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Miscellanies, Embracing Nature, Addresses, and Lectures
Miscellanies Embracing Nature Addresses and Lectures Author:Ralph Waldo Emerson General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1866 Original Publisher: Ticknor and Fields Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you ... more »can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: THE METHOD OF NATURE. AN ORATION DELIVERED BEFORE THE SOCIETY OF THE ADELFHI, IN WATERVILLE COLLEGE, MAINE, AUGUST 11, 1841. f THE METHOD OF NATURE, Gentlemen, Let us exchange congratulations on the enjoyments and the promises of this literary anniversary. The land we live in has no interest so dear, if it knew its want, as the fit consecration of days of reason and thought. . Where there is no vision, the people perish. The scholars are the priests of that thought which establishes the foundations of the earth. No matter what is their special work or profession, they stand for the spiritual interest of the world, and it is a common calamity if they neglect their post in a country where the material interest is so predominant as it is in America. We hear something too much of the results of machinery, commerce, and the useful arts. We are a puny and a fickle folk. Avarice, hesitation, and following, are our diseases. The rapid wealth which hundreds in the community acquire in trade, or by the incessant expansions of our population and arts, enchants the eyes of all the rest; the luck of one is the hope of thousands, and the bribe acts like the neighborhood of a gold mine to impoverish the farm, the school, the church, the house, and the very body and feature of man. I do not wish to look with sour aspect at the industrious manufacturing village, or the mart of commerce. I love the music of the water-wheel; I value the railway ; I feel the pride which the sight of a ship inspires; I look on trade and every mechanical craft as education also. But let me dis...« less