Page:Henry Mulford Tichenor - A Guide to Emerson (1923).djvu/17

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
14
A GUIDE TO EMERSON

by upper and lower teeth. This new spine is destined to high uses. It is a new man on the shoulders oi the last. it can almost shed its trunk, and manage to live alone, according to the Platonic idea in the Timaeus. Within it, on a higher plane, all that was done in the trunk repeats itself.

"Nature recites her lesson once more in a higher mood. The mind is a finer body, and resumes its functions of feeding, digesting, absorbing, excluding, and generating, in a new and ethereal element. Here, in the brain, is all the process of alimentation repeated, in the acquiring, comparing, digesting, and assimilating of experience. Here again is the mystery of generation repeated. in the brain are male and female faculties; here is marriage, here is fruit.

"And there is no limit to this ascending scale, but series on series. Everything, at the end of one use, is taken up into the next, each series punctually repeating every organ and process of the last. We are adapted to infinity. We are hard to please, and love nothing which ends; and in Nature is no end; but everything, at the end of one use, is lifted into a superior, and the ascent of these things climbs into demonias and celestial natures. Creative force, like a musical composer, goes on unweariedly repeating a simple air or theme, ten thousand times reverberated, till it fills earth and heaven with the chant. …

"The 'Animal Kingdom' is a book of wonderful merits. It was written with the highest end—to put science and the soul, long