To the heights of such estimate of Nature indeed ascending, we proceed
to make observations for our Vistas, breathing rarest air. What is
I believe called Idealism seems to me to suggest, (guarding against
extravagance, and ever modified even by its opposite,) the course of
inquiry and desert of favor for our New World metaphysics, their
foundation of and in literature, giving hue to all.[31]
The elevating and etherealizing ideas of the unknown and of unreality
must be brought forward with authority, as they are the legitimate
heirs of the known, and of reality, and at least as great as their
parents. Fearless of scoffing, and of the ostent, let us take our
stand, our ground, and never desert it, to confront the growing excess
and arrogance of realism. To the cry, now victorious--the cry of
sense, science, flesh, incomes, farms, merchandise, logic, intellect,
demonstrations, solid perpetuities, buildings of brick and iron, or
even the facts of the shows of trees, earth, rocks, &c., fear not, my
brethren, my sisters, to sound out with equally determin'd voice,
that conviction brooding within the recesses of every envision'd
soul--illusions! apparitions! figments all! True, we must not condemn
the show, neither absolutely deny it, for the indispensability of its
meanings; but how clearly we see that, migrate in soul to what we
can already conceive of superior and spiritual points of view, and,
palpable as it seems under present relations, it all and several
might, nay certainly would, fall apart and vanish.
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