RIVERSIDE, CAMBRIDGE:
STEREOTYPED BY H. O. HOUGHTON AND COMPANY.
CONTENTS.
| [NATURE] | [5] |
| [ THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR] An Oration before the Phi Beta Kappa Society, at Cambridge, August 31, 1837 | [75] |
| [AN ADDRESS.]to the Senior Class in Divinity College, Cambridge, July 15, 1838 | [113] |
| [LITERARY ETHICS. ]An Address to the Literary Societies in Dartmouth College, July 24, 1838 | [147] |
| [THE METHOD OF NATURE.] An Address to the Society of the Adelphi, in Waterville College, Maine, August 11, 1841 | [181] |
| [MAN THE REFORMER.] A Lecture read before the Mechanics’ Apprentices’ Library Association, Boston, January 25, 1841 | [217] |
| [INTRODUCTORY LECTURE ON THE TIMES.] Read in the Masonic Temple, Boston, Dec. 2, 1841 | [249] |
| [THE CONSERVATIVE.] A Lecture read in the Masonic Temple, Boston, December 9, 1841 | [283] |
| [THE TRANSCENDENTALIST. ]A Lecture read in the Masonic Temple, Boston, January, 1842 | [317] |
| [THE YOUNG AMERICAN.] A Lecture read to the Mercantile Library Association, in Boston, February 7, 1844 | [349] |
NATURE.
A subtle chain of countless rings
The next unto the farthest brings;
The eye reads omens where it goes,
And speaks all languages the rose;
And, striving to be man, the worm
Mounts through all the spires of form.
INTRODUCTION.
Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy 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 of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, 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 are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.
Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable. We must trust the perfection of the creation so far, as to believe that whatever curiosity the order 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 would put. 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. Let us interrogate the great apparition, that shines so peacefully around us. Let us inquire, to what end is nature?
All science has one aim, namely, to find a theory of nature. We have theories of races and of functions, but scarcely yet a remote approach to an idea of creation. We are now so far from the road to truth, that religious teachers dispute and hate each other, and speculative men are esteemed unsound and frivolous. But to a sound judgment, the most abstract truth is the most practical. Whenever a true theory appears, it will be its own evidence. Its test is, that it will explain all phenomena. Now many are thought not only unexplained but inexplicable; as language, sleep, madness, dreams, beasts, sex.