The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson - by R.W. Emerson Institute, Jim Manley, Director - RWE.org

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

1. Words are signs of natural facts.

2. Particular natural facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts.

3. Nature is the symbol of spirit.

1. Words are signs of natural facts. The use of natural history is to give us
aid in supernatural history: the use of the outer creation, to give us language
for the beings and changes of the inward creation. Every word which is used to
express a moral or intellectual fact, if traced to its root, is found to be
borrowed from some material appearance. Right means straight; wrong means
twisted. Spirit primarily means wind; transgression, the crossing of a line;
supercilious, the raising of the eyebrow. We say the heart to express emotion,
the head to denote thought; and thought and emotion are words borrowed from
sensible things, and now appropriated to spiritual nature. Most of the process
by which this transformation is made, is hidden from us in the remote time when
language was framed; but the same tendency may be daily observed in children.
Children and savages use only nouns or names of things, which they convert into
verbs, and apply to analogous mental acts.

2. But this origin of all words that convey a spiritual import, — so
conspicuous a fact in the history of language, — is our least debt to nature.
It is not words only that are emblematic; it is things which are emblematic.
Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact. Every appearance in
nature corresponds to some state of the mind, and that state of the mind can
only be described by presenting that natural appearance as its picture. An
enraged man is a lion, a cunning man is a fox, a firm man is a rock, a learned
man is a torch. A lamb is innocence; a snake is subtle spite; flowers express to
us the delicate affections. Light and darkness are our familiar expression for
knowledge and ignorance; and heat for love. Visible distance behind and before
us, is respectively our image of memory and hope.

Who looks upon a river in a meditative hour, and is not reminded of the flux
of all things? Throw a stone into the stream, and the circles that propagate
themselves are the beautiful type of all influence. Man is conscious of a
universal soul within or behind his individual life, wherein, as in a firmament,
the natures of Justice, Truth, Love, Freedom, arise and shine. This universal
soul, he calls Reason: it is not mine, or thine, or his, but we are its; we are
its property and men. And the blue sky in which the private earth is buried, the
sky with its eternal calm, and full of everlasting orbs, is the type of Reason.
That which, intellectually considered, we call Reason, considered in relation to
nature, we call Spirit. Spirit is the Creator. Spirit hath life in itself. And
man in all ages and countries, embodies it in his language, as the FATHER.

It is easily seen that there is nothing lucky or capricious in these
analogies, but that they are constant, and pervade nature. These are not the
dreams of a few poets, here and there, but man is an analogist, and studies
relations in all objects. He is placed in the centre of beings, and a ray of
relation passes from every other being to him. And neither can man be understood
without these objects, nor these objects without man. All the facts in natural
history taken by themselves, have no value, but are barren, like a single sex.
But marry it to human history, and it is full of life. Whole Floras, all
Linnaeus’ and Buffon’s volumes, are dry catalogues of facts; but the most
trivial of these facts, the habit of a plant, the organs, or work, or noise of
an insect, applied to the illustration of a fact in intellectual philosophy, or,
in any way associated to human nature, affects us in the most lively and
agreeable manner. The seed of a plant, — to what affecting analogies in the
nature of man, is that little fruit made use of, in all discourse, up to the
voice of Paul, who calls the human corpse a seed, — “It is sown a natural body;
it is raised a spiritual body.” The motion of the earth round its axis, and
round the sun, makes the day, and the year. These are certain amounts of brute
light and heat. But is there no intent of an analogy between man’s life and the
seasons? And do the seasons gain no grandeur or pathos from that analogy? The
instincts of the ant are very unimportant, considered as the ant’s; but the
moment a ray of relation is seen to extend from it to man, and the little drudge
is seen to be a monitor, a little body with a mighty heart, then all its habits,
even that said to be recently observed, that it never sleeps, become sublime.

Because of this radical correspondence between visible things and human
thoughts, savages, who have only what is necessary, converse in figures. As we
go back in history, language becomes more picturesque, until its infancy, when
it is all poetry; or all spiritual facts are represented by natural symbols. The
same symbols are found to make the original elements of all languages. It has
moreover been observed, that the idioms of all languages approach each other in
passages of the greatest eloquence and power. And as this is the first language,
so is it the last. This immediate dependence of language upon nature, this
conversion of an outward phenomenon into a type of somewhat in human life, never
loses its power to affect us. It is this which gives that piquancy to the
conversation of a strong-natured farmer or back-woodsman, which all men relish.

A man’s power to connect his thought with its proper symbol, and so to utter
it, depends on the simplicity of his character, that is, upon his love of truth,
and his desire to communicate it without loss. The corruption of man is followed
by the corruption of language. When simplicity of character and the sovereignty
of ideas is broken up by the prevalence of secondary desires, the desire of
riches, of pleasure, of power, and of praise, — and duplicity and falsehood
take place of simplicity and truth, the power over nature as an interpreter of
the will, is in a degree lost; new imagery ceases to be created, and old words
are perverted to stand for things which are not; a paper currency is employed,
when there is no bullion in the vaults. In due time, the fraud is manifest, and
words lose all power to stimulate the understanding or the affections. Hundreds
of writers may be found in every long-civilized nation, who for a short time
believe, and make others believe, that they see and utter truths, who do not of
themselves clothe one thought in its natural garment, but who feed unconsciously
on the language created by the primary writers of the country, those, namely,
who hold primarily on nature.

But wise men pierce this rotten diction and fasten words again to visible
things; so that picturesque language is at once a commanding certificate that he
who employs it, is a man in alliance with truth and God. The moment our
discourse rises above the ground line of familiar facts, and is inflamed with
passion or exalted by thought, it clothes itself in images. A man conversing in
earnest, if he watch his intellectual processes, will find that a material
image, more or less luminous, arises in his mind, cotemporaneous with every
thought, which furnishes the vestment of the thought. Hence, good writing and
brilliant discourse are perpetual allegories. This imagery is spontaneous. It is
the blending of experience with the present action of the mind. It is proper
creation. It is the working of the Original Cause through the instruments he has
already made.

These facts may suggest the advantage which the country-life possesses for a
powerful mind, over the artificial and curtailed life of cities. We know more
from nature than we can at will communicate. Its light flows into the mind
evermore, and we forget its presence. The poet, the orator, bred in the woods,
whose senses have been nourished by their fair and appeasing changes, year after
year, without design and without heed, — shall not lose their lesson
altogether, in the roar of cities or the broil of politics. Long hereafter,
amidst agitation and terror in national councils, — in the hour of revolution,
— these solemn images shall reappear in their morning lustre, as fit symbols
and words of the thoughts which the passing events shall awaken. At the call of
a noble sentiment, again the woods wave, the pines murmur, the river rolls and
shines, and the cattle low upon the mountains, as he saw and heard them in his
infancy. And with these forms, the spells of persuasion, the keys of power are
put into his hands.

3. We are thus assisted by natural objects in the expression of particular
meanings. But how great a language to convey such pepper-corn informations! Did
it need such noble races of creatures, this profusion of forms, this host of
orbs in heaven, to furnish man with the dictionary and grammar of his municipal
speech? Whilst we use this grand cipher to expedite the affairs of our pot and
kettle, we feel that we have not yet put it to its use, neither are able. We are
like travellers using the cinders of a volcano to roast their eggs. Whilst we
see that it always stands ready to clothe what we would say, we cannot avoid the
question, whether the characters are not significant of themselves. Have
mountains, and waves, and skies, no significance but what we consciously give
them, when we employ them as emblems of our thoughts? The world is emblematic.
Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the
human mind. The laws of moral nature answer to those of matter as face to face
in a glass. “The visible world and the relation of its parts, is the dial plate
of the invisible.” The axioms of physics translate the laws of ethics. Thus,
“the whole is greater than its part;” “reaction is equal to action;” “the
smallest weight may be made to lift the greatest, the difference of weight being
compensated by time;” and many the like propositions, which have an ethical as
well as physical sense. These propositions have a much more extensive and
universal sense when applied to human life, than when confined to technical use.

In like manner, the memorable words of history, and the proverbs of nations,
consist usually of a natural fact, selected as a picture or parable of a moral
truth. Thus; A rolling stone gathers no moss; A bird in the hand is worth two in
the bush; A cripple in the right way, will beat a racer in the wrong; Make hay
while the sun shines; ‘T is hard to carry a full cup even; Vinegar is the son of
wine; The last ounce broke the camel’s back; Long-lived trees make roots first;
— and the like. In their primary sense these are trivial facts, but we repeat
them for the value of their analogical import. What is true of proverbs, is true
of all fables, parables, and allegories.

This relation between the mind and matter is not fancied by some poet, but
stands in the will of God, and so is free to be known by all men. It appears to
men, or it does not appear. When in fortunate hours we ponder this miracle, the
wise man doubts, if, at all other times, he is not blind and deaf;

—— “Can these things be,
And overcome us like a summer’s
cloud,
Without our special wonder?”

for the universe becomes transparent, and the light of higher laws than its
own, shines through it. It is the standing problem which has exercised the
wonder and the study of every fine genius since the world began; from the era of
the Egyptians and the Brahmins, to that of Pythagoras, of Plato, of Bacon, of
Leibnitz, of Swedenborg. There sits the Sphinx at the road-side, and from age to
age, as each prophet comes by, he tries his fortune at reading her riddle. There
seems to be a necessity in spirit to manifest itself in material forms; and day
and night, river and storm, beast and bird, acid and alkali, preexist in
necessary Ideas in the mind of God, and are what they are by virtue of preceding
affections, in the world of spirit. A Fact is the end or last issue of spirit.
The visible creation is the terminus or the circumference of the invisible
world. “Material objects,” said a French philosopher, “are necessarily kinds of
scoriae of the substantial thoughts of the Creator, which must always preserve
an exact relation to their first origin; in other words, visible nature must
have a spiritual and moral side.”

This doctrine is abstruse, and though the images of “garment,” “scoriae,”
“mirror,” &c., may stimulate the fancy, we must summon the aid of subtler
and more vital expositors to make it plain. “Every scripture is to be
interpreted by the same spirit which gave it forth,” — is the fundamental law
of criticism. A life in harmony with nature, the love of truth and of virtue,
will purge the eyes to understand her text. By degrees we may come to know the
primitive sense of the permanent objects of nature, so that the world shall be
to us an open book, and every form significant of its hidden life and final
cause.

A new interest surprises us, whilst, under the view now suggested, we
contemplate the fearful extent and multitude of objects; since “every object
rightly seen, unlocks a new faculty of the soul.” That which was unconscious
truth, becomes, when interpreted and defined in an object, a part of the domain
of knowledge, — a new weapon in the magazine of power.

The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson