l.
Wherever the impulse exceeds the Rest or Identity insinuates its
compensation. All over the wide fields of earth grows the
prunella[524] or self-heal. After every foolish day we sleep off the
fumes and furies of its hours; and though we are always engaged with
particulars, and often enslaved to them, we bring with us to every
experiment the innate universal laws. These, while they exist in the
mind as ideas, stand around us in nature forever embodied, a present
sanity to expose and cure the insanity of men. Our servitude to
particulars betrays us into a hundred foolish expectations. We
anticipate a new era from the invention of a locomotive, or a balloon;
the new engine brings with it the old checks. They say that by
electro-magnetism, your salad shall be grown from the seed whilst your
fowl is roasting for dinner: it is a symbol of our modern aims and
endeavors,--of our condensation and acceleration of objects: but
nothing is gained: nature cannot be cheated: man's life is but seventy
salads long, grow they swift or grow they slow. In these checks and
impossibilities, however, we find our advantage, not less than in
impulses. Let the victory fall where it will, we are on that side. And
the knowledge that we traverse the whole scale of being, from the
center to the poles of nature, and have some stake in every
possibility, lends that sublime luster to death, which philosophy and
religion have too outwardly and literally striven to express in the
popular doctrine of the immortality of the soul. The reality is more
excellent than the report. Here is no ruin, no discontinuity, no spent
ball. The divine circulations never rest nor linger. Nature is the
incarnation of a thought, and turns to a thought again, as ice becomes
water and gas. The world is mind precipitated, and the volatile
essence is forever escaping again into the state of free thought.
Hence the virtue and pungency of the influence on the mind, of natural
objects, whether inorganic or organized. Man imprisoned, man
crystallized, man vegetative, speaks to man impersonated. That power
which does not respect quantity, which makes the whole and the
particle its equal channel, delegates its smile to the morning, and
distills its essence into every drop of rain. Every moment instructs
and every object: for wisdom is infused into every form. It has been
poured into us as blood; it convulsed us as pain; it slid into us as
pleasure; it enveloped us in dull, melancho