Nature; Addresses, and Lectures

Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing…

To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though…

Whoever considers the final cause of the world, will discern a multitude of uses that enter as parts into that result. They all admit of…

A nobler want of man is served by nature, namely, the love of Beauty.

Language is a third use which Nature subserves to man. Nature is the vehicle of thought, and in a simple, double, and threefold degree.

In view of the significance of nature, we arrive at once at a new fact, that nature is a discipline. This use of the world includes the…

Thus is the unspeakable but intelligible and practicable meaning of the world conveyed to man, the immortal pupil, in every object of…

It is essential to a true theory of nature and of man, that it should contain somewhat progressive. Uses that are exhausted or that may be,…

In inquiries respecting the laws of the world and the frame of things, the highest reason is always the truest. That which seems faintly…

An Oration delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society, at Cambridge, August 31, 1837.

Delivered before the Senior Class in Divinity College, Cambridge, Sunday Evening, July 15, 1838.

An Oration delivered before the Literary Societies of Dartmouth College, July 24, 1838.

An Oration delivered before the Society of the Adelphi, in Waterville College, Maine, August 11, 1841.

A Lecture read before the Mechanics’ Apprentices’ Library Association, Boston, January 25, 1841.

Read at the Masonic Temple, Boston, December 2, 1841.

A Lecture delivered at the Masonic Temple, Boston, December 9, 1841.

A Lecture read at the Masonic Temple, Boston, January, 1842.

A Lecture read before the Mercantile Library Association, Boston, February 7, 1844.