What has been said should make clear that though both humanist and Rousseauist associate man with nature it is in very different ways, and that there is therefore an ambiguity in the expression “pathetic fallacy.” It remains to show that men may not only associate themselves with nature in different ways but that they may likewise differ in their ways of asserting man’s separateness from nature. The chief distinction to be made here is that between the humanist and the supernaturalist. Some sense of the gap between man and the “outworld” is almost inevitable and forces itself at times even upon those most naturalistically inclined:
Nor will I praise a cloud however bright,
Disparaging Man’s gifts and proper food—
Grove, isle, with every shape of sky-built dome,
Though clad in colors beautiful and pure,
Find in the heart of man no natural home.[193]
The Wordsworth who speaks here is scarcely the Wordsworth of Tintern Abbey or the Wordsworth whose “daily teachers had been woods and rills.” He reminds us rather of Socrates who gave as his reason for going so rarely into the country, delightful as he found it when once there, that he did not learn from woods and rills but from the “men in the cities.” This sense of the separateness of the human and the natural realm may be carried much further—to a point where an ascetic distrust of nature begins to appear. Something of this ascetic distrust is seen for example in the following lines from Cardinal Newman:
There strayed awhile amid the woods of Dart
One who could love them, but who durst not love;