Science ministers to the body, art to the spirit. Men who go from things to ideas are practical; those who go from ideas back to things are the seers. Practical men conserve, but never venture. Seers throw the light of their genius into the dark beyond, disclosing new worlds for men. They are the leaders, they are in the vanguard of human progress.
By the possession of two eyes, the eye of sense and the eye of reason, man is placed into relation with two worlds.
The world he sees by the eye of sense is meager, limited, poverty-stricken. There are only a few houses in it, a little clump of trees, a little patch of meadow, a horizon hounded by the curl of his cabin smoke. The world he sees by the eye of reason stretches far down into the twilight of the past, embracing all ages, all stages of progress, all empires and republics, all literature and peoples.
Through the eye of sense, he sees a world of hard limitation and fact. Through the eye of reason, a universe of ideas, visions, relations. Through the eye of sense, he sees a candle, with its flickering and passing flame. Through the eye of reason, he sees a kingdom of light, with truth and beauty, and love billowing away to infinity.
Through the eye of sense he sees a little mountain spring rise from the ground, to lose itself in the deepening shadows of the trees. Through the eye of reason he sees a river, clear as crystal, flowing forever from under the throne of God. A few violets and buttercups, covering with their blue and their beauty a little strip of meadow, he sees through the eye of sense. The hills of day, numberless and immeasurable, covered with flowers, whose leaves never wither and whose beauty never fades, he sees through the eye of reason.
It is the conceit of those whose habit of mind is to look through the eye of sense alone, that they see more in the actual tangible world than those who are accustomed to look through the eye of reason as well as through the eye of sense. There never was a greater mistake. Those who see most in the world of mountain and sea and sky, are those who look most through the eye of reason into the world of idea, principle, and relation. Adams in England, and Leverrier in France, discovered Neptune, not by sweeping the heavens with their telescopes, but by careful ciphering in their studies. “Mr. Turner,” said a friend to him one day, “I never see in nature the glows and colors you put into your pictures.” “Ah! don’t you wish you could, though,” was the painter’s reply. In an apple’s fall Newton sees the law of gravitation. Goethe sees in the sections of a deer’s skull the spinal column modified. Emerson sings:
“Let me go where’er I will,
I hear a sky-born music still.
’Tis not in the stars alone,
Nor in the cups of budding flowers,