textfiles/etext/AUTHORS/EMERSON/emerson-method-236.txt

 
        THE METHOD OF NATURE
 
        _An Oration delivered before the Society of the Adelphi, in
Waterville College, Maine, August 11, 1841_

        GENTLEMEN,
        Let us exchange congratulations on the enjoyments and the pros
literary anniversary.  The land we live in has no interest so dear,
if it knew its want, as the fit consecration of days of reason and
thought.  Where there is no vision, the people perish.  The scholars
are the priests of that thought which establishes the foundations of
the earth.  No matter what is their special work or profession, they
stand for the spiritual interest of the world, and it is a common
calamity if they neglect their post in a country where the material
interest is so predominant as it is in America.  We hear something
too much of the results of machinery, commerce, and the useful arts.
We are a puny and a fickle folk.  Avarice, hesitation, and following,
are our diseases.  The rapid wealth which hundreds in the community
acquire in trade, or by the incessant expansions of our population
and arts, enchants the eyes of all the rest; the luck of one is the
hope of thousands, and the bribe acts like the neighborhood of a gold
mine to impoverish the farm, the school, the church, the house, and
the very body and feature of man.

        I do not wish to look with sour aspect at the industrious
manufacturing village, or the mart of commerce.  I love the music of
the water-wheel; I value the railway; I feel the pride which the
sight of a ship inspires; I look on trade and every mechanical craft
as education also.  But let me discriminate what is precious herein.
There is in each of these works an act of invention, an intellectual
step, or short series of steps taken; that act or step is the
spiritual act; all the rest is mere repetition of the same a thousand
times.  And I will not be deceived into admiring the routine of
handicrafts and mechanics, how splendid soever the result, any more
than I admire the routine of the scholars or clerical class.  That
splendid results ensue from the labors of stupid men, is the fruit of
higher laws than their will, and the routine is not to be praised for
it.  I would not have the laborer sacrificed to the result, -- I
would not have the laborer sacrificed to my convenience and pride,
nor to that of a great class of such as me.  Let there be worse
cotton and better men.  The weaver should not be bereaved of his
superiority to his work, and his knowledge that the product or the
skill is of no value, except so far as it embodies his spiritual
prerogatives.  If I see nothing to admire in the unit, shall I admire
a million units?  Men stand in awe of the city, but do not honor any
individual citizen; and are continually yielding to this dazzling
result of numbers, that which they would never yield to the solitary
example of any one.

        Whilst the multitude of men degrade each other, and give
currency to desponding doctrines, the scholar must be a bringer of
hope, and must reinforce man against himself.  I sometimes believe
that our literary anniversaries will presently assume a greater
importance, as the eyes of men open to their capabilities.  Here, a
new set of distinctions, a new order of ideas, prevail.  Here, we set
a bound to the respectability of wealth, and a bound to the
pretensions of the law and the church.  The bigot must cease to be a
bigot to-day.  Into our charmed circle, power cannot enter; and the
sturdiest defender of existing institutions feels the terrific
inflammability of this air which condenses heat in every corner that
may restore to the elements the fabrics of ages.  Nothing solid is
secure; every thing tilts and rocks.  Even the scholar is not safe;
he too is searched and revised.  Is his learning dead?  Is he living
in his memory?  The power of mind is not mortification, but life.
But come forth, thou curious child! hither, thou loving, all-hoping
poet! hither, thou tender, doubting heart, who hast not yet found any
place in the world's market fit for thee; any wares which thou
couldst buy or sell, -- so large is thy love and ambition, -- thine
and not theirs is the hour.  Smooth thy brow, and hope and love on,
for the kind heaven justifies thee, and the whole world feels that
thou art in the right.

        We ought to celebrate this hour by expressions of manly joy.
Not thanks, not prayer seem quite the highest or truest name for our
communication with the infinite, -- but glad and conspiring
reception, -- reception that becomes giving in its turn, as the
receiver is only the All-Giver in part and in infancy.  I cannot, --
nor can any man, -- speak precisely of things so sublime, but it
seems to me, the wit of man, his strength, his grace, his tendency,
his art, is the grace and the presence of God.  It is beyond
explanation.  When all is said and done, the rapt saint is found the
only logician.  Not exhortation, not argument becomes our lips, but
paeans of joy and praise.  But not of adulation: we are too nearly
related in the deep of the mind to that we honor.  It is God in us
which checks the language of petition by a grander thought.  In the
bottom of the heart, it is said; `I am, and by me, O child! this fair
body and world of thine stands and grows.  I am; all things are mine:
and all mine are thine.'

        The festival of the intellect, and the return to its source,
cast a strong light on the always interesting topics of Man and
Nature.  We are forcibly reminded of the old want.  There is no man;
there hath never been.  The Intellect still asks that a man may be
born.  The flame of life flickers feebly in human breasts.  We demand
of men a richness and universality we do not find.  Great men do not
content us.  It is their solitude, not their force, that makes them
conspicuous.  There is somewhat indigent and tedious about them.
They are poorly tied to one thought.  If they are prophets, they are
egotists; if polite and various, they are shallow.  How tardily men
arrive at any result! how tardily they pass from it to another!  The
crystal sphere of thought is as concentrical as the geological
structure of the globe.  As our soils and rocks lie in strata,
concentric strata, so do all men's thinkings run laterally, never
vertically.  Here comes by a great inquisitor with auger and
plumb-line, and will bore an Artesian well through our conventions
and theories, and pierce to the core of things.  But as soon as he
probes the crust, behold gimlet, plumb-line, and philosopher take a
lateral direction, in spite of all resistance, as if some strong wind
took everything off its feet, and if you come month after month to
see what progress our reformer has made, -- not an inch has he
pierced, -- you still find him with new words in the old place,
floating about in new parts of the same old vein or crust.  The new
book says, `I will give you the key to nature,' and we expect to go
like a thunderbolt to the centre.  But the thunder is a surface
phenomenon, makes a skin-deep cut, and so does the sage.  The wedge
turns out to be a rocket.  Thus a man lasts but a very little while,
for his monomania becomes insupportably tedious in a few months.  It
is so with every book and person: and yet -- and yet -- we do not
take up a new book, or meet a new man, without a pulse-beat of
expectation.  And this invincible hope of a more adequate interpreter
is the sure prediction of his advent.

        In the absence of man, we turn to nature, which stands next.
In the divine order, intellect is primary; nature, secondary; it is
the memory of the mind.  That which once existed in intellect as pure
law, has now taken body as Nature.  It existed already in the mind in
solution; now, it has been precipitated, and the bright sediment is
the world.  We can never be quite strangers or inferiors in nature.
It is flesh of our flesh, and bone of our bone.  But we no longer
hold it by the hand; we have lost our miraculous power; our arm is no
more as strong as the frost; nor our will equivalent to gravity and
the elective attractions.  Yet we can use nature as a convenient
standard, and the meter of our rise and fall.  It has this advantage
as a witness, it cannot be debauched.  When man curses, nature still
testifies to truth and love.  We may, therefore, safely study the
mind in nature, because we cannot steadily gaze on it in mind; as we
explore the face of the sun in a pool, when our eyes cannot brook his
direct splendors.

        It seems to me, therefore, that it were some suitable paean, if
we should piously celebrate this hour by exploring the _method of
nature_.  Let us see _that_, as nearly as we can, and try how far it
is transferable to the literary life.  Every earnest glance we give
to the realities around us, with intent to learn, proceeds from a
holy impulse, and is really songs of praise.  What difference can it
make whether it take the shape of exhortation, or of passionate
exclamation, or of scientific statement?  These are forms merely.
Through them we express, at last, the fact, that God has done thus or
thus.

        In treating a subject so large, in which we must necessarily
appeal to the intuition, and aim much more to suggest, than to
describe, I know it is not easy to speak with the precision
attainable on topics of less scope.  I do not wish in attempting to
paint a man, to describe an air-fed, unimpassioned, impossible ghost.
My eyes and ears are revolted by any neglect of the physical facts,
the limitations of man.  And yet one who conceives the true order of
nature, and beholds the visible as proceeding from the invisible,
cannot state his thought, without seeming to those who study the
physical laws, to do them some injustice.  There is an intrinsic
defect in the organ.  Language overstates.  Statements of the
infinite are usually felt to be unjust to the finite, and
blasphemous.  Empedocles undoubtedly spoke a truth of thought, when
he said, "I am God;" but the moment it was out of his mouth, it
became a lie to the ear; and the world revenged itself for the
seeming arrogance, by the good story about his shoe.  How can I hope
for better hap in my attempts to enunciate spiritual facts?  Yet let
us hope, that as far as we receive the truth, so far shall we be felt
by every true person to say what is just.

        The method of nature: who could ever analyze it?  That rushing
stream will not stop to be observed.  We can never surprise nature in
a corner; never find the end of a thread; never tell where to set the
first stone.  The bird hastens to lay her egg: the egg hastens to be
a bird.  The wholeness we admire in the order of the world, is the
result of infinite distribution.  Its smoothness is the smoothness of
the pitch of the cataract.  Its permanence is a perpetual inchoation.
Every natural fact is an emanation, and that from which it emanates
is an emanation also, and from every emanation is a new emanation.
If anything could stand still, it would be crushed and dissipated by
the torrent it resisted, and if it were a mind, would be crazed; as
insane persons are those who hold fast to one thought, and do not
flow with the course of nature.  Not the cause, but an ever novel
effect, nature descends always from above.  It is unbroken obedience.
The beauty of these fair objects is imported into them from a
metaphysical and eternal spring.  In all animal and vegetable forms,
the physiologist concedes that no chemistry, no mechanics, can
account for the facts, but a mysterious principle of life must be
assumed, which not only inhabits the organ, but makes the organ.

        How silent, how spacious, what room for all, yet without place
to insert an atom, -- in graceful succession, in equal fulness, in
balanced beauty, the dance of the hours goes forward still.  Like an
odor of incense, like a strain of music, like a sleep, it is inexact
and boundless.  It will not be dissected, nor unravelled, nor shown.
Away profane philosopher! seekest thou in nature the cause?  This
refers to that, and that to the next, and the next to the third, and
everything refers.  Thou must ask in another mood, thou must feel it
and love it, thou must behold it in a spirit as grand as that by
which it exists, ere thou canst know the law.  Known it will not be,
but gladly beloved and enjoyed.

        The simultaneous life throughout the whole body, the equal
serving of innumerable ends without the least emphasis or preference
to any, but the steady degradation of each to the success of all,
allows the understanding no place to work.  Nature can only be
conceived as existing to a universal and not to a particular end, to
a universe of ends, and not to one, -- a work of _ecstasy_, to be
represented by a circular movement, as intention might be signified
by a straight line of definite length.  Each effect strengthens every
other.  There is no revolt in all the kingdoms from the commonweal:
no detachment of an individual.  Hence the catholic character which
makes every leaf an exponent of the world.  When we behold the
landscape in a poetic spirit, we do not reckon individuals.  Nature
knows neither palm nor oak, but only vegetable life, which sprouts
into forests, and festoons the globe with a garland of grasses and
vines.

        That no single end may be selected, and nature judged thereby,
appears from this, that if man himself be considered as the end, and
it be assumed that the final cause of the world is to make holy or
wise or beautiful men, we see that it has not succeeded.  Read
alternately in natural and in civil history, a treatise of astronomy,
for example, with a volume of French _Memoires pour servir_.  When we
have spent our wonder in computing this wasteful hospitality with
which boon nature turns off new firmaments without end into her wide
common, as fast as the madrepores make coral, -- suns and planets
hospitable to souls, -- and then shorten the sight to look into this
court of Louis Quatorze, and see the game that is played there, --
duke and marshal, abbe and madame, -- a gambling table where each is
laying traps for the other, where the end is ever by some lie or
fetch to outwit your rival and ruin him with this solemn fop in wig
and stars, -- the king; one can hardly help asking if this planet is
a fair specimen of the so generous astronomy, and if so, whether the
experiment have not failed, and whether it be quite worth while to
make more, and glut the innocent space with so poor an article.

        I think we feel not much otherwise if, instead of beholding
foolish nations, we take the great and wise men, the eminent souls,
and narrowly inspect their biography.  None of them seen by himself
-- and his performance compared with his promise or idea, will
justify the cost of that enormous apparatus of means by which this
spotted and defective person was at last procured.

        To questions of this sort, nature replies, `I grow.' All is
nascent, infant.  When we are dizzied with the arithmetic of the
savant toiling to compute the length of her line, the return of her
curve, we are steadied by the perception that a great deal is doing;
that all seems just begun; remote aims are in active accomplishment.
We can point nowhere to anything final; but tendency appears on all
hands: planet, system, constellation, total nature is growing like a
field of maize in July; is becoming somewhat else; is in rapid
metamorphosis.  The embryo does not more strive to be man, than
yonder burr of light we call a nebula tends to be a ring, a comet, a
globe, and parent of new stars.  Why should not then these messieurs
of Versailles strut and plot for tabourets and ribbons, for a season,
without prejudice to their faculty to run on better errands by and
by?

        But nature seems further to reply, `I have ventured so great a
stake as my success, in no single creature.  I have not yet arrived
at any end.  The gardener aims to produce a fine peach or pear, but
my aim is the health of the whole tree, -- root, stem, leaf, flower,
and seed, -- and by no means the pampering of a monstrous pericarp at
the expense of all the other functions.'

        In short, the spirit and peculiarity of that impression nature
makes on us, is this, that it does not exist to any one or to any
number of particular ends, but to numberless and endless benefit;
that there is in it no private will, no rebel leaf or limb, but the
whole is oppressed by one superincumbent tendency, obeys that
redundancy or excess of life which in conscious beings we call
_ecstasy_.

        With this conception of the genius or method of nature, let us
go back to man.  It is true, he pretends to give account of himself
to himself, but, at last, what has he to recite but the fact that
there is a Life not to be described or known otherwise than by
possession?  What account can he give of his essence more than _so it
was to be_?  The _royal_ reason, the Grace of God seems the only
description of our multiform but ever identical fact.  There is
virtue, there is genius, there is success, or there is not.  There is
the incoming or the receding of God: that is all we can affirm; and
we can show neither how nor why.  Self-accusation, remorse, and the
didactic morals of self-denial and strife with sin, is a view we are
constrained by our constitution to take of the fact seen from the
platform of action; but seen from the platform of intellection, there
is nothing for us but praise and wonder.

        The termination of the world in a man, appears to be the last
victory of intelligence.  The universal does not attract us until
housed in an individual.  Who heeds the waste abyss of possibility?
The ocean is everywhere the same, but it has no character until seen
with the shore or the ship.  Who would value any number of miles of
Atlantic brine bounded by lines of latitude and longitude?  Confine
it by granite rocks, let it wash a shore where wise men dwell, and it
is filled with expression; and the point of greatest interest is
where the land and water meet.  So must we admire in man, the form of
the formless, the concentration of the vast, the house of reason, the
cave of memory.  See the play of thoughts! what nimble gigantic
creatures are these! what saurians, what palaiotheria shall be named
with these agile movers?  The great Pan of old, who was clothed in a
leopard skin to signify the beautiful variety of things, and the
firmament, his coat of stars, -- was but the representative of thee,
O rich and various Man! thou palace of sight and sound, carrying in
thy senses the morning and the night and the unfathomable galaxy; in
thy brain, the geometry of the City of God; in thy heart, the bower
of love and the realms of right and wrong.  An individual man is a
fruit which it cost all the foregoing ages to form and ripen.  The
history of the genesis or the old mythology repeats itself in the
experience of every child.  He too is a demon or god thrown into a
particular chaos, where he strives ever to lead things from disorder
into order.  Each individual soul is such, in virtue of its being a
power to translate the world into some particular language of its
own; if not into a picture, a statue, or a dance, -- why, then, into
a trade, an art, a science, a mode of living, a conversation, a
character, an influence.  You admire pictures, but it is as
impossible for you to paint a right picture, as for grass to bear
apples.  But when the genius comes, it makes fingers: it is pliancy,
and the power of transferring the affair in the street into oils and
colors.  Raphael must be born, and Salvator must be born.

        There is no attractiveness like that of a new man.  The sleepy
nations are occupied with their political routine.  England, France
and America read Parliamentary Debates, which no high genius now
enlivens; and nobody will read them who trusts his own eye: only they
who are deceived by the popular repetition of distinguished names.
But when Napoleon unrolls his map, the eye is commanded by original
power.  When Chatham leads the debate, men may well listen, because
they must listen.  A man, a personal ascendency is the only great
phenomenon.  When nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to
do it.  Follow the great man, and you shall see what the world has at
heart in these ages.  There is no omen like that.

        But what strikes us in the fine genius is that which belongs of
right to every one.  A man should know himself for a necessary actor.
A link was wanting between two craving parts of nature, and he was
hurled into being as the bridge over that yawning need, the mediator
betwixt two else unmarriageable facts.  His two parents held each of
one of the wants, and the union of foreign constitutions in him
enables him to do gladly and gracefully what the assembled human race
could not have sufficed to do.  He knows his materials; he applies
himself to his work; he cannot read, or think, or look, but he unites
the hitherto separated strands into a perfect cord.  The thoughts he
delights to utter are the reason of his incarnation.  Is it for him
to account himself cheap and superfluous, or to linger by the wayside
for opportunities?  Did he not come into being because something must
be done which he and no other is and does?  If only he _sees_, the
world will be visible enough.  He need not study where to stand, nor
to put things in favorable lights; in him is the light, from him all
things are illuminated, to their centre.  What patron shall he ask
for employment and reward?  Hereto was he born, to deliver the
thought of his heart from the universe to the universe, to do an
office which nature could not forego, nor he be discharged from
rendering, and then immerge again into the holy silence and eternity
out of which as a man he arose.  God is rich, and many more men than
one he harbors in his bosom, biding their time and the needs and the
beauty of all.  Is not this the theory of every man's genius or
faculty?  Why then goest thou as some Boswell or listening worshipper
to this saint or to that?  That is the only lese-majesty.  Here art
thou with whom so long the universe travailed in labor; darest thou
think meanly of thyself whom the stalwart Fate brought forth to unite
his ragged sides, to shoot the gulf, to reconcile the irreconcilable?

        Whilst a necessity so great caused the man to exist, his health
and erectness consist in the fidelity with which he transmits
influences from the vast and universal to the point on which his
genius can act.  The ends are momentary: they are vents for the
current of inward life which increases as it is spent.  A man's
wisdom is to know that all ends are momentary, that the best end must
be superseded by a better.  But there is a mischievous tendency in
him to transfer his thought from the life to the ends, to quit his
agency and rest in his acts: the tools run away with the workman, the
human with the divine.  I conceive a man as always spoken to from
behind, and unable to turn his head and see the speaker.  In all the
millions who have heard the voice, none ever saw the face.  As
children in their play run behind each other, and seize one by the
ears and make him walk before them, so is the spirit our unseen
pilot.  That well-known voice speaks in all languages, governs all
men, and none ever caught a glimpse of its form.  If the man will
exactly obey it, it will adopt him, so that he shall not any longer
separate it from himself in his thought, he shall seem to be it, he
shall be it.  If he listen with insatiable ears, richer and greater
wisdom is taught him, the sound swells to a ravishing music, he is
borne away as with a flood, he becomes careless of his food and of
his house, he is the fool of ideas, and leads a heavenly life.  But
if his eye is set on the things to be done, and not on the truth that
is still taught, and for the sake of which the things are to be done,
then the voice grows faint, and at last is but a humming in his ears.
His health and greatness consist in his being the channel through
which heaven flows to earth, in short, in the fulness in which an
ecstatical state takes place in him.  It is pitiful to be an artist,
when, by forbearing to be artists, we might be vessels filled with
the divine overflowings, enriched by the circulations of omniscience
and omnipresence.  Are there not moments in the history of heaven
when the human race was not counted by individuals, but was only the
Influenced, was God in distribution, God rushing into multiform
benefit?  It is sublime to receive, sublime to love, but this lust of
imparting as from _us_, this desire to be loved, the wish to be
recognized as individuals, -- is finite, comes of a lower strain.

        Shall I say, then, that, as far as we can trace the natural
history of the soul, its health consists in the fulness of its
reception, -- call it piety, call it veneration -- in the fact, that
enthusiasm is organized therein.  What is best in any work of art,
but that part which the work itself seems to require and do; that
which the man cannot do again, that which flows from the hour and the
occasion, like the eloquence of men in a tumultuous debate?  It was
always the theory of literature, that the word of a poet was
authoritative and final.  He was supposed to be the mouth of a divine
wisdom.  We rather envied his circumstance than his talent.  We too
could have gladly prophesied standing in that place.  We so quote our
Scriptures; and the Greeks so quoted Homer, Theognis, Pindar, and the
rest.  If the theory has receded out of modern criticism, it is
because we have not had poets.  Whenever they appear, they will
redeem their own credit.

        This ecstatical state seems to direct a regard to the whole and
not to the parts; to the cause and not to the ends; to the tendency,
and not to the act.  It respects genius and not talent; hope, and not
possession: the anticipation of all things by the intellect, and not
the history itself; art, and not works of art; poetry, and not
experiment; virtue, and not duties.

        There is no office or function of man but is rightly discharged
by this divine method, and nothing that is not noxious to him if
detached from its universal relations.  Is it his work in the world
to study nature, or the laws of the world?  Let him beware of
proposing to himself any end.  Is it for use?  nature is debased, as
if one looking at the ocean can remember only the price of fish.  Or
is it for pleasure? he is mocked: there is a certain infatuating air
in woods and mountains which draws on the idler to want and misery.
There is something social and intrusive in the nature of all things;
they seek to penetrate and overpower, each the nature of every other
creature, and itself alone in all modes and throughout space and
spirit to prevail and possess.  Every star in heaven is discontented
and insatiable.  Gravitation and chemistry cannot content them.  Ever
they woo and court the eye of every beholder.  Every man who comes
into the world they seek to fascinate and possess, to pass into his
mind, for they desire to republish themselves in a more delicate
world than that they occupy.  It is not enough that they are Jove,
Mars, Orion, and the North Star, in the gravitating firmament: they
would have such poets as Newton, Herschel and Laplace, that they may
re-exist and re-appear in the finer world of rational souls, and fill
that realm with their fame.  So is it with all immaterial objects.
These beautiful basilisks set their brute, glorious eyes on the eye
of every child, and, if they can, cause their nature to pass through
his wondering eyes into him, and so all things are mixed.

        Therefore man must be on his guard against this cup of
enchantments, and must look at nature with a supernatural eye.  By
piety alone, by conversing with the cause of nature, is he safe and
commands it.  And because all knowledge is assimilation to the object
of knowledge, as the power or genius of nature is ecstatic, so must
its science or the description of it be.  The poet must be a
rhapsodist: his inspiration a sort of bright casualty: his will in it
only the surrender of will to the Universal Power, which will not be
seen face to face, but must be received and sympathetically known.
It is remarkable that we have out of the deeps of antiquity in the
oracles ascribed to the half fabulous Zoroaster, a statement of this
fact, which every lover and seeker of truth will recognize.  "It is
not proper," said Zoroaster, "to understand the Intelligible with
vehemence, but if you incline your mind, you will apprehend it: not
too earnestly, but bringing a pure and inquiring eye.  You will not
understand it as when understanding some particular thing, but with
the flower of the mind.  Things divine are not attainable by mortals
who understand sensual things, but only the light-armed arrive at the
summit."

        And because ecstasy is the law and cause of nature, therefore
you cannot interpret it in too high and deep a sense.  Nature
represents the best meaning of the wisest man.  Does the sunset
landscape seem to you the palace of Friendship, -- those purple skies
and lovely waters the amphitheatre dressed and garnished only for the
exchange of thought and love of the purest souls?  It is that.  All
other meanings which base men have put on it are conjectural and
false.  You cannot bathe twice in the same river, said Heraclitus;
and I add, a man never sees the same object twice: with his own
enlargement the object acquires new aspects.

        Does not the same law hold for virtue?  It is vitiated by too
much will.  He who aims at progress, should aim at an infinite, not
at a special benefit.  The reforms whose fame now fills the land with
Temperance, Anti-Slavery, Non-Resistance, No Government, Equal Labor,
fair and generous as each appears, are poor bitter things when
prosecuted for themselves as an end.  To every reform, in proportion
to its energy, early disgusts are incident, so that the disciple is
surprised at the very hour of his first triumphs, with chagrins, and
sickness, and a general distrust: so that he shuns his associates,
hates the enterprise which lately seemed so fair, and meditates to
cast himself into the arms of that society and manner of life which
he had newly abandoned with so much pride and hope.  Is it that he
attached the value of virtue to some particular practices, as, the
denial of certain appetites in certain specified indulgences, and,
afterward, found himself still as wicked and as far from happiness in
that abstinence, as he had been in the abuse?  But the soul can be
appeased not by a deed but by a tendency.  It is in a hope that she
feels her wings.  You shall love rectitude and not the disuse of
money or the avoidance of trade: an unimpeded mind, and not a monkish
diet; sympathy and usefulness, and not hoeing or coopering.  Tell me
not how great your project is, the civil liberation of the world, its
conversion into a Christian church, the establishment of public
education, cleaner diet, a new division of labor and of land, laws of
love for laws of property; -- I say to you plainly there is no end to
which your practical faculty can aim, so sacred or so large, that, if
pursued for itself, will not at last become carrion and an offence to
the nostril.  The imaginative faculty of the soul must be fed with
objects immense and eternal.  Your end should be one inapprehensible
to the senses: then will it be a god always approached, -- never
touched; always giving health.  A man adorns himself with prayer and
love, as an aim adorns an action.  What is strong but goodness, and
what is energetic but the presence of a brave man?  The doctrine in
vegetable physiology of the _presence_, or the general influence of
any substance over and above its chemical influence, as of an alkali
or a living plant, is more predicable of man.  You need not speak to
me, I need not go where you are, that you should exert magnetism on
me.  Be you only whole and sufficient, and I shall feel you in every
part of my life and fortune, and I can as easily dodge the
gravitation of the globe as escape your influence.

        But there are other examples of this total and supreme
influence, besides Nature and the conscience.  "From the poisonous
tree, the world," say the Brahmins, "two species of fruit are
produced, sweet as the waters of life, Love or the society of
beautiful souls, and Poetry, whose taste is like the immortal juice
of Vishnu." What is Love, and why is it the chief good, but because
it is an overpowering enthusiasm?  Never self-possessed or prudent,
it is all abandonment.  Is it not a certain admirable wisdom,
preferable to all other advantages, and whereof all others are only
secondaries and indemnities, because this is that in which the
individual is no longer his own foolish master, but inhales an
odorous and celestial air, is wrapped round with awe of the object,
blending for the time that object with the real and only good, and
consults every omen in nature with tremulous interest.  When we speak
truly, -- is not he only unhappy who is not in love? his fancied
freedom and self-rule -- is it not so much death?  He who is in love
is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the
object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those
virtues which it possesses.  Therefore if the object be not itself a
living and expanding soul, he presently exhausts it.  But the love
remains in his mind, and the wisdom it brought him; and it craves a
new and higher object.  And the reason why all men honor love, is
because it looks up and not down; aspires and not despairs.

        And what is Genius but finer love, a love impersonal, a love of
the flower and perfection of things, and a desire to draw a new
picture or copy of the same?  It looks to the cause and life: it
proceeds from within outward, whilst Talent goes from without inward.
Talent finds its models, methods, and ends, in society, exists for
exhibition, and goes to the soul only for power to work.  Genius is
its own end, and draws its means and the style of its architecture
from within, going abroad only for audience, and spectator, as we
adapt our voice and phrase to the distance and character of the ear
we speak to.  All your learning of all literatures would never enable
you to anticipate one of its thoughts or expressions, and yet each is
natural and familiar as household words.  Here about us coils forever
the ancient enigma, so old and so unutterable.  Behold! there is the
sun, and the rain, and the rocks: the old sun, the old stones.  How
easy were it to describe all this fitly; yet no word can pass.
Nature is a mute, and man, her articulate speaking brother, lo! he
also is a mute.  Yet when Genius arrives, its speech is like a river;
it has no straining to describe, more than there is straining in
nature to exist.  When thought is best, there is most of it.  Genius
sheds wisdom like perfume, and advertises us that it flows out of a
deeper source than the foregoing silence, that it knows so deeply and
speaks so musically, because it is itself a mutation of the thing it
describes.  It is sun and moon and wave and fire in music, as
astronomy is thought and harmony in masses of matter.

        What is all history but the work of ideas, a record of the
incomputable energy which his infinite aspirations infuse into man?
Has any thing grand and lasting been done?  Who did it?  Plainly not
any man, but all men: it was the prevalence and inundation of an
idea.  What brought the pilgrims here?  One man says, civil liberty;
another, the desire of founding a church; and a third, discovers that
the motive force was plantation and trade.  But if the Puritans could
rise from the dust, they could not answer.  It is to be seen in what
they were, and not in what they designed; it was the growth and
expansion of the human race, and resembled herein the sequent
Revolution, which was not begun in Concord, or Lexington, or
Virginia, but was the overflowing of the sense of natural right in
every clear and active spirit of the period.  Is a man boastful and
knowing, and his own master? -- we turn from him without hope: but
let him be filled with awe and dread before the Vast and the Divine,
which uses him glad to be used, and our eye is riveted to the chain
of events.  What a debt is ours to that old religion which, in the
childhood of most of us, still dwelt like a sabbath morning in the
country of New England, teaching privation, self-denial and sorrow!
A man was born not for prosperity, but to suffer for the benefit of
others, like the noble rock-maple which all around our villages
bleeds for the service of man.  Not praise, not men's acceptance of
our doing, but the spirit's holy errand through us absorbed the
thought.  How dignified was this!  How all that is called talents and
success, in our noisy capitals, becomes buzz and din before this
man-worthiness!  How our friendships and the complaisances we use,
shame us now!  Shall we not quit our companions, as if they were
thieves and pot-companions, and betake ourselves to some desert cliff
of mount Katahdin, some unvisited recess in Moosehead Lake, to bewail
our innocency and to recover it, and with it the power to communicate
again with these sharers of a more sacred idea?

        And what is to replace for us the piety of that race?  We
cannot have theirs: it glides away from us day by day, but we also
can bask in the great morning which rises forever out of the eastern
sea, and be ourselves the children of the light.  I stand here to
say, Let us worship the mighty and transcendent Soul.  It is the
office, I doubt not, of this age to annul that adulterous divorce
which the superstition of many ages has effected between the
intellect and holiness.  The lovers of goodness have been one class,
the students of wisdom another, as if either could exist in any
purity without the other.  Truth is always holy, holiness always
wise.  I will that we keep terms with sin, and a sinful literature
and society, no longer, but live a life of discovery and performance.
Accept the intellect, and it will accept us.  Be the lowly ministers
of that pure omniscience, and deny it not before men.  It will burn
up all profane literature, all base current opinions, all the false
powers of the world, as in a moment of time.  I draw from nature the
lesson of an intimate divinity.  Our health and reason as men needs
our respect to this fact, against the heedlessness and against the
contradiction of society.  The sanity of man needs the poise of this
immanent force.  His nobility needs the assurance of this
inexhaustible reserved power.  How great soever have been its
bounties, they are a drop to the sea whence they flow.  If you say,
`the acceptance of the vision is also the act of God:' -- I shall not
seek to penetrate the mystery, I admit the force of what you say.  If
you ask, `How can any rules be given for the attainment of gifts so
sublime?' I shall only remark that the solicitations of this spirit,
as long as there is life, are never forborne.  Tenderly, tenderly,
they woo and court us from every object in nature, from every fact in
life, from every thought in the mind.  The one condition coupled with
the gift of truth is its use.  That man shall be learned who reduceth
his learning to practice.  Emanuel Swedenborg affirmed that it was
opened to him, "that the spirits who knew truth in this life, but did
it not, at death shall lose their knowledge." "If knowledge," said
Ali the Caliph, "calleth unto practice, well; if not, it goeth away."
The only way into nature is to enact our best insight.  Instantly we
are higher poets, and can speak a deeper law.  Do what you know, and
perception is converted into character, as islands and continents
were built by invisible infusories, or, as these forest leaves absorb
light, electricity, and volatile gases, and the gnarled oak to live a
thousand years is the arrest and fixation of the most volatile and
ethereal currents.  The doctrine of this Supreme Presence is a cry of
joy and exultation.  Who shall dare think he has come late into
nature, or has missed anything excellent in the past, who seeth the
admirable stars of possibility, and the yet untouched continent of
hope glittering with all its mountains in the vast West?  I praise
with wonder this great reality, which seems to drown all things in
the deluge of its light.  What man seeing this, can lose it from his
thoughts, or entertain a meaner subject?  The entrance of this into
his mind seems to be the birth of man.  We cannot describe the
natural history of the soul, but we know that it is divine.  I cannot
tell if these wonderful qualities which house to-day in this mortal
frame, shall ever reassemble in equal activity in a similar frame, or
whether they have before had a natural history like that of this body
you see before you; but this one thing I know, that these qualities
did not now begin to exist, cannot be sick with my sickness, nor
buried in any grave; but that they circulate through the Universe:
before the world was, they were.  Nothing can bar them out, or shut
them in, but they penetrate the ocean and land, space and time, form
and essence, and hold the key to universal nature.  I draw from this
faith courage and hope.  All things are known to the soul.  It is not
to be surprised by any communication.  Nothing can be greater than
it.  Let those fear and those fawn who will.  The soul is in her
native realm, and it is wider than space, older than time, wide as
hope, rich as love.  Pusillanimity and fear she refuses with a
beautiful scorn: they are not for her who putteth on her coronation
robes, and goes out through universal love to universal power.

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