"Emerson, Ralph W. - Nature Adresses and Lectures" - читать интересную книгу автора (Emerson Ralph Waldo)

Nature; Adresses, and Lectures
by Ralph Waldo Emerson



NATURE

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A subtle chain of countless rings
The next unto the farthest brings;

The eye reads omens where it goes,
And speaks all languages the rose;
And, striving to be man, the worm
Mounts through all the spires of form.




Introduction

Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the
fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The
foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through
their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the
universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight
and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the
history of theirs? Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of
life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they
supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among
the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into
masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also.
There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new
men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.

Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable.
We must trust the perfection of the creation so far, as to believe
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