Introduction
Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes
biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature
face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to
the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of
tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? Embosomed
for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us
by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the
dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded
wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are
new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.
Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable. We must trust the
perfection of the creation so far, as to believe that whatever curiosity the order of
things has awakened in our minds, the order of things can satisfy. Every man's condition
is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life, before
he apprehends it as truth. In like manner, nature is already, in its forms and tendencies,
describing its own design. Let us interrogate the great apparition, that shines so
peacefully around us. Let us inquire, to what end is nature?
All science has one aim, namely, to find a theory of nature. We have theories of races
and of functions, but scarcely yet a remote approach to an idea of creation. We are now so
far from the road to truth, that religious teachers dispute and hate each other, and
speculative men are esteemed unsound and frivolous. But to a sound judgment, the most
abstract truth is the most practical. Whenever a true theory appears, it will be its own
evidence. Its test is, that it will explain all phenomena. Now many are thought not only
unexplained but inexplicable; as language, sleep, madness, dreams, beasts, sex.
Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul. Strictly
speaking, therefore, all that is separate from us, all which Philosophy distinguishes as
the NOT ME, that is, both nature and art, all other men and my own body, must be ranked
under this name, NATURE. In enumerating the values of nature and casting up their sum, I
shall use the word in both senses; — in its common and in its philosophical import. In
inquiries so general as our present one, the inaccuracy is not material; no confusion of
thought will occur. Nature, in the common sense, refers to essences unchanged by
man; space, the air, the river, the leaf. Art is applied to the mixture of his
will with the same things, as in a house, a canal, a statue, a picture. But his operations
taken together are so insignificant, a little chipping, baking, patching, and washing,
that in an impression so grand as that of the world on the human mind, they do not vary
the result.
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