with and reduces all things, until the world
becomes at last a realised will.

Every natural process is a version of a moral sentence. The moral law
lies at the centre of Nature and radiates to the circumference. What is
a farm but a mute gospel? The chaff and the wheat, weeds and plants,
blight, rain, insects, sun--it is a sacred emblem from the first furrow
of spring to the last stack which the snow of winter overtakes in the
fields. Who can guess how much firmness the sea-beaten rock has taught
the fisherman? How much tranquillity has been reflected to man from the
azure sky? How much industry and providence and affection we have caught
from the pantomime of brutes?

The unity of Nature meets us everywhere. Resemblances exist in things
wherein there is great superficial unlikeness. Thus architecture is
called "frozen music" by Goethe. "A Gothic church," said Coleridge, "is
petrified religion." The law of harmonic sounds reappears in the
harmonic colours. The granite is different in its laws only by the more
or less of heat from the river that wears it away. The river, as it
flows, resembles the air that flows over it; the air resembles the light
that traverses it with more subtle currents.

Each creature is only a modification of the other, the likeness in them
is more than the difference, and their radical law is one and the same.
This unity pervades thought also.

_VI.--IS NATURE REAL?_

A noble doubt suggests itself whether discipline be not the final cause
of the universe, and whether Nature outwardly exists. The frivolous make
themselves merry with the ideal theory as if its consequences were
burlesque, as if it affected the stability of Nature. It surely does
not. The wheels and springs of man are all set to the hypothesis of the
permanence of Nature.

But while we acquiesce entirely in the permanence of natural laws, the
question of the absolute existence of Nature still remains open. It is
the uniform effect of culture on the human mind to lead us to regard
Nature as a phenomenon, not a substance; to attribute necessary
existence to spirit.

Intellectual science fastens the attention upon immortal necessary
uncreated natures, that is, upon ideas; and in their presence we feel
that the outward circumstance is a dream and a shade. Whilst we wait in
this Olympus of the gods we think of Nature as an appendix to the soul.
Finally, religion and ethics, which may be fitly called the practice of
ideas,