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Chapter VIII. Prospects
from Nature, published as part of Nature; Addresses and Lectures
by
Ralph Waldo Emerson
In inquiries respecting the laws of the world and the frame of
things, the highest reason is always the truest. That which seems
faintly possible -- it is so refined, is often faint and dim because
it is deepest seated in the mind among the eternal verities.
Empirical science is apt to cloud the sight, and, by the very
knowledge of functions and processes, to bereave the student of the
manly contemplation of the whole. The savant becomes unpoetic. But
the best read naturalist who lends an entire and devout attention to
truth, will see that there remains much to learn of his relation to
the world, and that it is not to be learned by any addition or
subtraction or other comparison of known quantities, but is arrived
at by untaught sallies of the spirit, by a continual self-recovery,
and by entire humility. He will perceive that there are far more
excellent qualities in the student than preciseness and
infallibility; that a guess is often more fruitful than an
indisputable affirmation, and that a dream may let us deeper into the
secret of nature than a hundred concerted experiments.
For, the problems to be solved are precisely those which the
physiologist and the naturalist omit to state. It is not so
pertinent to man to know all the individuals of the animal kingdom,
as it is to know whence and whereto is this tyrannizing unity in his
constitution, which evermore separates and classifies things,
endeavoring to reduce the most diverse to one form. When I behold a
rich landscape, it is less to my purpose to recite correctly the
order and superposition of the strata, than to know why all thought
of multitude is lost in a tranquil sense of unity. I cannot greatly
honor minuteness in details, so long as there is no hint to explain
the relation between things and thoughts; no ray upon the
_metaphysics_ of conchology, of botany, of the arts, to show the
relation of the forms of flowers, shells, animals, architecture, to
the mind, and build science upon ideas. In a cabinet of natural
history, we become sensible of a certain occult recognition and
sympathy in regard to the most unwieldly and eccentric forms of
beast, fish, and insect. The American who has been confined, in his
own country, to the sight of buildings designed after foreign models,
is surprised on entering York Minster or St. Peter's at Rome, by the
feeling that these structures are imitations also, -- faint copies of
an invisible archetype. Nor has science sufficient humanity, so long
as the naturalist overlooks that wonderful congruity which subsists
between man and the world; of which he is lord, not because he is the
most subtile inhabitant, but because he is its head and heart, and
finds something of himself in every great and small thing, in every
mountain stratum, in every new law of color, fact of astronomy, or
atmospheric influence which observation or analysis lay open. A
perception of this mystery inspires the muse of George Herbert, the
beautiful psalmist of the seventeenth century. The following lines
are part of his little poem on Man.
"Man is all symmetry,
Full of proportions, one limb to another,
And to all the world besides.
Each part may call the farthest, brother;
For head with foot hath private amity,
And both with moons and tides.
"Nothing hath got so far
But man hath caught and kept it as his prey;
His eyes dismount the highest star;
He is in little all the sphere.
Herbs gladly cure our flesh, because that they
Find their acquaintance there.
"For us, the winds do blow,
The earth doth rest, heaven move, and fountains flow;
Nothing we see, but means our good,
As our delight, or as our treasure;
The whole is either our cupboard of food,
Or cabinet of pleasure.
"The stars have us to bed:
Night draws the curtain; which the sun withdraws.
Music and light attend our head.
All things unto our flesh are kind,
In their descent and being; to our mind,
In their ascent and cause.
"More servants wait on man
Than he'll take notice of. In every path,
He treads down that which doth befriend him
When sickness makes him pale and wan.
Oh mighty love! Man is one world, and hath
Another to attend him."
The perception of this class of truths makes the attraction
which draws men to science, but the end is lost sight of in attention
to the means. In view of this half-sight of science, we accept the
sentence of Plato, that, "poetry comes nearer to vital truth than
history." Every surmise and vaticination of the mind is entitled to a
certain respect, and we learn to prefer imperfect theories, and
sentences, which contain glimpses of truth, to digested systems which
have no one valuable suggestion. A wise writer will feel that the
ends of study and composition are best answered by announcing
undiscovered regions of thought, and so communicating, through hope,
new activity to the torpid spirit.
I shall therefore conclude this essay with some traditions of
man and nature, which a certain poet sang to me; and which, as they
have always been in the world, and perhaps reappear to every bard,
may be both history and prophecy.
`The foundations of man are not in matter, but in spirit. But
the element of spirit is eternity. To it, therefore, the longest
series of events, the oldest chronologies are young and recent. In
the cycle of the universal man, from whom the known individuals
proceed, centuries are points, and all history is but the epoch of
one degradation.
`We distrust and deny inwardly our sympathy with nature. We
own and disown our relation to it, by turns. We are, like
Nebuchadnezzar, dethroned, bereft of reason, and eating grass like an
ox. But who can set limits to the remedial force of spirit?
`A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be
longer, and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from
dreams. Now, the world would be insane and rabid, if these
disorganizations should last for hundreds of years. It is kept in
check by death and infancy. Infancy is the perpetual Messiah, which
comes into the arms of fallen men, and pleads with them to return to
paradise.
`Man is the dwarf of himself. Once he was permeated and
dissolved by spirit. He filled nature with his overflowing currents.
Out from him sprang the sun and moon; from man, the sun; from woman,
the moon. The laws of his mind, the periods of his actions
externized themselves into day and night, into the year and the
seasons. But, having made for himself this huge shell, his waters
retired; he no longer fills the veins and veinlets; he is shrunk to a
drop. He sees, that the structure still fits him, but fits him
colossally. Say, rather, once it fitted him, now it corresponds to
him from far and on high. He adores timidly his own work. Now is
man the follower of the sun, and woman the follower of the moon. Yet
sometimes he starts in his slumber, and wonders at himself and his
house, and muses strangely at the resemblance betwixt him and it. He
perceives that if his law is still paramount, if still he have
elemental power, if his word is sterling yet in nature, it is not
conscious power, it is not inferior but superior to his will. It is
Instinct.' Thus my Orphic poet sang.
At present, man applies to nature but half his force. He works
on the world with his understanding alone. He lives in it, and
masters it by a penny-wisdom; and he that works most in it, is but a
half-man, and whilst his arms are strong and his digestion good, his
mind is imbruted, and he is a selfish savage. His relation to
nature, his power over it, is through the understanding; as by
manure; the economic use of fire, wind, water, and the mariner's
needle; steam, coal, chemical agriculture; the repairs of the human
body by the dentist and the surgeon. This is such a resumption of
power, as if a banished king should buy his territories inch by inch,
instead of vaulting at once into his throne. Meantime, in the thick
darkness, there are not wanting gleams of a better light, --
occasional examples of the action of man upon nature with his entire
force, -- with reason as well as understanding. Such examples are;
the traditions of miracles in the earliest antiquity of all nations;
the history of Jesus Christ; the achievements of a principle, as in
religious and political revolutions, and in the abolition of the
Slave-trade; the miracles of enthusiasm, as those reported of
Swedenborg, Hohenlohe, and the Shakers; many obscure and yet
contested facts, now arranged under the name of Animal Magnetism;
prayer; eloquence; self-healing; and the wisdom of children. These
are examples of Reason's momentary grasp of the sceptre; the
exertions of a power which exists not in time or space, but an
instantaneous in-streaming causing power. The difference between the
actual and the ideal force of man is happily figured by the
schoolmen, in saying, that the knowledge of man is an evening
knowledge, _vespertina cognitio_, but that of God is a morning
knowledge, _matutina cognitio_.
The problem of restoring to the world original and eternal
beauty, is solved by the redemption of the soul. The ruin or the
blank, that we see when we look at nature, is in our own eye. The
axis of vision is not coincident with the axis of things, and so they
appear not transparent but opake. The reason why the world lacks
unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is, because man is disunited
with himself. He cannot be a naturalist, until he satisfies all the
demands of the spirit. Love is as much its demand, as perception.
Indeed, neither can be perfect without the other. In the uttermost
meaning of the words, thought is devout, and devotion is thought.
Deep calls unto deep. But in actual life, the marriage is not
celebrated. There are innocent men who worship God after the
tradition of their fathers, but their sense of duty has not yet
extended to the use of all their faculties. And there are patient
naturalists, but they freeze their subject under the wintry light of
the understanding. Is not prayer also a study of truth, -- a sally
of the soul into the unfound infinite? No man ever prayed heartily,
without learning something. But when a faithful thinker, resolute to
detach every object from personal relations, and see it in the light
of thought, shall, at the same time, kindle science with the fire of
the holiest affections, then will God go forth anew into the
creation.
It will not need, when the mind is prepared for study, to
search for objects. The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the
miraculous in the common. What is a day? What is a year? What is
summer? What is woman? What is a child? What is sleep? To our
blindness, these things seem unaffecting. We make fables to hide the
baldness of the fact and conform it, as we say, to the higher law of
the mind. But when the fact is seen under the light of an idea, the
gaudy fable fades and shrivels. We behold the real higher law. To
the wise, therefore, a fact is true poetry, and the most beautiful of
fables. These wonders are brought to our own door. You also are a
man. Man and woman, and their social life, poverty, labor, sleep,
fear, fortune, are known to you. Learn that none of these things is
superficial, but that each phenomenon has its roots in the faculties
and affections of the mind. Whilst the abstract question occupies
your intellect, nature brings it in the concrete to be solved by your
hands. It were a wise inquiry for the closet, to compare, point by
point, especially at remarkable crises in life, our daily history,
with the rise and progress of ideas in the mind.
So shall we come to look at the world with new eyes. It shall
answer the endless inquiry of the intellect, -- What is truth? and of
the affections, -- What is good? by yielding itself passive to the
educated Will. Then shall come to pass what my poet said; `Nature is
not fixed but fluid. Spirit alters, moulds, makes it. The
immobility or bruteness of nature, is the absence of spirit; to pure
spirit, it is fluid, it is volatile, it is obedient. Every spirit
builds itself a house; and beyond its house a world; and beyond its
world, a heaven. Know then, that the world exists for you. For you
is the phenomenon perfect. What we are, that only can we see. All
that Adam had, all that Caesar could, you have and can do. Adam
called his house, heaven and earth; Caesar called his house, Rome;
you perhaps call yours, a cobler's trade; a hundred acres of ploughed
land; or a scholar's garret. Yet line for line and point for point,
your dominion is as great as theirs, though without fine names.
Build, therefore, your own world. As fast as you conform your life
to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its great
proportions. A correspondent revolution in things will attend the
influx of the spirit. So fast will disagreeable appearances, swine,
spiders, snakes, pests, madhouses, prisons, enemies, vanish; they are
temporary and shall be no more seen. The sordor and filths of
nature, the sun shall dry up, and the wind exhale. As when the
summer comes from the south; the snow-banks melt, and the face of the
earth becomes green before it, so shall the advancing spirit create
its ornaments along its path, and carry with it the beauty it visits,
and the song which enchants it; it shall draw beautiful faces, warm
hearts, wise discourse, and heroic acts, around its way, until evil
is no more seen. The kingdom of man over nature, which cometh not
with observation, -- a dominion such as now is beyond his dream of
God, -- he shall enter without more wonder than the blind man feels
who is gradually restored to perfect sight.
