ly,--are words of God, and as fugitive as other
words. Has the naturalist or chemist learned his craft, who has explored
the gravity of atoms and the elective affinities, who has not yet
discerned the deeper law whereof this is only a partial or approximate
statement, namely that like draws to like, and that the goods which
belong to you gravitate to you and need not be pursued with pains
and cost? Yet is that statement approximate also, and not final.
Omnipresence is a higher fact. Not through subtle subterranean channels
need friend and fact be drawn to their counterpart, but, rightly
considered, these things proceed from the eternal generation of the
soul. Cause and effect are two sides of one fact.

The same law of eternal procession ranges all that we call the virtues,
and extinguishes each in the light of a better. The great man will
not be prudent in the popular sense; all his prudence will be so much
deduction from his grandeur. But it behooves each to see, when he
sacrifices prudence, to what god he devotes it; if to ease and pleasure,
he had better be prudent still; if to a great trust, he can well spare
his mule and panniers who has a winged chariot instead. Geoffrey draws
on his boots to go through the woods, that his feet may be safer from
the bite of snakes; Aaron never thinks of such a peril. In many years
neither is harmed by such an accident. Yet it seems to me that with
every precaution you take against such an evil you put yourself into
the power of the evil. I suppose that the highest prudence is the lowest
prudence. Is this too sudden a rushing from the centre to the verge
of our orbit? Think how many times we shall fall back into pitiful
calculations before we take up our rest in the great sentiment, or make
the verge of to-day the new centre. Besides, your bravest sentiment is
familiar to the humblest men. The poor and the low have their way of
expressing the last facts of philosophy as well as you. "Blessed be
nothing" and "The worse things are, the better they are" are proverbs
which express the transcendentalism of common life.

One man's justice is another's injustice; one man's beauty another's
ugliness; one man's wisdom another's folly; as one beholds the same
objects from a higher point. One man thinks justice consists in paying
debts, and has no measure in his abhorrence of another who is very
remiss in this duty and makes the creditor wait tediously. But that
second man has his own way o