Through the eye of sense he sees a little mountain spring rise from the ground, to lose itself in the deepening shadows of the trees. Through the eye of reason he sees a river, clear as crystal, flowing forever from under the throne of God. A few violets and buttercups, covering with their blue and their beauty a little strip of meadow, he sees through the eye of sense. The hills of day, numberless and immeasurable, covered with flowers, whose leaves never wither and whose beauty never fades, he sees through the eye of reason. It is the conceit of those whose habit of mind is to look through the eye of sense alone, that they see more in the actual tangible world than those who are accustomed to look through the eye of reason as well as through the eye of sense. There never was a greater mistake. Those who see most in the world of mountain and sea and sky, are those who look most through the eye of reason into the world of idea, principle, and relation. Adams in England, and Leverrier in France, discovered Neptune, not by sweeping the heavens with their telescopes, but by careful ciphering in their studies. “Mr. Turner,” said a friend to him one day, “I never see in nature the glows and colors you put into your pictures.” “Ah! don’t you wish you could, though,” was the painter’s reply. In an apple’s fall Newton sees the law of gravitation. Goethe sees in the sections of a deer’s skull the spinal column modified. Emerson sings: “Let me go where’er I will, I hear a sky-born music still. ’Tis not in the stars alone, Nor in the cups of budding flowers, Nor in the red-breast’s yellow tone, Nor in the bow that smiles in showers; But in the mud and scum of things, There always, always something sings.” Humboldt habitually dwelt in the realm of principles and ideas. He spent only five years in America, and it took twelve quartos, and sixteen folios, and half a dozen helpers, and many years to put on record what he saw. “The poem hangs on the berry bush, When comes the poet’s eye, And the street is one long masquerade When Shakspere passes by.” I. Yet the mind must first see through the eye of sense, before it is capable of seeing through the eye of reason. The universe, that really belongs to the mind, the eye of sense never sees, but it sees something that suggests it. Through the eye of sense man takes in a few colors, but these suggest to Rubens the magnificent visions which illuminate the art galleries of Europe. Through the sense man hears a few notes, but these are taken and multiplied into the symphonies of Beethoven.