On poetic interpretation of nature

by John Campbell Shairp

When, therefore, in the light of these thoughts we study Nature in this, her highest poetic aspect, we may well feel that we are engaged in no trivial employment, but in one befitting an immortal being. Even the most common acts of minutely observing Nature’s handiwork may in this way partake of a religious character. How much more when the great spectacle of Nature lends itself to devout imagination, and becomes as it were the steps of a stair ascending toward the Eternal!

CHAPTER VII.
PRIMEVAL IMAGINATION WORKING ON NATURE—LANGUAGE AND MYTHOLOGY.

The thought with which the last chapter closed opens up views which are boundless. Through the imaginative apprehension of outward Nature, and through the beauty inherent in it, we get a glimpse into the connection of the visible world with the realities of morality and of religion. The vivid feeling of Beauty suggests, what other avenues of thought more fully disclose, that the complicated mechanism of Nature which Science investigates and formulates into physical law is not the whole, that it is but the case or outer shell of something greater and better than itself, that through this mechanism and above it, within it, and beyond it, there lie existences which Science has not yet formulated—probably never can formulate—a supersensible world, which, to the soul, is more real and of higher import than any which the senses reveal. It is apprehended by other faculties than those through which Science works, yet it is in no way opposed to science, but in perfect harmony with it, while transcending it. The mechanical explanation of things—of the Universe—we accept as far as it goes, but we refuse to take it as the whole account of the matter, for we know, on the testimony of moral and spiritual powers, that there is more beyond, and that that which is behind and beyond the mechanism is higher and nobler than the mechanism. We refuse to regard the Universe as only a machine, and hold by the intuitions of faith and of Poetry, though the objects which these let in on us cannot be counted, measured, or weighed, or verified by any of the tests which some physicists demand as the only gauges of reality. This ideal but most real region, which the visible world in part hides from us, in part reveals, is the abode of that supersensible truth to which conscience witnesses,—the special dwelling-place of the One Supreme Mind. The mechanical world and the ideal or spiritual are both actual. Neither is to be denied, and Imagination and Poetry do their best work when they body forth those glimpses of beauty and goodness which flash upon us through the outer shell of Nature’s mechanism.

But

“Descending

From these imaginative heights,”

we must turn to the humbler task of showing by a few concrete examples how Imagination has actually worked on the plastic stuff supplied by Nature. To this the readiest way would be to turn to the works of the great poets, and see how they, as a matter of fact, have dealt with the outward world. Before doing so, however, a few words may be given to the marks which Imagination has impressed on Nature in the prehistoric and preliterary ages. The record of this process lies imbedded in two fossil creations, Language and Mythology.

Language.—In the very childhood of the race, long before regular poetry or literature were thought of, there was a time when Imagination, working on the appearances of the visible world, was the great weaver of human speech, the most powerful agent in forming the marvelous fabric of language. It has long been well known to all who have given attention to the subject, that Metaphor has played a large part in the original formation of language. But how large that part is has only been recently made evident by the researches of Comparative Philology. Metaphor, as all know, means “the transferring of a name from the object to which it properly belongs to other objects which strike the mind as in some way resembling the first object.” Now this is the great instrument which works at the production of a large portion of language. And Imagination is the power which creates metaphor, which sees resemblances between things, seizes on them, and makes them the occasion of transferring the name from the well known original object to some other object resembling it, which still waits for a name. Even in our own day newly-invented objects are often named by metaphor, but metaphors thus consciously formed belong to a later age. Long before such metaphors were formed, Imagination had been silently and unconsciously at work, naming the whole world of mental and spiritual existences by metaphors taken from visible and tangible things. It is quite a commonplace that the whole vocabulary by which we name our souls, our mental states, our emotions, abstract conceptions, invisible and spiritual realities, is woven in the earliest ages by the Imagination from the resemblances which it seemed to perceive between the subtle and still unnamed things of mind, and objects or aspects of the external world. This is not so easily seen in the English language, because owing to our having borrowed almost all our words expressive of mental things from other languages, the marks of metaphor are to our eyes obliterated. In fact all our words for mental and spiritual things are like coins which, having passed through many hands, have had the original image and superscription nearly quite worn out. None the less these are still to be traced by those who have their eyes exercised to it by reason of use. But it is manifest in German, which has spun a large part of its philosophical vocabulary out of native roots. It may be seen, in some measure, in Latin, but much more in Greek philosophical language.

This whole subject has been so well handled and so amply illustrated by Professor Max Müller in the Second Series of his Lectures on “the Science of Language,” and in Archbishop Trench’s instructive and delightful volumes on “Words,” that I can but refer to these works and make here a few excerpts from them as examples of the general principle of thought to which I have adverted. Locke, as Professor Müller shows, long ago asserted that in all languages “names which stand for things which fall not under our senses have had their first rise from sensible ideas.”