Latest / Philosophy Library / Nature - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Transcript
- 0:00Speaker 1: Chapter one. To go into solitude, a man needs to
- 0:06Speaker 1: retire as much from his chamber as from society. I
- 0:11Speaker 1: am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody
- 0:15Speaker 1: is with me. But if a man would be alone,
- 0:20Speaker 1: let him look at the stars. The rays that come
- 0:24Speaker 1: from those heavenly worlds will separate between him and what
- 0:29Speaker 1: he touches. One might think the atmosphere was made transparent
- 0:34Speaker 1: with this design, to give man in the heavenly bodies
- 0:39Speaker 1: the perpetual presence of the sublime seen in the streets
- 0:44Speaker 1: of cities. How great they are. If the stars should
- 0:48Speaker 1: appear one night in a thousand years, how would men
- 0:53Speaker 1: believe and adore and preserve for many generations the remembrance
- 0:58Speaker 1: of the City of God which had been shown. But
- 1:03Speaker 1: every night come out these envoys of beauty and light
- 1:07Speaker 1: the universe with their admonishing smile. The stars awaken a
- 1:13Speaker 1: certain reverence because, though always present, they are inaccessible. But
- 1:20Speaker 1: all natural objects make a kindred impression when the mind
- 1:25Speaker 1: is open to their influence. Nature never wears a mean appearance.
- 1:32Speaker 1: Neither does the wisest man extort her secret and lose
- 1:37Speaker 1: his curiosity by finding out all her perfection. Nature never
- 1:44Speaker 1: became a toy to a wise spirit. The flowers, the animals,
- 1:49Speaker 1: the mountains reflected the wisdom of his best hour as
- 1:55Speaker 1: much as they had delighted the simplicity of his childhood.
- 2:01Speaker 1: When we speak of nature in this manner, we have
- 2:04Speaker 1: a distinct but most poetical sense and mind. We mean
- 2:10Speaker 1: the integrity of impression made by manifold natural objects. It
- 2:15Speaker 1: is this which distinguishes the stick of timber of the
- 2:19Speaker 1: woodcutter from the tree of the poet. The charming landscape
- 2:24Speaker 1: which I saw this morning is indubitably made up of
- 2:29Speaker 1: some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, locke that,
- 2:35Speaker 1: and manning the woodland beyond, but none of them owns
- 2:40Speaker 1: the landscape. There is a property in the horizon which
- 2:45Speaker 1: no man has, but he whose eye can integrate all
- 2:49Speaker 1: the parts, that is the poet. This is the best
- 2:54Speaker 1: part of these men's farms. But to this their warranty
- 2:58Speaker 1: deeds give no title to speak. Truly, few adult persons
- 3:05Speaker 1: can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun.
- 3:10Speaker 1: At least they have a very superficial scene. The sun
- 3:15Speaker 1: illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into
- 3:19Speaker 1: the eye and the heart of the child. The lover
- 3:23Speaker 1: of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are
- 3:28Speaker 1: still truly adjusted to each other, who has retained the
- 3:32Speaker 1: spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood. His
- 3:38Speaker 1: intercourse with heaven and Earth becomes part of his daily food.
- 3:44Speaker 1: In the presence of nature, a wild delight runs through
- 3:48Speaker 1: the man. In spite of real sorrows, Nature says, he
- 3:53Speaker 1: is my creature, and maugre all his impertinent griefs. He
- 3:59Speaker 1: shall be glad with me, not the sun or the
- 4:03Speaker 1: summer alone. But every hour and season yields its tribute
- 4:08Speaker 1: of delight, for every hour and change corresponds to and
- 4:14Speaker 1: authorizes a different state of the mind, from breathless noon
- 4:20Speaker 1: to grimaced midnight. Nature is a setting that fits equally
- 4:26Speaker 1: well a comic or a morning piece. In good health,
- 4:33Speaker 1: the air is a cordial of incredible virtue, crossing a
- 4:38Speaker 1: bare common in snow puddles at twilight under a clouded sky.
- 4:44Speaker 1: Without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune,
- 4:50Speaker 1: I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to
- 4:55Speaker 1: the brink of fear in the woods too. A man
- 4:59Speaker 1: casts off his years as the snake is slough, and
- 5:04Speaker 1: at what period soever of life is always a child?
- 5:09Speaker 1: In the woods is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God,
- 5:16Speaker 1: a decorum and sanctity reign. A perennial festival is dressed,
- 5:21Speaker 1: and the guest sees not how he should tire of
- 5:24Speaker 1: them in a thousand years. In the woods we return
- 5:30Speaker 1: to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can
- 5:35Speaker 1: befall me in life, no disgrace, no calamity, leaving me
- 5:41Speaker 1: my eyes which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground,
- 5:47Speaker 1: my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into
- 5:52Speaker 1: infinite space, all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball.
- 6:02Speaker 1: I am nothing. I see all the currents of the
- 6:07Speaker 1: universal being circulate through me. I am part or particle
- 6:13Speaker 1: of God. The name of the nearest Friend sounds then
- 6:20Speaker 1: foreign and accidental. To be brothers, to be acquaintances, master,
- 6:27Speaker 1: or servant is then a trifle and a disturbance. I
- 6:33Speaker 1: am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty. In the wilderness,
- 6:39Speaker 1: I find something more dear and kannate than in streets
- 6:45Speaker 1: or villages. In the tranquill landscape, and especially in the
- 6:50Speaker 1: distant line of the horizon man beholds somewhat as beautiful
- 6:55Speaker 1: as his own nature. The greatest delight which the fields
- 7:00Speaker 1: and woods minister is the suggestion of an occult relation
- 7:06Speaker 1: between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged.
- 7:12Speaker 1: They nod to me, and I to them. The waving
- 7:17Speaker 1: of the bows in the storm is new to me
- 7:21Speaker 1: and old. It takes me by surprise, and yet is
- 7:26Speaker 1: not unknown. Its effect is like that of a higher
- 7:31Speaker 1: thought or a better emotion, coming over me when I
- 7:36Speaker 1: deemed I was thinking justly or doing right. Yet it
- 7:42Speaker 1: is certain that the power to produce this delight does
- 7:45Speaker 1: not reside in nature, but in man, or in a
- 7:51Speaker 1: harmony of both. It is necessary to use these pleasures
- 7:57Speaker 1: with great temperance, for nature is not always tricked in
- 8:02Speaker 1: holiday attire. But the same scene which yesterday breathed perfume
- 8:08Speaker 1: and glittered, as for the frolic of the nymphs, is
- 8:12Speaker 1: overspread with melancholy today. Nature always wears the colors of
- 8:19Speaker 1: the spirit. To a man laboring under calamity the heat
- 8:24Speaker 1: of his own fire hath sadness in it, then there
- 8:30Speaker 1: is a kind of contempt of the landscape felt by
- 8:33Speaker 1: him who has just lost by death a dear friend.
- 8:40Speaker 1: The sky is less grand as it shuts down over
- 8:45Speaker 1: less worth in the population end of Chapter one.
- 8:53Speaker 2: Chapter two commodity. Whoever considers the final cause of the world,
- 9:00Speaker 2: will discern a multitude of uses that result. They all
- 9:03Speaker 2: admit of being thrown into one of the following classes commodity, beauty, language,
- 9:10Speaker 2: and discipline. Under the general name of commodity, I rank
- 9:14Speaker 2: all those advantages which our senses owe to nature. This,
- 9:18Speaker 2: of course, is a benefit which is temporary and mediate,
- 9:21Speaker 2: not ultimate, like its service to the soul. Yet although low,
- 9:25Speaker 2: it is perfect in its kind, and is the only
- 9:27Speaker 2: use of nature which all men apprehend. The misery of
- 9:31Speaker 2: man appears like childish petulance when we explore the steady
- 9:34Speaker 2: and prodigal provision that has been made for his support
- 9:37Speaker 2: and delight on this green ball which floats in through
- 9:39Speaker 2: the heavens. What angels invented these splendid ornaments, these rich conveniences,
- 9:45Speaker 2: This ocean of air above, this ocean of water, beneath,
- 9:49Speaker 2: this firmament of earth, between, this zodiac of lights, this
- 9:52Speaker 2: tint of dropping clouds, this striped coat of climates, this
- 9:56Speaker 2: fourfold year. Beasts, fire, water, stones, and corn serve him.
- 10:03Speaker 2: The field is at once his floor, his work yard,
- 10:06Speaker 2: his playground, his garden, and his bed. More servants weigh
- 10:11Speaker 2: on man than he'll take notice of nature in its ministry.
- 10:16Speaker 2: To man is not only the material, but is also
- 10:19Speaker 2: the process and the result. All the parts incessantly work
- 10:23Speaker 2: into each other's hands for the profit of man. The
- 10:26Speaker 2: wind sows the seed, The sun evaporates the sea. The
- 10:29Speaker 2: wind blows the vapor to the field. The ice on
- 10:32Speaker 2: the other side of the planet condenses rain on this
- 10:36Speaker 2: the rain feeds the plant, the plant feeds the animal,
- 10:39Speaker 2: and thus the endless circulations of the divine charity nourish man.
- 10:45Speaker 2: The useful arts are reproductions or new combinations by the
- 10:48Speaker 2: wit of man of the same natural benefactors. He no
- 10:52Speaker 2: longer waits for favoring gales, but by means of steam
- 10:55Speaker 2: he realizes the fable of Yolus's bag, and carries the
- 10:58Speaker 2: two and thirty winds in the boiler to diminish friction.
- 11:03Speaker 2: He paves the road with iron bars, and mounting a
- 11:05Speaker 2: coach with a shipload of men, animals, and merchandise behind him,
- 11:08Speaker 2: he darts through the country from town to town, like
- 11:11Speaker 2: an eagle or a swallow through the air. By the
- 11:14Speaker 2: aggregate of these aids, how is the face of the
- 11:16Speaker 2: world changed from the era of Noah to that of Napoleon.
- 11:20Speaker 2: The private poor man had cities, ships, canals, bridges built
- 11:23Speaker 2: for him. He goes to the post office, and the
- 11:26Speaker 2: human race run on his errands. To the bookshop, and
- 11:29Speaker 2: the human race read and write of all that happens
- 11:31Speaker 2: for him, to the court house, and nations repair his wrongs.
- 11:36Speaker 2: He sets his house upon the road, and the human
- 11:39Speaker 2: race go forth every morning and shovel out the snow
- 11:42Speaker 2: and cut a path for him. But there is no
- 11:44Speaker 2: need of specifying particulars in this class of uses. The
- 11:47Speaker 2: catalog is endless, and the example so obvious, that I
- 11:51Speaker 2: shall leave them to the reader's reflection, with the general
- 11:53Speaker 2: remark that this mercenary benefit is one which has respect
- 11:57Speaker 2: to a farther good. A man is fed, not that
- 12:00Speaker 2: he may be fed, but that he may work. End
- 12:05Speaker 2: of Chapter two, Chapter three. Beauty, a nobler want of
- 12:11Speaker 2: man is served by nature, namely the love of beauty.
- 12:16Speaker 2: The ancient Greeks call the world cosmos beauty. Such is
- 12:21Speaker 2: the constitution of all things, or such the plastic power
- 12:24Speaker 2: of the human eye, that the primary forms as the sky,
- 12:28Speaker 2: the mountain, the tree, the animal gives delight in and
- 12:32Speaker 2: for themselves, a pleasure arising from outline, color, motion, and grouping.
- 12:39Speaker 2: This seems partly owing to the eye itself. The eye
- 12:42Speaker 2: is the best of artists. By the mutual action of
- 12:45Speaker 2: its structure and of the laws of light, perspective is
- 12:48Speaker 2: produced which integrates every mass of objects, of what characters soever,
- 12:53Speaker 2: into a well colored and shaded globe, so that where
- 12:55Speaker 2: the particular objects are mean and unaffecting, the landscape which
- 12:59Speaker 2: they compose is round and symmetrical. And as the eye
- 13:03Speaker 2: is the best composer, so light is the first of painters.
- 13:07Speaker 2: There is no object so foul that intense light will
- 13:10Speaker 2: not make beautiful. And the stimulus it affords, the sense
- 13:14Speaker 2: and the sort of infinitude which it hath, like space
- 13:16Speaker 2: and time, make all matter gay. Even the corpse has
- 13:21Speaker 2: its own beauty. But besides this general grace diffused over nature,
- 13:25Speaker 2: almost all individual forms are agreeable to the eye, as
- 13:29Speaker 2: is proved by our endless imitations of some of them,
- 13:31Speaker 2: as the acorn, the grape, the pine cone, the wheat, ear,
- 13:35Speaker 2: the egg, the wings and forms of most birds, the
- 13:39Speaker 2: lion's claw, the serpent, the butterfly, seashells, flames, clouds, buds, leaves,
- 13:45Speaker 2: and the forms of many trees as the palm. For
- 13:49Speaker 2: better consideration, we may distribute the aspects of beauty in
- 13:53Speaker 2: the threefold manner. One First, the simple perception of natural
- 13:59Speaker 2: forms is a light. The influence of the forms and
- 14:02Speaker 2: actions in nature is so needful to man that, in
- 14:05Speaker 2: its low its functions, it seems to lie on the
- 14:07Speaker 2: confines of commodity and beauty. To the body and mind,
- 14:11Speaker 2: which have been cramped by noxious work or company, nature
- 14:14Speaker 2: is medicinal and restores their tone. The tradesmen the attorney
- 14:18Speaker 2: comes out of the din and craft of the street,
- 14:20Speaker 2: and sees the sky in the woods, and is a
- 14:22Speaker 2: man again. In their eternal calm he finds himself. The
- 14:26Speaker 2: health of the eye seems to demand the horizon. We
- 14:29Speaker 2: are never tired so long as we can see far enough.
- 14:33Speaker 2: But in other hours nature satisfies by its loveliness, and
- 14:37Speaker 2: without any mixture of corporeal benefit. I see the spectacle
- 14:41Speaker 2: of mourning from the hill top over against my house,
- 14:44Speaker 2: from daybreak to sunrise with emotions which an angel might cheer.
- 14:48Speaker 2: The long, slender bars of cloud float like fishes in
- 14:51Speaker 2: the sea of crimson light from the earth. As ashore,
- 14:55Speaker 2: I look out into that silent sea. I seem to
- 14:57Speaker 2: partake its rapid transformations. The active enchantment reaches my dust,
- 15:02Speaker 2: and I dilate and conspire with the morning wind. How
- 15:06Speaker 2: does nature deify us with a few and cheap elements?
- 15:10Speaker 2: Give me health and a day, and I will make
- 15:12Speaker 2: the pomp of emperors ridiculous. The dawn is my assyria,
- 15:16Speaker 2: the sunset and moonrise my paphos and unimaginable realms of
- 15:21Speaker 2: fairy broad noon shall be my england of the senses
- 15:24Speaker 2: and the understanding. The night shall be my Germany, of
- 15:27Speaker 2: mystic philosophy and dreams. Not less excellent except for our
- 15:32Speaker 2: less susceptibility. In the afternoon was the charm last evening
- 15:36Speaker 2: of a January sunset. The western clouds divided, and some
- 15:40Speaker 2: divided themselves into pink flakes, modulated with tints of unspeakable softness,
- 15:45Speaker 2: and the air had so much life and sweetness that
- 15:48Speaker 2: it was a pain to come within doors. What was
- 15:51Speaker 2: it that nature would say? Was there no meaning in
- 15:53Speaker 2: the live repose of the valley behind the mill, and
- 15:56Speaker 2: which Homer or Shakespeare could not reform for me. In words,
- 16:00Speaker 2: the leafless trees became spires of flame in the sunset,
- 16:03Speaker 2: but the blue east for their background, and the stars
- 16:06Speaker 2: of the dead calluses of flowers, and every withered stem
- 16:09Speaker 2: and stabble rhymed with frost contribute something to the mute music.
- 16:15Speaker 2: The inhabitants of cities suppose that the country landscape is
- 16:18Speaker 2: pleasant only half the year. I please myself with the
- 16:22Speaker 2: graces of the winter scenery, and believe that we are
- 16:24Speaker 2: as much touched by it as by the genial influences
- 16:27Speaker 2: of summer. To the attentive eye, each moment of the
- 16:31Speaker 2: year has its own beauty, and in the same field
- 16:33Speaker 2: that beholds every hour a picture which was never seen before,
- 16:37Speaker 2: and which shall never be seen again. The heavens change
- 16:40Speaker 2: every moment and reflect their glory or gloom on the
- 16:43Speaker 2: plains beneath. The state of the crop and the surrounding
- 16:46Speaker 2: farms alters the expression of the earth from week to week.
- 16:50Speaker 2: The succession of native plants in the passes and roadsides,
- 16:53Speaker 2: which make the silent clock by which time tells the
- 16:55Speaker 2: summer hours, will make even the divisions of the day
- 16:58Speaker 2: sensible to a keen observer. The tribes of birds and insects,
- 17:02Speaker 2: like the plants, punctual to their time, follow each other,
- 17:05Speaker 2: and the year has room for all my water courses.
- 17:09Speaker 2: The variety is greater in July. The blue pondityria or
- 17:13Speaker 2: pikelweed blooms in large beds in the shallow parts of
- 17:16Speaker 2: our pleasant river, and swarms with yellow butterflies in continual motion.
- 17:21Speaker 2: Art cannot rival this pomp of purple and gold. Indeed,
- 17:24Speaker 2: the river is a perpetual gala, and boasts each month
- 17:27Speaker 2: a new ornament. But this beauty of nature, which is
- 17:31Speaker 2: seen and felt as beauty, is the least part the
- 17:34Speaker 2: shows of day, the dewy morning, the rainbow mountains orchards,
- 17:38Speaker 2: and blossom stars, moonlight, shadows, and still water, and the like.
- 17:43Speaker 2: If too eagerly hunted, becomes shows merely and mock us
- 17:46Speaker 2: with their unreality. Go out of the house to see
- 17:50Speaker 2: the moon, and t is mere tinsel. It will not
- 17:53Speaker 2: please as when its light shines upon your necessary journey.
- 17:56Speaker 2: The beauty that timmers in the yellow afternoons of October,
- 17:59Speaker 2: whoever could climb go forth to find it. And it
- 18:02Speaker 2: is gone. Tis only a mirage as you look from
- 18:04Speaker 2: the windows of diligence. Two. The presence of a higher,
- 18:09Speaker 2: namely of the spiritual element, is essential to his perfection.
- 18:13Speaker 2: The high and divine beauty, which can be like without effeminacy,
- 18:16Speaker 2: is that which is found in combination with the human will.
- 18:20Speaker 2: Beauty is the mark God sets upon virtue. Every natural
- 18:24Speaker 2: action is graceful. Every heroic act is also decent, and
- 18:29Speaker 2: causes the place and the bystanders to shine. We are
- 18:33Speaker 2: taught by great actions that the universe is the property
- 18:35Speaker 2: of every individual in it. Every rational creature has all
- 18:39Speaker 2: nature for his dowry, and the state it is his.
- 18:42Speaker 2: If he will, he may divest himself of it. He
- 18:46Speaker 2: may creep into a corner and abdicate his kingdom, as
- 18:48Speaker 2: most men do. But he is entitled to the world
- 18:51Speaker 2: by his constitution. In proportion to the energy of his
- 18:55Speaker 2: thought and will. He takes up the world into himself.
- 18:58Speaker 2: All those things for which men plow, build or sail
- 19:01Speaker 2: obey virtue, said Sallust. The winds and waves, said Gibbon,
- 19:06Speaker 2: are always on the side of the abeless navigators. So
- 19:10Speaker 2: are the sun and moon, and all the stars of
- 19:12Speaker 2: heaven when a noble act is done perchance in a
- 19:16Speaker 2: scene of great natural beauty, When Leonidus and his three
- 19:19Speaker 2: hundred martyrs consume one day in dying, and the sun
- 19:22Speaker 2: and moon come each and look at them once in
- 19:24Speaker 2: the steep defile of Thermopylae, When Arnold winkelried in the
- 19:28Speaker 2: high Alps, under the shadow of the avalanche, gathers in
- 19:31Speaker 2: his side a sheaf of Austrian spears to break the
- 19:33Speaker 2: line for his comrades. Are not these heroes entitled to
- 19:37Speaker 2: add the beauty of the scene to the beauty of
- 19:39Speaker 2: the deed. When the bark of Columbus nears the shore
- 19:42Speaker 2: of America, before it, the beach lined with savages fleeing
- 19:46Speaker 2: out of all their huts of cane, the sea behind,
- 19:49Speaker 2: and the purple mountains of the Indian archipelago around, can
- 19:52Speaker 2: we separate the man from the living picture? Does not
- 19:55Speaker 2: the new world clothe his form with her palm groves
- 19:58Speaker 2: and savannahs as fit drapery? Ever? Does natural beauty steal
- 20:02Speaker 2: in like air and envelope great actions. When Sir Harry
- 20:06Speaker 2: Vane was dragged up the Tower Hill sitting on a
- 20:09Speaker 2: sledge to suffer death, as the champion of the English laws.
- 20:12Speaker 2: One of the multitude cried out to him, you never
- 20:15Speaker 2: sat on so glorious a seat. Charles the second, to
- 20:19Speaker 2: intimidate the citizens of London, caused the patriot Lord Russell
- 20:22Speaker 2: to be drawn in an open coach through the principal
- 20:25Speaker 2: streets of the city on his wat the scaffold. But
- 20:28Speaker 2: his biographer says, the multitude imagined they saw liberty and
- 20:32Speaker 2: virtue sitting by his side in private places among sordid objects.
- 20:37Speaker 2: An active truth or heroism seems at once to draw
- 20:40Speaker 2: to itself the sky as its temple, the sun as
- 20:42Speaker 2: its candle. Nature stretcheth out her arms to embrace man.
- 20:47Speaker 2: Only let his thoughts be of equal greatness. Willingly does
- 20:52Speaker 2: she follow his steps with the rose and the violet,
- 20:55Speaker 2: and bend her lines of grandeur and grace to the
- 20:57Speaker 2: decoration of her darling child. Let his thoughts be of
- 21:01Speaker 2: equal scope, and the frame will suit the picture. A
- 21:04Speaker 2: virtuous man is in unison with her works and makes
- 21:08Speaker 2: the central figure of the visible sphere. Homer Pindar, Socrates
- 21:13Speaker 2: Potian associate themselves fitly in our memory with the geography
- 21:17Speaker 2: and climate of Greece. The visible heavens and earth sympathize
- 21:20Speaker 2: with Jesus. And in common life, whosoever has seen a
- 21:24Speaker 2: person of powerful character and happy genius will have remarked
- 21:28Speaker 2: how easily he took all things along with him. The persons,
- 21:31Speaker 2: the opinions, and the day and nature became ancillary to
- 21:35Speaker 2: a man. Three. There is still another aspect under which
- 21:41Speaker 2: the beauty of the world may be viewed, namely, as
- 21:44Speaker 2: it becomes an object of the intellect. Beside the relation
- 21:47Speaker 2: of things to virtue, they have a relation to thought.
- 21:51Speaker 2: The intellect searches out the absolute order of things as
- 21:53Speaker 2: they stand in the mind of God, and without the
- 21:56Speaker 2: colors of affection. The intellectual and the act of powers
- 22:00Speaker 2: seem to succeed each other, and the exclusive activity of
- 22:02Speaker 2: the one generates the exclusive activity of the other. There
- 22:06Speaker 2: is something unfriendly in each to the other, but they
- 22:09Speaker 2: are like the alternate periods of feeding and working in animals.
- 22:12Speaker 2: Each prepares and will be followed by the other. Therefore
- 22:16Speaker 2: does beauty, which, in relation to actions, as we have seen,
- 22:19Speaker 2: comes unsought, and comes because it is unsought, remain for
- 22:23Speaker 2: the apprehension and pursuit of the intellect. And then again
- 22:26Speaker 2: in its turn of the active power. Nothing divine dies.
- 22:31Speaker 2: All good is eternally reproductive. The beauty of nature reforms
- 22:35Speaker 2: itself in the mind, and not forbearen contemplation, but for
- 22:38Speaker 2: new creation. All men are in some degree impressed by
- 22:43Speaker 2: the face of the world, Some men even to delight.
- 22:47Speaker 2: This love of beauty is taste. Others have the same
- 22:51Speaker 2: love in such excess that, not content with admiring, they
- 22:54Speaker 2: seek to embody it in new forms. The creation of
- 22:57Speaker 2: beauty is art. The production of a work of art
- 23:01Speaker 2: throws a light upon the mystery of humanity. A work
- 23:05Speaker 2: of art is an abstract or epitome of the world.
- 23:08Speaker 2: It is the result or expression of nature in miniature.
- 23:12Speaker 2: For although the works of nature are innumerable and all different,
- 23:15Speaker 2: the result or the expression of them all is similar
- 23:18Speaker 2: and single. Nature is a sea of forms, radically alike
- 23:22Speaker 2: and even unique. A leaf, a sanben, a landscape, the
- 23:26Speaker 2: ocean make an analogous impression on the mind. What is
- 23:30Speaker 2: common to them all that perfectness and harmony, is beauty.
- 23:35Speaker 2: The standard of beauty is the entire circuit of natural forms,
- 23:38Speaker 2: the totality of nature, which the Italians express by defining
- 23:42Speaker 2: beauty in pure ne luna. Nothing is quite beautiful alone,
- 23:47Speaker 2: nothing but is beautiful in the whole. A single object
- 23:50Speaker 2: is only so far beautiful as it suggests this universal grace.
- 23:54Speaker 2: The poet, the painter, the sculptor, the musician, the architect
- 23:58Speaker 2: seek each to concentrate them radiance of the world on
- 24:01Speaker 2: one point, and each in his several work to satisfy
- 24:04Speaker 2: the love of beauty which simulates him to produce. Thus
- 24:08Speaker 2: is art a nature passed through the alembic of man.
- 24:12Speaker 2: Thus in art does nature work through the will of
- 24:14Speaker 2: a man, filled with the beauty of her first works.
- 24:18Speaker 2: The world thus exists to the soul to satisfy the
- 24:21Speaker 2: desire of beauty. This element I call an ultimate end.
- 24:26Speaker 2: No reason can be asked or given why the soul
- 24:29Speaker 2: seeks beauty. Beauty in its largest and profoundest sense, is
- 24:34Speaker 2: one expression for the universe. God is the all fair, truth,
- 24:39Speaker 2: and goodness and beauty are but different faces of the
- 24:42Speaker 2: same all. But beauty in nature is not ultimate. It
- 24:47Speaker 2: is the herald of inward and eternal beauty, and is
- 24:50Speaker 2: not alone a solid and satisfactory good. It must stand
- 24:53Speaker 2: as a part, and not as yet the last or
- 24:56Speaker 2: highest expression of the final cause of nature. End of
- 25:03Speaker 2: Chapter three.
- 25:05Speaker 3: Chapter four Language. Language is a third use which nature
- 25:11Speaker 3: subserves to man. Nature is the vehicle and threefold degree.
- 25:18Speaker 3: One words are signs of natural facts. Two particular natural
- 25:25Speaker 3: facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts. Three Nature is
- 25:31Speaker 3: the symbol of spirit. One words are signs of natural facts.
- 25:39Speaker 3: The use of natural history is to give us aid
- 25:42Speaker 3: in supernatural history, the use of the outer creation to
- 25:46Speaker 3: give us language for the beings and changes of the
- 25:49Speaker 3: inward creation. Every word which is used to express a
- 25:53Speaker 3: moral or intellectual fact, if traced to its root, is
- 25:57Speaker 3: found to be borrowed from some material appears vints. Right
- 26:02Speaker 3: means straight, wrong means twisted. Spirit primarily means wind, transgression,
- 26:11Speaker 3: the crossing of a lion, supercilious, the raising of the eyebrow.
- 26:17Speaker 3: We say, the heart to express emotion, the head to
- 26:21Speaker 3: denote thought. And thought and emotion are words borrowed from
- 26:25Speaker 3: sensible things and now appropriated to spiritual nature. Most of
- 26:31Speaker 3: the process by which this transformation is made is hidden
- 26:34Speaker 3: from us in the remote time when language was framed,
- 26:38Speaker 3: but the same tendency may be daily observed in children.
- 26:43Speaker 3: Children and savages use only nouns or names of things
- 26:47Speaker 3: which they convert into verbs and apply to analogous mental acts.
- 26:53Speaker 2: Two.
- 26:55Speaker 3: But this origin of all words that convey a spiritual import,
- 27:00Speaker 3: so conspicuous a fact in the history of language, is
- 27:03Speaker 3: our least debt to nature. It is not words only
- 27:07Speaker 3: that are emblematic. It is things which are emblematic. Every
- 27:12Speaker 3: natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact. Every
- 27:16Speaker 3: appearance in nature corresponds to some state of the mind,
- 27:20Speaker 3: and that state of the mind can only be described
- 27:23Speaker 3: by presenting that natural appearance as its picture. An enraged
- 27:28Speaker 3: man is a lion. A cunning man is a fox.
- 27:32Speaker 3: A firm man is a rock, A learned man is
- 27:35Speaker 3: a torch. A lamb is innocence, a snake is subtle
- 27:40Speaker 3: spite flowers expressed to us the delicate affections light and
- 27:45Speaker 3: darkness are a familiar expression for knowledge and ignorance, and
- 27:50Speaker 3: heat for love. Visible distance behind and before us is,
- 27:54Speaker 3: respectively our image of memory and hope. Who looks upon
- 28:00Speaker 3: a river in a meditative hour and is not reminded
- 28:03Speaker 3: of the flux of all things, throw a stone into
- 28:07Speaker 3: the stream, and the circles that propagate themselves are the
- 28:10Speaker 3: beautiful type of all influence. Man is conscious of a
- 28:15Speaker 3: universal soul within or behind this individual life, wherein as
- 28:20Speaker 3: in Affirmament, the nature is of justice, truth, love, freedom,
- 28:25Speaker 3: arise and shine. This universal soul he calls reason. It
- 28:31Speaker 3: is not mine or thine or his, but we are its.
- 28:37Speaker 3: We are its property and men. And the blue sky
- 28:41Speaker 3: in which the private earth is buried. The sky, with
- 28:44Speaker 3: its eternal calm and full of everlasting herbs, is the
- 28:47Speaker 3: type of reason, that which intellectually considered we call reason.
- 28:53Speaker 3: Considered in relation to nature we call spirit. Spirit is
- 28:58Speaker 3: the creator. Spirit hath life in itself, and man, in
- 29:03Speaker 3: all ages and countries, embodies it in his language as
- 29:07Speaker 3: the father. It is easily seen that there is nothing
- 29:12Speaker 3: lucky or capricious in these analogies, and that they are
- 29:16Speaker 3: constant and pervade nature. These are not the dreams of
- 29:20Speaker 3: a few poets here and there. But man is an
- 29:23Speaker 3: analogist and studies relations in all objects. He is placed
- 29:28Speaker 3: in the center of beings, and a ray of relation
- 29:30Speaker 3: passes from every other being to him. And neither can
- 29:34Speaker 3: man be understood without these objects, nor these objects without man.
- 29:40Speaker 3: All the facts in natural history taken by themselves have
- 29:43Speaker 3: no value, but are barren, like a single sex but
- 29:48Speaker 3: marry it to human history, and it is full of life.
- 29:52Speaker 3: Whole floras, all Linaeuses, and Buffon's volumes are dry catalogs
- 29:57Speaker 3: of facts. But the more trivial of these facts, the
- 30:02Speaker 3: habit of a plant, the organs or work or noise
- 30:05Speaker 3: of an insect, applied to the illustration of a fact
- 30:08Speaker 3: in intellectual philosophy, or in any way associated to human nature,
- 30:13Speaker 3: affix us in the most lively and agreeable manner the
- 30:17Speaker 3: seed of a plant to what affecting analogies in the
- 30:21Speaker 3: nature of man? Is that little fruit made use of
- 30:24Speaker 3: in all discourse up to the voice of Paul, who
- 30:27Speaker 3: calls the human corpse a seed. Quote, it is soun
- 30:32Speaker 3: a natural body. It is raised a spiritual body. End quote.
- 30:39Speaker 3: The motion of the earth round its axis and round
- 30:42Speaker 3: the sun makes the day and the year. These are
- 30:45Speaker 3: certain amounts of brute light and heat. But is there
- 30:49Speaker 3: no intent of an analogy between man's life and the seasons?
- 30:53Speaker 3: And do the seasons gain no grandeur or pathos from
- 30:56Speaker 3: that analogy? The instincts of the thing and are very
- 31:01Speaker 3: unimportant considered as the ants, But the moment ar ray
- 31:05Speaker 3: of relation is seen to extend from it to man,
- 31:08Speaker 3: and the little drudge is seen to be a monitor,
- 31:11Speaker 3: a little body with a mighty heart than all its habits.
- 31:15Speaker 3: Even that said to be recently observed that it never
- 31:18Speaker 3: sleeps becomes sublime. Because of this radical correspondence between visible
- 31:24Speaker 3: things and human thoughts. Savages who have only what is
- 31:28Speaker 3: necessary converse in figures. As we go back in history,
- 31:33Speaker 3: language becomes more picturesque until its infancy, when it is
- 31:37Speaker 3: all poetry or all spiritual facts are represented by natural symbols.
- 31:43Speaker 3: The same symbols are found to make the original elements
- 31:46Speaker 3: of all languages. It has moreover been observed that the
- 31:50Speaker 3: idioms of all languages approach each other in passages of
- 31:53Speaker 3: the greatest eloquence and power. And as this is the
- 31:57Speaker 3: first language, so is it the last. This immediate dependence
- 32:02Speaker 3: of language upon nature, this conversion of an outward phenomenon
- 32:06Speaker 3: into a type of somewhat inhuman life, never loses its
- 32:10Speaker 3: power to affect us. It is this which gives that
- 32:13Speaker 3: piquancy to the conversation of a strong natured farmer or backwardsman,
- 32:18Speaker 3: which all men relish. A man's power to connect his
- 32:22Speaker 3: thought with its proper symbol, and so to utter it
- 32:26Speaker 3: depends on the simplicity of his character, that is, upon
- 32:29Speaker 3: his love of truth, and is desired to communicate it
- 32:32Speaker 3: without loss. The corruption of man is followed by the
- 32:37Speaker 3: corruption of language. When simplicity of character and the sovereignty
- 32:42Speaker 3: of ideas is broken up by the prevalence of secondary desires,
- 32:45Speaker 3: the desire of riches, of pleasure, of power, and of praise,
- 32:50Speaker 3: and duplicity and falsehood take place of simplicity and truth.
- 32:54Speaker 3: The power over nature as an interpreter of the will
- 32:57Speaker 3: is in a degree lost. New imagery ceases to be created,
- 33:02Speaker 3: and old words are perverted to stand for things which
- 33:05Speaker 3: are not. A paper currency is employed when there is
- 33:09Speaker 3: no bullion in the vaults. In due time, the fraud
- 33:14Speaker 3: is manifest, and words lose all power to stimulate the
- 33:18Speaker 3: understanding or the affections. Hundreds of writers may be found
- 33:22Speaker 3: in every long civilized nation, who for a short time
- 33:25Speaker 3: believe and make others believe that they see and utter truths,
- 33:30Speaker 3: who do not of themselves clothe one thought in its
- 33:33Speaker 3: natural garment, but who feed unconsciously on the language created
- 33:37Speaker 3: by the primary writers of the country. Those namely who
- 33:41Speaker 3: hold primarily on nature. But wise men pierce this rotten
- 33:46Speaker 3: diction and fazen words again to visible things, so that
- 33:50Speaker 3: picturesque language is at once a commanding certificate that he
- 33:54Speaker 3: who employs it is a man in alliance with truth
- 33:57Speaker 3: and God. The moment are discourse rises above the ground
- 34:01Speaker 3: line of familiar facts, and is inflamed with passion or
- 34:04Speaker 3: exalted by thought. It clothes itself in images. A man
- 34:09Speaker 3: conversing in earnest, if he watch his intellectual processes, will
- 34:13Speaker 3: find that a material image, more or less luminous, arises
- 34:17Speaker 3: in his mind, contemporaneous with every thought which furnishes the
- 34:21Speaker 3: vestment of the thought. Hence, good writing and brilliant discourse
- 34:26Speaker 3: are perpetual allegories. This imagery is spontaneous. It is the
- 34:32Speaker 3: blending of experience with the present action of the mind.
- 34:36Speaker 3: It is proper creation. It is the working of the
- 34:40Speaker 3: original cause through the instruments he has already made. These
- 34:45Speaker 3: facts may suggest the advantage which the country life possesses
- 34:48Speaker 3: for a powerful mind over the artificial and curtailed life
- 34:52Speaker 3: of cities. We know more from nature than we can
- 34:55Speaker 3: at will communicate. Its light flows into the mind ever more,
- 35:00Speaker 3: and we forget its presence. The poet, the orator bred
- 35:05Speaker 3: in the woods, whose senses have been nourished by their
- 35:07Speaker 3: fair and appeasing changes year after year, without design and
- 35:11Speaker 3: without heed, shall not lose their lesson altogether in the
- 35:15Speaker 3: roar of cities or the broil of politics. Long hereafter,
- 35:19Speaker 3: amidst agitation and terror in national councils, in the hour
- 35:24Speaker 3: of revolution, these solemn images shall reappear in their morning luster,
- 35:29Speaker 3: as fit symbols and words of the thoughts which the
- 35:32Speaker 3: passing events will awaken. At the call of a noble sentiment. Again,
- 35:37Speaker 3: the woods wave, the pines murmur, the river rolls and shins,
- 35:42Speaker 3: and the cattle low upon the mountains, as he saw
- 35:45Speaker 3: and heard them in his infancy. And with these forms
- 35:49Speaker 3: the spells of persuasion, the keys of power are put
- 35:53Speaker 3: into his hands. Three. We are thus assisted by natural
- 35:59Speaker 3: objects in the expression of particular meanings. But how great
- 36:03Speaker 3: a language to convey such peppercorn informations? Did it need
- 36:07Speaker 3: such noble races of creatures, this profusion of forms, this
- 36:11Speaker 3: host of orbs in heaven, to furnish man with the
- 36:14Speaker 3: dictionary and grammar of his municipal speech. Whilst we use
- 36:19Speaker 3: this grand cipher to expedite the affairs of our pot
- 36:22Speaker 3: and kettle, we feel that we have not yet put
- 36:24Speaker 3: it to its use. Neither are able. We all like
- 36:28Speaker 3: travelers using the cinders of a volcano to roast their eggs,
- 36:32Speaker 3: whilst we see that it always stands ready to clothe
- 36:35Speaker 3: what we would say. We cannot avoid the question whether
- 36:38Speaker 3: the characters are not significant of themselves. Have mountains and
- 36:43Speaker 3: waves and skies no significance, but what we consciously give
- 36:47Speaker 3: them when we employ them as emblems of our thoughts.
- 36:50Speaker 3: The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors, because
- 36:54Speaker 3: the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.
- 36:57Speaker 3: The laws of moral nature answers to the matter as
- 37:01Speaker 3: phase to phase in a glass quote. The visible world
- 37:05Speaker 3: and the relation of its parts is the dial plate
- 37:08Speaker 3: of the invisible end quote. The axioms of physics translate
- 37:14Speaker 3: the laws of ethics. Thus, the whole is greater than
- 37:18Speaker 3: its part. Reaction is equal to action. The smallest weight
- 37:21Speaker 3: may be made to live the greatest, the difference of
- 37:24Speaker 3: weight being compensated by time. And many the like propositions
- 37:29Speaker 3: which have an ethical as well as physical sense. These
- 37:33Speaker 3: propositions have a much more extensive and universal sense when
- 37:37Speaker 3: applied to human life than when confined to technical use.
- 37:43Speaker 3: In like manner, the memorable words of history and the
- 37:46Speaker 3: proverbs of nations consist usually of a natural fact selected
- 37:51Speaker 3: as a picture or parable of a moral truth. Thus,
- 37:56Speaker 3: a rolling stone gathers no moss. A bird in the
- 37:59Speaker 3: hand is worth two in the bush. A cripple in
- 38:02Speaker 3: the right way will beat a razor in the wrong.
- 38:05Speaker 3: Make hay while the sun shines, tis hard to carry
- 38:09Speaker 3: a full cup. Even vinegar is the son of wine.
- 38:14Speaker 3: The last ounce brook, the camel's back, long lived trees
- 38:18Speaker 3: make roots first, and the like. In their primary sense,
- 38:23Speaker 3: these are trivial facts, but we repeat them for the
- 38:26Speaker 3: value of their analogical import. What is true of proverbs
- 38:30Speaker 3: is true of all fables, parables, and allegories. This relation
- 38:36Speaker 3: between the mind and matter is not fancied by some poet,
- 38:40Speaker 3: but stands in the will of God, and so is
- 38:42Speaker 3: free to be known by all men. It appears to men,
- 38:47Speaker 3: or it does not appear. When in fortunate hours we
- 38:50Speaker 3: ponder this miracle, the wise man doubts, if at all
- 38:54Speaker 3: other times he is not blind and deaf, can these
- 38:58Speaker 3: things be and overcome us like a summer's cloud. Without
- 39:03Speaker 3: our special wonder, for the universe becomes transparent, and the
- 39:09Speaker 3: light of higher laws than its own shines through it.
- 39:12Speaker 3: It is the standing problem which has exercised the wonder
- 39:16Speaker 3: and the study of every fine genius since the world began,
- 39:20Speaker 3: from the era of the Egyptians and the Brahmins to
- 39:23Speaker 3: that of Pythagoras, of Plato, of Bacon, of Leibniz, of Swedenborg.
- 39:30Speaker 3: There sits the sphinx at the road side, and from
- 39:33Speaker 3: age to age, as each prophet comes by, he tries
- 39:36Speaker 3: his fortune at reading her riddle. There seems to be
- 39:40Speaker 3: a necessity in spirits to manifest itself in material forms,
- 39:45Speaker 3: and day and night, river and storm, beast and bird,
- 39:50Speaker 3: acid and alkali pre exist in necessary ideas in the
- 39:54Speaker 3: mind of God, and are what they are by virtue
- 39:57Speaker 3: of preceding affections. In the world of s spirit, a
- 40:01Speaker 3: fact is the end or last issue of spirit. The
- 40:05Speaker 3: visible creation is the terminus or the circumference of the
- 40:09Speaker 3: invisible world. Material objects, said a French philosopher, are necessary
- 40:15Speaker 3: kinds of scoriae of the substantial thoughts of the Creator,
- 40:20Speaker 3: which must always preserve an exact relation to their first origin.
- 40:25Speaker 3: In other words, visible nature must have a spiritual and
- 40:29Speaker 3: moral side. This doctrine is obstruse, and though the images
- 40:34Speaker 3: of garment, scorie, mir et cetera may stimulate the fancy,
- 40:40Speaker 3: we must summon the aid of subtler and more vital
- 40:43Speaker 3: expositors to make it plain. Quote. Every scripture is to
- 40:48Speaker 3: be interpreted by the same spirit which gave it forth
- 40:52Speaker 3: end quote is the fundamental law of criticism. A life
- 40:57Speaker 3: in harmony with nature, the love of truth and of
- 41:00Speaker 3: virtue will purge the eyes to understand her text. By degrees,
- 41:05Speaker 3: we may come to know the primitive sense of the
- 41:07Speaker 3: permanent objects of nature, so that the world shall be
- 41:10Speaker 3: to us an open book, and every form significant of
- 41:14Speaker 3: its hidden life and final cause. A new interest surprises us,
- 41:20Speaker 3: whilst under the view now suggested, we contemplate the fearful
- 41:24Speaker 3: extent and the multitude of objects. Since quote, every object
- 41:30Speaker 3: rightly seen unlocks a new faculty of the soul. End quote.
- 41:36Speaker 3: That which was unconscious truth becomes, when interpreted and defined
- 41:41Speaker 3: in an object, a part of the domain of knowledge,
- 41:45Speaker 3: a new weapon in the magazine of power. End of
- 41:50Speaker 3: Chapter four.
- 41:52Speaker 1: Chapter five Discipline. In view of the significance of nature,
- 41:59Speaker 1: we arrive at one at a new fact that nature
- 42:03Speaker 1: is a discipline. This use of the word includes the
- 42:06Speaker 1: preceding uses as parts of itself space, time, society, labor, climate, food, locomotion,
- 42:19Speaker 1: the animals, the mechanical forces give us sincerest lessons day
- 42:25Speaker 1: by day whose meaning is unlimited. They educate both the
- 42:30Speaker 1: understanding and the reason. Every property of matter is a
- 42:36Speaker 1: school for the understanding its solidity or resistance, its inertia,
- 42:43Speaker 1: its extension, its figure, its divisibility. The understanding adds, divides,
- 42:51Speaker 1: combines measures, and finds nutriment and room for its activity
- 42:57Speaker 1: in this worthy scene. Meantime, reason transfers all these lessons
- 43:04Speaker 1: into its own world of thought by perceiving the analogy
- 43:08Speaker 1: that marries matter and mind.
- 43:13Speaker 2: One.
- 43:14Speaker 1: Nature is a discipline of the understanding in intellectual truths.
- 43:19Speaker 1: Our dealing with sensible objects is a constant exercise in
- 43:24Speaker 1: the necessary lessons of difference, of likeness, of order of being,
- 43:29Speaker 1: and seeming, of progressive arrangement of assent from particular to general,
- 43:36Speaker 1: of combination to one end of manifold forces. Proportion to
- 43:42Speaker 1: the importance of the organ to be formed is the
- 43:46Speaker 1: extreme care with which its tuition is provided. A care
- 43:50Speaker 1: pretermitted in no single case. What tedious training, day after day,
- 43:56Speaker 1: year after year, never ending to form the common sense.
- 44:01Speaker 1: What continual reproduction of annoyances inconveniences, dilemmas, What rejoicing over
- 44:09Speaker 1: us of little men, What disputing of prices, what reckonings
- 44:14Speaker 1: of interest? And all to form the hand of the
- 44:18Speaker 1: mind to instruct us that good thoughts are no better
- 44:22Speaker 1: than good dreams unless they be executed. The same good
- 44:28Speaker 1: office is performed by property and its filial systems of
- 44:32Speaker 1: debt and credit, debt grinding debt whose iron face the widow,
- 44:39Speaker 1: the orphan, and the sons of genius, fear and hate.
- 44:43Speaker 1: Debt which consumes so much time, which so cripples and
- 44:47Speaker 1: disheartens a great spirit with cares that seem so base,
- 44:52Speaker 1: is a preceptor whose lessons cannot be foregone, and is
- 44:57Speaker 1: needed most by those who suffer from it at most. Moreover, property,
- 45:03Speaker 1: which has been well compared to snow. If it fall
- 45:08Speaker 1: level today, it will be blown into drifts tomorrow, is
- 45:12Speaker 1: the surface action of internal machinery, like the index on
- 45:16Speaker 1: the face of a clock. Whilst now it is the
- 45:20Speaker 1: gymnastics of the understanding, it is hiving in the foresight
- 45:24Speaker 1: of the spirit experience. In profounder laws, the whole character
- 45:31Speaker 1: and fortune of the individual are affected by the least
- 45:36Speaker 1: inequalities in the culture of the understanding. For example, in
- 45:41Speaker 1: the perception of differences. Therefore is space, and therefore time,
- 45:47Speaker 1: that man may know that things are not huddled and lumped,
- 45:51Speaker 1: but sundered and individual. A bell and a plow each
- 45:57Speaker 1: have their use, and neither can do the office of
- 46:00Speaker 1: the other. Water is good to drink, coal to burn,
- 46:06Speaker 1: wool to wear. But wool cannot be drunk, nor water spun,
- 46:12Speaker 1: nor coal eaten. The wise man shows his wisdom in separation,
- 46:18Speaker 1: in gradation, and his scale of creatures and of merits
- 46:23Speaker 1: is as wide as nature. The foolish have no range
- 46:27Speaker 1: in their scale. But suppose every man is as every
- 46:32Speaker 1: other man. What is not good they call the worst,
- 46:36Speaker 1: and what is not hateful they call the best. In
- 46:40Speaker 1: like manner, what good heed nature forms in us, she
- 46:45Speaker 1: pardons no mistakes. Her yea is yea, and her nay nay.
- 46:52Speaker 1: The first steps in agriculture, astronomy, zoology, those first steps
- 46:57Speaker 1: which the farmer, the hunter, and the sale take, teach
- 47:01Speaker 1: that Nature's dice are always loaded, that in her heaps
- 47:06Speaker 1: and rubbish are concealed sure and useful results. How calmly
- 47:13Speaker 1: and genially the mind apprehends, one after another the laws
- 47:18Speaker 1: of physics. What noble emotions dilate The mortal as he
- 47:23Speaker 1: enters into the councils of the creation and feels by
- 47:27Speaker 1: knowledge the privilege to be his insight refines him. The
- 47:34Speaker 1: beauty of nature shines in his own breast. Man is
- 47:38Speaker 1: greater that he can see this, and the universe less
- 47:42Speaker 1: because time and space relations vanish as laws are known.
- 47:48Speaker 1: Here again, we are impressed and even daunted by the
- 47:52Speaker 1: immense universe to be explored. What we know is a
- 47:56Speaker 1: point to what we do not know. Open any recent
- 48:01Speaker 1: journal of science, and way the problems suggested concerning light, heat, electricity, magnetism, physiology, geology,
- 48:13Speaker 1: and judge whether the interest of natural science is likely
- 48:18Speaker 1: to be soon exhausted. Passing by many particulars of the
- 48:23Speaker 1: discipline of nature, we must not omit to specify two.
- 48:29Speaker 1: The exercise of the will or the lesson of power,
- 48:34Speaker 1: is taught in every event. From the child's successive possession
- 48:40Speaker 1: of his several senses up to the hour when he
- 48:43Speaker 1: says die will be done. He is learning the secret
- 48:48Speaker 1: that he can reduce under his will not only particular events,
- 48:53Speaker 1: but great classes, nay, the whole series of events, and
- 48:58Speaker 1: so conform all facts to his character. Nature is thoroughly mediate,
- 49:05Speaker 1: It is made to serve. It receives the dominion of
- 49:10Speaker 1: man as meekly as the ass on which the Savior road.
- 49:15Speaker 1: It offers all its kingdoms to man as the raw
- 49:18Speaker 1: material which he may mold into what is useful. Man
- 49:23Speaker 1: is never weary of working it up. He forges the
- 49:27Speaker 1: subtle and delicate air into wise and melodious words, and
- 49:33Speaker 1: gives them wings as angels of persuasion and command. One
- 49:38Speaker 1: after another. His victorious thought comes up with and reduces
- 49:43Speaker 1: all things, until the world becomes at last only a
- 49:48Speaker 1: realized will, the double of the man. Two sensible objects
- 49:56Speaker 1: conform to the premonitions of reason and re reflect the conscience.
- 50:02Speaker 1: All things are moral, and in their boundless changes have
- 50:06Speaker 1: an unceasing reference to spiritual nature. Therefore is nature glorious
- 50:12Speaker 1: with form, color, and motion, that every globe in the
- 50:18Speaker 1: remotest heaven, every chemical change from the rudest crystal up
- 50:23Speaker 1: to the laws of life, every change of vegetation from
- 50:27Speaker 1: the first principle of growth in the eye of belief,
- 50:31Speaker 1: to the tropical forest and antediluvian coal mine. Every animal function,
- 50:37Speaker 1: from the sponge up to hercules, shall hint or thunder
- 50:42Speaker 1: to man the laws of right and wrong, and echo
- 50:46Speaker 1: the Ten Commandments. Therefore is nature. Ever, the ally of
- 50:51Speaker 1: religion lends all her pomp and riches to the religious sentiment.
- 50:57Speaker 1: Prophet and priest David Isaiah Jesus have drawn deeply from
- 51:04Speaker 1: this source. This ethical character so penetrates the bone and
- 51:10Speaker 1: marrow of nature as to seem the end for which
- 51:14Speaker 1: it was made. Whatever private purpose is answered by any
- 51:19Speaker 1: member or part, this is its public and universal function,
- 51:24Speaker 1: and is never omitted. Nothing in nature is exhausted in
- 51:29Speaker 1: its first use. When a thing has served an end
- 51:32Speaker 1: to the uttermost, it is wholly new for an ulterior service.
- 51:38Speaker 1: In God, every end is converted into a new means.
- 51:43Speaker 1: Thus the use of commodity, regarded by itself is mean
- 51:48Speaker 1: and squalid. But it is to the mind an education
- 51:53Speaker 1: in the doctrine of use, namely, that a thing is
- 51:57Speaker 1: good only so far as it serves that a conspiring
- 52:01Speaker 1: of parts and efforts to the production of an end
- 52:05Speaker 1: is essential to any being. The first and gross manifestation
- 52:11Speaker 1: of this truth is our inevitable and hated training in
- 52:16Speaker 1: values and wants, in corn and meat. It has already
- 52:22Speaker 1: been illustrated that every natural process is a version of
- 52:27Speaker 1: a moral sentence. The moral law lies at the center
- 52:32Speaker 1: of nature and radiates to all the circumferences. It is
- 52:37Speaker 1: the pith and marrow of every substance, every relation, and
- 52:41Speaker 1: every process. All things with which we deal preach to us.
- 52:48Speaker 1: What is a farm but a mute gospel. The chaff
- 52:53Speaker 1: and the wheat, weeds and plants, blight, rain insects. It
- 53:01Speaker 1: is a sacred emblem, from the first furrow of spring
- 53:06Speaker 1: to the last stack, which the snow of winter overtakes
- 53:10Speaker 1: in the fields. But the sailor, the shepherd, the miner,
- 53:15Speaker 1: the merchant, and their several resorts have each an experience
- 53:20Speaker 1: precisely parallel and leading to the same conclusion, because all
- 53:26Speaker 1: organizations are radically alike. Nor can it be doubted that
- 53:31Speaker 1: this moral sentiment, which thus scents the air, grows in
- 53:36Speaker 1: the grain, and impregnates the waters of the world, is
- 53:40Speaker 1: caught by man and sinks into his soul. The moral
- 53:45Speaker 1: influence of nature upon every individual is that amount of
- 53:49Speaker 1: truth which it illustrates to him who can estimate this,
- 53:55Speaker 1: Who can guess how much firmness the sea beaten rock
- 54:00Speaker 1: has taught the fisherman, How much tranquility has been reflected
- 54:06Speaker 1: to man from the azure sky, over whose unspotted deeps
- 54:12Speaker 1: the winds forever more dry flocks of stormy clouds, and
- 54:17Speaker 1: leave no wrinkle or stain. How much industry and providence
- 54:23Speaker 1: and affection we have caught from the pantomime of brutes.
- 54:28Speaker 1: What a searching preacher of self command is the varying
- 54:33Speaker 1: phenomenon of health herein is especially apprehended the unity of nature,
- 54:41Speaker 1: the unity in variety which meets us everywhere. All the
- 54:46Speaker 1: endless variety of things make an identical impression. Xenophanes complained
- 54:53Speaker 1: in his old age that look where he would all
- 54:57Speaker 1: things hastened back to unity. He was weary of seeing
- 55:02Speaker 1: the same entity in the tedious variety of forms. The
- 55:07Speaker 1: fable of Proteus has a cordial truth. A leaf, a drop,
- 55:13Speaker 1: a crystal, a moment of time is related to the
- 55:18Speaker 1: whole and partakes of the perfection of the whole. Each
- 55:23Speaker 1: particle is a microcosm and faithfully renders the likeness of
- 55:29Speaker 1: the world. Not only resemblances exist in things whose analogy
- 55:35Speaker 1: is obvious, as when we detect the type of the
- 55:39Speaker 1: human hand in the flipper of the fossil saurus, but
- 55:44Speaker 1: also in objects wherein there is great superficial unlikeness. Thus
- 55:50Speaker 1: architecture is called frozen music by the style, and Gerta
- 55:55Speaker 1: Vitruvius thought an architect should be a musician. A Gothic church,
- 56:02Speaker 1: said Coleridge, is a petrified religion. Michelangelo maintained that to
- 56:08Speaker 1: an architect, a knowledge of anatomy is essential. In Haydn's oratorios,
- 56:14Speaker 1: the notes present to the imagination not only motions, as
- 56:20Speaker 1: of the snake, the stag, and the elephant, but colors
- 56:25Speaker 1: also as the green grass. The law of harmonic sounds
- 56:31Speaker 1: reappears in the harmonic colors. The granite is differenced in
- 56:36Speaker 1: its laws only by the more or less of heat
- 56:40Speaker 1: from the river that wears it away. The river as
- 56:44Speaker 1: it flows resembles the air that flows over it. The
- 56:49Speaker 1: air resembles the light which traverses it with more subtile currents.
- 56:55Speaker 1: The light resembles the heat which rides with it through space.
- 57:01Speaker 1: Each creature is only a modification of the other. The
- 57:06Speaker 1: likeness and then is more than the difference. And their
- 57:10Speaker 1: radical law is one and the same. A rule of
- 57:15Speaker 1: one art or a law of one organization holds true
- 57:20Speaker 1: throughout nature. So intimate is this unity that it is
- 57:26Speaker 1: easily seen. It lies under the undermost garment of nature
- 57:31Speaker 1: and betrays its source in universal spirit, for it pervades thought. Also,
- 57:39Speaker 1: every universal truth which we express in words, implies or
- 57:45Speaker 1: supposes every other truth omnivum vero consonant. It is like
- 57:52Speaker 1: a great circle on a sphere, comprising all possible circles, which,
- 57:58Speaker 1: however may be, and comprise it in like manner. Every
- 58:04Speaker 1: such truth is the absolute ends seen from one side,
- 58:10Speaker 1: but it has innumerable sides. The central unity is still
- 58:15Speaker 1: more conspicuous. In actions, words are finite organs of the
- 58:20Speaker 1: infinite mind. They cannot cover the dimensions of what is
- 58:26Speaker 1: in truth. They break, chop and imboverish it. In action
- 58:32Speaker 1: is the perfection and publication of thought. A right action
- 58:38Speaker 1: seems to fill the eye and to be related to
- 58:41Speaker 1: all nature. The wise man, in doing one thing, does all,
- 58:48Speaker 1: or in the one thing he does rightly, he sees
- 58:52Speaker 1: the likeness of all which is done rightly. Words and
- 58:57Speaker 1: actions are not the attribute of brute nature. They introduce
- 59:02Speaker 1: us to the human form, of which all other organizations
- 59:07Speaker 1: appear to be degradations. When this appears among so many
- 59:12Speaker 1: that surround it, the spirit prefers it to all others.
- 59:17Speaker 1: It says, from such as this have I drawn joy
- 59:21Speaker 1: and knowledge? In such as this have I found and
- 59:25Speaker 1: beheld myself? I will speak to it. It can speak again,
- 59:31Speaker 1: It can yield me thought already formed and alive. In fact,
- 59:38Speaker 1: the eye the mind is always accompanied by these forms,
- 59:44Speaker 1: male and female, and these are incomparably the richest informations
- 59:51Speaker 1: of the power and order that lie at the heart
- 59:54Speaker 1: of things. Unfortunately, every one of them bears the marks
- 1:00:00Speaker 1: as of some injury, is marred and superficially defective. Nevertheless,
- 1:00:07Speaker 1: far different from the deaf and dumb nature around them,
- 1:00:11Speaker 1: these all rest like fountain pipes on the unfathomed sea
- 1:00:16Speaker 1: of thought and virtue, where too, they alone, of all organizations,
- 1:00:23Speaker 1: are the entrances. It were a pleasant inquiry to follow
- 1:00:29Speaker 1: into detail their ministry to our education, But where would
- 1:00:34Speaker 1: it stop. We are associated, in adolescent and adult life
- 1:00:40Speaker 1: with some friends who, like skies and waters, are co
- 1:00:44Speaker 1: extensive with our idea, who answering each to a certain
- 1:00:51Speaker 1: affection of the soul, satisfy our desire. On that side,
- 1:00:55Speaker 1: whom we lack power to put at such a focal
- 1:00:59Speaker 1: discs from us that we can mend or even analyze them,
- 1:01:04Speaker 1: we cannot choose but love them. When much intercourse with
- 1:01:10Speaker 1: the Friend has supplied us with the standard of excellence,
- 1:01:14Speaker 1: and has increased our respect for the resources of God,
- 1:01:18Speaker 1: who thus sends a real person to outgo our ideal.
- 1:01:24Speaker 1: When he has moreover become an object of thought, and
- 1:01:29Speaker 1: whilst his character retains all its unconscious effect is converted
- 1:01:35Speaker 1: in the mind into solid and sweet wisdom, it is
- 1:01:40Speaker 1: a sign to us that his office is closing, and
- 1:01:45Speaker 1: he is commonly withdrawn from our sight in a short time.
- 1:01:53Speaker 1: End of Chapter five of Nature.
- 1:01:57Speaker 4: Chapter six. Idealism thus is the unspeakable but intelligible and
- 1:02:04Speaker 4: practicable meaning of the world conveyed to man, the immortal pupil.
- 1:02:08Speaker 4: In every object of sense to this one end of discipline,
- 1:02:13Speaker 4: all parts of nature conspire. A noble doubt perpetually suggests itself.
- 1:02:20Speaker 4: Whether this end be not the final cause of the universe,
- 1:02:23Speaker 4: and whether nature outwardly exists. It is a sufficient account
- 1:02:27Speaker 4: of that appearance we call the world that God will
- 1:02:30Speaker 4: teach a human mind, and so makes it the receiver
- 1:02:33Speaker 4: of a certain number of congruent sensations, which we call
- 1:02:38Speaker 4: sun and moon, man and woman, house and trade. In
- 1:02:43Speaker 4: my utter impotence to test the authenticity of the report
- 1:02:47Speaker 4: of my senses, to know whether the impressions they make
- 1:02:50Speaker 4: on me correspond with outlying objects, what difference does it
- 1:02:54Speaker 4: make whether Orion is up there in heaven or some
- 1:02:57Speaker 4: God paints the image in the firmaments of the soul,
- 1:03:01Speaker 4: the relations of parts and the end of the whole
- 1:03:04Speaker 4: remaining the same. What is the difference whether land and
- 1:03:08Speaker 4: sea interact, and worlds revolve and intermingle without number or
- 1:03:12Speaker 4: end deep yawning under deep, and galaxy balancing galaxy throughout
- 1:03:18Speaker 4: absolute space, or whether without relations of time and space,
- 1:03:23Speaker 4: the same appearances are inscribed in the constant faith of man.
- 1:03:28Speaker 4: Whether nature enjoy a substantial existence without or is only
- 1:03:32Speaker 4: in the apocalypse of the mind. It is alike, useful,
- 1:03:36Speaker 4: and alike venerable to me. Be it what it may.
- 1:03:39Speaker 4: It is ideal to me, so long as I cannot
- 1:03:42Speaker 4: try the accuracy of my senses. The frivolous make themselves
- 1:03:47Speaker 4: merry with the ideal theory if its consequences were burlesque,
- 1:03:52Speaker 4: as if it affected the stability of nature, it surely
- 1:03:55Speaker 4: does not. God never jests with us, and will not
- 1:03:59Speaker 4: compromise them end of nature by permitting any inconsequence in
- 1:04:03Speaker 4: its procession. Any distrust of the permanence of laws would
- 1:04:07Speaker 4: paralyze the faculties of man. Their permanence is sacredly respected,
- 1:04:12Speaker 4: and his faith therein is perfect. The wheels and springs
- 1:04:17Speaker 4: of man are all set to the hypothesis of the
- 1:04:20Speaker 4: permanence of nature. We are not built like a ship
- 1:04:24Speaker 4: to be tossed, but like a house to stand. It
- 1:04:28Speaker 4: is a natural consequence of this structure that, so long
- 1:04:32Speaker 4: as the active powers predominate over the reflective, we resist
- 1:04:36Speaker 4: with indignation any hint that nature is more short lived
- 1:04:39Speaker 4: or mutable than spirit. The broker, the wheelwright, the carpenter,
- 1:04:44Speaker 4: the toll man are much displeased at the intimation. But
- 1:04:50Speaker 4: whilst we acquiesce entirely in the permanence of natural laws,
- 1:04:54Speaker 4: the question of the absolute existence of nature still remains open.
- 1:04:59Speaker 4: It is the u uniform effect of culture on the
- 1:05:02Speaker 4: human mind not to shake our faith in the stability
- 1:05:05Speaker 4: of particular phenomena, as of heat, water, azote, but to
- 1:05:10Speaker 4: lead us to regard nature as a phenomenon, not a substance,
- 1:05:15Speaker 4: to attribute necessary existence to spirit, to esteem nature as
- 1:05:20Speaker 4: an accident and an effect. To the senses, and the
- 1:05:24Speaker 4: unrenewed understanding belongs a sort of instinctive belief in the
- 1:05:28Speaker 4: absolute existence of nature. In their view, man and nature
- 1:05:33Speaker 4: are indissolubly joined. Things are ultimates, and they never look
- 1:05:38Speaker 4: beyond their sphere. The presence of reason mars this faith.
- 1:05:43Speaker 4: The first effort of thought tends to relax this despotism
- 1:05:47Speaker 4: of the senses, which binds us to nature as if
- 1:05:50Speaker 4: we were a part of it, and shows us nature
- 1:05:52Speaker 4: aloof and as it were afloat. Until this higher agency intervened,
- 1:05:59Speaker 4: the animal eye sees with wonderful accuracy, sharp outlines and
- 1:06:04Speaker 4: colored surfaces. When the eye of reason opens to outline
- 1:06:08Speaker 4: and surface are at once added grace and expression. These
- 1:06:13Speaker 4: proceed from imagination and affection and abate somewhat of the
- 1:06:17Speaker 4: angular distinctness of objects. If the reason be stimulated to
- 1:06:22Speaker 4: more earnest vision, outlines and surfaces become transparent and are
- 1:06:27Speaker 4: no longer seen causes and spirits are seen through them.
- 1:06:32Speaker 4: The best moments of life are these delicious awakenings of
- 1:06:36Speaker 4: the higher powers and the reverential withdrawing of nature before
- 1:06:40Speaker 4: its God. Let us proceed to indicate the effects of culture.
- 1:06:46Speaker 4: One our first institution in the ideal philosophy is a
- 1:06:50Speaker 4: hint from nature herself. Nature is made to conspire with
- 1:06:54Speaker 4: spirit to emancipate us certain mechanical changes. A small alteration
- 1:07:01Speaker 4: in our local position apprises us of a dualism. We
- 1:07:05Speaker 4: are strangely affected by seeing the shore from a moving ship,
- 1:07:09Speaker 4: from a balloon, or through the tints of an unusual sky.
- 1:07:13Speaker 4: The least change in our point of view gives the
- 1:07:16Speaker 4: whole world a pictorial air. A man who seldom rides
- 1:07:20Speaker 4: needs only to get into a coach and traverse his
- 1:07:23Speaker 4: own town to turn the street into a puppet show.
- 1:07:27Speaker 4: The men, the women, talking, running, bartering, fighting, the earnest mechanic,
- 1:07:33Speaker 4: the lounger, the beggar, the boys, the dogs are unrealized
- 1:07:38Speaker 4: at once, or at least wholly detached from all relation
- 1:07:43Speaker 4: to the observer, and seen as a parent not substantial beings.
- 1:07:48Speaker 4: What new thoughts are suggested by seeing a face of
- 1:07:51Speaker 4: country quite familiar in the rapid movement of the railroad car. Nay,
- 1:07:56Speaker 4: the most wonted objects make a very slight chain, and
- 1:08:00Speaker 4: the point of vision please us most. In a chimera obscura,
- 1:08:05Speaker 4: the butcher's cart and the figure of one of our
- 1:08:07Speaker 4: own family amuse us. So a portrait of a well
- 1:08:11Speaker 4: known face gratifies us. Turn the eyes upside down by
- 1:08:15Speaker 4: looking at the landscape through your legs, And how agreeable
- 1:08:18Speaker 4: is the picture, though you have seen it any time
- 1:08:21Speaker 4: these twenty years. In these cases by mechanical means, is
- 1:08:26Speaker 4: suggested the difference between the observer and the spectacle, between
- 1:08:30Speaker 4: man and nature, hence arises a pleasure mixed with awe.
- 1:08:36Speaker 4: I may say, a low degree of the sublime is
- 1:08:38Speaker 4: felt from the fact, probably that man is hereby apprized
- 1:08:43Speaker 4: that whilst the world is a spectacle, something in himself
- 1:08:47Speaker 4: is stable.
- 1:08:49Speaker 3: Two.
- 1:08:50Speaker 4: In a higher manner, the poet communicates the same pleasure.
- 1:08:55Speaker 4: By a few strokes, he delineates as on air, the sun,
- 1:08:59Speaker 4: the mountain, the camp, the city, the hero, the maiden,
- 1:09:03Speaker 4: not different from what we know them, but only lifted
- 1:09:06Speaker 4: from the ground and afloat before the eye. He unfixes
- 1:09:11Speaker 4: the land and the sea, makes them revolve around the
- 1:09:14Speaker 4: axis of his primary thought, and disposes them anew. Possessed
- 1:09:19Speaker 4: himself by a heroic passion, he uses matter as symbols
- 1:09:24Speaker 4: of it. The sensual man conforms thoughts to things. The
- 1:09:28Speaker 4: poet conforms things to his thoughts. The one esteems nature
- 1:09:34Speaker 4: as rooted and fast, the other as fluid, and impresses
- 1:09:38Speaker 4: his being thereon to him. The refractory world is ductile
- 1:09:45Speaker 4: and flexible. He invests dust and stones with humanity and
- 1:09:50Speaker 4: makes them the words of the reason. The imagination may
- 1:09:54Speaker 4: be defined to be the use which the reason makes
- 1:09:58Speaker 4: of the material world. Shakespeare possesses the power of subordinating
- 1:10:03Speaker 4: nature for the purposes of expression beyond all poets. His
- 1:10:08Speaker 4: imperial muse tosses the creation like a bauble from hand
- 1:10:12Speaker 4: to hand, and uses it to embody any caprice of
- 1:10:16Speaker 4: thought that is uppermost in his mind. The remotest spaces
- 1:10:20Speaker 4: of nature are visited, and the farthest sundered things are
- 1:10:24Speaker 4: brought together by a subtle spiritual connection. We are made
- 1:10:28Speaker 4: aware that magnitude of material things is relative, and all
- 1:10:33Speaker 4: objects shrink and expand to serve the passion of the poet. Thus,
- 1:10:38Speaker 4: in his sonnets, the lays of birds, the scents and
- 1:10:42Speaker 4: dyes of flowers, he finds to be the shadow of
- 1:10:45Speaker 4: his beloved. Time, which keeps her from him is his chest.
- 1:10:52Speaker 4: The suspicion she has awakened is her ornament. The ornament
- 1:10:57Speaker 4: of beauty is suspect a crow which flies in Heaven's
- 1:11:01Speaker 4: sweetest air. His passion is not the fruit of chance.
- 1:11:06Speaker 4: It swells as he speaks to a city or a state. No,
- 1:11:12Speaker 4: it was builded far from accident. It suffers not in
- 1:11:16Speaker 4: smiling pomp, nor falls under the brow of thralling discontent.
- 1:11:22Speaker 4: It fears not policy that heretic that works on leases
- 1:11:27Speaker 4: of short numbered hours, but all alone stands hugely politic
- 1:11:33Speaker 4: In the strength of his constancy, the pyramids seem to
- 1:11:36Speaker 4: him recent and transitory. The freshness of youth and love
- 1:11:41Speaker 4: dazzles him with its resemblance to mourning. Take those lips away,
- 1:11:47Speaker 4: which so sweetly were forsworn, and those eyes the break
- 1:11:53Speaker 4: of day lights that do mislead the morn. The wild
- 1:11:58Speaker 4: beauty of this hyperbole, I may say, in passing it
- 1:12:02Speaker 4: would not be easy to match in literature, this transfiguration,
- 1:12:07Speaker 4: which all material objects undergo through the passion of the poet.
- 1:12:12Speaker 4: This power, which he exerts to dwarf the great to
- 1:12:15Speaker 4: magnify the small, might be illustrated by a thousand examples
- 1:12:19Speaker 4: from his plays. I have before me the Tempest, and
- 1:12:22Speaker 4: will cite only these few lines. Aeriel, the strong based
- 1:12:29Speaker 4: promontory have I made shake, and by the spurs plucked
- 1:12:32Speaker 4: up the pine and cedar. Prospero calls for music to
- 1:12:36Speaker 4: soothe the frantic. Alonzo and his companions, A solemn air
- 1:12:41Speaker 4: and the best comforter to an unsettled fancy, cure thy brains,
- 1:12:45Speaker 4: now useless, boiled within thy skull. Again, the charm dissolves apace,
- 1:12:52Speaker 4: and as the morning steals upon the night, melting the darkness,
- 1:12:56Speaker 4: so their rising senses begin to chase the ignorant fume
- 1:13:00Speaker 4: that mantle their clearer reason. Their understanding begins to swell,
- 1:13:05Speaker 4: and the approaching tide will shortly fill the reasonable shores
- 1:13:09Speaker 4: that now lie foul and muddy. The perception of real
- 1:13:14Speaker 4: affinities between events, that is to say, of ideal affinities,
- 1:13:19Speaker 4: for those only are real, enables the poet thus to
- 1:13:23Speaker 4: make free with the most imposing forms and phenomena of
- 1:13:27Speaker 4: the world, and to assert the predominance of the soul. Three.
- 1:13:33Speaker 4: Whilst thus the poet animates nature with his own thoughts,
- 1:13:37Speaker 4: he differs from the philosopher only herein that the one
- 1:13:41Speaker 4: proposes beauty as his main end, the other truth. But
- 1:13:47Speaker 4: the philosopher, not less than the poet, postpones the apparent
- 1:13:51Speaker 4: order and relations of things to the empire of thought.
- 1:13:55Speaker 4: The problem of philosophy, according to Plato, is for all
- 1:14:00Speaker 4: that exists conditionally to find a ground, unconditioned and absolute.
- 1:14:06Speaker 4: It proceeds on the faith that a law determines all phenomena, which,
- 1:14:11Speaker 4: being known, the phenomena can be predicted. That law, when
- 1:14:16Speaker 4: in the mind is an idea, its beauty is infinite.
- 1:14:22Speaker 4: The true philosopher and the true poet are one, and
- 1:14:26Speaker 4: a beauty which is truth, and a truth which is
- 1:14:30Speaker 4: beauty is the aim of both. Is not the charm
- 1:14:35Speaker 4: of one of Plato's or Aristotle's definitions. Strictly like that
- 1:14:39Speaker 4: of the antigony of Sophocles. It is in both cases
- 1:14:44Speaker 4: that a spiritual life has been imparted to nature, that
- 1:14:47Speaker 4: the solid, seeming block of matter has been pervaded and
- 1:14:51Speaker 4: dissolved by a thought, that this feeble human being has
- 1:14:56Speaker 4: penetrated the vast masses of nature with an informing so
- 1:15:00Speaker 4: soul and recognized itself in their harmony, that is, seized
- 1:15:05Speaker 4: their law. In physics. When this is attained, the memory
- 1:15:10Speaker 4: disburthens itself of its cumbrous catalogs of particulars, and carries
- 1:15:16Speaker 4: centuries of observation in a single formula. Thus, even in physics,
- 1:15:22Speaker 4: the material is degraded before the spiritual. The astronomer, the
- 1:15:27Speaker 4: geometer rely on their irrefragable analysis and disdain the results
- 1:15:34Speaker 4: of observation. The sublime remark of Euler on his law
- 1:15:38Speaker 4: of arches, this will be found contrary to all experience.
- 1:15:42Speaker 4: Yet is true had already transferred nature into the mind
- 1:15:47Speaker 4: and left matter like an outcast corpse.
- 1:15:51Speaker 1: Four.
- 1:15:53Speaker 4: Intellectual science has been observed to beget invariably a doubt
- 1:15:57Speaker 4: of the existence of matter. Urgot said, he that has
- 1:16:02Speaker 4: never doubted the existence of matter may be assured that
- 1:16:06Speaker 4: he has no aptitude for metaphysical inquiries. It fastens the
- 1:16:11Speaker 4: attention upon immortal, necessary, uncreated natures, that is, upon ideas,
- 1:16:18Speaker 4: and in their presence, we feel that the outward circumstance
- 1:16:22Speaker 4: is a dream and a shade. Whilst we wait in
- 1:16:26Speaker 4: this olympus of gods, we think of nature as an
- 1:16:30Speaker 4: appendix to the soul. We ascend into their region and
- 1:16:35Speaker 4: know that these are the thoughts of the supreme Being.
- 1:16:39Speaker 4: These are they who were set up from everlasting, from
- 1:16:43Speaker 4: the beginning, or ever the earth was. When He prepared
- 1:16:47Speaker 4: the heavens, they were there when he established the clouds above,
- 1:16:52Speaker 4: when he strengthened the fountains of the deep. Then they
- 1:16:56Speaker 4: were by him, as one brought up with him of
- 1:17:00Speaker 4: them to key counsel. Their influence is proportionate. As objects
- 1:17:07Speaker 4: of science, they are accessible to few men. Yet all
- 1:17:10Speaker 4: men are capable of being raised by piety or by
- 1:17:14Speaker 4: passion into their region. And no man touches these divine
- 1:17:19Speaker 4: natures without becoming in some degree himself divine, like a
- 1:17:25Speaker 4: new soul. They renew the body. We become physically nimble
- 1:17:29Speaker 4: and lightsome. We tread on air. Life is no longer irksome,
- 1:17:34Speaker 4: and we think it will never be so. No man
- 1:17:38Speaker 4: fears age or misfortune or death in their serene company,
- 1:17:43Speaker 4: for he is transported out of the district of change.
- 1:17:48Speaker 4: Whilst we behold unveiled the nature of justice and truth,
- 1:17:53Speaker 4: we learn the difference between the absolute and the conditional
- 1:17:57Speaker 4: or relative. We apprehend the appslceut as it were. For
- 1:18:02Speaker 4: the first time we exist, we become immortal, for we
- 1:18:08Speaker 4: learn that time and space are relations of matter that
- 1:18:12Speaker 4: with a perception of truth or a virtuous will, they
- 1:18:16Speaker 4: have no affinity.
- 1:18:19Speaker 1: Five.
- 1:18:21Speaker 4: Finally, religion and ethics, which may be fitly called the
- 1:18:26Speaker 4: practice of ideas or the introduction of ideas into life,
- 1:18:31Speaker 4: have an analogous effect with all lower culture, in degrading
- 1:18:36Speaker 4: nature and suggesting its dependence on spirit. Ethics and religion
- 1:18:42Speaker 4: differ herein that the one is the system of human
- 1:18:46Speaker 4: duties commencing from man, the other from God. Religion includes
- 1:18:52Speaker 4: the personality of God, ethics does not. They are one
- 1:18:58Speaker 4: to our present design. They both put in nature under foot.
- 1:19:03Speaker 4: The first and last lesson of religion is the things
- 1:19:06Speaker 4: that are seen are temporal, the things that are unseen
- 1:19:10Speaker 4: are eternal. It puts an affront upon nature. It does
- 1:19:16Speaker 4: that for the unschooled, which philosophy does for Berkelly and Viasa.
- 1:19:21Speaker 4: The uniform language that may be heard in the churches
- 1:19:24Speaker 4: of the most ignorant sects is contemn the unsubstantial shows
- 1:19:30Speaker 4: of the world. They are vanities, dreams, shadows, unrealities. Seek
- 1:19:36Speaker 4: the realities of religion. The devotee flouts nature. Some theosophists
- 1:19:43Speaker 4: have arrived at a certain hostility and indignation towards matter,
- 1:19:48Speaker 4: As the Venetian and Plotinus they distrusted in themselves any
- 1:19:53Speaker 4: looking back to these flesh pots of Egypt, Plotinus was
- 1:19:57Speaker 4: ashamed of his body. In short, they might all say
- 1:20:02Speaker 4: of matter what Michaelangelo said of external beauty. It is
- 1:20:07Speaker 4: the frail and weary weed in which God dresses the
- 1:20:11Speaker 4: soul which he has called into time. It appears that motion, poetry,
- 1:20:17Speaker 4: physical and intellectual, science, and religion all tend to affect
- 1:20:22Speaker 4: our convictions of the reality of the external world. But
- 1:20:26Speaker 4: I own there is something ungrateful in expanding too curiously
- 1:20:31Speaker 4: the particulars of the general proposition that all culture tends
- 1:20:35Speaker 4: to imbue us with idealism. I have no hostility to nature,
- 1:20:40Speaker 4: but a child's love to it. I expand and live
- 1:20:44Speaker 4: in the warm day like corn and melons. Let us
- 1:20:47Speaker 4: speak her fair. I do not wish to fling stones
- 1:20:51Speaker 4: at my beautiful mother, nor soil my gentle nest. I
- 1:20:56Speaker 4: only wish to indicate the true position of nature in
- 1:20:59Speaker 4: regard to man, wherein to establish man all right, education
- 1:21:05Speaker 4: tends as the ground which to attain is the object
- 1:21:09Speaker 4: of human life, that is, of man's connection with nature.
- 1:21:15Speaker 4: Culture inverts the vulgar views of nature and brings the
- 1:21:19Speaker 4: mind to call that apparent which it uses to call real,
- 1:21:24Speaker 4: and that real which it uses to call visionary. Children.
- 1:21:29Speaker 4: It is true believe in the external world. The belief
- 1:21:33Speaker 4: that it appears only is an afterthought. But with culture
- 1:21:38Speaker 4: this faith will as surely arise on the mind as
- 1:21:41Speaker 4: it did the first. The advantage of the ideal theory
- 1:21:47Speaker 4: over the popular faith is this that it presents the
- 1:21:51Speaker 4: world in precisely that view which is most desirable to
- 1:21:55Speaker 4: the mind. It is, in fact the view which real,
- 1:22:00Speaker 4: both speculative and practical. That is, philosophy and virtue take
- 1:22:06Speaker 4: for seen. In the light of thought, the world always
- 1:22:11Speaker 4: is phenomenal, and virtue subordinates it to the mind. Idealism
- 1:22:17Speaker 4: sees the world in God. It beholds the whole circle
- 1:22:21Speaker 4: of persons and things, of actions and events, of country
- 1:22:26Speaker 4: and religion, not as painfully accumulated atom after atom, act
- 1:22:31Speaker 4: after act in an aged creeping past, but as one
- 1:22:36Speaker 4: vast picture which God paints on the instant eternity for
- 1:22:40Speaker 4: the contemplation of the soul. Therefore, the soul holds itself
- 1:22:46Speaker 4: off from a too trivial and microscopic study of the
- 1:22:50Speaker 4: universal tablet. It respects the end too much to immerse
- 1:22:54Speaker 4: itself in the means. It sees something more important in
- 1:22:59Speaker 4: Christianity than the scandals of ecclesiastical history or the niceties
- 1:23:04Speaker 4: of criticism, and very incurious concerning persons or miracles, and
- 1:23:11Speaker 4: not at all disturbed by chasms of historical evidence. It
- 1:23:15Speaker 4: accepts from God the phenomenon as it finds it as
- 1:23:19Speaker 4: the pure and awful form of religion in the world.
- 1:23:24Speaker 4: It is not hot and passionate at the appearance of
- 1:23:27Speaker 4: what it calls its own good or bad fortune, at
- 1:23:31Speaker 4: the union or opposition of other persons. No man is
- 1:23:35Speaker 4: its enemy. It accepts whatsoever befalls as part of its lesson.
- 1:23:41Speaker 4: It is a watcher more than a doer. It is
- 1:23:44Speaker 4: a doer only that it may the better watch. End
- 1:23:50Speaker 4: of Chapter.
- 1:23:51Speaker 2: Six seven Spirit. It is essential to a true theory
- 1:23:59Speaker 2: of nature and of man that it should contain somewhat
- 1:24:02Speaker 2: progressive uses that are exhausted or that may be and
- 1:24:07Speaker 2: facts that end in the statement cannot be all that
- 1:24:09Speaker 2: is true of this brave lodging, wherein man is harbored,
- 1:24:12Speaker 2: and wherein all his faculties find appropriate and endless exercise,
- 1:24:17Speaker 2: and all the uses of nature admit of being summed
- 1:24:19Speaker 2: in one which yield the activity of man in infinite scope,
- 1:24:24Speaker 2: through all its kingdoms, to the suburbs and outskirts of things.
- 1:24:28Speaker 2: It is faithful to the cause whence it had its origin.
- 1:24:31Speaker 2: It always speaks of spirit. It suggests the absolute. It
- 1:24:36Speaker 2: is a perpetual effect. It is a great shadow, pointing
- 1:24:39Speaker 2: always to the sun behind us. The aspect of nature
- 1:24:44Speaker 2: is devout, like the figure of Jesus, she stands with
- 1:24:48Speaker 2: bended head and hands folded upon the breast. The happiest
- 1:24:53Speaker 2: man is he who learns from nature the lesson of
- 1:24:55Speaker 2: worship of that ineffable essence which we call spirit. He
- 1:25:00Speaker 2: that thinks most will say least. We can foresee God
- 1:25:04Speaker 2: in the course and as it were, a distant phenomena
- 1:25:07Speaker 2: of matter. But when we try to define and describe himself,
- 1:25:10Speaker 2: both language and thought desert us, and we are as
- 1:25:13Speaker 2: helpless as fools and savages. That essence refuses to be
- 1:25:17Speaker 2: recorded in propositions that when man has worshiped him intellectually,
- 1:25:21Speaker 2: the noblest ministry of nature is to stand as the
- 1:25:24Speaker 2: apparition of God. It is the organ through which the
- 1:25:27Speaker 2: universal Spirit speaks to the individual and strives to lead
- 1:25:30Speaker 2: back the individual to it. When we consider spirit, we
- 1:25:35Speaker 2: see that the views already presented do not include the
- 1:25:37Speaker 2: whole circumference of man. We must adds of related thoughts.
- 1:25:41Speaker 2: Three problems are put by nature to the mind. What
- 1:25:44Speaker 2: is matter, whence is it? And where too? The first
- 1:25:49Speaker 2: of these questions only the ideal theory answers. Idealism said
- 1:25:53Speaker 2: matter is a phenomenon, not a substance. Idealism acquaints us
- 1:25:58Speaker 2: with a total disparity between the evidence of our own
- 1:26:00Speaker 2: being and the evidence of the world's being. The one
- 1:26:03Speaker 2: is perfect, the other incapable of any assurance. The mind
- 1:26:07Speaker 2: is a part of the nature of things. The world's
- 1:26:10Speaker 2: a divine dream from which we may presently awake to
- 1:26:12Speaker 2: the glories and certainties of day. Idealism is a hypothesis
- 1:26:16Speaker 2: to account for nature by other principles than those of
- 1:26:19Speaker 2: carpentry and chemistry. Yet if it only denied the existence
- 1:26:23Speaker 2: of matter, it does not satisfy the demands of the spirit.
- 1:26:26Speaker 2: It leaves God out of me, It leaves me in
- 1:26:29Speaker 2: the splendid labyrinth of my own perceptions, to wander without end.
- 1:26:34Speaker 2: Then the heart resists it, because it balks the affections
- 1:26:37Speaker 2: in denying substantive being to men and women. Nature is
- 1:26:42Speaker 2: so pervaded with human life that there is something of
- 1:26:44Speaker 2: humanity in all and in every particular. But this theory
- 1:26:48Speaker 2: makes nature foreign to me, and does not account for
- 1:26:51Speaker 2: that consanguinity which we acknowledge to it. Let it stand then,
- 1:26:56Speaker 2: in the present state of our knowledge, merely as a
- 1:26:59Speaker 2: useful introductory hypothesis, serving to apprise us of the eternal
- 1:27:02Speaker 2: distinction between the soul and the world. But when following
- 1:27:06Speaker 2: the invisible step of thought, we come to inquire whence
- 1:27:09Speaker 2: is matter, and where too many truths arise to us
- 1:27:12Speaker 2: out of the recesses of consciousness. We learn that the
- 1:27:16Speaker 2: Highest is present to the soul of man, That the
- 1:27:19Speaker 2: dread universal lessence, which is not wisdom or love, or
- 1:27:22Speaker 2: beauty or power, but all in one and each entirely,
- 1:27:27Speaker 2: is that for which all things exist, and that by
- 1:27:29Speaker 2: which they are. That Spirit creates. That behind nature, throughout nature,
- 1:27:34Speaker 2: Spirit is present, one and not compound. It does not
- 1:27:38Speaker 2: act upon us from without, that is, in space and time,
- 1:27:41Speaker 2: but spiritually or through ourselves. Therefore, that spirit, that is
- 1:27:45Speaker 2: the supreme Being, does not build up nature around us,
- 1:27:49Speaker 2: but puts it forth through us, as the life of
- 1:27:51Speaker 2: the tree puts forth new branches and leaves the pores
- 1:27:54Speaker 2: of the old as a plant upon the earth. So
- 1:27:58Speaker 2: man breasts upon the bosom of God. He is nourished
- 1:28:01Speaker 2: by unfailing fountains, and draws at his need in exhaustible power.
- 1:28:05Speaker 2: Who can set bounce to the possibilities of man? Once
- 1:28:09Speaker 2: inhale the upper air being admitted to behold the absolute
- 1:28:12Speaker 2: natures of justice and truth, and we learn that man
- 1:28:15Speaker 2: has access to the entire mind of the Creator, is
- 1:28:18Speaker 2: himself the creator in the finite. This view, which admonishes
- 1:28:22Speaker 2: me where the sources of wisdom and power lie, and
- 1:28:25Speaker 2: points to virtuous to the golden key, which opes the
- 1:28:28Speaker 2: palace of eternity, carries upon its face the highest certificate
- 1:28:32Speaker 2: of truth, because it animates me to create my own
- 1:28:35Speaker 2: world through the purification of my soul. The world proceeds
- 1:28:39Speaker 2: from the same spirit as the body of man. It
- 1:28:42Speaker 2: is a remoter and inferior incarnation of God, a projection
- 1:28:46Speaker 2: of God in the unconscious. But it differs from the
- 1:28:48Speaker 2: body in one important respect. It is not like that
- 1:28:52Speaker 2: now subjected to human will. Its serene order is inviolable
- 1:28:55Speaker 2: by us. It is therefore to us the present expositor
- 1:28:59Speaker 2: of the divine mind. It is a fixed point, whereby
- 1:29:02Speaker 2: we may measure our departure as we degenerate. The contrast
- 1:29:06Speaker 2: between us and our house is more evident. We are
- 1:29:09Speaker 2: as much strangers in nature as we are aliens from God.
- 1:29:13Speaker 2: We do not understand the notes of birds. The fox
- 1:29:16Speaker 2: and the deer run away from us, the bare and
- 1:29:19Speaker 2: tiger rend us. We do not know the uses of
- 1:29:21Speaker 2: more than a few plants, as corn and the apple,
- 1:29:24Speaker 2: the potato, and the vine. Is not the landscape, every
- 1:29:28Speaker 2: glimpse of which hath a grandeur a base of him?
- 1:29:32Speaker 2: That this may show us what discord is between man
- 1:29:34Speaker 2: and nature. For you cannot freely admire a noble landscape
- 1:29:38Speaker 2: if laborers are digging in the field. Hard By the
- 1:29:41Speaker 2: poet finds something ridiculous in his delight until he is
- 1:29:44Speaker 2: out of the sight of men. End of Chapter seven,
- 1:29:49Speaker 2: Chapter eight prospects in Inquiries respecting the Laws of the
- 1:29:57Speaker 2: World and the frame of things the highest reason, and
- 1:30:00Speaker 2: is always the truest. That which seems faintly possible it
- 1:30:04Speaker 2: is so refined, is often faint and dim because it
- 1:30:07Speaker 2: is deepest seated in the mind among the eternal verities.
- 1:30:11Speaker 2: Empirical science is apt to cloud the site, and by
- 1:30:15Speaker 2: the very knowledge of functions and processes, to bereave the
- 1:30:18Speaker 2: student of the manly contemplation of the whole. The savant
- 1:30:22Speaker 2: becomes unpoetic. But the best read naturalist, who lends an
- 1:30:26Speaker 2: entire and devoured attention to truth, will see that there
- 1:30:29Speaker 2: remains much to learn of his relation to the world,
- 1:30:32Speaker 2: and that it is not to be learned by any
- 1:30:34Speaker 2: addition or subtraction or other comparison of known quantities, but
- 1:30:38Speaker 2: is arrived at by untaught sallies of the spirit, by
- 1:30:41Speaker 2: a continual self recovery, and by entire humility. He will
- 1:30:47Speaker 2: perceive that there are far more excellent qualities in the
- 1:30:49Speaker 2: student than preciseness and infallibility, that I guess is often
- 1:30:53Speaker 2: more fruitful than an indisputable information, and that a dream
- 1:30:58Speaker 2: may let us deeper into the secret of nature than
- 1:31:00Speaker 2: a hundred concerted experiments. For the problems to be solved
- 1:31:04Speaker 2: are precisely those which the physiologists and the naturalist omit
- 1:31:08Speaker 2: to state. It is not so pertinent to man to
- 1:31:11Speaker 2: know all the individuals of the animal kingdom as it
- 1:31:14Speaker 2: is to know whence and where too? Is this tyrannizing
- 1:31:16Speaker 2: unity in its constitution, which ever more separates and classifies things,
- 1:31:20Speaker 2: endeavoring to reduce the most diverse to one form. When
- 1:31:25Speaker 2: I behold the rich landscape, it is less my purpose
- 1:31:28Speaker 2: to recite correctly the order and superposition of the strata
- 1:31:31Speaker 2: than to know why all thought of multitude is lost
- 1:31:34Speaker 2: in a tranquil sense of unity. I cannot greatly honor
- 1:31:38Speaker 2: mi nuteness and details, so long as there is no
- 1:31:41Speaker 2: hint to explain the relation between things and thoughts, no
- 1:31:44Speaker 2: ray upon the metaphysics of conchology, of botany of the arts,
- 1:31:48Speaker 2: to show the relation of the forms flowers, shells, animals,
- 1:31:52Speaker 2: architecture to the mind, and build science upon ideas. In
- 1:31:57Speaker 2: a cabinet of natural history, we become sense of of
- 1:32:00Speaker 2: a certain occult recognition and sympathy in regard to the
- 1:32:03Speaker 2: most unwieldy and eccentric forms of beast, fish, and insect.
- 1:32:07Speaker 2: The American who has been confined in his own country
- 1:32:10Speaker 2: to the site of buildings designed after foreign models, is
- 1:32:14Speaker 2: surprised on entering New York Minster or Saint Peter's at
- 1:32:17Speaker 2: Rome by the feeling that these structures are imitations, also
- 1:32:20Speaker 2: faint copies of an invisible archetype. Norros science sufficient humanity,
- 1:32:25Speaker 2: so long as the naturalist overlooks that wonderful congruity which
- 1:32:28Speaker 2: subsists between man and the world of which he is lourd,
- 1:32:31Speaker 2: not because he is the most subtle inhabitant, but because
- 1:32:34Speaker 2: he is its head and heart, and finds something of
- 1:32:36Speaker 2: himself in every great and small thing, in every mountain stratum,
- 1:32:40Speaker 2: in every new law of color, fact of astronomy, or
- 1:32:43Speaker 2: atmospheric influence, which observation or analysis lay open. A perception
- 1:32:47Speaker 2: of this mystery inspires the muse of George Herbert, the
- 1:32:50Speaker 2: beautiful psalmist of the seventeenth century. The following lines are
- 1:32:54Speaker 2: part of his little poem on Man. Man is all symmetry,
- 1:32:58Speaker 2: full of proportions, one limb to another and to all
- 1:33:01Speaker 2: the world. Besides, each part may call the farthest brother,
- 1:33:06Speaker 2: for head with foot have private amity, and both with
- 1:33:09Speaker 2: moons and tides. Nothing hath got so far, but man
- 1:33:14Speaker 2: hath caught and kept it as his prey. His eyes
- 1:33:17Speaker 2: dismount the highest star. He is in little. All the
- 1:33:20Speaker 2: sphere herbs gladly cure our flesh, because that they find
- 1:33:25Speaker 2: their acquaintance there. For us. The winds do blow, the
- 1:33:30Speaker 2: earth doth rest have more, and fountains flow. Nothing we
- 1:33:33Speaker 2: see but means our good, as our delight or as
- 1:33:36Speaker 2: our treasure. The whole is either our cupboard of food
- 1:33:40Speaker 2: or cabinet of pleasure. The stars have us to bed.
- 1:33:44Speaker 2: Night draws the curtain which the sun withdraws. Music and
- 1:33:48Speaker 2: light attend our head. All things unto our flesh are
- 1:33:51Speaker 2: kind in their descent, and being to our mind in
- 1:33:55Speaker 2: their ascent, and cause more servants weigh on man than
- 1:34:00Speaker 2: he'll take notice of. In every path he treads down
- 1:34:03Speaker 2: that which doth befriend him. When sickness makes him pale,
- 1:34:06Speaker 2: and wan, oh mighty love, Man is one world, and
- 1:34:10Speaker 2: half another to attend him. The perception of this class
- 1:34:14Speaker 2: of truth makes the attraction which draws men to science,
- 1:34:18Speaker 2: but the end is lost sight of in attention to
- 1:34:20Speaker 2: the means. In view of this half side of science,
- 1:34:23Speaker 2: we accept a sentence of Plato that poetry comes nearer
- 1:34:27Speaker 2: to vital truth than history. Every surmise and theaicination of
- 1:34:31Speaker 2: the mind is entitled to a certain respect, and we
- 1:34:34Speaker 2: learn to prefer imperfect theories and sentences which contain glimpses
- 1:34:37Speaker 2: of truth, to digested system which have no one valuable suggestion.
- 1:34:42Speaker 2: A wise writer will feel that the ends of studying
- 1:34:45Speaker 2: composition are best answered by announcing undiscovered regions of thought,
- 1:34:49Speaker 2: and so communicating through hope new activity to the torpid spirit.
- 1:34:54Speaker 2: I shall therefore conclude this essay with some traditions of
- 1:34:56Speaker 2: man in nature, which a certain poet saying to me,
- 1:34:59Speaker 2: and which, as they have always been in this world
- 1:35:01Speaker 2: and perhaps reappear to every bard, may be both history
- 1:35:05Speaker 2: and prophecy. The foundations of man are not in matter,
- 1:35:10Speaker 2: but in spirit. But the element of spirit is eternity
- 1:35:14Speaker 2: to it. Therefore, the longest series of events, the oldest chronologies,
- 1:35:18Speaker 2: are young and recent in the cycle of the universal man,
- 1:35:21Speaker 2: from whom the known individuals proceed. Sentries are points in
- 1:35:25Speaker 2: all histories, but the epoch of one degradation. We distrust
- 1:35:30Speaker 2: and deny inwardly our sympathy with nature. We own and
- 1:35:33Speaker 2: disown our relation to it by turns. We are like
- 1:35:36Speaker 2: nebuchad Nezzar, dethroned, bereft of reason, and eating grass like
- 1:35:41Speaker 2: an ox. But who can set limits to the remedial
- 1:35:44Speaker 2: force of spirit? A man is a god in ruins.
- 1:35:49Speaker 2: When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall
- 1:35:52Speaker 2: pass into the immortal as gently as we awake from dreams. Now,
- 1:35:57Speaker 2: the world will be insane and rabid if these disorganization
- 1:36:00Speaker 2: should last for hundreds of years. It is kept in
- 1:36:03Speaker 2: check by death and infancy. Infancy is perpetual Messiah, which
- 1:36:07Speaker 2: comes into the arms of fallen men and pleads with
- 1:36:10Speaker 2: them to return to paradise. Man is the dwarf from himself.
- 1:36:15Speaker 2: Once he was permeated and dissolved by spirit, he filled
- 1:36:19Speaker 2: nature with his overflowing currents. Out from him sprang the
- 1:36:22Speaker 2: sun and moon from man, the sun from woman, the moon,
- 1:36:26Speaker 2: the laws of his mind, the periods of his actions
- 1:36:29Speaker 2: externized themselves into day and night, into the year and
- 1:36:32Speaker 2: the seasons. But having made for himself this huge shell,
- 1:36:36Speaker 2: his waters retired. He no longer fills the veins and veinlets.
- 1:36:41Speaker 2: He is shrunk to a drop. He sees that the
- 1:36:44Speaker 2: structure still fits him, but fits him colossally say, rather
- 1:36:48Speaker 2: once it fitted him, now it corresponds to him from
- 1:36:52Speaker 2: far and on high. He adores timidly his own work.
- 1:36:56Speaker 2: Now is man the follower of the sun, and woman
- 1:36:59Speaker 2: the follower of the moon. Yet sometimes he starts in
- 1:37:02Speaker 2: his slumber and wonders at himself in his house, and
- 1:37:05Speaker 2: muses strangely at the resemblance betwixt him and it. He
- 1:37:09Speaker 2: perceives that if his law is still paramount, if still
- 1:37:12Speaker 2: he have elemental power, if his word is sterling. Yet
- 1:37:16Speaker 2: in nature it is not conscious power. It is not inferior,
- 1:37:19Speaker 2: but superior to his will. It is instinct. Thus my
- 1:37:25Speaker 2: orphic poet saying, at present man applies to nature but
- 1:37:30Speaker 2: half his force. He works on the world with his
- 1:37:33Speaker 2: understanding alone. He lives in it and masters it by
- 1:37:37Speaker 2: a penny wisdom. And he that works most in it
- 1:37:40Speaker 2: is but a half met And whilst his arms are
- 1:37:43Speaker 2: strong and digestion good, his mind is imbruded, and he
- 1:37:48Speaker 2: is a selfish savage. His relation to nature, his power
- 1:37:53Speaker 2: over it, is through the understanding, is by manure. The
- 1:37:56Speaker 2: economic use of fire, wind, water, and the mariner's needle, steam, coal,
- 1:38:01Speaker 2: chemical agriculture, the repairs of the human body by the
- 1:38:05Speaker 2: dentist and the surgeon. This is such a resumption of
- 1:38:08Speaker 2: power as if a banished king should buy his territories
- 1:38:11Speaker 2: inch by inch instead of vaulting at once into his throne. Meantime,
- 1:38:16Speaker 2: in the thick darkness, there are not wanting gleams of
- 1:38:19Speaker 2: a better light. Occasional examples of the action of man
- 1:38:22Speaker 2: upon nature with his entire force, with reason as well
- 1:38:25Speaker 2: as understanding. Such examples are the traditions of miracles in
- 1:38:29Speaker 2: the earliest antiquity of all nations, the history of Jesus Christ,
- 1:38:34Speaker 2: the achievements of a principle, as in religious and political
- 1:38:37Speaker 2: revolutions and in the abolition of the slave trade. The
- 1:38:40Speaker 2: miracles of enthusiasm as those reported of Spuedenberg, Hooenlo and
- 1:38:45Speaker 2: the Shakers. Many obscure and yet contested facts now arrange
- 1:38:49Speaker 2: under the name of animal magnetism, prayer, eloquence, self healing,
- 1:38:54Speaker 2: and the wisdom of children. These are examples of reasons.
- 1:38:58Speaker 2: Momentary grasp of the scepter, the exertions of a power
- 1:39:01Speaker 2: which exists not in time or space, but an instantaneous
- 1:39:04Speaker 2: in streaming causing power. The difference between the actual and
- 1:39:09Speaker 2: the ideal force of Man is happily figured by the
- 1:39:11Speaker 2: schoolmen in saying that the knowledge of Man is an
- 1:39:13Speaker 2: evening knowledge, thuspertina cognitio, but that of God is a
- 1:39:18Speaker 2: mourning knowledge matutina cognitiu. The problem of restoring to the
- 1:39:23Speaker 2: world original internal beauty is solved by the redemption of
- 1:39:27Speaker 2: the soul. The ruin of the blank that we see
- 1:39:30Speaker 2: when we look at nature is in our own eye.
- 1:39:33Speaker 2: The axis of vision is not coincident with the axis
- 1:39:36Speaker 2: of things, and so they appear not transparent but opaque.
- 1:39:41Speaker 2: The reason why the world lacks unity and lies broken
- 1:39:44Speaker 2: in heaps is because the man is disunited with himself.
- 1:39:49Speaker 2: He cannot be a naturalist until he satisfies all the
- 1:39:52Speaker 2: demands of the spirit. Love is as much its demand
- 1:39:55Speaker 2: as perception. Indeed, neither can be perfect without the other.
- 1:40:00Speaker 2: In the uttermost meaning of the words, thought is devout
- 1:40:03Speaker 2: and devotion is thought. Deep calls unto deep, but in
- 1:40:07Speaker 2: actual life the marriage is not celebrated. There are innocent
- 1:40:11Speaker 2: men who worship God after the tradition of their fathers,
- 1:40:14Speaker 2: but their sense of duty has not yet extended to
- 1:40:16Speaker 2: the use of all their faculties. And there are patient naturalists,
- 1:40:20Speaker 2: but they freeze their subject under the wintry light of
- 1:40:22Speaker 2: the understanding. Is not prayer also a study of truth,
- 1:40:27Speaker 2: a sally of the soul into the unfound infinite. No
- 1:40:31Speaker 2: man ever prayed heartily without learning something. But when a
- 1:40:34Speaker 2: faithful thinker resolute to detach every object from personal relations
- 1:40:38Speaker 2: and see it in the light of thought, shall, at
- 1:40:40Speaker 2: the same time kindle science with the fire of the
- 1:40:43Speaker 2: holiest affections. Then will God go forth anew into the creation.
- 1:40:49Speaker 2: It will not need when the mind is prepared for
- 1:40:51Speaker 2: study to search for objects. The invariable mark of wisdom
- 1:40:55Speaker 2: is to see the miraculous in the common What is
- 1:40:59Speaker 2: a day? What is a year? What is summer? What
- 1:41:02Speaker 2: is woman? What is a child? What is sleep? To
- 1:41:06Speaker 2: our blindness, these things seem unaffecting. We make fables to
- 1:41:10Speaker 2: hide the baldness of the fact and conform it, as
- 1:41:12Speaker 2: we say, to the higher law of the mind. But
- 1:41:15Speaker 2: when the fact is seen under the light of an idea,
- 1:41:18Speaker 2: the gaudy fable fades and triveles. We behold the real
- 1:41:21Speaker 2: higher law to the wise. Therefore, a fact is true poetry,
- 1:41:27Speaker 2: and the most beautiful of fables. These wonders are brought
- 1:41:30Speaker 2: to our own door. You also are a man, man
- 1:41:34Speaker 2: and woman, and their social life, poverty, labor, sleep, fear,
- 1:41:39Speaker 2: fortune are known to you. Learn that none of these
- 1:41:42Speaker 2: things is superficial, but that each phenomenon has its roots
- 1:41:45Speaker 2: in the faculties and affections of the mind. Whilst the
- 1:41:49Speaker 2: abstract question occupies your intellect, Nature brings it into concrete
- 1:41:53Speaker 2: to be solved by your hands. It were a wise
- 1:41:56Speaker 2: inquiry for the closet to compare a point by point. Especially,
- 1:41:59Speaker 2: it remarks, what crises in life are daily history with
- 1:42:03Speaker 2: the rise and progress of ideas in the mind. So
- 1:42:07Speaker 2: shall we come to look at the world with new eyes.
- 1:42:09Speaker 2: It shall answer the endless inquiry of the intellect what
- 1:42:12Speaker 2: is truth? And of the affections what is good? By
- 1:42:16Speaker 2: yielding itself passive to the educated, will then shall come
- 1:42:20Speaker 2: to pass what my poet said. Nature is not fixed,
- 1:42:23Speaker 2: but fluid. Spirit alters mold makes it. The immobility or
- 1:42:29Speaker 2: bruteness of nature is the absence of spirit. To pure spirit,
- 1:42:33Speaker 2: it is fluid, it is volatile, it is obedient. Every
- 1:42:38Speaker 2: spirit builds itself a house, and beyond its house a world,
- 1:42:42Speaker 2: and beyond its world a heaven. Know then that the
- 1:42:46Speaker 2: world exists for you. For you is the phenomenon perfect
- 1:42:51Speaker 2: what we are. That only can we see all that
- 1:42:55Speaker 2: Adam had, all that Caesar, could you have and can do.
- 1:43:00Speaker 2: Adam called his house heaven and earth. Caesar call this
- 1:43:03Speaker 2: house room. You perhaps call yours a cobblersh trade, a
- 1:43:08Speaker 2: hundred acres of plaid land, or a scholar's garret. Yet,
- 1:43:12Speaker 2: line for line, and point for point, your dominion is
- 1:43:15Speaker 2: as great as theirs, though without fine names. Build Therefore
- 1:43:20Speaker 2: your own world, as fast as you can form your
- 1:43:23Speaker 2: life to the pure idea in your mind, that will
- 1:43:26Speaker 2: unfold its great proportions. A correspondent revolution in things will
- 1:43:31Speaker 2: attend the influx of the spirit. So fast will disagreeable appearances, swine, spiders, snakes, pests,
- 1:43:39Speaker 2: mad houses, prisons, enemies vanish. They are temporary and shall
- 1:43:44Speaker 2: be no more seen the sorder and filths of nature.
- 1:43:49Speaker 2: The sun shall dry up and the wind ex hail,
- 1:43:52Speaker 2: as when the summer comes from the south, the snow
- 1:43:54Speaker 2: bags melt, and the face of the earth becomes green
- 1:43:57Speaker 2: before it, So shall the advancing spirit create its ornaments
- 1:44:01Speaker 2: along its path, and carry with it the beauty it visits,
- 1:44:06Speaker 2: and the song which enchants it. It shall draw beautiful faces,
- 1:44:10Speaker 2: warm hearts, wise discourse, and heroic acts around its way,
- 1:44:15Speaker 2: until evil is no more seen. The Kingdom of Man
- 1:44:19Speaker 2: over nature, which cometh not with observation. A dominion such
- 1:44:23Speaker 2: as now is beyond his dream of God. He shall
- 1:44:25Speaker 2: enter without more wonder than the blind man feels, who
- 1:44:28Speaker 2: is gradually restored to perfect sight. End of Nature