like
that when we look at the shore from a moving ship, and others which
cheat the senses by false appearances.

The poet animates Nature with his own thoughts, perceives the affinities
between Nature and the soul, with Beauty as his main end. The
philosopher pursues Truth, but, "not less than the poet, postpones
the apparent order and relation of things to the empire of thought."
Religion and ethics agree with all lower culture in degrading Nature
and suggesting its dependence on Spirit. "The devotee flouts
Nature."--"Plotinus was ashamed of his body."--"Michael Angelo said of
external beauty, 'it is the frail and weary weed, in which God dresses
the soul, which He has called into time.'" Emerson would not
undervalue Nature as looked at through the senses and "the unrenewed
understanding." "I have no hostility to Nature," he says, "but a
child's love of it. I expand and live in the warm day like corn and
melons."--But, "seen in the light of thought, the world always is
phenomenal; and virtue subordinates it to the mind. Idealism sees the
world in God,"--as one vast picture, which God paints on the instant
eternity, for the contemplation of the soul.

The unimaginative reader is likely to find himself off soundings in the
next chapter, which has for its title _Spirit_.

Idealism only denies the existence of matter; it does not satisfy the
demands of the spirit. "It leaves God out of me."--Of these three
questions, What is matter? Whence is it? Where to? The ideal theory
answers the first only. The reply is that matter is a phenomenon, not a
substance.

"But when we come to inquire Whence is matter? and Whereto? many
truths arise to us out of the recesses of consciousness. We learn
that the highest is present to the soul of man, that the dread
universal essence, which is not wisdom, or love, or beauty, or
power, but all in one, and each entirely, is that for which all
things exist, and that by which they are; that spirit creates; that
behind nature, throughout nature, spirit is present; that spirit is
one and not compound; that spirit does not act upon us from
without, that is, in space and time, but spiritually, or through
ourselves."--"As a plant upon the earth, so a man rests upon the
bosom of God; he is nourished by unfailing fountains, and draws, at
his need, inexhaustible power."

Man may have access to the entire mind of the Creator, himself become a
"creator