If the auguries of the prophesying heart shall make themselves good in time, the man who shall be born, whose advent men and events prepare and foreshow, is one who shall enjoy his connection with a higher life, with the man within man; shall destroy distrust by his trust, shall use his native but forgotten methods, shall not take counsel of flesh and blood, but shall rely on the Law alive and beautiful which works over our heads and under our feet.
His faculties refer to natures out of him and predict the world he is to inhabit, as the fins of the fish foreshow that water exists, or the wings of an eagle in the egg presuppose air.
Second, and perhaps more importantly, to the extent that Christ's transfigured body prefigures the "brightness of future glory," it exists in a state of temporal ecstasy in which the present is, so to speak, "stretched out" into the future to "foreshow" (praemon-strare) the glory of the kingdom.
In "History" Emerson wrote in the original 1841 essay: "[A man's] faculties refer to natures out of him, and predict the world he is to inhabit, as the fins of the fish foreshow that water exists, or the wings of an eagle in the egg presuppose a medium like air.