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All these baffling questions pressed hard upon Emerson. He could not do without God in nature, and yet, like most of us, he could not justify himself until he had trimmed and cut away a part of nature. God is the All, but the All is a hard mass to digest. It means hell as well as heaven, demon as well as seraph, geology as well as biology, devolution as well as evolution, earthquake as well as earth tranquillity, cyclones as well as summer breezes, the jungle as well as the household, pain as well as pleasure, death as well as life. How are you to reconcile all these contradictions?

Emerson said that nature was a swamp with flowers and birds on the borders, and terrible things in the interior. Shall we have one God for the fair things, and another God for the terrible things?

“Nature is saturated with deity,” he says, the terrific things as the beatific, I suppose. “A great deal of God in the universe,” he again says, “but not valuable to us till we can make it up into a man.” And when we make it up into a man we have got a true compendium of nature; all the terrific and unholy elements–fangs and poisons and eruptions, sharks and serpents–have each and all contributed something to the make-up. Man is nature incarnated, no better, no worse.

But the majority of mankind who take any interest in the God-question at all will probably always think of the Eternal in terms of man, and endow Him with personality.

One feels like combating some of Emerson’s conclusions, or, at least, like discounting them. His refusal to see any value in natural science as such, I think, shows his limitations. “Natural history,” he says, “by itself has no value; it is like a single sex; but marry it to human history and it is poetry. Whole Floras, all Linnaeus’, and Buffon’s volumes contain not one line of poetry.” Of course he speaks for himself. Natural facts, scientific truth, as such, had no interest to him. One almost feels as if this were idealism gone to seed.

“Shall I say that the use of Natural Science seems merely ‘ancillary’ to Morals? I would learn the law of the defraction of a ray because when I understand it, it will illustrate, perhaps suggest, a new truth in ethics.” Is the ethical and poetic value of the natural sciences, then, their main or only value to the lay mind? Their technical details, their tables and formulae and measurements, we may pass by, but the natural truths they disclose are of interest to the healthy mind for their own sake. It is not the ethics of chemical reactions and combinations–if there be ethics in them–that arrests our attention, but the light they throw on the problem of how the world was made, and how our own lives go on. The method of Nature in the physical world no doubt affords clues to the method of Nature in the non-physical, or supersensuous world. But apart from that, it is incredible that a mind like Emerson’s took no interest in natural knowledge for its own sake. The fact that two visible and inodorous gases like hydrogen and oxygen–one combustible and the other the supporter of combustion–when chemically combined produce water, which extinguishes fire, is intensely interesting as affording us a glimpse of the contradictions and paradoxes that abound everywhere in Nature’s methods. If there is any ethics or any poetry in it, let him have it who can extract it. The great facts of nature, such as the sphericity of the cosmic bodies, their circular motions, their mutual interdependence, the unprovable ether in which they float, the blue dome of the sky, the master currents of the ocean, the primary and the secondary rocks, have an intellectual value, but how they in any way illustrate the moral law is hard to see. The ethics, or right and wrong, of attraction and repulsion, of positive and negative, have no validity outside the human sphere. Might is right in Nature, or, rather, we are outside the standards of right and wrong in her sphere. Scientific knowledge certainly has a poetic side to it, but we do not go to chemistry or to geology or to botany for rules for the conduct of life. We go to these things mainly for the satisfaction which the knowledge of Nature’s ways gives us.