Miscellanies : $b embracing Nature, addresses, and lecturesEmerson, Ralph Waldo
Philosophy
Miscellanies : $b embracing Nature, addresses, and lectures
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
American essays -- 19th century; Philosophy of nature; Transcendentalism (New England)
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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