The Heart of Nature; or, The Quest for Natural Beauty

by Sir Francis Edward Younghusband

But the Earth is itself only a minute mite even of the Solar System. And the Sun is only one of perhaps a thousand million other stars, some so distant that light travelling at the rate of 186,000 miles a second must have started from them before the birth of Christ to reach us to-day. Nevertheless the Earth is composed of the same ultimate particles of matter that even the most distant stars are made of. The Earth, the Sun and stars, are composed of electrons which are all alike. Doubtless there are individual differences between electrons as there are between men, but in a general way they are as much alike as all men appear alike to an eagle. And of these electrons the whole Universe is made as well as the Earth. The same laws of motion, of gravitation, and of electro-magnetic and chemical attraction, obtain there as here. The scale of the Stellar World is immensely larger than the scale we are accustomed to on this Earth. But the same fundamental laws everywhere prevail, and the Earth and stars are composed of the same material.

So it must have been from the Heart of Nature as a whole that the Earth-Spirit must have derived the ideal which actuated it. Deep in the Heart of Nature must have resided the ideal of the state of the Earth as it is to-day. In the great world as a whole, as in the rose-seed, must have been operating an ideal at least of what is on the Earth to-day, and of what this Earth will become and of what it might become; and possibly also of greater things which have already been realised, or will be realised and might be realised in the planets of other suns than our Sun. There must ever have been working throughout the Universe an Activity constraining the ultimate particles in a given direction. There must have been an Organising Activity, collecting the diffused particles together, grouping them into concentrated organisms and achieving loftier and loftier modes of being. Each of those inconceivably numerous and incredibly minute particles which make up the stars and the Earth and all on it—each one acted of itself. But each acted of itself under the influence of its fellows—that is, of every other particle; that is, of the whole. Each acted in response to its surroundings, but its surroundings were nothing short of the whole of Nature outside itself. Together they formed the Spirit of Nature with the ideal as its essence. And Nature in her turn acted on the particles—as Englishmen form the spirit of England and the spirit of England acts back upon individual Englishmen.

It was the working of this Spirit, with its self-improving ideal, that has produced Nature as we see her to-day. The distant ideal furnished the motive-power by which the whole is driven forward. And this ideal was itself built up by the unceasing interaction of the whole upon the parts and the parts upon the whole. What was in the parts responded to the stimulus of what was in the whole, and the whole was affected by the activity of the parts. What was immanent responded to what was transcendent. And the transcendence was affected by the immanence.

CHAPTER XI

NATURE'S IDEAL

If we have been right so far, we have arrived at the position that Nature is a Personal Being in process of realising an ideal operating within herself. We have now to satisfy ourselves as to the character of that ideal. What is the full ideal working in the whole of Nature we cannot possibly know. We can only know so much of it as can be detected with our imperfect faculties on this minute atom of the Universe on which we dwell. We cannot be sure we have even discerned the highest levels of the ideal. For there may be higher beings than ourselves on the planets of the stars, and among those higher beings higher qualities than any we know of, or can conceive, may have emerged. Love is the highest quality we know. But love in any true sense of the word—love as a self-conscious activity—has only emerged with man, and man has only appeared within the last half-million of the Earth's four or five hundred million years of existence as the Earth. We cannot, therefore, presume to say what is the ideal in its highest development for the whole of Nature.

But from our experience here we can see what that ideal is up to (what for us is) a very high level, and we can make out what is apparently its fundamental characteristic. I obtained my best conception of it on the evening I left Lhasa at the conclusion of my Mission to Tibet in 1904, when I had an experience of such value for determining Nature's ideal, and, for me at any rate, so convincingly corroborative of the conclusions which others who have had similar experiences have drawn from them as to Nature's ideal, that I hope I may be excused for relating in some detail the circumstances in which it came to me.

These circumstances, though not the experience itself, were somewhat exceptional. I was at that particular moment at the highest pitch of existence—that is to say, of my own existence. I had had an unusually wide experience of the wild countries of that most interesting and varied of the continents—Asia, and for that reason had been specially selected for the charge of a Mission to Tibet. However ill-qualified I might be for other tasks, for this particular business of establishing neighbourly relations with a very secluded and seclusive Asiatic people, difficult of approach both on account of their natural disposition and of the mighty mountain barrier which stood between them and the rest of the world, I was esteemed to have peculiar qualifications. My comrades were also men selected for their special qualifications—one for his knowledge of the Tibetans, another for his knowledge of the Chinese, another for his knowledge of geology, and so on. The troops engaged were selected for their experience in frontier warfare, and each man had had to pass a medical test. We were at the top of our physical fitness and ripe in experience.

Besides British officers and a few British troops, there were among the soldiers Sikhs, Pathans, Gurkhas, a few Bengalis, a few Rajputs and Dogras; and among the followers were Bhutias and Lepchas from Sikkim, Baltis from Kashmir, Bhutanese from Bhutan. There were thus Christians, Mohammedans, Hindus, and Buddhists: men from an island in the Atlantic, and men from the remotest valleys of the Himalaya. And our destination had been a sacred city hidden two hundred miles behind the loftiest range of mountains in the world.