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.”

“As we degenerate, the contrast between us and our house is more evident.  We are as much strangers in nature as we are aliens from God.  We do not understand the notes of birds.  The fox and the deer run away from us; the bear and the tiger rend us.”

All this has an Old Testament sound as of a lost Paradise.  In the next chapter he dreams of Paradise regained.