MAN AS TEE INTERPRETER OF NATURE. 685 



definition of the real philosopher as one who always loves truth 

 better than his system ? And when at last he had gained the full as- 

 surance of a success so complete that (as he says) he thought he must 

 be dreaming, or that he had been reasoning in a circle, who does not 

 feel the almost sublimity of the self-abnegation with which, after at- 

 taining what was in his own estimation such a glorious reward of his 

 life of toil, he abstains from claiming the applause of his contempo- 

 raries, but leaves his fame to after-ages in these noble words : " The 

 book is written ; to be read either now or by posterity, I care not 

 which. It may well wait a century for a reader, as God has waited 

 6,000 years for an observer." 



And when a yet greater than Kepler was bringing to its final issue 

 that grandest of all scientific conceptions, long pondered over by his 

 almost superhuman intellect which linked together the Heavens and 

 the Earth, in the nexus of a universal attraction, establishing the truth 

 for whose utterance Galileo had been condemned, and giving to Kepler's 

 Laws a significance of which their author had never dreamed what 

 was the meaning of that agitation which prevented the philosoj^her 

 from completing his computation, and compelled him to hand it over 

 to his friend ? That it was not the thought of his own greatness, but 

 the glimpse of the grand universal order thus revealed to his mental 

 vision, which shook the soul of Newton to its foundations, we have 

 the proof in that comparison in which he likened himself to a child 

 picking up shells on the shore of the vast ocean of truth a comparison 

 which will be evidence to all time at once of his true philosophy and of 

 his profound humility. 



Though it is with the intellectual representation of Nature which 

 we call science that we are primarily concerned, it will not be without 

 its use to cast a glance in the first instance at the other two principal 

 characters under which man acts as her interpreter those, namely, of 

 the artist and of the poet. 



The artist serves as the interpreter of Nature, not when he works 

 as the mere copyist, delineating that which he sees with his bodily 

 eyes, and which we could see as well for ourselves, but when he en- 

 deavors to awaken within us the perception of those beauties and har- 

 monies which his own trained sense has recognized, and thus impart 

 to us the pleasure he has himself derived from their contemplation. 

 As no two artists agree in the original constitution and acquired habits 

 of their minds, all look at Nature with different (mental) eyes ; so that, 

 to each, Nature is what he individually sees in her. 



The poet, again, serves as the interpreter of Nature, not so much 

 when by skilful word-painting (whether in prose or verse) he calls up 

 before our mental vision the picture of some actual or ideal scene, 

 however beautiful, as when, by rendering into appropriate forms those 

 deeper impressions made by the Nature around him on the moral and 

 emotional part of his own nature, he transfers these impressions to the 



