INTRODUCTION. OUR age is retrospective. It builds chres of the fathers. It writes biogra tories, and criticism. The foregoing g beheld God and nature face to face; w their eyes. Why should not we also original relation to the universe? W not we have a poetry and philosophy and not of tradition, and a religion tion to us, and not the history of thei bosomed for a season in nature, who of life stream around and through us, a us by the powers they supply, to actio tioned to nature, why should we grop the dry bones of the past, or put the li eration into masquerade out of its fa robe? The sun shines to-day also. more wool and flax in the fields. new lands, new men, new thoughts demand our own works and laws and which are unanswerable. We must trust the erfection of the creation so far, as to believe hat whatever curiosity the order of things has wakened in our minds, the order of things can atisfy. Every man's condition is a solution in ieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as ruth. In like manner, nature is already, in its orms and tendencies, describing its own design. et us interrogate the great apparition, that hines so peacefully around us. Let us inquire, o what end is nature? All science has one aim, namely, to find a heory of nature. We have theories of races nd of functions, but scarcely yet a remote aproach to an idea of creation. We are now so ar from the road to truth, that religious teachers ispute and hate each other, and speculative men re esteemed unsound and frivolous. But to a ound judgment, the most abstract truth is the most practical. Whenever a true theory appears, t will be its own evidence. Its test is, that will explain all phenomena. Now many are hought not only unexplained but inexplicable; s language, sleep, madness, dreams, beasts, sex. Philosophically considered, the universe is omposed of Nature and the Soul. Strictly all which Philosophy distinguishes a ME, that is, both nature and art, all and my own body, must be ranked name, NATURE. In enumerating the nature and casting up their sum, I sh word in both senses;-in its common philosophical import. In inquiries so our present one, the inaccuracy is no no confusion of thought will occur. the common sense, refers to essences by man; space, the air, the river, the is applied to the mixture of his will same things, as in a house, a canal, picture. But his operations taken to so insignificant, a little chipping, baki ing, and washing, that in an impressio as that of the world on the human do not vary the result. NATURE. CHAPTER I. 1 To go into solitude, a man needs much from his chamber as from soci not solitary whilst I read and write, body is with me. But if a man woul let him look at the stars. The rays from those heavenly worlds, will separa him and what he touches. One migh atmosphere was made transparent w sign, to give man, in the heavenly perpetual presence of the sublime. streets of cities, how great they a stars should appear one night in : years, how would men believe and preserve for many generations the re of the city of God which had been s |