sages who lived and thought a thousand years before. They argue and refine; build theories one upon another, as the old astronomers piled epicycles upon cycle and epicycle, as each new discovery in relation to the movements of the stars and planets demanded a new law to account for each new fact. Copernicus swept all these away by stating the one central law which governs our solar system, that the earth revolves upon its own axis, and also circles around the sun; and so that the apparent movements of the stars are imaginary, not real. Emerson affirms, in substance, that there is such a law in the universe of existence. The foregoing is the nearest approach which we can find to a statement of what that law is, so far as relates to material and spiritual facts. To us, we acknowledge that we have not been able to attain to any clear conception of the teaching, and await some expositor to elucidate it. None such has shown himself to us. It is a Sphinx riddle. Emerson so styles it. He says:

THE SPHINX RIDDLE.

"This doctrine is abstruse, and though the images of 'garment,'scoriæ,' 'mirror,' etc., may stimulate the fancy, we must summon the aid of subtler and more vital expositors to make it plain. Every scripture is to be interpreted by the same spirit which gave it forth,' is the fundamental law of criticism. A life in harmony with Nature, the love of truth and of virtue, will purge the eyes to understand her text. By degrees we may

come to know the primitive sense of the permanent objects of Nature, so that the world shall be to us an open book, and every form significant of its hidden life and final cause. 99

Forty years passed between the appearance of this book and the date of the last of Emerson's writings; and yet we do not find that he has come any nearer to the explication of this Sphinx riddle. We read his address before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge, delivered in 1867. It is as eloquent as anything which he ever wrote or spoke. The old doctrine is repeated with added emphasis and new wealth of illustration. He really seems to have reached in his own consciousness to a definite apprehension upon the matter in question. Yet to us the whole stands just as before. Thus, he says:

THE UNITY OF ALL THINGS.

"Shall we study the mathematics of the sphere, and not its causal essence also? Nature is a fable whose moral blazes through it. There is no use in Copernicus if the robust periodicity of the solar system does not show its equal perfection in the mental sphere: the periodicity, the compensating errors, the grand reactions. I shall never believe that centrifugence and centripe-. tence balance unless mind heats and meliorates as well the surface and soil of the globe. On this power, this all dissolving unity, the emphasis of heaven and earth is laid. Nature is brute but as the soul quickens it; Nature always the effect, Mind the flowing cause. Mind

carries the law; history is the slow and atomic unfolding.

"Every inch of the mountains is scarred by unimaginable convulsions, yet the new day is purple with the bloom of youth and love. Look out into the July night, and see the broad belt of silver flame which flashes up the half of heaven, fresh and delicate as the bonfires of the meadow flies. Yet the powers of numbers can not compute its enormous age; lasting as time and spaceimbosomed in time and space. And time and space, what are they? Our first problems, which we ponder all our lives through, and leave where we found them; whose outrunning immensity, as the old Greeks believed, astonished the gods themselves; of whose dizzy vastitudes all the worlds of God are a mere dot on the margin: impossible to deny, impossible to believe. Yet the moral element in man counterpoises this dismaying immensity, and bereaves it of terror."

This is certainly nowise in contravention of the sublime truth with which the Hebrew Scriptures open: "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." But it seems to us to be intended to convey far more than is implied in that terse phrase. Fail as we may to at all assure ourselves that we have reached the center core of Emerson's philosophy, we are at least prepared to say with him: "A new interest surprises us, whilst, under the view now suggested, we contemplate the fearful extent and multitude of objects, since every object, rightly seen, unlocks a new faculty of the soul. That which was uncon

scious truth becomes, when interpreted and defined in an object, a part of the domain of knowledge-a new weapon in the magazine of power." And truths not a few, which had lain, as it were, dormant in our consciousness, have by him come to be so alive that, as with Grimm, they are as new to us as though we had never heard them before, and as old as though they had always been parts of our intellectual being.

In the chapter on "Discipline" are grouped together a series of suggestions touching closely upon what has before been said under the title of "Commodity." Still, there is valid reason for thus grouping them.

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 word 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 stolidity, 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 these worthy scenes. Meanwhile, reason transfers its own lessons into its own world of thought by perceiving the analogy that marries matter and mind."

A few isolated sentences will, in some fair degree, set forth the general aim and scope of this chapter on “Discipline.”

DISCIPLINE OF THE UNDERSTANDING.

"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 purposes. Proportioned to the importance of the organ, is the extreme care with which its tuition is provided. What tedious training, day after day, year after year, never ending, to form the common sense, what continual reproduction of annoyances, inconveniences, dilemmas, what rejoicings over 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."

DISCIPLINE BY PROPERTY.

"The same good office is performed by property, and its filial systems of debt and credit. Debt, grinding 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 can not be foregone, 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 the clock. Whilst now it is