DISCIPLINE.
In view of the significance of nature, we arrive at once at a new fact,
that nature is a discipline. This use of the world includes the
preceding uses, as parts of itself.
Space, time, society, labor, climate, food, locomotion, the animals, the
mechanical forces, give us sincerest lessons, day by day, whose meaning
is unlimited. They educate both the Understanding and the Reason. Every
property of matter is a school for the understanding,--its solidity or
resistance, its inertia, its extension, its figure, its divisibility.
The understanding adds, divides, combines, measures, and finds nutriment
and room for its activity in this worthy scene. Meantime, Reason
transfers all these lessons into its own world of thought, by perceiving
the analogy that marries Matter and Mind.
1. Nature is a discipline of the understanding in intellectual truths.
Our dealing with sensible objects is a constant exercise in the
necessary lessons of difference, of likeness, of order, of being and
seeming, of progressive arrangement; of assent from particular to
general; of combination to one end of manifold forces. Proportioned to
the importance of the organ to be formed, is the extreme care with which
its tuition is provided,--a care pretermitted in no single case. What
tedious training, day after day, year after year, never ending, to form
the common sense; what continual reproduction of annoyances,
inconveniences, dilemmas; what rejoicing over us of little men; what
disputing of prices, what reckonings of interest,--and all to form the
Hand of the mind;--to instruct us that “good thoughts are no better than
good dreams, unless they be executed!”
The same good office is performed by Property and its filial systems of
debt and credit. Debt, grinding debt, whose iron face the widow, the
orphan, and the sons of genius fear and hate;--debt, which consumes so
much time, which so cripples and disheartens a great spirit with cares
that seem so base, is a preceptor whose lessons cannot be forgone, and
is needed most by those who suffer from it most. Moreover, property,
which has been well compared to snow,--“if it fall level to-day, it will
be blown into drifts to-morrow,”--is the surface action of internal
machinery, like the index on the face of a clock. Whilst now it is the
gymnastics of the understanding, it is having in the foresight of the
spirit, experience in profounder laws.
The whole character and fortune of the individual are affected by the
least inequalities in the culture of the understanding; for example, in
the perception of differences. Therefore is Space, and therefore Time,
that man may know that things are not huddled and lumped, but sundered
and individual. A bell and a plough have each their use, and neither can
do the office of the other. Water is good to drink, coal to burn, wool
to wear; but wool cannot be drunk, nor water spun, nor coal eaten. The
wise man shows his wisdom in separation, in gradation, and his scale of
creatures and of merits is as wide as nature. The foolish have no range
in their scale, but suppose every man is as every other man. What is not
good they call the worst, and what is not hateful, they call the best.
In like manner, what good heed nature forms in us! She pardons no
mistakes. Her yea is yea, and her nay, nay.
The first steps in Agriculture, Astronomy, Zoölogy, (those first steps
which the farmer, the hunter, and the sailor take,) teach that nature’s
dice are always loaded; that in her heaps and rubbish are concealed sure
and useful results.
How calmly and genially the mind apprehends one after another the laws
of physics! What noble emotions dilate the mortal as he enters into the
counsels of the creation, and feels by knowledge the privilege to BE!
His insight refines him. The beauty of nature shines in his own breast.
Man is greater than he can see this, and the universe less, because Time
and Space relations vanish as laws are known.
Here again we are impressed and even daunted by the immense Universe to
be explored. “What we know, is a point to what we do not know.” Open any
recent journal of science, and weigh the problems suggested concerning
Light, Heat, Electricity, Magnetism, Physiology, Geology, and judge
whether the interest of natural science is likely to be soon exhausted.
Passing by many particulars of the discipline of nature, we must not
omit to specify two.
The exercise of the Will or the lesson of power is taught in every
event. From the child’s successive possession of his several senses up
to the hour when he saith, “Thy will be done!” he is learning the
secret, that he can reduce under his will, not only particular events,
but great classes, nay the whole series of events, and so conform all
facts to his character. Nature is thoroughly mediate. It is made to
serve. It receives the dominion of man as meekly as the ass on which
the Saviour rode. It offers all its kingdoms to man as the raw material
which he may mould into what is useful. Man is never weary of working it
up. He forges the subtile and delicate air into wise and melodious
words, and gives them wing as angels of persuasion and command. One
after another, his victorious thought comes up with and reduces all
things, until the world becomes, at last, only a realized will,--the
double of the man.
2. Sensible objects conform to the premonitions of Reason and reflect
the conscience. All things are moral; and in their boundless changes
have an unceasing reference to spiritual nature. Therefore is nature
glorious with form, color, and motion, that every globe in the remotest
heaven; every chemical change from the rudest crystal up to the laws of
life; every change of vegetation from the first principle of growth in
the eye of a leaf, to the tropical forest and antediluvian coal-mine;
every animal function from the sponge up to Hercules, shall hint or
thunder to man the laws of right and wrong, and echo the Ten
Commandments. Therefore is nature ever the ally of Religion: lends all
her pomp and riches to the religious sentiment. Prophet and priest,
David, Isaiah, Jesus, have drawn deeply from this source. This ethical
character so penetrates the bone and marrow of nature, as to seem the
end for which it was made. Whatever private purpose is answered by any
member or part, this is its public and universal function, and is never
omitted. Nothing in nature is exhausted in its first use. When a thing
has served an end to the uttermost, it is wholly new for an ulterior
service. In God, every end is converted into a new means. Thus the use
of commodity, regarded by itself, is mean and squalid. But it is to the
mind an education in the doctrine of Use, namely, that a thing is good
only so far as it serves; that a conspiring of parts and efforts to the
production of an end, is essential to any being. The first and gross
manifestation of this truth, is our inevitable and hated training in
values and wants, in corn and meat.
It has already been illustrated, that every natural process is a version
of a moral sentence. The moral law lies at the centre of nature and
radiates to the circumference. It is the pith and marrow of every
substance, every relation, and every process. All things with which we
deal, preach to us. What is a farm but a mute gospel? The chaff and the
wheat, weeds and plants, blight, rain, insects, sun,--it is a sacred
emblem from the first furrow of spring to the last stack which the snow
of winter overtakes in the fields. But the sailor, the shepherd, the
miner, the merchant, in their several resorts, have each an experience
precisely parallel, and leading to the same conclusion: because all
organizations are radically alike. Nor can it be doubted that this moral
sentiment which thus scents the air, grows in the grain, and impregnates
the waters of the world, is caught by man and sinks into his soul. The
moral influence of nature upon every individual is that amount of truth
which it illustrates to him. Who can estimate this? Who can guess how
much firmness the sea-beaten rock has taught the fisherman? how much
tranquillity has been reflected to man from the azure sky, over whose
unspotted deeps the winds forevermore drive flocks of stormy clouds, and
leave no wrinkle or stain? how much industry and providence and
affection we have caught from the pantomime of brutes? What a searching
preacher of self-command is the varying phenomenon of Health!
Herein is especially apprehended the unity of Nature,--the unity in
variety,--which meets us everywhere. All the endless variety of things
make an identical impression. Xenophanes complained in his old age,
that, look where he would, all things hastened back to Unity. He was
weary of seeing the same entity in the tedious variety of forms. The
fable of Proteus has a cordial truth. A leaf, a drop, a crystal, a
moment of time is related to the whole, and partakes of the perfection
of the whole. Each particle is a microcosm, and faithfully renders the
likeness of the world.
Not only resemblances exist in things whose analogy is obvious, as when
we detect the type of the human hand in the flipper of the fossil
saurus, but also in objects wherein there is great superficial
unlikeness. Thus architecture is called “frozen music,” by De Stael and
Goethe. Vitruvius thought an architect should be a musician. “A Gothic
church,” said Coleridge, “is a petrified religion.” Michael Angelo
maintained, that, to an architect, a knowledge of anatomy is essential.
In Hayden’s oratories, the notes present to the imagination not only
motions, as, of the snake, the stag, and the elephant, but colors also;
as the green grass. The law of harmonic sounds reappears in the harmonic
colors. The granite is differenced in its laws only by the more or less
of heat, from the river that wears it away. The river, as it flows,
resembles the air that flows over it; the air resembles the light which
traverses it with more subtile currents; the light resembles the heat
which rides with it through Space. Each creature is only a modification
of the other; the likeness in them is more than the difference, and
their radical law is one and the same. A rule of one art, or a law of
one organization, holds true throughout nature. So intimate is this
Unity, that, it is easily seen, it lies under the undermost garment of
nature, and betrays its source in Universal Spirit. For, it pervades
Thought also. Every universal truth which we express in words, implies
or supposes every other truth. _Omne verum vero consonat._ It is like a
great circle on a sphere, comprising all possible circles; which,
however, may be drawn, and comprise it, in like manner. Every such truth
is the absolute Ens seen from one side. But it has innumerable sides.
The central Unity is still more conspicuous in actions. Words are finite
organs of the infinite mind. They cannot cover the dimensions of what is
in truth. They break, chop, and impoverish it. An action is the
perfection and publication of thought. A right action seems to fill the
eye, and to be related to all nature. “The wise man, in doing one thing,
does all; or, in the one thing he does rightly, he sees the likeness of
all which is done rightly.”
Words and actions are not the attributes of brute nature. They
introduce us to the human form, of which all other organizations appear
to be degradations. When this appears among so many that surround it,
the spirit prefers it to all others. It says, ‘From such as this, have I
drawn joy and knowledge; in such as this, have I found and beheld
myself; I will speak to it; it can speak again; it can yield me thought
already formed and alive.’ In fact, the eye,--the mind,--is always
accompanied by these forms, male and female; and these are incomparably
the richest informations of the power and order that lie at the heart of
things. Unfortunately, every one of them bears the marks as of some
injury; is marred and superficially defective. Nevertheless, far
different from the deaf and dumb nature around them, these all rest like
fountain-pipes on the unfathomed sea of thought and virtue whereto they
alone, of all organizations, are the entrances.
It were a pleasant inquiry to follow into detail their ministry to our
education, but where would it stop? We are associated in adolescent and
adult life with some friends, who, like skies and waters, are
coextensive with our idea; who, answering each to a certain affection of
the soul, satisfy our desire on that side; whom we lack power to put at
such focal distance from us, that we can mend or even analyze them. We
cannot choose but love them. When much intercourse with a friend has
supplied us with a standard of excellence, and has increased our respect
for the resources of God who thus sends a real person to outgo our
ideal; when he has, moreover, become an object of thought, and, whilst
his character retains all its unconscious effect, is converted in the
mind into solid and sweet wisdom,--it is a sign to us that his office is
closing, and he is commonly withdrawn from our sight in a short time.