34 Education through Nature 



to lay the foundations of all arts and sciences, by afford- 

 ing that experience with nature on which all art and 

 science depend. 



Emerson could not be accused of materialism, nor 

 of a bias towards realism, nor of dogmatic adherence 

 to a philosophical system. He says: "Words are 

 signs of natural facts. The use of the outer creation 

 is 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. . . . When simplicity of character and 

 the sovereignty of ideas is broken up by the preva- 

 lence of secondary desires the desire of riches, of 

 pleasure, of power, and of praise and duplicity and 

 falsehood take the place of simplicity and truth, the 

 power over nature, as an interpreter of the will, is in 

 a degree lost; new imagery ceases to be created, and 

 old words are perverted to stand for things which are 

 not; a paper currency is employed when there is no 

 bullion in the vaults. Hundreds of writers may be 

 found in every long- civilized nation who for a short 

 time believe, and make others believe, that they see 

 and utter truths who do not themselves clothe one 

 thought in its natural garment, but who feed uncon- 

 sciously on the language created by the primary writers 

 of the country those^ namely, who hold primarily on 



