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The Influences Of Nature Upon The Mind
The Influences Of Nature Upon The Mind
[Hear Far, Too, As Her]
The first in time and the first in importance of the influences upon the
mind is that of Nature. Every day, the sun; and, after sunset, Night and her
stars. Ever the winds blow; ever the grass grows. Every day, men and women,
conversing, beholding and beholden. The scholar is he of all men whom this
spectacle most engages. He must settle its value in his mind. What is Nature
to him? There is never a beginning, there is never an end, to the inexplicable
continuity of this web of God, but always circular power returning into
itself. Therein it resembles his own spirit, whose beginning, whose ending, he
never can find, - so entire, so boundless. Far, too, as her splendors shine,
system on system shooting like rays upward, downward, without centre, without
circumference, - in the mass and in the particle, Nature hastens to render
account of herself to the mind. Classification begins. To the young mind,
everything is individual, stands by itself. By and by it finds how to join two
things, and see in them one nature; then three, then three thousand; and so
tyrannized over by its own unifying instinct, it goes on tying things
together, diminishing anomalies, discovering roots running under ground,
whereby contrary and remote things cohere, and flower out from one stem. It
presently learns that since the dawn of history there has been a constant
accumulation and classifying of facts. But what is classification but the
perceiving that these objects are not chaotic, and are not foreign, but have a
law which is also a law of the human mind? The astronomer discovers that
geometry, a pure abstraction of the human mind, is the measure of planetary
motion. The chemist finds proportions and intelligible method throughout
matter; and science is nothing but the finding of analogy, identity, in the
most remote parts. The ambitious soul sits down before each refractory fact;
one after another reduces all strange constitutions, all new powers, to their
class and their law, and goes on forever to animate the last fibre of
organization, the outskirts of nature, by insight.
Thus to him, to this school-boy under the bending dome of day, is
suggested that he and it proceed from one root; one is leaf and one is flower;
relation, sympathy, stirring in every vein. And what is that Root? Is not that
the soul of his soul? A thought too bold, a dream too wild. Yet when this
spiritual light shall have revealed the law of more earthly natures, when he
has learned to worship the soul, and to see that the natural philosophy that
now is, is only the first gropings of its gigantic hand, he shall look forward
to an ever-expanding knowledge as to a becoming creator. He shall see that
Nature is the opposite of the soul, answering to it part for part. One is seal
and one is print. Its beauty is the beauty of his own mind. Its laws are the
laws of his own mind. Nature then becomes to him the measure of his
attainments. So much of Nature as he is ignorant of, so much of his own mind
does he not yet possess. And, in fine, the ancient precept, "Know thyself,"
and the modern precept, "Study Nature," become at last one maxim.
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