man who seldom rides needs only to get into a coach and traverse his own town, to turn the street into a puppet-show. What new thoughts are suggested by seeing a face of country quite familiar in the rapid movements of the railroad car!" And so on. "In these cases," says Emerson, "by mechanical means is suggested the difference between the observer and the spectacle, between man and Nature. Hence arises a pleasure mixed with awe. I may say that a low degree of the sublime is felt from the fact, probably, that the man is apprised that, while the world is a spectacle, something in himself is stable." But similar in kind, but far higher in effect, is the ideal ministry of poetry, philosophy, and religion.

THE IDEAL IN POETRY.

"In a higher manner the poet communicates the same pleasure. By a few strokes he delineates, as on air, the sun, the mountain, the camp, the city, the hero, the maiden—not different from what we know them, but only lifted from the ground and afloat before the eye. He unfixes the land and the sea, makes them revolve around the axis of his primary thought, and disposes them anew. Possessed himself by a heroic passion, he uses matter as symbols of it. The sensual man conforms thoughts to things; the poet conforms things to his thoughts. The one esteems Nature as rooted and fast; the other as fluid, and impresses his being thereon. To him the refractory world is ductile and flexible; he invests dust and stones with humanity, and makes them

the words of the reason. The imagination may be defined to be the use which the reason makes of the material world. Shakespeare possesses the power of subordinating Nature for the purposes of expression beyond all poets. His imperial muse tosses the creation like a bauble from hand to hand, and uses it to embody any caprice of thought that is uppermost in his mind. The remotest spaces of Nature are visited, and the farthestsundered things are brought together by a subtle spiritual connection. We are made aware that the magnitude of material things is relative, and all objects shrink and expand to serve the passion of the poet. The perception of real affinities between events (that is to say, of ideal affinities, for these only are real) enables the poet thus to make free with the most imposing forms and phenomena of the world, and to assert the predominance of the soul."

THE IDEAL IN PHILOSOPHY.

"Whilst the poet thus animates Nature with his own thoughts, he differs from the philosopher only herein: that the one proposes beauty as his main end; the other · proposes truth. But the philosopher, not less than the poet, postpones the apparent order and relations of things to the empire of thought. The problem of philosophy,' according to Plato, 'is for all that exists conditionally to find a ground unconditioned and absolute.' It proceeds on the faith that a law determines all phenomena, which being known, the phenomenon can be predicted. That law, when in the mind, is an idea. Its beauty is infinite. The true philosopher and the true poet are one; and a beauty which is faith, and a truth which is beauty, is the aim of both. Is not the charm of one of Plato's or Aristotle's definitions strictly like the

'Antigone' of Sophocles? It is, in both cases, that a spiritual life has been imparted to Nature; that the solid-seeming block of matter has been pervaded and dissolved by a thought; that this feeble human being has penetrated the vast masses of Nature with an informing soul, and recognized itself in their harmony—that is, seized their law. In physics, when this is attained, the memory disburdens itself of its cumbrous catalogues of particulars, and carries centuries of observation in a single formula. Thus, even in physics, the material is degraded before the spiritual. The astronomer, the geometer, rely on their irrefragable analysis, and disdain the results of observation. The sublime remark of Euler on his law of arches: 'This will be found contrary to all experience, yet it is true,' had already transferred Nature into the mind, and left matter like an outcast corpse."

THE IDEAL IN RELIGION AND ETHICS.

"Religion and ethics-which may be fitly called the practice of ideas, or the introduction of ideas into lifehave an analogous effect with all lower culture in degrading Nature, and suggesting its dependence on spirit. Ethics and religion differ herein: that the one is the system of human duties commencing from man; the other, from God. Religion includes the personality of God; ethics does not. They are one to our present design. They both put Nature under foot. The first and last lesson of religion is, 'The things which are seen are temporal; the things which are unseen are eternal.' It does that for the unschooled which philosophy does for Berkeley and Viasa. The uniform language that may be heard in the churches of the most ignorant sects is, 'Contemn the unsubstantial shows of the world; they

are vanities, dreams, shadows, unrealities; seek the realities of religion.' The devotee flouts Nature. Some theosophists have arrived at a certain hostility toward matter; as the Manichæans and Plotinus. In short, they might say of all matter what Michel Angelo said of external beauty: 'It is the frail and weary weed in which God dresses the soul which he has called into time.'

ADVANTAGE OF THE IDEAL THEORY.

"The advantage of the ideal theory over the popular faith is this: that it presents the world in precisely that view which is most desirable to the mind. It is, in fact, the view which reason, both speculative and practicalthat is, philosophy and virtue-take. For, seen in the light of thought, the world is always phenomenal; and virtue subordinates it to the mind. Idealism sees the world in God. It beholds the whole circle of persons and things, of actions and events, of country and religion, not as painfully accumulated, atom after atom, act after act, in an aged and creeping past, but as one vast picture, which God paints on the instant eternity for the contemplation of the soul. Therefore, the soul holds itself off from a too trivial and microscopic study of the universal tablet. It respects the end too much to immerse itself in the means. It sees something more important in Christianity than the scandals of ecclesiastical history or the niceties of criticism; and, very incurious concerning persons or miracles, and not at all disturbed by chasms of historical evidence, it accepts from God the phenomenon as it finds it, as the pure and awful form of religion in the world. It is not hot and passionate at the appearance of what it calls its own good or bad fortune, at the union or opposition of other persons.

No man is its enemy. It accepts whatsoever befalls as a part of its lesson. It is a watcher more than a doer, and it is a doer only that it may the better watch."

Thus closes the characteristic chapter on "Idealism," which certainly contains many things which seem to contravene much which has before been strenuously insisted upon. Most likely Emerson perceived this, and, if he ever condescended to explanations, he would have said that all these were but parts of the one universal truth, which could only be expressed in fragments. For, just before the last paragraph, urging the "advantages of the ideal theory over the popular faith," and repeating the affirmation that "motion, poetry, physical and intellectual science, and religion all tend to affect our convictions of the reality of the external world," he adds, as if half regretful that such was the case, "I own that there is something ungrateful too curiously to scan the particulars of the general proposition that all culture tends to imbue us with idealism. I have no hostility to Nature, but a child's love to it. I expand and live in the warm day like corn and melons. Let us speak her fair. I do not wish to fling stones at my beautiful mother, nor soil my gentle nest. I only wish to indicate the true position of Nature in regard to man, wherein to establish man all right education tends, as the ground which to attain is the object of human life—that is, of man's connection with Nature."