NEW EDITION
BOSTON & CAMBRIDGE:
JAMES MUNROE AND COMPANY
M DCCC XLIX.
Entered, according to the Act of Congress, in the year 1849
By JAMES MUNROE AND COMPANY,
in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts.
BOSTON:
THURSTON, TORRY AND COMPANY,
31 Devonshire Street.
CONTENTS
| INTRODUCTION | 1 | |
| CHAPTER I. | NATURE | 8 |
| CHAPTER II. | COMMODITY | 10 |
| CHAPTER III. | BEAUTY | 13 |
| CHAPTER IV. | LANGUAGE | 23 |
| CHAPTER V. | DISCIPLINE | 34 |
| CHAPTER VI. | IDEALISM | 45 |
| CHAPTER VII. | SPIRIT | 59 |
| CHAPTER VIII. | PROSPECTS | 64 |
INTRODUCTION.
OUR age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writesbiographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God andnature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy anoriginal relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry andphilosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us,and not the history of theirs? Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods oflife stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, toaction proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of thepast, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe?The sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There arenew lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws andworship.
Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable. We must trustthe perfection of the creation so far, as to believe that whatever curiosity theorder of things has awakened in our minds, the order of things can satisfy.Every man's condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he wouldput. He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth. In like manner,nature is already, in its forms and tendencies, describing its own design. Letus interrogate the great apparition, that shines so peacefully around us. Let usinquire, to what end is nature?
All science has one aim, namely, to find a theory of nature. We have theoriesof races and of functions, but scarcely ye