that
whatever curiosity the order of things has awakened in our minds,
the order of things can satisfy. Every man's condition is a solution in
hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life,
before he apprehends it as truth. In like manner, nature is already, in
its forms and tendencies, describing its own design. Let us
interrogate the great apparition, that shines so peacefully around us.
Let us inquire, to what end is nature?

All science has one aim, namely, to find a theory of nature. We have
theories of races and of functions, but scarcely yet a remote
approach to an idea of creation. We are now so far from the road to
truth, that religious teachers dispute and hate each other, and
speculative men are esteemed unsound and frivolous. But to a sound
judgment, the most abstract truth is the most practical. Whenever a
true theory appears, it will be its own evidence. Its test is, that it will
explain all phenomena. Now many are thought not only unexplained
but inexplicable; as language, sleep, madness, dreams, beasts, sex.

Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and
the Soul. Strictly speaking, therefore, all that is separate from us, all
which Philosophy distinguishes as the NOT ME, that is, both nature
and art, all other men and my own body, must be ranked under this
name, NATURE. In enumerating the values of nature and casting up
their sum, I shall use the word in both senses;--in its common and in
its philosophical import. In inquiries so general as our present one,
the inaccuracy is not material; no confusion of thought will occur.
_Nature_, in the common sense, refers to essences unchanged by
man; space, the air, the river, the leaf. _Art_ is applied to the
mixture of his will with the same things, as in a house, a canal, a
statue, a picture. But his operations taken together are so
insignificant, a little chipping, baking, patching, and washing, that in
an impression so grand as that of the world on the human mind, they
do not vary the result.

NATURE.

CHAPTER I.

TO go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber
as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though
nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the
stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds, will separate
between him and what he touches. One might think the atmosphere
was made transparent with this design, to give man, in the heavenl