RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
558
tory lecture] has not looked into a metaphysical book ? And what sensible man ever looked twice ? "
Yet the repulsiveness subject, but in
"
Why
with
should
life
the
lay,
way
he thought, not in the which it is treated.
in
not be brought into connection cannot the laws and
it
and nature ?
Why
powers of the mind be stated as simply and as tractively as the physical laws are stated
and Faraday?
Those too are
facts,
at-
by Owen
and
suffer
themselves to be recorded, like stamens and verte-
But they have a higher interest as being nearer to the mysterious seat of creation. The highest value of physical science is felt when it brae.
goes beyond its special objects and translates their rules into a universal cipher, in which we read the rules of the intellect
and the
moral prac-
rules of
exceeding and universal part that interests us, because it opens the true history of
tice.
It
this
is
kingdom where a thousand years is as one day. The Natural History of the Intellect would be an that
enumeration of the laws of the world,
mon
— laws com-
to chemistry, anatomy, geometry,
moral and
In the human brain the universe
social life.
is
reproduced with all its opulence of relations it is high time that it should be humanly and popularly ;
unfolded,
that
the
should be written." as to think
Decalogue of the Intellect was not so hardy, he said,
He
any single observer could accomplish he could but he would attempt
this, still less that
;
some studies or sketches for such a
picture.