m the better. We make a huge man of
Him and then try to dodge the consequences of our own limitations.

All these baffling questions pressed hard upon Emerson. He could not
do without God in nature, and yet, like most of us, he could not
justify himself until he had trimmed and cut away a part of nature.
God is the All, but the All is a hard mass to digest. It means hell as
well as heaven, demon as well as seraph, geology as well as biology,
devolution as well as evolution, earthquake as well as earth
tranquillity, cyclones as well as summer breezes, the jungle as well
as the household, pain as well as pleasure, death as well as life. How
are you to reconcile all these contradictions?

Emerson said that nature was a swamp with flowers and birds on the
borders, and terrible things in the interior. Shall we have one God
for the fair things, and another God for the terrible things?

"Nature is saturated with deity," he says, the terrific things as the
beatific, I suppose. "A great deal of God in the universe," he again
says, "but not valuable to us till we can make it up into a man." And
when we make it up into a man we have got a true compendium of nature;
all the terrific and unholy elements--fangs and poisons and eruptions,
sharks and serpents--have each and all contributed something to the
make-up. Man is nature incarnated, no better, no worse.

But the majority of mankind who take any interest in the God-question
at all will probably always think of the Eternal in terms of man, and
endow Him with personality.

One feels like combating some of Emerson's conclusions, or, at least,
like discounting them. His refusal to see any value in natural science
as such, I think, shows his limitations. "Natural history," he says,
"by itself has no value; it is like a single sex; but marry it to
human history and it is poetry. Whole Floras, all Linnaeus', and
Buffon's volumes contain not one line of poetry." Of course he speaks
for himself. Natural facts, scientific truth, as such, had no interest
to him. One almost feels as if this were idealism gone to seed.

"Shall I say that the use of Natural Science seems merely 'ancillary'
to Morals? I would learn the law of the defraction of a ray because
when I understand it, it will illustrate, perhaps suggest, a new truth
in ethics." Is the ethical and poetic value of the natural sciences,
then, their main or only value to the lay mind? Their technical
details, their tables and form