The unity of Nature meets us everywhere.  Resemblances exist in things wherein there is great superficial unlikeness.  Thus architecture is called “frozen music” by Goethe.  “A Gothic church,” said Coleridge, “is petrified religion.”  The law of harmonic sounds reappears in the harmonic colours.  The granite is different in its laws only by the more or less of heat from the river that wears it away.  The river, as it flows, resembles the air that flows over it; the air resembles the light that traverses it with more subtle currents.

Each creature is only a modification of the other, the likeness in them is more than the difference, and their radical law is one and the same.  This unity pervades thought also.

VI.—­IS NATURE REAL?

A noble doubt suggests itself whether discipline be not the final cause of the universe, and whether Nature outwardly exists.  The frivolous make themselves merry with the ideal theory as if its consequences were burlesque, as if it affected the stability of Nature.  It surely does not.  The wheels and springs of man are all set to the hypothesis of the permanence of Nature.

But while we acquiesce entirely in the permanence of natural laws, the question of the absolute existence of Nature still remains open.  It is the uniform effect of culture on the human mind to lead us to regard Nature as a phenomenon, not a substance; to attribute necessary existence to spirit.

Intellectual science fastens the attention upon immortal necessary uncreated natures, that is, upon ideas; and in their presence we feel that the outward circumstance is a dream and a shade.  Whilst we wait in this Olympus of the gods we think of Nature as an appendix to the soul.  Finally, religion and ethics, which may be fitly called the practice of ideas, have an analogous effect.  The first and last lesson of religion is:  “The things that are seen are temporal; the things that are unseen are eternal.”

VII.—­THE SPIRIT BEHIND NATURE

The aspect of Nature is devout.  Like the figure of Jesus, she stands with bended head and hands folded on the breast.  The happiest man is he who learns from Nature the lesson of worship.  Of that ineffable essence we call spirit, he that thinks most will say least.  We can foresee God in the coarse, as it were, distant phenomena of matter; but when we try to define and describe Himself, both language and thought desert us, and we are as helpless as fools and savages.  The noblest ministry of Nature is to stand as the apparition of God.  It is the organ through which the universal spirit speaks to the individual, and strives to bring back the individual to it.

I conclude this essay with some traditions of man and Nature which a certain poet sang to me.