position apprizes
us of a dualism. We are strangely affected by seeing the shore from
a moving ship, from a balloon, or through the tints of an unusual sky.
The least change in our point of view, gives the whole world a
pictorial air. A man who seldom rides, needs only to get into a coach
and traverse his own town, to turn the street into a puppet-show. The
men, the women,--talking, running, bartering, fighting,--the earnest
mechanic, the lounger, the beggar, the boys, the dogs, are unrealized
at once, or, at least, wholly detached from all relation to the observer,
and seen as apparent, not substantial beings. What new thoughts are
suggested by seeing a face of country quite familiar, in the rapid
movement of the rail-road car! Nay, the most wonted objects, (make
a very slight change in the point of vision,) please us most. In a
camera obscura, the butcher's cart, and the figure of one of our own
family amuse us. So a portrait of a well-known face gratifies us.
Turn the eyes upside down, by looking at the landscape through
your legs, and how agreeable is the picture, though you have seen it
any time these twenty years!
In these cases, by mechanical means, is suggested the difference
between the observer and the spectacle,--between man and nature.
Hence arises a pleasure mixed with awe; I may say, a low degree of
the sublime is felt from the fact, probably, that man is hereby
apprized, that, whilst the world is a spectacle, something in himself
is stable.
2. In a higher manner, the poet communicates the same pleasure. By
a few strokes he delineates, as on air, the sun, the mountain, the
camp, the city, the hero, the maiden, not different from what we
know them, but only lifted from the ground and afloat before the eye.
He unfixes the land and the sea, makes them revolve around the axis
of his primary thought, and disposes them anew. Possessed himself
by a heroic passion, he uses matter as symbols of it. The sensual
man conforms thoughts to things; the poet conforms things to his
thoughts. The one esteems nature as rooted and fast; the other, as
fluid, and impresses his being thereon. To him, the refractory world
is ductile and flexible; he invests dust and stones with humanity, and
makes them the words of the Reason. The Imagination may be
defined to be, the use which the Reason makes of the material world.
Shakspeare possesses the power of subordinating nature for the
purposes of expression, beyond all poets. His imperial muse tosses
the creation like a bauble from hand to hand, and uses it to embody
any caprice of thought that is upper-most in his mind. The remotest
spaces of nature are visited, and the farthest sundered things are
brought together, by a subtle spiritual connection. We are made
aware that magnitude of material things is relative, and all objects
shrink and expand to serve the passion of the poet. Thus, in his
sonnets, the lays of birds, the scents and dyes of flowers, he finds to
be the _shadow_ of his beloved; time, which keeps her from him, is
his _chest_; the suspicion she has awakened, is her _ornament_;
The ornament of beauty is Suspect,
A crow which flies in heaven's sweetest air.
His passion is not the fruit of chance; it swells, as he speaks, to a
city, or a state.
No, it was builded far from accident;
It suffers not in smiling pomp, nor falls
Under the brow of thralling discontent;
It fears not policy, that heretic,
That works on leases of short numbered hours,
But all alone stands hugely politic.
In the strength of his constancy, the Pyramids seem to him recent
and transitory. The freshness of youth and love dazzles him with its
resemblance to morning.
Take those lips away
Which so sweetly were forsworn;
And those eyes,--the break of day,
Lights that do mislead the morn.
The wild beauty of this hyperbole, I may say, in passing, it would
not be easy to match in literature.
This transfiguration which all material objects undergo through the
passion of the poet,--this power which he exerts to dwarf the great,
to magnify the small,--might be illustrated by a thousand examples
from his Plays. I have before me the Tempest, and will cite only
these few lines.
ARIEL. The strong based promontory
Have I made shake, and by the spurs plucked up
The pine and cedar.
Prospero calls for music to soothe the frantic Alonzo, and his
companions;
A solemn air, and the best comforter
To an unsettled fancy, cure thy brains
Now useless, boiled within thy skull.
Again;
The charm dissolves apace,
And, as the morning steals upon the night,
Melting the darkness, so their rising senses
Begin to chase the ignorant fumes that mantle
Their clearer reason.
Their understanding
Begins to swell: and the approaching tide
Will shortly fill the reasonable shores
That now lie foul and muddy.
The perception of real affinities between events, (that is to say, of
_ideal_ affinities, for those only are real,) enables the poet thus to
make free with the most imposing forms and phenomena of the
world, and to assert the predominance of the soul.
3. Whilst thus the poet animates nature with his own thoughts, he
differs from the philosopher only herein, that the one proposes
Beauty as his main end; the other Truth. But the philosopher, not
less than the poet, postpones the apparent order and relations of
things to the empire of thought. "The problem of philosophy,"
according to Plato, "is, for all that exists conditionally, to find a
ground unconditioned and absolute." It proceeds on the faith that a
law determines all phenomena, which being known, the phenomena
can be predicted. That law, when in the mind, is an idea. Its beauty
is infinite. The true philosopher and the true poet are one, and a
beauty, which is truth, and a truth, which is beauty, is the aim of
both. Is not the charm of one of Plato's or Aristotle's definitions,
strictly like that of the Antigone of Sophocles? It is, in both cases,
that a spiritual life has been imparted to nature; that the solid
seeming block of matter has been pervaded and dissolved by a
thought; that this feeble human being has penetrated the vast masses
of nature with an informing soul, and recognised itself in their
harmony, that is, seized their law. In physics, when this is attained,
the memory disburthens itself of its cumbrous catalogues of
particulars, and carries centuries of observation in a single formula.
Thus even in physics, the material is degraded before the spiritual.
The astronomer, the geometer, rely on their irrefragable analysis,
and disdain the results of observation. The sublime remark of Euler
on his law of arches, "This will be found contrary to all experience,
yet is true;" had already transferred nature into the mind, and left
matter like an outcast corpse.
4. Intellectual science has been observed to beget invariably a doubt
of the existence of matter. Turgot said, "He that has never doubted
the existence of matter, may be assured he has no aptitude for
metaphysical inquiries." It fastens the attention upon immortal
necessary uncreated natures, that is, upon Ideas; and in their
presence, we feel that the outward circumstance is a dream and a
shade. Whilst we wait in this Olympus of gods, we think of nature as
an appendix to the soul. We ascend into their region, and know that
these are the thoughts of the Supreme Being. "These are they who
were set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth
was. When he prepared the heavens, they were there; when he
established the clouds above, when he strengthened the fountains of
the deep. Then they were by him, as one brought up with him. Of
them took he counsel."
Their influence is proportionate. As objects of science, they are
accessible to few men. Yet all men are capable of being raised by
piety or by passion, into their region. And no man touches these
divine natures, without becoming, in some degree, himself divine.
Like a new soul, they renew the body. We become physically
nimble and lightsome; we tread on air; life is no longer irksome, and
we think it will never be so. No man fears age or misfortune or death,
in their serene company, for he is transported out of the district of
change. Whilst we behold unveiled the nature of Justice and Truth,
we learn the difference between the absolute and the conditional or
relative. We apprehend the absolute. As it were, for the first time,
_we exist_. We become immortal, for we learn that time and space
are relations of matter; that, with a perception of truth, or a virtuous
will, they have no affinity.
5. Finally, religion and ethics, which may be fitly called,--the
practice of ideas, or the introduction of ideas into life,--have an
analogous effect with all lower culture, in degrading nature and
suggesting its dependence on spirit. Ethics and religion differ herein;
that the one is the system of human duties commencing from man;
the other, from God. Religion includes the personality of God;
Ethics does not. They are one to our present design. They both put
nature under foot. The first and last lesson of religion is, "The things
that are seen, are temporal; the things that are unseen, are eternal." It
puts an affront upon nature. It does that for the unschooled, which
philosophy does for Berkeley and Viasa. The uniform language that
may be heard in the churches of the most ignorant sects, is,
--"Contemn the unsubstantial shows of the world; they are vanities,
dreams, shadows, unrealities; seek the realities of religion." The
devotee flouts nature. Some theosophists have arrived at a certain
hostility and indignation towards matter, as the Manichean and
Plotinus. They distrusted in themselves any looking back to these
flesh-pots of Egypt. Plotinus was ashamed of his body. In short, they
might all say of matter, what Michael Angelo said of external beauty,
"it is the frail and weary weed, in which God dresses the soul, which
he has called into time."
It appears that motion, poetry, physical and intellectual science, and
religion, all tend to affect our convictions of the reality of the
external world. But I own there is something ungrateful in
expanding too curiously the particulars of the general proposition,
that all culture tends to imbue us with idealism. I have no hostility to
nature, but a child's love to it. I expand and live in the warm day like
corn and melons. Let us speak her fair. I do not wish to fling stones
at my beautiful mother, nor soil my gentle nest. I only wish to
indicate the true position of nature in regard to man, wherein to
establish man, all right education tends; as the ground which to
attain is the object of human life, that is, of man's connection with
nature. Culture inverts the vulgar views of nature, and brings the
mind to call that apparent, which it uses to call real, and that real,
which it uses to call visionary. Children, it is true, believe in the
external world. The belief that it appears only, is an afterthought, but
with culture, this faith will as surely arise on the mind as did the first.
The advantage of the ideal theory over the popular faith, is this, that
it presents the world in precisely that view which is most desirable
to the mind. It is, in fact, the view which Reason, both speculative
and practical, that is, philosophy and virtue, take. For, seen in the
light of thought, the world always is phenomenal; and virtue
subordinates it to the mind. Idealism sees the world in God. It
beholds the whole circle of persons and things, of actions and events,
of country and religion, not as painfully accumulated, atom after
atom, act after act, in an aged creeping Past, but as one vast picture,
which God paints on the instant eternity, for the contemplation of
the soul. Therefore the soul holds itself off from a too trivial and
microscopic study of the universal tablet. It respects the end too
much, to immerse itself in the means. It sees something more
important in Christianity, than the scandals of ecclesiastical history,
or the niceties of criticism; and, very incurious concerning persons
or miracles, and not at all disturbed by chasms of historical evidence,
it accepts from God the phenomenon, as it finds it, as the pure and
awful form of religion in the world. It is not hot and passionate at
the appearance of what it calls its own good or bad fortune, at the
union or opposition of other persons. No man is its enemy. It accepts
whatsoever befalls, as part of its lesson. It is a watcher more than a
doer, and it is a doer, only that it may the better watch.
CHAPTER VII.
SPIRIT.
IT is essential to a true theory of nature and of man, that it should
contain somewhat progressive. Uses that are exhausted or that may
be, and facts that end in the statement, cannot be all that is true of
this brave lodging wherein man is harbored, and wherein all his
faculties find appropriate and endless exercise. And all the uses of
nature admit of being summed in one, which yields the activity of
man an infinite scope. Through all its kingdoms, to the suburbs and
outskirts of things, it is faithful to the cause whence it had its origin.
It always speaks of Spirit. It suggests the absolute. It is a perpetual
effect. It is a great shadow pointing always to the sun behind us.
The aspect of nature is devout. Like the figure of Jesus, she stands
with bended head, and hands folded upon the breast. The happiest
man is he who learns from nature the lesson of worship.
Of that ineffable essence which we call Spirit, he that thinks most,
will say least. We can foresee God in the coarse, and, as it were,
distant phenomena of matter; but when we try to define and describe
himself, both language and thought desert us, and we are as helpless
as fools and savages. That essence refuses to be recorded in
propositions, but when man has worshipped him intellectually, the
noblest ministry of nature is to stand as the apparition of God. It is
the organ through which the universal spirit speaks to the individual,
and strives to lead back the individual to it.
When we consider Spirit, we see that the views already presented do
not include the whole circumference of man. We must add some
related thoughts.
Three problems are put by nature to the mind; What is matter?
Whence is it? and Whereto? The first of these questions only, the
ideal theory answers. Idealism saith: matter is a phenomenon, not a
substance. Idealism acquaints us with the total disparity between the
evidence of our own being, and the evidence of the world's being.
The one is perfect; the other, incapable of any assurance; the mind is
a part of the nature of things; the world is a divine dream, from
which we may presently awake to the glories and certainties of day.
Idealism is a hypothesis to account for nature by other principles
than those of carpentry and chemistry. Yet, if it only deny the
existence of matter, it does not satisfy the demands of the spirit. It
leaves God out of me. It leaves me in the splendid labyrinth of my
perceptions, to wander without end. Then the heart resists it, because
it balks the affections in denying substantive being to men and
women. Nature is so pervaded with human life, that there is
something of humanity in all, and in every particular. But this theory
makes nature foreign to me, and does not account for that
consanguinity which we acknowledge to it.
Let it stand, then, in the present state of our knowledge, merely as a
useful introductory hypothesis, serving to apprize us of the eternal
distinction between the soul and the world.
But when, following the invisible steps of thought, we come to
inquire, Whence is matter? and Whereto? many truths arise to us out
of the recesses of consciousness. We learn that the highest is present
to the soul of man, that the dread universal essence, which is not
wisdom, or love, or beauty, or power, but all in one, and each
entirely, is that for which all things exist, and that by which they are;
that spirit creates; that behind nature, throughout nature, spirit is
present; one and not compound, it does not act upon us from without,
that is, in space and time, but spiritually, or through ourselves:
therefore, that spirit, that is, the Supreme Being, does not build up
nature around us, but puts it forth through us, as the life of the tree
puts forth new branches and leaves through the pores of the old. As
a plant upon the earth, so a man rests upon the bosom of God; he is
nourished by unfailing fountains, and draws, at his need,
inexhaustible power. Who can set bounds to the possibilities of man?
Once inhale the upper air, being admitted to behold the absolute
natures of justice and truth, and we learn that man has access to the
entire mind of the Creator, is himself the creator in the finite. This
view, which admonishes me where the sources of wisdom and
power lie, and points to virtue as to
"The golden key
Which opes the palace of eternity,"
carries upon its face the highest certificate of truth, because it
animates me to create my own world through the purification of my
soul.
The world proceeds from the same spirit as the body of man. It is a
remoter and inferior incarnation of God, a projection of God in the
unconscious. But it differs from the body in one important respect. It
is not, like that, now subjected to the human will. Its serene order is
inviolable by us. It is, therefore, to us, the present expositor of the
divine mind. It is a fixed point whereby we may measure our
departure. As we degenerate, the contrast between us and our house
is more evident. We are as much strangers in nature, as we are aliens
from God. We do not understand the notes of birds. The fox and the
deer run away from us; the bear and tiger rend us. We do not know
the uses of more than a few plants, as corn and the apple, the potato
and the vine. Is not the landscape, every glimpse of which hath a
grandeur, a face of him? Yet this may show us what discord is
between man and nature, for you cannot freely admire a noble
landscape, if laborers are digging in the field hard by. The poet finds
something ridiculous in his delight, until he is out of the sight of
men.
CHAPTER VIII.
PROSPECTS.
IN inquiries respecting the laws of the world and the frame of things,
the highest reason is always the truest. That which seems faintly
possible--it is so refined, is often faint and dim because it is deepest
seated in the mind among the eternal verities. Empirical science is
apt to cloud the sight, and, by the very knowledge of functions and
processes, to bereave the student of the manly contemplation of the
whole. The savant becomes unpoetic. But the best read naturalist
who lends an entire and devout attention to truth, will see that there
remains much to learn of his relation to the world, and that it is not
to be learned by any addition or subtraction or other comparison of
known quantities, but is arrived at by untaught sallies of the spirit,
by a continual self-recovery, and by entire humility. He will
perceive that there are far more excellent qualities in the student
than preciseness and infallibility; that a guess is often more fruitful
than an indisputable affirmation, and that a dream may let us deeper
into the secret of nature than a hundred concerted experiments.
For, the problems to be solved are precisely those which the
physiologist and the naturalist omit to state. It is not so pertinent to
man to know all the individuals of the animal kingdom, as it is to
know whence and whereto is this tyrannizing unity in his
constitution, which evermore separates and classifies things,
endeavoring to reduce the most diverse to one form. When I behold
a rich landscape, it is less to my purpose to recite correctly the order
and superposition of the strata, than to know why all thought of
multitude is lost in a tranquil sense of unity. I cannot greatly honor
minuteness in details, so long as there is no hint to explain
the relation between things and thoughts; no ray upon the
_metaphysics_ of conchology, of botany, of the arts, to show the
relation of the forms of flowers, shells, animals, architecture, to the
mind, and build science upon ideas. In a cabinet of natural history,
we become sensible of a certain occult recognition and sympathy in
regard to the most unwieldly and eccentric forms of beast, fish, and
insect. The American who has been confined, in his own country, to
the sight of buildings designed after foreign models, is surprised on
entering York Minster or St. Peter's at Rome, by the feeling that
these structures are imitations also,--faint copies of an invisible
archetype. Nor has science sufficient humanity, so long as the
naturalist overlooks that wonderful congruity which subsists
between man and the world; of which he is lord, not because he is
the most subtile inhabitant, but because he is its head and heart, and
finds something of himself in every great and small thing, in every
mountain stratum, in every new law of color, fact of astronomy, or
atmospheric influence which observation or analysis lay open. A
perception of this mystery inspires the muse of George Herbert, the
beautiful psalmist of the seventeenth century. The following lines
are part of his little poem on Man.
"Man is all symmetry,
Full of proportions, one limb to another,
And to all the world besides.
Each part may call the farthest, brother;
For head with foot hath private amity,
And both with moons and tides.
"Nothing hath got so far
But man hath caught and kept it as his prey;
His eyes dismount the highest star;
He is in little all the sphere.
Herbs gladly cure our flesh, because that they
Find their acquaintance there.
"For us, the winds do blow,
The earth doth rest, heaven move, and fountains flow;
Nothing we see, but means our good,
As our delight, or as our treasure;
The whole is either our cupboard of food,
Or cabinet of pleasure.
"The stars have us to bed:
Night draws the curtain; which the sun withdraws.
Music and light attend our head.
All things unto our flesh are kind,
In their descent and being; to our mind,
In their ascent and cause.
"More servants wait on man
Than he'll take notice of. In every path,
He treads down that which doth befriend him
When sickness makes him pale and wan.
Oh mighty love! Man is one world, and hath
Another to attend him."
The perception of this class of truths makes the attraction which
draws men to science, but the end is lost sight of in attention to the
means. In view of this half-sight of science, we accept the sentence
of Plato, that, "poetry comes nearer to vital truth than history."
Every surmise and vaticination of the mind is entitled to a certain
respect, and we learn to prefer imperfect theories, and sentences,
which contain glimpses of truth, to digested systems which have no
one valuable suggestion. A wise writer will feel that the ends
of study and composition are best answered by announcing
undiscovered regions of thought, and so communicating, through
hope, new activity to the torpid spirit.
I shall therefore conclude this essay with some traditions of man and
nature, which a certain poet sang to me; and which, as they have
always been in the world, and perhaps reappear to every bard, may
be both history and prophecy.
'The foundations of man are not in matter, but in spirit. But the
element of spirit is eternity. To it, therefore, the longest series of
events, the oldest chronologies are young and recent. In the cycle of
the universal man, from whom the known individuals proceed,
centuries are points, and all history is but the epoch of one
degradation.
'We distrust and deny inwardly our sympathy with nature. We own
and disown our relation to it, by turns. We are, like Nebuchadnezzar,
dethroned, bereft of reason, and eating grass like an ox. But who can
set limits to the remedial force of spirit?
'A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer,
and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams.
Now, the world would be insane and rabid, if these disorganizations
should last for hundreds of years. It is kept in check by death and
infancy. Infancy is the perpetual Messiah, which comes into the
arms of fallen men, and pleads with them to return to paradise.
'Man is the dwarf of himself. Once he was permeated and dissolved
by spirit. He filled nature with his overflowing currents. Out from
him sprang the sun and moon; from man, the sun; from woman, the
moon. The laws of his mind, the periods of his actions externized
themselves into day and night, into the year and the seasons. But,
having made for himself this huge shell, his waters retired; he no
longer fills the veins and veinlets; he is shrunk to a drop. He sees,
that the structure still fits him, but fits him colossally. Say, rather,
once it fitted him, now it corresponds to him from far and on high.
He adores timidly his own work. Now is man the follower of the sun,
and woman the follower of the moon. Yet sometimes he starts in his
slumber, and wonders at himself and his house, and muses strangely
at the resemblance betwixt him and it. He perceives that if his law is
still paramount, if still he have elemental power, if his word is
sterling yet in nature, it is not conscious power, it is not inferior but
superior to his will. It is Instinct.' Thus my Orphic poet sang.
At present, man applies to nature but half his force. He works on the
world with his understanding alone. He lives in it, and masters it by
a penny-wisdom; and he that works most in it, is but a half-man, and
whilst his arms are strong and his digestion good, his mind is
imbruted, and he is a selfish savage. His relation to nature, his power
over it, is through the understanding; as by manure; the economic
use of fire, wind, water, and the mariner's needle; steam, coal,
chemical agriculture; the repairs of the human body by the dentist
and the surgeon. This is such a resumption of power, as if a banished
king should buy his territories inch by inch, instead of vaulting at
once into his throne. Meantime, in the thick darkness, there are not
wanting gleams of a better light,--occasional examples of the action
of man upon nature with his entire force,--with reason as well as
understanding. Such examples are; the traditions of miracles in the
earliest antiquity of all nations; the history of Jesus Christ; the
achievements of a principle, as in religious and political revolutions,
and in the abolition of the Slave-trade; the miracles of enthusiasm,
as those reported of Swedenborg, Hohenlohe, and the Shakers; many
obscure and yet contested facts, now arranged under the name of
Animal Magnetism; prayer; eloquence; self-healing; and the wisdom
of children. These are examples of Reason's momentary grasp of the
sceptre; the exertions of a power which exists not in time or space,
but an instantaneous in-streaming causing power. The difference
between the actual and the ideal force of man is happily figured by
the schoolmen, in saying, that the knowledge of man is an evening
knowledge, _vespertina cognitio_, but that of God is a morning
knowledge, _matutina cognitio_.
The problem of restoring to the world original and eternal beauty, is
solved by the redemption of the soul. The ruin or the blank, that we
see when we look at nature, is in our own eye. The axis of vision is
not coincident with the axis of things, and so they appear not
transparent but opake. The reason why the world lacks unity, and
lies broken and in heaps, is, because man is disunited with himself.
He cannot be a naturalist, until he satisfies all the demands of the
spirit. Love is as much its demand, as perception. Indeed, neither
can be perfect without the other. In the uttermost meaning of the
words, thought is devout, and devotion is thought. Deep calls unto
deep. But in actual life, the marriage is not celebrated. There are
innocent men who worship God after the tradition of their fathers,
but their sense of duty has not yet extended to the use of all their
faculties. And there are patient naturalists, but they freeze their
subject under the wintry light of the understanding. Is not prayer
also a study of truth,--a sally of the soul into the unfound infinite?
No man ever prayed heartily, without learning something. But when
a faithful thinker, resolute to detach every object from personal
relations, and see it in the light of thought, shall, at the same time,
kindle science with the fire of the holiest affections, then will God
go forth anew into the creation.
It will not need, when the mind is prepared for study, to search for
objects. The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in
the common. What is a day? What is a year? What is summer? What
is woman? What is a child? What is sleep? To our blindness, these
things seem unaffecting. We make fables to hide the baldness of the
fact and conform it, as we say, to the higher law of the mind. But
when the fact is seen under the light of an idea, the gaudy fable
fades and shrivels. We behold the real higher law. To the wise,
therefore, a fact is true poetry, and the most beautiful of fables.
These wonders are brought to our own door. You also are a man.
Man and woman, and their social life, poverty, labor, sleep, fear,
fortune, are known to you. Learn that none of these things is
superficial, but that each phenomenon has its roots in the faculties
and affections of the mind. Whilst the abstract question occupies
your intellect, nature brings it in the concrete to be solved by your
hands. It were a wise inquiry for the closet, to compare, point by
point, especially at remarkable crises in life, our daily history, with
the rise and progress of ideas in the mind.
So shall we come to look at the world with new eyes. It shall answer
the endless inquiry of the intellect,--What is truth? and of the
affections,--What is good? by yielding itself passive to the educated
Will. Then shall come to pass what my poet said; 'Nature is not
fixed but fluid. Spirit alters, moulds, makes it. The immobility or
bruteness of nature, is the absence of spirit; to pure spirit, it is fluid,
it is volatile, it is obedient. Every spirit builds itself a house; and
beyond its house a world; and beyond its world, a heaven. Know
then, that the world exists for you. For you is the phenomenon
perfect. What we are, that only can we see. All that Adam had, all
that Caesar could, you have and can do. Adam called his house,
heaven and earth; Caesar called his house, Rome; you perhaps call
yours, a cobler's trade; a hundred acres of ploughed land; or a
scholar's garret. Yet line for line and point for point, your dominion
is as great as theirs, though without fine names. Build, therefore,
your own world. As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in
your mind, that will unfold its great proportions. A correspondent
revolution in things will attend the influx of the spirit. So fast will
disagreeable appearances, swine, spiders, snakes, pests, madhouses,
prisons, enemies, vanish; they are temporary and shall be no more
seen. The sordor and filths of nature, the sun shall dry up, and the
wind exhale. As when the summer comes from the south; the
snow-banks melt, and the face of the earth becomes green before it, so
shall the advancing spirit create its ornaments along its path, and
carry with it the beauty it visits, and the song which enchants it; it
shall draw beautiful faces, warm hearts, wise discourse, and heroic
acts, around its way, until evil is no more seen. The kingdom of man
over nature, which cometh not with observation,--a dominion such
as now is beyond his dream of God,--he shall enter without more
wonder than the blind man feels who is gradually restored to perfect
sight.'
Building upon many years of privately shared thoughts on the real benefits of Stoic Philosophy, Liam Milburn eventually published a selection of Stoic passages that had helped him to live well. They were accompanied by some of his own personal reflections. This blog hopes to continue his mission of encouraging the wisdom of Stoicism in the exercise of everyday life. All the reflections are taken from his notes, from late 1992 to early 2017.
Reflections
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