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 ascent 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 hiving 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 that 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 Haydn's oratorios, 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.