oes nature work through
the will of a man filled with the beauty of her first works.

The world thus exists to the soul to satisfy the desire of beauty. This
element I call an ultimate end. No reason can be asked or given why
the soul seeks beauty. Beauty, in its largest and profoundest sense, is
one expression for the universe. God is the all-fair. Truth, and
goodness, and beauty, are but different faces of the same All. But
beauty in nature is not ultimate. It is the herald of inward and eternal
beauty, and is not alone a solid and satisfactory good. It must stand
as a part, and not as yet the last or highest expression of the final
cause of Nature.

CHAPTER IV.

LANGUAGE.

LANGUAGE is a third use which Nature subserves to man. Nature
is the vehicle, and threefold degree.

1. Words are signs of natural facts.

2. Particular natural facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts.

3. Nature is the symbol of spirit.

1. Words are signs of natural facts. The use of natural history is to
give us aid in supernatural history: the use of the outer creation, to
give us language for the beings and changes of the inward creation.
Every word which is used to express a moral or intellectual fact, if
traced to its root, is found to be borrowed from some material
appearance. _Right_ means _straight_; _wrong_ means _twisted_.
_Spirit_ primarily means _wind_; _transgression_, the crossing of a
_line_; _supercilious_, the _raising of the eyebrow_. We say the
_heart_ to express emotion, the _head_ to denote thought; and
_thought_ and _emotion_ are words borrowed from sensible things,
and now appropriated to spiritual nature. Most of the process by
which this transformation is made, is hidden from us in the remote
time when language was framed; but the same tendency may be
daily observed in children. Children and savages use only nouns or
names of things, which they convert into verbs, and apply to
analogous mental acts.

2. But this origin of all words that convey a spiritual import,--so
conspicuous a fact in the history of language,--is our least debt to
nature. It is not words only that are emblematic; it is things which
are emblematic. Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact.
Every appearance in nature corresponds to some state of the mind,
and that state of the mind can only be described by presenting that
natural appearance as its picture. An enraged man is a lion, a
cunning man is a fox, a firm man