sm. I have no hostility to
nature, but a child's love to it. I expand and live in the warm day like
corn and melons. Let us speak her fair. I do not wish to fling stones
at my beautiful mother, nor soil my gentle nest. I only wish to
indicate the true position of nature in regard to man, wherein to
establish man, all right education tends; as the ground which to
attain is the object of human life, that is, of man's connection with
nature. Culture inverts the vulgar views of nature, and brings the
mind to call that apparent, which it uses to call real, and that real,
which it uses to call visionary. Children, it is true, believe in the
external world. The belief that it appears only, is an afterthought, but
with culture, this faith will as surely arise on the mind as did the first.

The advantage of the ideal theory over the popular faith, is this, that
it presents the world in precisely that view which is most desirable
to the mind. It is, in fact, the view which Reason, both speculative
and practical, that is, philosophy and virtue, take. For, seen in the
light of thought, the world always is phenomenal; and virtue
subordinates it to the mind. Idealism sees the world in God. It
beholds the whole circle of persons and things, of actions and events,
of country and religion, not as painfully accumulated, atom after
atom, act after act, in an aged creeping Past, but as one vast picture,
which God paints on the instant eternity, for the contemplation of
the soul. Therefore the soul holds itself off from a too trivial and
microscopic study of the universal tablet. It respects the end too
much, to immerse itself in the means. It sees something more
important in Christianity, than the scandals of ecclesiastical history,
or the niceties of criticism; and, very incurious concerning persons
or miracles, and not at all disturbed by chasms of historical evidence,
it accepts from God the phenomenon, as it finds it, as the pure and
awful form of religion in the world. It is not hot and passionate at
the appearance of what it calls its own good or bad fortune, at the
union or opposition of other persons. No man is its enemy. It accepts
whatsoever befalls, as part of its lesson. It is a watcher more than a
doer, and it is a doer, only that it may the better watch.

CHAPTER VII.

SPIRIT.

IT is essential to a true theory of nature and of man, that it should
contain somewhat progressive. Uses that are exhausted or that may
be, a