Nature; Adresses, and Lectures .........................................................................................................................1

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 today 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

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

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

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

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 woodcutter, 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

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 eyeball; 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

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

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

Whoever considers the final cause of the world, will discern a multitude of usesthat 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

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

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 shipload 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 postoffice, and the human race run on his errands; to the

bookshop, and the human race read and write of all that happens, for him; to the courthouse, and nations

repair his wrongs. He sets his house upon the road, and the human race go forth every morning, and shovel

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.

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

pinecone, the wheatear, the egg, the wings and forms of most birds, the lion's claw, the serpent, the

butterfly, seashells, 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

But in other hours, Nature satisfies by its loveliness, and without any mixture of corporeal benefit. I see the

spectacle of morning from the hilltop over against my house, from daybreak to sunrise, 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 sunset and moonrise 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

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 background, 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 watercourses, the variety is

greater. In July, the blue pontederia or pickerelweed 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

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 palmgroves 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 Towerhill, 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

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

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 sunbeam, 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

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 allfair. 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

Language is a third use which Nature subserves to man. Nature is the vehble, and threefold degree.

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

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

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

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,

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 strongnatured farmer or backwoodsman, 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 longcivilized 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

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 countrylife 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

3. We are thus assisted by natural objects in the expression of particular meanings. But how great a language

to convey such peppercorn 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

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;

Longlived 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

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;

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 roadside, 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

This doctrine is abstruse, and though the images of "garment," "scoriae," "mirror," 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

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,

In view of the significance of nature, we arrive at once at a new This use of the world includes the preceding

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

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

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 today, it will be blown into drifts tomorrow," 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

In like manner, what good heed, nature forms in us! She pardons no mistakes. Her yea is yea, and her 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

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

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

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

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 coalmine; 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 seabeaten

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

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

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

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 fountainpipes 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

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

shortlived or mutable than spirit. The broker, the wheelwright, the carpenter, the tollman, are much

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 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 puppetshow. 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 railroad 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 wellknown face

gratifies us. Turn the eyes upside down, by looking at the landscape through your legs, and how agreeable is

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

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 uppermost 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;

His passion is not the fruit of chance; it swells, as he speaks, to a city, or a state.

In the strength of his constancy, the Pyramids seem to him recent and transitory. The freshness of youth and

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

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

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

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

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

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,

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 fleshpots 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

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

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

When we consider Spirit, we see that the views already presented do not include the whole circumference of

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,

Let it stand, then, in the present state of our knowledge, merely as a useful introductory hypothesis, serving to

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

carries upon its face the highest certificate of truth, because it animates me to create my own world through

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 selfrecovery, 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

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.

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 halfsight 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,

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

`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

`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

`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

`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

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 pennywisdom; and he that works most in it, is but a halfman, 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 Slavetrade; 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; selfhealing; 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

instreaming 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

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

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 snowbanks 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