Wherever the impulse exceeds, the Rest or Identity insinuates its compensation. All over the wide fields of earth grows the prunella 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." 1 That is, laws of nature are correlative to ideas of mind.

In such a theory the doctrine of ideas as set forth in Plato is apparent; but the form which the theory takes in Emerson is due to Coleridge's reworking of Plato's theory. Emerson himself has left a passage which proves this connection with Plato through Coleridge. "But the philosopher, not less than the poet," he explains in Nature, "postpones the apparent order and relations of things to the empire of thought. "The problem of philosophy,' according to Plato, 'is, for all that exists conditionally, to find a ground unconditioned and absolute.' It proceeds on the faith that a law determines all 1 Complete Works, III., 194–195.

phenomena, which being known, the phenomena can be predicted. That law, when in the mind, is an idea." 1

The source of this quotation is found in Coleridge's Friend, where the theory of correlation was fully stated for Emerson: "The grand problem, the solution of which forms, according to Plato, the final object and distinctive character of philosophy, is this: for all that exists conditionally (that is, the existence of which is inconceivable except under the condition of its dependency on some other as its antecedent) to find a ground that is unconditional and absolute, and thereby to reduce the aggregate of human knowledge to a system. For the relation common to all being known, the appropriate orbit of each becomes discoverable, together with its peculiar relations to its concentrics in the common sphere of subordination. Thus the centrality of the sun having been established, and the law of the distances of the planets from the sun having been determined, we possess the means of calculating the distance of each from the other. But as all objects of sense are in continual flux, and as the notices of them by the senses must, as far as they are true notices, 1 Complete Works, I., 55.

change with them, while scientific principles or laws are no otherwise principles of science than as they are permanent and always the same, the latter were appropriated to the pure reason, either as its products or as implanted in it. And now the remarkable fact forces itself on our attention, namely, that the material world is found to obey the same laws as had been deduced independently from the reason; and that the masses act by a force which can not be conceived to result from the component parts, known or imaginable. In magnetism, electricity, galvanism, and in chemistry generally, the mind is led instinctively, as it were, to regard the working powers as conducted, transmitted, or accumulated by the sensible bodies, and not as inherent. This fact has, at all times, been the stronghold alike of the materialists and of the spiritualists, equally solvable by the two contrary hypotheses, and fairly solved by neither. In the clear and masterly review of the elder philosophers, which must be ranked among the most splendid proofs of his judgment no less than of his genius, and more expressly in the critique on the atomic or corpuscular doctrine of Democritus and his followers as the one extreme, and in that of the pure rational

ism of Zeno the Eleatic as the other, Plato has proved incontrovertibly that in both alike the basis is too narrow to support the superstructure; that the grounds of both are false or disputable; and that if these were conceded, yet neither the one nor the other scheme is adequate to the solution of the problem—namely, what is the ground of the coincidence between reason and experience; or between the laws of matter, and the ideas of the pure intellect. The only answer which Plato deemed the question capable of receiving, compels the reason to pass out of itself and seek the ground of this agreement in a supersensual essence, which being at once the ideal of the reason and the cause of the material world, is the pre-establisher of the harmony in and between both."

1

To make his statement clearer Coleridge adds in a note: "I now more especially entreat the reader's attention to the sense in which here, and everywhere through this essay, I use the word idea, I assert, that the very impulse to universalize any phænomenon involves the prior assumption of some efficient law in nature, which in a thousand different

1 The Friend. The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, II., 420–422.

forms is evermore one and the same, entire in each, yet comprehending all, and incapable of being abstracted or generalized from any number of phænomena, because it is itself pre-supposed in each and all as their common ground and condition, and because every definition of a genus is the adequate definition of the lowest species alone, while the efficient law must contain the ground of all in all. It is attributed, never derived. The utmost we ever venture to say is, that the falling of an apple suggested the law of gravitation to Sir I. Newton. Now a law and an idea are correlative terms, and differ only as object and subject, as being and truth." 1

This is the manner in which Emerson considers the question of nature. First in importance of the influences upon the mind of the scholar is that of nature; and this influence, Emerson goes on to explain, leads the scholar to settle upon the value of nature to him, which is revealed only when he begins to study her meaning. "Classification begins," Emerson says. "To the young mind every thing is individual, stands by itself. By and by, it finds how to join two things

1 The Friend. The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, II., 424.