“It is a sufficient account of that Appearance we call the World, that God will teach a human mind, and so makes it the receiver of a certain number of congruent sensations, which we call sun and moon, man and woman, house and trade.  In my utter impotence to test the authenticity of the report of my senses, to know whether the impressions they make on me correspond with outlying objects, what difference does it make, whether Orion is up there in Heaven, or some god paints the image in the firmament of the Soul?”

We need not follow the thought through the argument from illusions, like that when we look at the shore from a moving ship, and others which cheat the senses by false appearances.

The poet animates Nature with his own thoughts, perceives the affinities between Nature and the soul, with Beauty as his main end.  The philosopher pursues Truth, but, “not less than the poet, postpones the apparent order and relation of things to the empire of thought.”  Religion and ethics agree with all lower culture in degrading Nature and suggesting its dependence on Spirit.  “The devotee flouts Nature.”—­“Plotinus was ashamed of his body.”—­“Michael Angelo said of external beauty, ’it is the frail and weary weed, in which God dresses the soul, which He has called into time.’” Emerson would not undervalue Nature as looked at through the senses and “the unrenewed understanding.”  “I have no hostility to Nature,” he says, “but a child’s love of it.  I expand and live in the warm day like corn and melons.”—­But, “seen in the light of thought, the world always is phenomenal; and virtue subordinates it to the mind.  Idealism sees the world in God,”—­as one vast picture, which God paints on the instant eternity, for the contemplation of the soul.

The unimaginative reader is likely to find himself off soundings in the next chapter, which has for its title Spirit.

Idealism only denies the existence of matter; it does not satisfy the demands of the spirit.  “It leaves God out of me.”—­Of these three questions, What is matter?  Whence is it?  Where to?  The ideal theory answers the first only.  The reply is that matter is a phenomenon, not a substance.

“But when we come to inquire Whence is matter? and Whereto? many truths arise to us out of the recesses of consciousness.  We learn that the highest is present to the soul of man, that the dread universal essence, which is not wisdom, or love, or beauty, or power, but all in one, and each entirely, is that for which all things exist, and that by which they are; that spirit creates; that behind nature, throughout nature, spirit is present; that spirit is one and not compound; that spirit does not act upon us from without, that is, in space and time, but spiritually, or through ourselves.”—­“As a plant upon the earth, so a man rests upon the bosom of God; he is nourished by unfailing fountains, and draws, at his need, inexhaustible power.”

Man may have access to the entire mind of the Creator, himself become a “creator in the finite.”