Emerson quotes Bacon as saying that man is the minister and interpreter
of Nature. But man has been very slow to see that he is a part of that
same Nature of which he is the minister and interpreter. His
interpretation is not complete until he has learned to interpret himself
also. This he has done all unconsciously through his art, his
literature, his religion, his philosophy. Painting interprets one phase
of him, music another, poetry another, sculpture another, his civic
orders another, his creeds and beliefs and superstitions another, so
that at this day and age of the world he has been pretty well
interpreted. But the final interpretation is as far off as ever, because
the condition of man is not static, but dynamic. He is forever born anew
into the world and experiences new wonder, new joy, new loves, new
enthusiasms. Nature is infinite, and the soul of man is infinite, and
the action and reaction between the two which gives us our culture and
our civilization can never cease. When man thinks he is interpreting
Nature, he is really interpreting himself--reading his own heart and
mind through the forms and movements that surround him. In his art and
his literature he bodies forth his own ideals; in his religion he gives
the measure of his awe and reverence and his aspirations toward the
perfect good; in his science he illustrates his capacity for logical
order and for weighing evidence. There is no astronomy to the night
prowler, there is no geology to the woodchuck or the ground mole, there
is no biology to the dog or to the wolf, there is no botany to the cows
and the sheep. All these sciences are creations of the mind of man; they
are the order and the logic which he reads into Nature. Nature
interprets man to himself. Her beauty, her sublimity, her harmony, her
terror, are names which he gives to the emotions he experiences in her
presence. The midnight skies sound the depths of his capacity for the
emotion of grandeur and immensity, the summer landscape reveals to him
his susceptibility to beauty.
It is considered sound rhetoric to speak of the statue as existing in
the block of marble before the sculptor touches it. How easy to fall
into such false analogies! Can we say that the music existed in the
flute or in the violin before the musician touches them? The statue in
the form of an idea or a conception exists in the mind of the sculptor,
and he fashions the marble accordingly. Does the book exist in the pot
of printer's ink? Living things exist in the germ, the oak in the acorn,
the chick in the egg, but from the world of dead matter there is no
resurrection or evolution. Life alone puts a particular stamp upon it.
We may say that the snowflake exists in the cloud vapor because of the
laws of crystallization, but the house does not exist in a thousand of
brick in the same sense. It exists in the mind of the builder.
The sculptor does not interpret the marble; he interprets his own soul
through the medium of the marble--the picture is not in the painter's
color tubes waiting to be developed as the flower is in the bud; it is
in the artist's imagination. The apple and the peach and the wheat and
the corn exist in the soil potentially; life working through the laws of
physics and chemistry draws their materials out and builds up the
perfect fruit. To decipher, to interpret, to translate, are terms that
apply to human things, and not to universal nature. We do not interpret
the stars when we form the constellations. The grouping of the stars in
the heavens is accidental--the chair, the dipper, the harp, the
huntsman, are our fabrications. Does Shelley interpret the skylark, or
Wordsworth the cuckoo, or Bryant the bobolink, or Whitman the
mockingbird and the thrush? Each interprets his own heart. Each poet's
mind is the die or seal that gives the impression to this wax.
All the so-called laws of Nature are of our own creation. Out of an
unfailing sequence of events we frame laws--the law of gravity, of
chemical affinity, of magnetism, of electricity--and refer to them as if
they had an objective reality, when they are only concepts in our own
minds. Nature has no statute books and no legislators, though we
habitually think of her processes under these symbols. Human laws can be
annulled, but Nature's laws cannot. Her ways are irrevocable, though
theology revokes or suspends them in its own behalf. It was Joshua's
mind that stopped while he conquered his enemies, and not the sun.
The winds and the tides do not heed our prayers; fire and flood, famine
and pestilence, are deaf to our appeals. One of the cardinal doctrines
of Emerson was that all true prayers are self-answered--the spirit which
the act of prayer begets in the suppliant is the answer. A heartfelt
prayer for faith or courage or humility is already answered in the
attitude of soul that devoutly asks it. We know that the official
prayers in the churches for victory to the armies in the field are of no
avail--and how absurd to expect them to be--but who shall say that the
prayer of the soldier on the eve of battle may not steady his hand and
clinch his courage? But the prayer for rain or for heat or cold, or for
the stay of an epidemic, or for any material good, is as vain as to
reach one's hands for the moon.