the absolute existence of nature still remains open. It is the uniform effect of culture on the human mind, not to shake our faith in the stability of particular phenomena, as of heat, water, azote; but to lead us to regard nature as a phenomenon, not a substance; to attribute necessary existence to spirit; to esteem nature as an accident and an effect.

To the senses and the unrenewed understanding belongs a sort of instinctive belief in the absolute existence of nature. In their view, man and nature are indissolubly joined. Things are ultimates, and they never look beyond their sphere. The presence of Reason mars this faith. The first effort of thought tends to relax this despotism of the senses, which binds us to nature as if we were a part of it, and shows us nature aloof, and, as it were, afloat. Until this higher agency intervened, the animal eye sees, with wonderful accuracy, sharp outlines and coloured surfaces. When the eye of Reason opens, to outline and surface are at once added grace and expression. These proceed from imagination and affection, and abate somewhat of the angular distinctness of objects. If the Reason be stimulated to more earnest vision, outlines and surfaces become transparent, and are no longer seen; causes and spirits are seen through them. The best moments of life are these delicious awakenings of the higher powers, and the reverential withdrawing of nature before its God.

Let us proceed to indicate the effects of culture. 1. Our first institution in the Ideal philosophy is a hint from Nature herself.

Nature is made to conspire with spirit to emancipate us. Certain mechanical changes, a small alteration in our local position apprises us of a dualism. We are strangely affected by seeing the shore from a moving ship, from a balloon, or through the tints of an unusual sky. The least change in our point of view gives the whole world a pictorial air. A man who seldom rides needs only to get into a coach and traverse his own town, to turn the street into a puppet-show. The men, the women,-talking, running, bartering, fighting,-the earnest mechanic, the lounger, the beggar, the boys, the dogs, are unrealized at once, or at least wholly detached from all relation to the observer, and seen as apparent, not substantial beings. What new thoughts are suggested by seeing a face of country quite familiar, in the rapid movement of the railroad car! Nay, the most wonted objects (make a very slight change in the point of vision) please us most. a camera-obscura, the butcher's cart and the figure of one of our own family amuse us. So a portrait of a well-known face gratifies

In

us. Turn the eyes upside down, by looking at the landscape through your legs, and how agreeable is the picture, though you have seen it any time these twenty years!

In these cases, by mechanical means, is suggested the difference between the observer and the spectacle, between man and nature. Hence arises a pleasure mixed with awe; I may say, a low degree of the sublime is felt from the fact, probably, that man is hereby apprised, that, whilst the world is a spectacle, something in himself is stable.

2. In a higher manner, the poet commu-
nicates the same pleasure. By a few strokes
he delineates, as on air, the sun, the moun-
tain, the camp, the city, the hero, the maiden,
not different from what we know them, but
only lifted from the ground and afloat before
the eye. He unfixes the land and the sea,
makes them revolve around the axis of his
primary thought, and disposes them anew.
Possessed himself by a heroic passion, he
uses matter as symbols of it. The sensual
man conforms thoughts to things; the poet
conforms things to his thoughts. The one
esteems nature as rooted and fast; the other,
as fluid, and impresses his being thereon,
To him, the refractory world is ductile and
flexible; he invests dust and stones with
humanity, and makes them the words of the
Reason. The imagination may be defined
to be, the use which the Reason makes of
the material world. Shakspeare possesses
the power of subordinating nature for the
purposes of expression, beyond all poets.
His imperial muse tosses the creation like a
bawble from hand to hand, and uses it to
embody any caprice of thought that is up-
permost in his mind. The remotest spaces
of nature are visited, and the farthest sun-
dered things are brought together, by a
subtle spiritual connection.
We are made
aware that magnitude of material things is
relative, and all objects shrink and expand
to serve the passion of the poet. Thus, in
his sonnets, the lays of birds, the scents and
dyes of flowers, he finds to be the shadow
of his beloved; time, which keeps her from
him, is his chest; the suspicion she has
awakened is her ornament ;

The ornament of beauty is Suspect,
A crow which flies in heaven's sweetest air.

His passion is not the fruit of chance; it
swells, as he speaks, to a city, or a state.

No, it was builded far from accident;
It suffers not in smiling pomp, nor falls
Under the brow of thralling discontent;
It fears not policy, that heretic,
That works on leases of short numbered hours,
But all alone stands hugely politic.
In the strength of his constancy, the
Pyramids seem to him recent and transitory.

The freshness of youth and love dazzles him and dissolved by a thought; that this feeble with its resemblance to morning.

Take those lips away Which so sweetly were forsworn; And those eyes, the break of day, Lights that do mislead the morn. The wild beauty of this hyperbole, I may say, in passing, it would not be easy to match in literature.

This transfiguration which all material objects undergo through the passion of the poet,-this power which he exerts to dwarf the great, to magnify the small,-might be illustrated by a thousand examples from his plays. I have before me the Tempest, and will cite only these few lines.

ARIEL. The strong based promontory
Have I made shake, and by the spurs plucked up
The pine and cedar.

Prospero calls for music to soothe the frantic
Alonzo, and his companions;

A solemn air, and the best comforter
To an unsettled fancy, cure thy brains
Now useless, boiled within thy skull.
Again ;

The charm dissolves apace,
And, as the morning steals upon the night,
Melting the darkness, so their rising senses
Begin to chase the ignorant fumes that mantle
Their clearer reason.

Their understanding
Begins to swell: and the approaching tide
Will shortly fill the reasonable shores
That now fie foul and muddy.

The perception of real affinities between events (that is to say, of ideal affinities, for those only are real) enables the poet thus to make free with the most imposing forms and phenomena of the world, and to assert the predominance of the soul.

human being has penetrated the vast masses of nature with an informing soul, and recogInized itself in their harmony, that is, seized their law. In physics, when this is attained, catalogues of particulars, and carries centhe memory disburdens itself of its cumbrous turies of observation in a single formula.

Thus even in physics, the material is degraded before the spiritual. The astronomer, the geometer, rely on their irrefragable analysis, and disdain the results of observation. The sublime remark of Euler on his law of arches, "This will be found contrary to all experience, yet is true," had already transferred nature into the mind, and left matter like an outcast corpse.

4. Intellectual science has been observed to beget invariably a doubt of the existence of matter. Turgot said, "He that has never doubted the existence of matter may be assured he has no aptitude for metaphysical inquiries.' It fastens the attention upon immortal necessary uncreated natures, that is, upon Ideas; and in their presence, we feel that the outward circumstance is a dream and a shade. Whilst we wait in this Olympus of gods, we think of nature as an appendix to the soul. We ascend into their region, and know that these are the thoughts of the Supreme Being. "These are they who were set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was. When he prepared the heavens, they were there; when he established the clouds above, when he strengthened the fountains of the deep. Then they were by him, as one brought up with him. Of them took he counsel."

Their influence is proportionate. As objects of science, they are accessible to few men. Yet all men are capable of being raised by piety or by passion into their region. And no man touches these divine natures, without becoming, in some degree, himself divine. Like a new soul, they renew the body. We become physically nimble and lightsome; we tread on air; life is no longer irksome, and we think it will never be so. No man fears age or misfortune or death, in their serene company, for he is transported out of the district of change. Whilst we behold unveiled the nature of Justice and Truth, we learn the difference between the absolute and the conditional or relative. We apprehend the absolute. As it were, for the first time, we exist. We become immortal, for we learn that time and space are relations of matter; that, with a perception of truth, or a virtuous will, they have

3. Whilst thus the poet animates nature with his own thoughts, he differs from the philosopher only herein, that the one proposes Beauty as his main end; the other, Truth. But the philosopher, not less than the poet, postpones the apparent order and relations of things to the empire of thought. "The problem of philosophy," according to Plato, is, for all that exists conditionally, to find a ground unconditioned and absolute." It proceeds on the faith that a law determines all phenomena, which being known, the phenomena can be predicted. That law, when in the mind, is an idea. Its beauty is infinite. The true philosopher and the true poet are one, and a beauty which is truth, and a truth which is beauty, is the aim of both. Is not the charm of one of Plato's or Aristotle's definitions strictly like that of the Antigone of Sophocles? It is, in both cases, that a spiritual life has no affinity. been imparted to nature; that the solid 5. Finally, religion and ethics-which may seeming block of matter has been pervaded | be fitly called the practice of ideas, or the

introduction of ideas into life-have an For, seen in the light of thought, the world analogous effect with all lower culture, in always is phenomenal; and virtue subordidegrading nature and suggesting its depend-nates it to the mind. Idealism sees the world ence on spirit. Ethics and religion differ in God. It beholds the whole circle of herein; that the one is the system of human persons and things, of actions and events, duties commencing from man; the other, of country and religion, not as painfully from God. Religion includes the person- accumulated, atom after atom, act after act, ality of God; Ethics does not. They are in an aged creeping Past, but as one vast one to our present design. They both put picture, which God paints on the instant nature under foot. The first and last lesson eternity, for the contemplation of the soul. of religion is, "The things that are seen, Therefore the soul holds itself off from a are temporal; the things that are unseen, too trivial and microscopic study of the uniare eternal." It puts an affront upon nature. versal tablet. It respects the end too much, It does that for the unschooled, which to immerse itself in the means.] It sees philosophy does for Berkeley and Viasa. something more important in Christianity The uniform language that may be heard than the scandals of ecclesiastical history, in the churches of the most ignorant sects or the niceties of criticism; and, very inis, "Contemn the unsubstantial shows of curious concerning persons or miracles, and the world; they are vanities, dreams, not at all disturbed by chasms of historishadows, unrealities; seek the realities cal evidence, it accepts from God the of religion." The devotee flouts nature. phenomenon, as it finds it, as the pure and Some theosophists have arrived at a certain awful form of religion in the world. It is hostility and indignation towards matter, as not hot and passionate at the appearance of the Manichean and Plotinus. They dis- what it calls its own good or bad fortune, trusted in themselves any looking back to at the union or opposition of other persons. these flesh-pots of Egypt. Plotinus was No man is its enemy. It accepts whatsoever ashamed of his body. In short, they might befalls, as part of its lesson. It is a watcher all say of matter, what Michel Angelo said more than a doer, and it is a doer, only that of external beauty, "It is the frail and weary it may the better watch. weed, in which God dresses the soul, which he has called into time."

It appears that motion, poetry, physical and intellectual science, and religion, all tend to affect our convictions of the reality of the external world. But I own there is something ungrateful in expanding too curiously the particulars of the general proposition, that all culture tends to imbue us with idealism. I have no hostility to nature, but a child's love to it. I expand and live in the warm day like corn and melons. Let us speak her fair. I do not wish to fling stones at my beautiful mother, nor soil my gentle nest. I only wish to indicate the true position of nature in regard to man, wherein to establish man, all right education tends; as the ground which to attain is the object of human life, that is, of man's connection with nature. Culture inverts the vulgar views of nature, and brings the mind to call that apparent, which it uses to call real, and that real, which it uses to call visionary. Children, it is true, believe in the external world. The belief that it appears only, is an afterthought, but with culture, this faith will as surely arise on the mind as did the first.

The advantage of the ideal theory over the popular faith is this, that it presents the world in precisely that view which is most desirable to the mind. It is, in fact, the view which Reason, both speculative and practical, that is, philosophy and virtue, take.

CHAPTER VII.

SPIRIT.

IT is essential to a true theory of nature and of man, that it should contain somewhat progressive. Uses that are exhausted or that may be, and facts that end in the statement, cannot be all that is true of this brave lodging wherein man is harboured, and wherein all his faculties find appropriate and endless exercise. And all the uses of nature admit of being summed in one, which yields the activity of man an infinite scope. Through all its kingdoms, to the suburbs and outskirts of things, it is faithful to the cause whence it had its origin. It always speaks of Spirit. It suggests the absolute. It is a perpetual effect. It is a great shadow pointing always to the sun behind us.

The

The aspect of nature is devout. Like the figure of Jesus, she stands with bended head, and hands folded upon the breast. happiest man is he who learns from nature the lesson of worship.

Of that ineffable essence which we call Spirit, he that thinks most will say least. We can foresee God in the coarse, as it were, distant phenomena of matter; but when we try to define and describe himself, both language and thought desert us, and we are as helpless as fools and savages. That essence refuses to be recorded in pro

positions, but when man has worshipped a plant upon the earth, so a man rests upon him intellectually, the noblest ministry of the bosom of God; he is nourished by un nature is to stand as the apparition of God. failing fountains, and draws, at his need, It is the organ through which the universal inexhaustible power. Who can set bounds spirit speaks to the individual, and strives to to the possibilities of man? Once inhale the lead back the individual to it. upper air, 'being admitted to behold the absolute natures of justice and truth, and we learn that man has access to the entire mind of the Creator, is himself the creator in the finite. This view, which admonishes me where the sources of wisdom and power lie, and points to virtue as to