State of nature

“ In the great centres of civilization we admire and study only the results of mind,—the products of human endeavor: here one views only the work of Nature,—but Nature in all her primeval power, as in the legendary frostless morning of creation. ”

“ But even the domain of the natural itself, as we know it, is by no means simple and capable of a unified interpretation. Nature, especially in the realm of organic life, the animal and plant world, appears to be filled with marvels of purposefulness, with riddles of development and differentiation, in short with all the mysteries of life. ”

“ Whatever the deeper reality behind Nature may turn out to be, — our Nature, the realm of matter and of laws with which our science and our popular opinions have to do, is a realm which we conceive as known or as knowable to various men, in precisely the same general sense in which we regard it as known or as knowable to our private selves. Take away the social factor in our present view of Nature, and you would alter the most essential of the characters possessed, for us, by that physical realm in which we all believe. ”

“ Nay, further we may ask, what kingdom is there of nature, what corner of space, in which there is any thing that can be examined by us, where we do not fall upon contrivance and design? The only reflection, perhaps, which arises in our minds from this view of the world around us, is that the laws of nature everywhere prevail; that they are uniform and universal. But what do we mean by the laws of nature? ”

“ Nature an enormous system, but in mass and in particle curiously available to the humblest need of the little creature that walks on the earth! The immeasurableness of Nature is not more astounding than his power to gather all her omnipotence into a manageable rod or wedge, bringing it to a hair-point for the eye and hand of the philosopher.
Here stretches out of sight, out of conception even, this vast Nature, daunting, bewildering, but all penetrable, all self-similar,—an unbroken unity,—and the mind of man is a key to the whole. ”

“ Say’st thou, “The course of nature governs all?”
The course of Nature is the art of God. 1269
The miracles thou call’st for, this attest;
For say, could Nature Nature’s course control?
But, miracles apart, who sees Him not,
Nature’s controller, author, guide, and end? ”

“ But probably the intensest feeling for Nature is that which is engendered out of the heart of the latest, perhaps over-refined, civilization. Ages that have been over-civilized turn away from their too highly-strung interests, their too feverish excitements, to find a peculiar relish in the calm, the coolness, the equability of Nature. ”

“ Here we see, then, that the constitution or structure of the various recipient objects, has power to convert the inflowing influence or substance into a nature corresponding to its own, and thus cause it to nourish its own life, of whatever nature that life be, whether good or evil, ugly or beautiful. There is but one sun for all—but one light and heat for all—yet how various are the colours, how different the qualities, of the myriad objects in the natural world. ”

“ Nature gives us, then, passions and desires suitable to our present state. [64] We are only troubled by the fears which we, and not nature, give ourselves, for they add to the state in which we are the passions of the state in which we are not. ”

“ We are by nature observers, and thereby learners. That is our permanent state. ”

“ In view of this significance of nature, we arrive at once at a new fact, that nature is a discipline. This use of the world includes the preceding uses, as parts of itself.
Space, time, society, labor, climate, food, locomotion, the animals, the mechanical forces, give us sincerest lessons, day by day, whose meaning is unlimited. They educate both the Understanding and the Reason. Every property of matter is a school for the understanding,—its solidity or resistance, its inertia, its extension, its figure, its divisibility. ”

“ Let us then content ourselves with a more humble and more material philosophy; and by keeping within the sphere Nature has allotted us, let us examine the rash steps and the rapid flight of those who attempt to soar beyond it. ”

“ And thus, provided we are true to the highest principles we have attained, we shall be safer when we look out on nature with the analogy of human agency in our mind, than when we regard its course as alien and indifferent. ”

“ And now that we have seen what is the nature of Nature, what is the end she has before her, and how she works to accomplish her end, we feel that we have gone a long way towards knowing and understanding her. ”

“ All things are moral; and in their boundless changes have an unceasing reference to spiritual nature. Therefore is nature glorious with form, color, and motion, that every globe in the remotest heaven; every chemical change from the rudest crystal up to the laws of life; every change of vegetation from the first principle of growth in the eye of a leaf, to the tropical forest and antediluvian coal-mine; every animal function from the sponge up to Hercules, shall hint or thunder to man the laws of right and wrong, and echo the Ten Commandments. ”

“ Although Nature be Infinite, yet all her Actions seem to be poysed, or balanced, by Opposition; as for example, As Nature hath dividing, so composing actions: Also, as Nature hath regular, so irregular actions; as Nature hath dilating, so contracting actions: In short, we may perceive amongst the Creatures, or Parts of this World, slow, swift, thick, thin, heavy, leight, rare, dense, little, big, low, high, broad, narrow, light, dark, hot, cold, productions, dissolutions, peace, warr, mirth, sadness, and that we name Life, and Death ”

“ Letting observation sleep, what can you know of nature? and you are a judge of landscape indeed. So it is that the world is taught to think of nature, as seen through other men's eyes, without any reference to its own original powers of perception, and much natural beauty is lost. ”

“ For this innumerable multitude of things, of which we now-a-days talk as if it were one thing, and had an organic unity of its own, or even as if it were one person, and had a will of its own, and call it Nature—a word which will one day be forgotten by philosophers, with the ‘four elements,’ and the ‘animal spirits;’—this multitude of things, I say, which we miscall Nature, has its dark and ugly, as well as its bright and fair side. ”

“ Nature, in being capricious and defying logic, in pulling down great and little, in crushing the noblest works of man, taking centuries to form—nature, by deviating from intellectual laws, proves that you cannot explain nature by nature’s laws themselves, and this sight drives the mind to the world of ideas, to the absolute. ”

“ Much of the wealth and luxuriance of living things, the infinite variety of form and structure, the exquisite grace and beauty in bird and insect, in foliage and flower, may have been mere by-products of the grand mechanism we call nature—the one and only method of developing humanity. ”

“ It is the reason for the transference of character from occasion to occasion. It is the reason for the relative stability of laws of Nature, some laws for a wider environment, some laws for a narrower environment. ”

“ The natural world, plants, animals, the human race, institutions, science, art, religion, all animate individual beings, man as an individual, have their history of development, which suggests its lesson.
Nature is aspiration. From chaos to the world of this geologic age, from protoplasm to man, from savagery to civilization, from ignorance to culture, from symbolism to developed art, from egoism to altruism, from germ to fruit, from infancy to maturity, from realization to higher realization, has been the process. ”

“ Here in contemplating the stupenduous organization which constitutes animal and vegetable life in Nature's infinite variety, all varying, yet all connected by one common link, operating by one common cause, and to one common end, a successive production and decay, decay and production, the human mind might find an exercise as infinite, and have ideas stirred up equally stupendous. ”

“ The dependence of all the systems of worlds upon each other, every dust composing each individual globe being “weighed in a balance,” the adjustment of the powers by which every physical condition is ordered, the disposition of matter in the mass of the earth, and the close relation of the kingdoms of nature,—are all revelations of natural truths, exalting the mind to the divine conception of the universe. ”

“ Thus it may be seen that Nature, to whom they had gone, was not only busy with the mountain and its life, but that her silent forces were also at work in those whose unperverted hearts were not beyond her power. ”

“ More to the point, at this stage of our inquiry, than a formally precise definition of Nature, is a consideration of the motives which lead us to acknowledge as real the facts that we all call physical, — viz. to acknowledge the existence of matter, the laws of natural processes, and the dependence of our own mental life upon these processes. To this aspect of the problem of Nature we accordingly at once proceed. ”

“ The fact that we men find Nature here, implies for us, then, that we are so constituted as to find the same sort of natural phenomena. The realm of the physical phenomena, whatever inner Being may be behind it, is, for us, primarily this common realm of human experience. Upon this consideration the very definition of what we call Nature depends. ”

“ Here as I lie on the towans by a cloud of daisies among the waving and glistening grass, while the sea recedes along the stretching sands, and the cloudless sky throbs with the song of larks, and no human thing is in sight, it is, after all, of Humanity that I am most conscious. I realise that there is no human function so exalted or so rare, none so simple or so humble, that it has not its symbol in Nature; that if all the Beauty of Nature is in Man, yet all the Beauty of Man is in Nature. ”

“ Which of these two views of Nature, so far as Nature can be judged from what we see of her on this planet, is correct, he has now to determine. The profound mystery which everywhere prevails in the forest and which exerts such a compelling spell upon us he will want to probe to the bottom. ”

“ It is never bare thought or bare existence that we are aware of. I find myself as essentially a unity of emotions, enjoyments, hopes, fears, regrets, valuations of alternatives, decisions — all of them subjective reactions to the environment as active in my nature. ”

“ It is a natural consequence of the structure, that, so long as the active powers predominate over the reflective, we resist with indignation any hint that nature is more short-lived or mutable than spirit. ”

“ Turning from the contemplation of the changing world of men to the changeless face of Nature, I renewed my old-time acquaintance with the natural wonders of the earth--the thundering cataracts, the stormy ocean shores, the lonely mountain tops, the great rivers, the glittering splendors of the polar regions, and the desolate places of the deserts. ”

“ Even where the views of Science are not only strange, but even at first crude and repulsive, Imagination can soften their asperity and subdue their harsher features. Just as when a railway has been driven through some beautiful and sequestered scene, outraging its quiet and scarring its loveliness, we see Nature in time return, and “busy with a hand of healing,” cover the raw wounds with grass, and strew artificial mounds and cuttings with underwood and flowers. ”

“ We have, therefore, ample evidence that Nature is actuated by an intention to enrich perfection and is continually working towards it. So we have confidence that Nature, hard and exacting though she be, is only exacting in order that the Highest may be attained. We know that Nature is aiming at the Highest and nothing short of the Highest. And all the spirit of daring and adventure in us leaps to the call she makes. ”

“ For it is in ourselves that the dominating spirit of Nature is most clearly manifested to us. And being ourselves the instruments and agents of Nature, and informed through and through with her spirit, we ought to be able to understand how she works if only we look carefully enough into the working of our own inner selves.
What we find is that under the inspiration of the genius of Nature we are perpetually projecting in front of us a pattern or standard of what we think we ought to be, or should like to be, and of what we think our country and the world ought to be. We set up an ideal. ”

“ By observing Nature in so many different aspects, and by comparing our impressions with one another, we ought to understand Nature better than any other race. And by entering more readily into communion with her we, better than others, should realise the Beauty she possesses. ”

“ If we follow this doctrine of evolution, step by step, it will lead us to perceive that God is in every fact of nature. Watch an acorn as it develops into the sturdy oak. No scientist will say that a material environment is its only condition of growth. ”

“ It has taken long ages of toilsome and often fruitless labour to enable man to look steadily at the shifting scenes of the phantasmagoria of Nature, to notice what is fixed among her fluctuations, and what is regular among her apparent irregularities; and it is only comparatively lately, within the last few centuries, that the conception of a universal order and of a definite course of things, which we term the course of Nature, has emerged. ”

“ That is [pg 059] the thought, the idea, the logos of dog. Can there be a thought without a thinker? Did the ideas in nature, the millions of objects which make up our knowledge, fall from the clouds? Did they make themselves or did nature make them? Who, then, is nature? Is it a masculine, feminine, or neuter? If nature can choose, then it can also think and produce. But can it? No, nature is a word, very useful for certain purposes; but empty, intangible, and incomprehensible. Nature is an abstraction, as much as dog or tree, but far more inclusive. ”