Prophet for Today

**AetheLove** · 03-15-12, 09:11 PM

So the Science thing comes up in these forums pretty often. So does the Religion thing; often in the same threads. Reconciliation is rare.

I was in a used book store late last fall and saw a book by an author I hadn't read much - for fifty cents. Hard to pass up at that price. It sat around for a couple months, but for the past couple I've been picking it up when I have a chance.

Today I read something in it that I thought some here might appreciate:

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The Universe is the externization of the soul. Wherever the life is, that bursts into appearance around it. Our science is sensual, and therefore superficial. The earth and the heavenly bodies, physics, and chemistry, we sensually treat, as if they were self-existent; but these are the retinue of that Being we have. "The mighty heaven," said Proclus, "exhibits, in its transfigurations, clear images of the splendor of intellectual perceptions; being moved in conjunction with the unapparent periods of intellectual natures." Therefore science always goes abreast with the just elevation of the man, keeping step with religion and metaphysics; or the state of science is an index of our self-knowledge. Since everything in nature answers to a moral power, if any phenomenon remains brute and dark it is that the corresponding faculty in the observer is not yet active.

No wonder then, if these waters be so deep, that we hover over them with a religious regard. The beauty of the fable proves the importance of the sense; to the poet, and to all others; or, if you please, every man is so far a poet as to be susceptible of these enchantments of nature; for all men have the thoughts whereof the universe is the celebration. I find that the fascination resides in the symbol. Who loves nature? Who does not? Is it only poets, and men of leisure and cultivation, who live with her? No; but also hunters, farmers, grooms, and butchers, though they express their affection in their choice of life and not in their choice of words. The writer wonders what the coachman or the hunter values in riding, in horses and dogs. It is not superficial qualities. When you talk with him he holds these at as slight a rate as you. His worship is sympathetic; he has no definitions, but he is commanded in nature, by the living power which he feels to be there present. No imitation or playing of these things would content him; he loves the earnest of the north wind, of rain, of stone, and wood, and iron. A beauty not explicable is dearer than a beauty which we can see to the end of. It is nature the symbol, nature certifying the supernatural, body overflowed by life which he worships with coarse but sincere rites.
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That's Ralph Waldo Emerson, sometime between 1841-1843

"every man is so far a poet as to be susceptible of these enchantments of nature; for all men have the thoughts whereof the universe is the celebration"

Jesus might have said that, or Aristotle, or James Clerk Maxwell

Prophets, philosophers, scientists: Poets.

Be poets. You probably already are anyway.

Who else might have said that? Richard Feynman? Thomas Merton?

Also, no - I didn't type the passage in. I searched and it turns out Project Gutenberg has it:

Essays, Second Series, by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Cheers,

AetheLove