On the Nature of Art. By James Edward Fitzgerald. 



[Lecture delivered at the Colonial Museum, Wellington, August 18, 1868.] 



It was once said that " Man made the town, but God made the country ;" and 

 I do not know that any expression more immediately or strikingly suggests 

 the two great branches into which all human learning may be divided ; — the 

 two great divisions, in one or other of which must be placed all the objects 

 which are presented for our curiosity or our study, in such a Museum as that 

 in which I address you this evening. 



The phenomena of nature, and the phenomena of man — the study of 

 nature and the study of man — these two embrace the whole range of human 

 enquiry. 



It is no new discovery, although we seem to realize it more distinctly 

 with every fresh step in scientific knowledge, that all the operations which are 

 going on in the universe around us, all the subtle and manifold changes, which 

 transform the external appearance of our planetaiy home, from epoch to epoch, 

 year to year, season to season, and hour to hour, are conducted, not by the 

 chapter of accidents, not by arbitrary will, but by fixed and irrevocable law. 



In our present provisional and partial insight into nature, we call by 

 technical names, and arrange and classify under technical systems, the unity of 

 which, or the connection between which, are at present but very dimly 

 perceived, those hidden relations which subsist between the particles of matter, 

 and which produce the various phenomena which become the subject of our 

 observation and study. That strange quality by which the planets revolve in 

 their orbits, and the mountains remain fixed in their places undisturbed by the 

 gyrations of the world in space, we call the law of gravity. We speak of the 

 laws of chemistry and electricity, of light, and h eat, and sound, of statics and 

 dynamics, and of the rest and motion of fluids, and so on ; and, with a far less 

 definite sense of what we mean, we talk of the powers of animal and vegetable 

 life ; and perhaps the day may come, when we shall be able to recognise in 

 all these various laws, the evidences of one all-comprehensive principle, 

 impressed upon and inherent in all created matter, of which the laws at 

 present within the scope of our philosophy are but partial and subordinate 

 manifestations. However this may be, it will be admitted by all, that the 

 tendency of scientific knowledge has been to present nature to us as under the 

 influence of fixed law, as opposed to arbitrary will. 



In the earlier ages of the world, when the intelligence of man had not 

 penetrated beyond a superficial observation of the external appearance of 

 things, he was wont to ascribe to the powers of nature, a personality similar to 

 that which he recognised in himself. He loved to symbolise its localities and 

 operations under the forms of imaginary beings, invested with such human 

 characters and attributes as were suggested by the emotions and feelings which 

 those localities and operations naturally awoke in his mind. Thus the streams 

 and the groves, the winds and the ocean, the volcano and the whirlpool, were 

 clothed in the language of the poet, and in popular belief, with the forms and 

 characters of semi-human beings — fawns and satyrs, nymphs and dryads, 

 ^Eolus with his cavern-bound winds, Neptune and his Tritons, Vulcan and his 

 Cyclops ; until every power of nature was endowed in popular superstition 



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