ructure still fits him, but fits him colossally. Say, rather,
once it fitted him, now it corresponds to him from far and on high.
He adores timidly his own work. Now is man the follower of the sun,
and woman the follower of the moon. Yet sometimes he starts in his
slumber, and wonders at himself and his house, and muses strangely
at the resemblance betwixt him and it. He perceives that if his law is
still paramount, if still he have elemental power, if his word is
sterling yet in nature, it is not conscious power, it is not inferior but
superior to his will. It is Instinct.' Thus my Orphic poet sang.

At present, man applies to nature but half his force. He works on the
world with his understanding alone. He lives in it, and masters it by
a penny-wisdom; and he that works most in it, is but a half-man, and
whilst his arms are strong and his digestion good, his mind is
imbruted, and he is a selfish savage. His relation to nature, his power
over it, is through the understanding; as by manure; the economic
use of fire, wind, water, and the mariner's needle; steam, coal,
chemical agriculture; the repairs of the human body by the dentist
and the surgeon. This is such a resumption of power, as if a banished
king should buy his territories inch by inch, instead of vaulting at
once into his throne. Meantime, in the thick darkness, there are not
wanting gleams of a better light,--occasional examples of the action
of man upon nature with his entire force,--with reason as well as
understanding. Such examples are; the traditions of miracles in the
earliest antiquity of all nations; the history of Jesus Christ; the
achievements of a principle, as in religious and political revolutions,
and in the abolition of the Slave-trade; the miracles of enthusiasm,
as those reported of Swedenborg, Hohenlohe, and the Shakers; many
obscure and yet contested facts, now arranged under the name of
Animal Magnetism; prayer; eloquence; self-healing; and the wisdom
of children. These are examples of Reason's momentary grasp of the
sceptre; the exertions of a power which exists not in time or space,
but an instantaneous in-streaming causing power. The difference
between the actual and the ideal force of man is happily figured by
the schoolmen, in saying, that the knowledge of man is an evening
knowledge, _vespertina cognitio_, but that of God is a morning
knowledge, _matutina cognitio_.

The problem of restoring to the world original and eternal beauty