And this is essentially the Christian ideal, that spirit shall be lord of nature. I ought to reject my natural life, accounting it not my life at all. Until shaped by myself, it is merely my opportunity for life, material furnished, out of which my true and conscious life may be constructed. Widely is this contrasted with the pagan conceptions, where man appears with powers as fixed as the things around him. Indeed, in many forms of paganism there is no distinction between persons and things. They are blended. And such blending usually operates to the disparagement of the person; for things being more numerous, and their laws more urgent, the powers of man become lost in those of nature. Or if distinction is made, and men in some dim fashion become aware that they are different from things, still it is the tendency of paganism to subordinate person to nature. The child is sacrificed to the sun. The sun is not thought of as existing for the child. From the Christian point of view everything seems turned upside down. Man is absorbed in natural forces, natural forces are reverenced as divine, and self-consciousness—if noticed at all—is regarded as an impertinent accident.
In the Christian ideal all this is reversed. Man is called to be master of himself, and therefore of all else. The many beautiful adjustments of the natural world are thought to possess dignity only so far as they accept the conscious purposes put by us in their keeping. And in man himself goodness is held to exist only in proportion as his conduct expresses fullness of self-consciousness, fullness of direction, and fullness of conscious conjunction with other persons. I do not see how we can escape this conclusion. The careful argumentation through which the previous chapters have brought us obliges us to count conduct valuable in proportion as it bears the impress of self-conscious mind.
III
Yet it must be owned that during the last few centuries doubts have arisen about the justice of this Christian ideal. The simple conception of a world of spirit and a world of nature arrayed against each other, the one of them exactly what the other is not, the world of spirit the superior, the world of nature to be frowned on, used possibly, but always in subordination to spiritual purposes,—this view, dominant as it was in the Middle Ages, and still largely influential, has been steadily falling into disrepute. There is even a tendency in present estimates to reverse the ancient valuation and allow superiority to nature. Such a transformation is strikingly evident in those sensitive recorders of human ideals, the Fine Arts. Let us see what at different times they have judged best worthy of record.
Early painting dealt with man alone, or rather with persons; for personality in its transcendent forms—saints, angels, God himself— was usually preferred above little man. Except the spiritual, nothing was regarded as of consequence. The principle of early painting might be summed in the proud saying, "On earth there is nothing great but man; in man there is nothing great but mind." It is true when man is thus detached from nature he hardly appears to advantage or in his appropriate setting. But the early painters would tolerate nothing natural near their splendid persons. They covered their backgrounds with gilding, so that a glory surrounded the entire figure, throwing out the personality sharp and strong. Nothing broke its effect. But after all, one comes to see that we inhabit a world; nature is continually about us, and man really shows his eminence most fully when standing dominant over nature. Early painting, accordingly, began to set in a little landscape around the human figures, contrasting the person with that which was not himself. But an independent interest could not fail to spring up in these accessories. By degrees the landscape is elaborated and the figure subordinated. The figure is there by prescription, the landscape because people enjoy it. Nature begins to assert her claims; and man, the eminent and worthy representative of old ideals, retires from his ancient prominence.
When the Renaissance revolted against the teachings of the mediaeval church, the disposition to return to nature was insolently strong. Natural impulses were glorified, the physical world attracted attention, and even began to be studied. Hitherto it had been thought deserving of study only because in a few respects it was able to minister to man. But in the Renaissance men studied it for its own sake. Gradually the distinction between man and nature grew faint, so that a kind of pantheism arose in which a general power, at once natural and spiritual, appeared as the ruler of all. We individual men emerge for a moment from this great central power, ultimately relapsing into it. Nature had acquired coordinate, if not superior, rights. Yet the full expression of this independent interest in nature is more recent than is usually observed. Landscape painting goes back but little beyond the year sixteen hundred. It is only two or three centuries ago that painters discovered the physical world to be worthy of representation for its own sake.
As the worth of nature thus became vindicated in painting, parallel changes were wrought in the other arts. Arts less distinctly rational began to assert themselves, and even to take the lead. The art most characteristic of modern times, the one which most widely and poignantly appeals to us, is music. But in music we are not distinctly conscious of a meaning. Most of us in listening to music forget ourselves under its lulling charms, abandon ourselves to its spell, and by it are swept away, perhaps to the infinite, perhaps to an obliteration of all clear thought. Is it not largely because we are so hard pressed under the anxious conditions of modern life that music becomes such an enormous solace and strength? I do not say that no other factors have contributed to the vogue of music, but certainly it is widely prized as an effective means of escape from ourselves. Music too, though early known in calm and elementary forms, has within the last two centuries been developed into almost a new art.
Of all the arts poetry is the most strikingly rational and articulate. Its material is plain thought, plain words. We employ in it the apparatus of conscious life. Poetry was therefore concerned in early times entirely with things of the spirit. It dealt with persons, and with them alone. It celebrated epic actions, recorded sagacious judgments, or uttered in lyric song emotions primarily felt by an individual, yet interpreting the common lot of man. But there has occurred a great change in poetry too, a change notable during the last century but initiated long before. Poetry has been growing naturalistic, and is to-day disposed to reject all severance of body and spirit. The great nature movement which we associate with the names of Cowper, Burns, and Wordsworth, has withdrawn man's attention from conscious responsibility, and has taught him to adore blind and vast forces which he cannot fully comprehend. We all know the refreshment and the deepening of life which this mystic new poetry has brought. But it is hard to say whether poetry is nowadays a spiritual or a natural art. Many of us would incline to the latter view, and would hold that even in dealing with persons it treats them as embodiments of natural forces. Our instincts and unguided passions, the features which most identify us with the physical world, are coming more and more to be the subjects of modern poetry.
IV
Nature, meanwhile, that part of the universe which is not consciously guided, has become within a century our favorite field of scientific study. The very word science is popularly appropriated to naturalistic investigation. Of course this is a perversion. Originally it was believed that the proper study of mankind was man. And probably we should all still acknowledge that the study of personal structure is as truly science as study of the structure of physical objects. Yet so powerfully is the tide setting toward reverence for the unconscious and the sub-conscious that science, our word for knowledge, has lost its universality and has taken on an almost exclusively physical character.