NATURE MYSTICISM

BY

J. EDWARD MERCER, D.D., OXON.
BISHOP OF TASMANIA

LONDON
GEORGE ALLEN & COMPANY, Ltd.
44 & 45 RATHBONE PLACE

1913

All rights reserved

PREFACE

The aims of this study of Nature Mysticism, and the methods adopted for attaining them, are sufficiently described in the introductory chapter. It may be said, by way of special preface, that the nature mystic here portrayed is essentially a "modern." He is assumed to have accepted the fundamentals of the hypothesis of evolution. Accordingly, his sympathy with the past is profound: so also is his sense of the reality and continuity of human development, physical, psychic, and mystical. Moreover, he tries to be abreast of the latest critical and scientific conclusions. Imperfections manifold will be discovered in the pages that follow; but the author asks that a percentage of them may be attributed to the difficulties of writing in Tasmania and publishing at the antipodes.

J. E. M.

Bishop's Court, Hobart,
March, 1912.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCTORY

A wave of Mysticism is passing over the civilised nations. It is welcomed by many: by more it is mistrusted. Even the minds to which it would naturally appeal are often restrained from sympathy by fears of vague speculative driftings and of transcendental emotionalism. Nor can it be doubted that such an attitude of aloofness is at once reasonable and inevitable. For a systematic exaltation of formless ecstasies, at the expense of sense and intellect, has a tendency to become an infirmity if it does not always betoken loss of mental balance. In order, therefore, to disarm natural prejudice, let an opening chapter be devoted to general exposition of aims and principles.

The subject is Nature Mysticism. The phenomena of "nature" are to be studied in their mystical aspects. The wide term Mysticism is used because, in spite of many misleading associations, it is hard to replace. "Love of nature" is too general: "cosmic emotion" is too specialised. But let it at once be understood that the Mysticism here contemplated is neither of the popular nor of the esoteric sort. In other words, it is not loosely synonymous with the magical or supernatural; nor is it a name for peculiar forms of ecstatic experience which claim to break away from the spheres of the senses and the intellect. It will simply be taken to cover the causes and the effects involved in that wide range of intuitions and emotions which nature stimulates without definite appeal to conscious reasoning processes. Mystic intuition and mystic emotion will thus be regarded, not as antagonistic to sense impression, but as dependent on it—not as scornful of reason, but merely as more basic and primitive.

Science describes nature, but it cannot feel nature; still less can it account for that sense of kinship with nature which is so characteristic of many of the foremost thinkers of the day. For life is more and more declaring itself to be something fuller than a blind play of physical forces, however complex and sublimated their interactions. It reveals a ceaseless striving—an élan vital (as Bergson calls it) to expand and enrich the forms of experience—a reaching forward to fuller beauty and more perfect order.

A certain amount of metaphysical discussion will be necessary; but it will be reduced to the minimum compatible with coherency. Fortunately, Nature Mysticism can be at home with diverse world-views. There is, however, one exception—the world-view which is based on the concept of an Unconditioned Absolute. This will be unhesitatingly rejected as subversive of any genuine "communion" with nature. So also Symbolism will be repudiated on the ground that it furnishes a quite inadequate account of the relation of natural phenomena to the human mind. The only metaphysical theory adopted, as a generalised working basis, is that known as Ideal-Realism. It assumes three spheres of existence—that which in a peculiar sense is within the individual mind: that which in a peculiar sense is without (external to) the individual mind: and that in which these two are fused or come into living contact. It will be maintained, as a thesis fundamental to Nature Mysticism, that the world of external objects must be essentially of the same essence as the perceiving minds. The bearing of these condensed statements will become plain as the phenomena of nature are passed in review. Of formal theology there will be none.

The more certain conclusions of modern science, including the broader generalisations of the hypothesis of evolution, will be assumed. Lowell, in one of his sonnets, says:

"I grieve not that ripe knowledge takes away
The charm that nature to my childhood wore
For, with that insight cometh, day by day,
A greater bliss than wonder was before:
The real doth not clip the poet's wings;
To win the secret of a weed's plain heart
Reveals some clue to spiritual things,
And stumbling guess becomes firm-rooted art."

Admirable—as far as it goes! But the modern nature-mystic cannot rest content with the last line. The aim of nature-insight is not art, however firm-rooted; for art is, so to speak, a secondary product, a reflection. The goal of the nature-mystic is actual living communion with the Real, in and through its sensuous manifestations.

Nature Mysticism, as thus conceived, does not seek to glorify itself above other modes of experience and psychic activity. The partisanship of the theological or of the transcendental type is here condemned. Nor will there be an appeal to any ecstatic faculty which can only be the vaunted appanage of the few. The appeal will lie to faculties which are shared in some degree by all normal human beings, though they are too often neglected, if not disparaged. Rightly developed, the capacity for entering into communion with nature is not only a source of the purest pleasure, but a subtle and powerful agent in aiding men to realise some of the noblest potentialities of their being.

When treating of specific natural phenomena, the exposition demands proof and illustration. In certain chapters, therefore, quotations from the prose and poetry of those ancients and moderns who, avowedly or unavowedly, rank as nature-mystics, are freely introduced. These extracts form an integral part of the study, because they afford direct evidence of the reality, and of the continuity, of the mystical faculty as above defined.

The usual method of procedure will be to trace the influence of certain selected natural phenomena on the human mind, first in the animistic stage, then in the mythological stage, and lastly in the present, with a view to showing that there has been a genuine and living development of deep-seated nature intuitions. But this method will not be too strictly followed. Special subjects will meet with special treatment, and needless repetition will be carefully avoided. The various chapters, as far as may be, will not only present new themes, but will approach the subject at different angles.

It is obvious that severe limitations must be imposed in the selection from so vast a mass of material. Accordingly, the phenomena of Water, Air, and Fire have received the fullest attention—the first of the triad getting the lion's share; but other marked features of the physical universe have not been altogether passed by. The realm of organic life—vegetable and animal—does not properly fall within the limits of this study. For where organised life reveals itself, men find it less difficult to realise their kinship with existences other than human. The curious, and still obscure, history of totemism supplies abundant evidence on this point; and not less so that modern sympathy with all living things, which is largely based on what may be termed the new totemism of the Darwinian theory. But while attention will thus be focussed on the sphere of the inorganic, seemingly so remote from human modes of experience, some attempt will nevertheless be made to suggest the inner harmonies which link together all modes of existence. A further limitation to be noted is that "nature" will be taken to cover only such natural objects as remain in what is generally called their "natural" condition—that is, which are independent of, and unaffected by, human activities.

Let Goethe, in his Faust hymn, tell what is the heart and essence of Nature Mysticism as here to be expounded and defended.

"Rears not the heaven its arch above?
Doth not the firm-set earth beneath us lie?
And with the tender gaze of love
Climb not the everlasting stars on high?
Do I not gaze upon thee, eye to eye?
And all the world of sight and sense and sound,
Bears it not in upon thy heart and brain,
And mystically weave around
Thy being influences that never wane?"

CHAPTER II

NATURE, AND THE ABSOLUTE

As just stated, metaphysics and theology are to be avoided. But since Mysticism is generally associated with belief in an Unconditioned Absolute, and since such an Absolute is fatal to the claims of any genuine Nature Mysticism, a preliminary flying incursion into the perilous regions must be ventured.

Mysticism in its larger sense is admittedly difficult to define. It connotes a vast group of special experiences and speculations which deal with material supposed to be beyond the reach of sense and reason. It carries us back to the strangely illusive "mysteries" of the Greeks, but is more definitely used in connection with the most characteristic subtleties of the wizard East, and with certain developments of the Platonic philosophy. Extended exposition is not required. Suffice it to state what may fairly be regarded as the three fundamental principles, or doctrines, on which mystics of the orthodox schools generally depend. These principles will be subjected to a free but friendly criticism: considerable modifications will be suggested, and the way thus prepared for the study of Nature Mysticism properly so-called.

The three principles alluded to are the following. First, the true mystic is one possessed by a desire to have communion with the ultimately Real. Second, the ultimately Real is to be regarded as a supersensuous, super-rational, and unconditional Absolute—the mystic One. Third, the direct communion for which the mystic yearns—the unio mystica—cannot be attained save by passive contemplation, resulting in vision, insight, or ecstasy.

With a view to giving a definite and concrete turn to the critical examination of these three fundamentals, let us take a passage from a recently published booklet. The author tells how that on a certain sunny afternoon he flung himself down on the bank of a brimming mill-stream. The weir was smoothly flowing: the mill-wheel still. He meditates on the scene and concludes thus: "Perhaps we are never so receptive as when with folded hands we say simply, 'This is a great mystery.' I watched and wondered until Jem called, and I had to leave the rippling weir and the water's side, and the wheel with its untold secret."

There are certain forms, or modes, of experience here presented which are at least mystical in their tendency—the sense of a deeper reality than that which can be grasped by conscious reason—a desire to penetrate a secret that will not yield itself to articulate thought and which nevertheless leaves a definite impress on the mind. There is also a recognition of the passive attitude which the ordinary mystic doctrine avers to be essential to vision. Will these features warrant our regarding the experiences as genuinely mystical?

The answer to this question brings into bold relief a vital difference between orthodox mystics and those here called nature-mystics, and raises the issue on which the very existence of a valid Nature Mysticism must depend. The stricter schools would unhesitatingly refuse to accord to such experiences the right to rank with those which result in true insight. Why? Because they obviously rest on sense impressions. An English mystic, for example, states in a recent article that Mysticism is always and necessarily extra-phenomenal, and that the man who tries to elucidate the visible by means of the invisible is no true mystic; still less, of course, the man who tries to elucidate the invisible by means of the visible. The true mystic, he says, fixes his eyes on eternity and the infinite; he loses himself when he becomes entangled in the things of time, that is, in the phenomenal. Still more explicit is the statement of a famous modern Yogi. "This world is a delusive charm of the great magician called Maya. . . . Maya has imagined infinite illusions called the different things in the universe. . . . The minds which have not attained to the Highest, and are a prey to natural beauties in the stage of Maya, will continually have to turn into various forms, from one to another, because nothing in the stage of Maya is stable." Nor would the Christian mystics allow of any intermediaries between the soul and God; they most of them held that the soul must rise above the things of sense, mount into another sphere, and be "alone with the Alone."

What, then, is the concept of the ultimately Real which these stricter mystics have evolved and are prepared to defend? It is that of pure and unconditioned Being—the One—the Absolute. By a ruthless process of abstraction they have abjured the world of sense to vow allegiance to a mode of being of which nothing can be said without denying it. For even to allow a shadow of finiteness in the Absolute is to negate it; to define it is to annihilate it! It swallows up all conditions and relations without becoming any more knowable; it embraces everything and remains a pure negation. It lies totally and eternally beyond the reach of man's faculties and yet demands his perfect and unreasoning surrender. A concept, this, born of the brains of logical Don Quixotes.

And it is for such a monstrous abstraction we are asked to give up the full rich world of sense, with all it means to us. It is surely not an intellectual weakness to say: "Tell us what you will of existence above and beyond that which is known to us; but do not deny some measure of ultimate Reality to that which falls within our ken. Leave us not alone with the Absolute of the orthodox mystic, or we perish of inanity! Clearly the élan vital—the will to live—gives us a more hopeful starting-point in our search for the Real. Clearly the inexhaustible variety of the universe of sense need not be dubbed an illusion to save the consistency of a logic which has not yet succeeded in grasping its own first principles. No, the rippling weir and the mill-wheel were real in their own degree, and the intuitions and emotions they prompted were the outcome of a contact between the inner and the outer—a unio mystica—a communion between the soul of a man and the soul in the things he saw.

"But" (says the orthodox mystic) "there is a special form of craving—the craving for the Infinite. Man cannot find rest save in communion with a supreme Reality free from all imperfections and limitations; and such a Reality can be found in nothing less than the Unconditioned Absolute." Now we may grant the existence and even the legitimacy of the craving thus emphatically asserted while questioning the form which it is made to assume. The man gazing at the mill-wheel longed to know its secret. Suppose he had succeeded! We think of Tennyson's "little flower in the crannied wall." We think of Blake's lines:

"To see the world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour."

Is it really necessary to forsake the finite to reach the infinite—whatever that term may be taken to mean? Do we not often better realise the infinity of the sky by looking at it through the twigs of a tree?

For the craving itself, in its old mystic form, we can have nothing but sympathy. Some of its expressions are wonderfully touching, but their pathos must not blind us to the maimed character of the world-view on which they rest. Grant that the sphere of sense is limited and therefore imperfect, let it at any rate be valid up to the limit it does actually attain. The rippling weir and the mill-wheel did produce some sort of effect upon the beholder, and therefore must have been to that extent real. What do we gain by flinging away the chance to learn, even though the gain be small? And if, as the nature-mystic claims, the gain be great, the folly is proportionately intensified.

Coleridge is quoted as an exponent of the feeling of the stricter mystics.

"It were a vain endeavour,
Though I should gaze for ever
On the green light that lingers in the West;
I may not hope from outward forms to win
The passion and the life whose fountains are within."

This, however, is too gentle and hesitating, too tinged with love of nature, to convey the fierce conviction of the consistent devotee of the Absolute, of the defecated transparency of pure Being. If, as is urged by Récéjac, we find among some of the stricter mystics a very deep and naive feeling for nature, such feeling can only be a sign of inconsistency, a yielding to the solicitations of the lower nature. Granted their premisses, the world of sense can teach nothing. It is well to face this issue squarely—let the mystic choose, either the Absolute and Maya, or a Ground of existence which can allow value to nature, and which therefore admits of limitations. Or, if there is to be a compromise, let it be on the lines laid down by Spinoza and Schelling. That is to say, let the name God be reserved for the phenomenal aspect of the Absolute. But the nature-mystic will be wise if he discards compromise, and once for all repudiates the Unconditioned Absolute. His reason can then chime in with his intuitions and his deepest emotions. He loses nothing; he gains intellectual peace and natural joy.

The never-ceasing influence of the genuine Real is bound to declare itself sooner or later. Buddhism itself is yielding, as witness this striking pronouncement of the Buddhist Lord Abbot, Soyen Shaku. "Buddhism does not, though sometimes understood by Western people to do so, advocate the doctrine of emptiness or annihilation. It most assuredly recognises the multi-tudinousness and reality of phenomena. This world as it is, is real, not void. This life, as we live it, is true, and not a dream. We Buddhists believe that all these particular things surrounding us come from one Ultimate Source, all-knowing and all-loving. The world is the manifestation of this Reason, or Spirit, or Life, whatever you may designate it. However diverse, therefore, things are, they all partake of the nature of the Ultimate Being. Not only sentient beings, but non-sentient, reflect the glory of the Original Reason."

Assuredly a comforting passage to set over against that of the Yogi quoted above! But is not the good Abbot a little hard on the Westerners? For the full truth is that while the Yogi represents the old Absolutism, the Abbot is feeling his way to a wider and more human world-view. Buddhism has evidently better days in store. Let our views of ultimate Reality be what they may, the nature-mystic's position demands not only that man may hold communion with nature, but that, in and through such communion, he is in living touch with the Ground of Existence.

CHAPTER III

MYSTIC INTUITION AND REASON

So much for the nature-mystic's relation to the concept of the Absolute. It would be interesting to discuss, from the same point of view, his relations to the rival doctrines of the monists, dualists, and pluralists. But to follow up these trails with any thoroughness would lead us too far into the thickets and quagmires of metaphysics. Fortunately the issues are not nearly so vital as in the case of the Absolute; and they may thus be passed by without serious risk of invalidating subsequent conclusions. It may be worth our while, however, to note that many modern mystics are not monists, and that the supposed inseparable connection between Mysticism and Monism is being thrown overboard. Even the older mystics, when wrestling with the problem of evil, were dualists in their own despite. Of the moderns, so representative a thinker as Lotze suggested that Reality may run up, not into one solitary peak, but into a mountain chain. Höffding contends that we have not yet gained the right to career rough-shod over the antinomies of existence. James, a typical modern mystic, was an avowed pluralist. Bergson emphasises the category of Becoming, and, if to be classed at all, is a dualist. Thus the nature-mystic is happy in the freedom to choose his own philosophy, so long as he avoids the toils of the Absolute. For, as James remarks, "oneness and manyness are absolutely co-ordinate. Neither is primordial or more excellent than the other."

It remains, then, to subject to criticism the third principle of Mysticism, that of intuitional insight as a mode of knowing independent of the reasoning faculties, at any rate in their conscious exercise. Its root idea is that of directness and immediacy; the word itself prepares us for some power of apprehending at a glance—a power which dispenses with all process and gains its end by a flash. A higher stage is known as vision; the highest is known as ecstasy. Intuition has its own place in general psychology, and has acquired peculiar significance in the domains of aesthetics, ethics, and theology; and the same root idea is preserved throughout—that of immediacy of insight. The characteristic of passivity on which certain mystics would insist is subsidiary—even if it is to be allowed at all. Its claims will be noted later.

Now Nature Mysticism is based on sense perception, and this in itself is a form of intuition. It is immediate, for the "matter" of sensation presents itself directly to the consciousness affected; it simply asserts itself. It is independent of the conscious exercise of the reasoning powers. It does not even permit of the distinction between subject and object; it comes into the mind as "a given." When conscious thought grips this "given," it can put it into all manner of relations with other "givens." It may even to some extent control the course of subsequent sensations by the exercise of attention and in accordance with a conscious purpose. But thought cannot create a sensation. The sensation is thus at the base of all mental life. It furnishes material for the distinction between subject and object—between the outer and the inner. The conscious processes, thus primed, rise through the various stages of contemplation, reflection, abstraction, conception, and reasoning.

The study of sense perception is thus seen to be a study of primary mystical intuition. But the similarity, or essential bond, between the two may be worked at a deeper level. When an external object stimulates a sensation, it produces a variety of changes in the mind of the percipient. Most of these may remain in the depths of subconscious mental life, but they are none the less real as effectual agents of change. Now what is here implied? The external object has somehow or other got "inside" the percipient mind—has penetrated to it, and modified it. In other words, a form of mystical communion has been established. The object has penetrated into the mind, and the mind has come into living touch with the Real external to itself. The object and the subject are to this extent fused in a mystic union. How could the fusion take place unless the two were linked in some fundamental harmony of being? Other and higher modes of mystical union may be experienced; but sense perception contains them all in germ. How vain, then, the absolutist's attempt to sever himself from the sphere of sense!

Intuition, we have seen, must be deemed to be independent of conscious reasoning processes. But this is not to say that it is independent of reason, either objectively or subjectively. Not objectively, for if the world is a cosmos, it must be rationally constituted. Not subjectively, for man's reasoning faculties may influence many of his mental activities without rising to the level of reflective ratiocination. And thus man's communion with the cosmos, of which he is himself a part, will be grounded in the reason which permeates the whole.

If we go on to ask what is the relation between intuition and conscious reflective processes, the answer would seem to be somewhat of this kind. "Intuition, in its wide sense, furnishes material; reason works it up. Intuition moves about in worlds not systematised; reason reduces them to order. Reflective thought dealing with the phenomena presented to it by sensation has three tasks before it—to find out the nature of the objects, to trace their causes, and to trace their effects. And whereas each intuitional experience stands alone and isolated in its immediacy, reason groups these single experiences together, investigates their conditions, and makes them subserve definite conscious purposes.

But if mystics have too often made the mistake of underrating the powers and functions of reflective reason, the champions of logic have also been guilty of the counter-mistake of disparaging intuition, more especially that called mystical. That is to say, the form of thought is declared to be superior to the matter of thought—a truly remarkable contention! What is reason if it has no material to work up? And whence comes the material but from sensation and intuition? Moreover, even when the material is furnished to the reasoning processes, the conclusions arrived at have to be brought continuously and relentlessly to the bar, not only of physical fact, but also to that of intuition and sentiment, if serious errors are to be avoided. Systematising and speculative zeal have a tendency to run ahead of their data.

Bergson has done much to restore to intuition the rights which were being filched or wrenched from it. He has shown (may it be said conclusively?) that systematised thought is quite unequal to grappling with the processes which constitute actual living. Before him, Schopenhauer had poured well-deserved contempt on the idea that the brain, an organ which can only work for a few hours at a stretch, and is dependent on all the accidents of the physical condition of the body, should be considered equal to solving the problems of existence. "Certainly" (writes Schwegler) "the highest truths of reason, the eternal, the divine, are not to be proved by means of demonstration." But this is no less true of the simplest manifestations of reality. Knowledge is compelled to move on the surface when it aims at scientific method and demonstrated results. Intuitive knowledge can often penetrate deeper, get nearer to the heart of things and divine their deeper relations. When intuitions can be gripped by conscious reasoning processes, man gains much of the knowledge which is power. But the scope of knowledge in the fullest sense is indefinitely greater than that of science and philosophy.

Nor is it hard to see why the sphere of reflective thought is thus comparatively limited. For modern speculations, and even the straitest psychology, have familiarised us with the idea of a larger self that is beyond the reach of conscious analysis. Obscure workings of the mind—emotions, moods, immediate perceptions, premonitions, and the rest—have a potent part to play in the actual living of a life. Consider in this connection such a passage as the following, taken from Jefferies' "Story of My Heart." It means something, though it is not scientific.

"Three things only have been discovered of that which concerns the inner consciousness since before written history began. Three things only in twelve thousand written, or sculptured years, and in the dumb, dim time before them. Three ideas the cavemen wrested from the unknown, the night which is round us still in daylight—the existence of the soul, immortality, the deity. These things . . . do not suffice me. I desire to advance farther, and to wrest a fourth, and even still more than a fourth, from the darkness of thought. I want more ideas of soul-life. . . . My naked mind confronts the unknown. I see as clearly as the noonday that this is not all; I see other and higher conditions than existence; I see not only the existence of the soul, but, in addition, I realise a soul-life illimitable. . . . I strive to give utterance to a Fourth Idea. The very idea that there is another idea is something gained. The three gained by the cavemen are but stepping-stones, first links of an endless chain."

Of course, we are here reminded of Wordsworth's "obstinate questionings of sense and outward things"; of his "misgivings of a creature moving about in worlds not realised." Intuition is feeling its way outwards beyond the sphere of the known, and emotion is working in harmony with it, the reason still fails to grip. Morris' description of a like sense of unrealised possibilities applies, in varying degrees, to men of all sorts and conditions, though the poets of whom he speaks are the most favoured.

"Blind thoughts which occupy the brain,
Dumb melodies which fill the ear,
Dim perturbations, precious pain,
A gleam of hope, a chill of fear—
These seize the poet's soul, and mould
The ore of fancy into gold."

Language is thus employed to proclaim its own inadequacy. And who can fail to see that between the rich complexity of the workings of the whole mind and the means by which we would fain render them articulate, there yawns a gap which no effort can bridge over? Even the poet fails—much more the scientist! To refuse to take cognisance of the fresh spontaneity of feeling and intuition is to rob life of its higher joys and its deeper meanings.

CHAPTER IV

MAN AND NATURE

Many thinkers of the present day pride themselves upon the growth of what they call the naturalistic spirit. What do they mean by this? They mean that the older ways of interpreting nature, animistic or supernatural, are being supplanted by explanations founded on knowledge of physical facts and "natural" laws. And, up to a point, there are but few natural mystics who will not concur in their feelings of satisfaction that ignorance and superstition are disappearing in rough proportion as exact knowledge advances. At any rate, in this study, the more solid conclusions of science will be freely and gladly accepted. The very idea of a conflict between Science and Natural Mysticism is to be mercilessly scouted.

But this concurrence must be conditional. Tait, for example, was scornful of any form of animism. He wrote thus: "The Pygmalions of modern days do not require to beseech Aphrodite to animate the world for them. Like the savage with his Totem, they have themselves already attributed life to it. 'It comes,' as Helmholtz says, 'to the same thing as Schopenhauer's metaphysics. The stars are to love and hate one another, feel pleasure and displeasure, and to try to move in a way corresponding to these feelings.' The latest phase of this peculiar non-science tells us that all matter is alive; or at least that it contains the 'promise and potency' (whatever these may be) 'of all terrestrial life.' All this probably originated in the very simple manner already hinted at; viz., in the confusion of terms constructed for application to thinking beings only, with others applicable only to brute matter, and a blind following of this confusion to its necessarily preposterous consequences. So much for the attempts to introduce into science an element altogether incompatible with the fundamental conditions of its existence."

This is vigorous! But how does the matter now stand? Since Tait wrote his invective, many physicists of at least equal rank with himself, and with some undreamt-of discoveries to the good, have subscribed to the views which he so trenchantly condemns. As for the metaphysicians, there are but few of the first flight who do not conceive of consciousness as the ultimate form of existence. Again, the reference to the Pygmalion myth implies the view that mythology was a mere empty product of untutored fancy and imaginative subjectivism. Here also he is out of harmony with the spirit now pervading the science of religion and the comparative study of early modes of belief. It will be well to devote some chapters to a survey of the problems thus suggested, and to preface them by an enquiry, on general lines, into man's relation to nature.

We shall best come to grips with the real issue by fastening on Tait's "brute matter." For the words contain a whole philosophy. On the one hand, matter, inert, lifeless: on the other hand, spirit, living, supersensuous: between the two, and linking the two, man, a spirit in a body. Along with this there generally goes a dogma of special creations, though it may perhaps be held that such a dogma is not essential to the distinction between the two realms thus sharply sundered. It is at once obvious that, starting from such premisses, Tait's invective is largely justified. For if matter is inert, brute, dead—it certainly seems preposterous to speak of its having within it the potency of life—using "life" as a synonym for living organisms, including man. The nature-mystic is overwhelmed with Homeric laughter.

But the whole trend of scientific investigation and speculation is increasingly away from this crude and violent dualism. The relation of soul to body is still a burning question, but does not at all preclude a belief that matter is one mode of the manifestation of spirit. Indeed, it is hard to understand how upholders of the disappearing doctrine would ever bring themselves to maintain, even on their own premisses, that any creation of the Supreme Spirit could be "brute"—that is, inert and irrational! Regarded from the new view-point, all is what may, for present purposes, be called spiritual. And when man appeared upon the globe, he was not something introduced from without, different from and alien to the world of matter, but merely the outcome of a more intense activity of the same forces as were at work from the first and in the whole—in brief, a higher manifestation of the life which is the ultimate Ground of all modes of existence. There are not two different realms, that of brute matter and living spirit; but various planes, or grades, of life and consciousness. Leibniz had the beautiful and profound idea that life has three modes on earth—it sleeps in plants, it dreams in animals, and it wakes in man. Modern thought is expanding, universalising, this idea.

Man's relation to nature, in the light of this newer doctrine, thus becomes sufficiently clear. He is not an interloper, but an integral part of a whole. He is the highest outcome (so far as our world of sense is concerned) of a vast upward movement. Nay, modern science links him on to other worlds and other aeons. Cosmic evolution is "all of a piece," so to speak, and man takes his own special place in an ordered whole. The process is slow, measured by the standard of human life. Countless ages have lapsed to bring us and our world to its present degree of conscious life. Countless ages are yet to elapse. What shall be the end—the goal? Who can tell? Judging by what we know, it would seem simplest to say that the trend of the evolutionary process is towards the increase of internal spontaneity and consciously formed and prosecuted purpose. In his "Songs before Sunrise," Swinburne calls this spontaneity "freedom."

"Freedom we call it, for holier
Name of the soul's there is none;
Surelier it labours, if slowlier,
Than the metres of star and of sun;
Slowlier than life unto breath,
Surelier than time unto death,
It moves till its labour is done."

The nature-mystic, then, is bound to reject the "brute" matter doctrine just as decidedly as the doctrine of the unconditioned Absolute. Each, in its own way, robs nature of its true glory and significance. Nature, for him, is living: and that, not indirectly as a "living garment" (to quote Goethe's Time Spirit) of another Reality, but as itself a living part of that Reality—a genuine, primary manifestation of the ultimate Ground. And man is an integral living part of living nature.

There is another aspect of this "brute" matter doctrine which leads to the same conclusions. If matter be held to possess no other properties than those known to the physicist, it might be possible to account for what may be termed the utilitarian side of human development, social and individualistic. Nature makes demands upon man's energies and capacities before she will yield him food and shelter, and his material requirements generally. The enormously important and far-reaching range of facts here brought to view have largely determined the chequered course of industrial and social evolution. But even so, weighty reservations must be made. There is the element of rationality (implicit in external phenomena) which has responded to the workings of human reason. There are the manifestations of something deeper than physics in the operations of so-called natural laws, and all the moral influences those laws have brought to bear on man's higher development. There is the significant fact that as the resources of civilisation have increased, the pressure of the utilitarian relation has relaxed.

According fullest credit, however, to the influence of the purely "physical" properties of nature, has man no other relation to his external environment than the utilitarian? The moral influence has been just suggested; the exploitation of this rich vein has for some time past engaged the attention of evolutionary moralists. Our more immediate concern is with the aesthetic influences. And in nature there is beauty as well as utility. Nor is the beauty a by-product of utility; it exists on its own account, and asserts itself in its own right. As Emerson puts it—"it is its own excuse for being." As another writer puts it—"in the beauty which we see around us in nature's face, we have felt the smile of a spiritual Being, as we feel the smile of our friend adding light and lustre to his countenance." Yes, nature is beautiful and man knows it. How great the number and variety of the emotions and intuitions that beauty can stir and foster will be seen in detail hereafter.

But beauty is not the only agent in moulding and developing man's character. Nature, as will be shown, is a manifestation of immanent ideas which touch life at every point. Ugliness, for example, has its place as well as beauty, and will be dealt with in due course. So with ideas of life and death, of power and weakness, of hope and despondency—these and a thousand others, immanent in external phenomena, have stimulated the powerful imaginations of the infant race, and still maintain their magic to move the sensitive soul. The wonderful mythological systems of the past enshrine science, philosophy, and poetry—and they were prompted by physical phenomena. The philosophy and poetry of the present are still largely dependent on the same phenomena. So it will be to the end.

That the revelation of Reality is a partial one—that the highest summits are veiled in mists—this is freely granted. But the very fact constitutes in itself a special charm. If what we see is so wonderful, what must that be which is behind!

CHAPTER V

MYSTIC RECEPTIVITY

The general character of the nature-mystic's main contention will now be sufficiently obvious. He maintains that man and his environment are not connected in any merely external fashion, but that they are sharers in the same kind of Being, and therefore livingly related. If this be sound, we shall expect to find that wherever and whenever men are in close and constant touch with nature they will experience some definite sort of influence which will affect their characters and their thoughts. Nor, as will already have been obvious, are we disappointed in this expectation. Let us turn to a somewhat more detailed study of the evidence for the reality and potency of the mystic influence continuously exercised by physical phenomena on man's psychic development.

As has been stated, the nature-mystic lays considerable, though by no means exclusive, stress upon what he calls "intuition." His view of this faculty or capacity is not quite that of the strict psychologist. Herbert Spencer, for instance, in his "Psychology," uses the term intuition in what he deems to be its "common acceptation"—"as meaning any cognition reached by an undecomposable mental act." Of course much would turn on what is implied by cognition, and it is impossible to embark on the wide sea of epistemology, or even on that of the intuitional controversy, with a view to determining this point. Spencer's own illustration of an intuited fact for knowledge—relations which are equal to the same relation are equal to one another—would appear to narrow its application to those so-called self-evident or necessary truths which are unhesitatingly accepted at first sight. The nature-mystic, however, while unreservedly recognising this kind of intuition (whatever may be its origin) demands a wider meaning for the term. A nearer approach to what he wants is found in the feats of certain calculating prodigies, who often seem to reach their astounding results rather by insights than operations. The celebrated mathematician, Euler, is said to have possessed, in addition to his extraordinary memory for numbers, "a kind of divining power," by which he perceived almost at a glance, the most complicated relations of factors and the best modes of manipulating them. As regards the calculating prodigies, a thought suggests itself. It has been almost invariably found that as they learnt more, their special power decreased. Has this any bearing on the loss of imaginative power and aesthetic insight which often accompanies the spread of civilisation?—or on the materialisms and the "brute matter" doctrines which so often afflict scientists?

But even this expansion of meaning does not satisfy the nature-mystic. Perhaps the case of musical intuition comes still nearer to what he is looking for, inasmuch as cognition, in the sense of definite knowledge, is here reduced to a minimum. On the other hand there is more at work than mere feeling. The soul of the music-lover moves about in a world which is at once realised and yet unrealised—his perceptions are vivid and yet indefinable. And it is important to note that the basis is sense-perception.

And thus we say of mystical intuition that it is a passing of the mind, without reasoned process, behind the world of phenomena into a more central sphere of reality—an insight into a world beyond the reach of sense—a direct beholding of spiritual facts, guided by a logic which is implicit, though it does not emerge into consciousness. It is intuition of this fuller and deeper kind which in all likelihood forms the core of what some would call the aesthetic and the moral senses.

And here an interesting question presents itself. The older mystics, and the more orthodox of modern mystics, would have us believe that the intuition for which they contend is purely passive. The mind must be quieted, the will negated, until a state of simple receptivity is attained. Is this contention valid? It is difficult to break away from venerable traditions, but the nature-mystic who would be abreast of the knowledge of his day must at times be prepared to submit even intuition itself to critical analysis. And in this instance, criticism is all the more necessary because the doctrine of pure passivity is largely a corollary of belief in an unconditioned Absolute. If union with such an Absolute is to be enjoyed, the will must be pulseless, the intellect atrophied, the whole soul inactive: otherwise the introduction of finite thoughts and desires inhibits the divine afflatus!

Now it was noted, when intuition was first mentioned, that, like sensation (which is an elementary form of intuition) it provides "matter" for the mind to work upon. So far, it may rightly be deemed passive—receptive. But only half the story is thus told. The mind reacts upon the "matter" so provided, and gives it context and meaning. Even the sense-organ reacts to the physical stimulus, and conditions it in its own fashion; much more will the mind as a whole assert itself. Indeed it is only on condition of such action and reaction that any union, or communion, worthy of the name, can be effected. And should it be suspected that the distinction between "matter" and "form" is too Kantian and technical (though it is not intended to be such) the matter can be stated in more general terms by saying that in all forms of intuition, from the lowest to the highest, the mind goes out to meet that which comes to it—there is always some movement from within, be it desire, emotion, sympathy, or other like affection. In short, the self, as long as it is a self, can never be purely passive.

Consider from this point of view the following passage from Jefferies. "With all the intensity of feeling which exalted me, all the intense communion I held with the earth, the sun and sky, the stars hidden by the light, with the ocean—in no manner can the thrilling depth of these feelings be written—with these I prayed, as if they were the keys of an instrument, of an organ, with which I swelled forth the notes of my soul, redoubling my own voice by their power. The great sun burning with light; the strong earth, dear earth; the warm sky; the pure air; the thought of ocean; the inexpressible beauty of all filled me with a rapture, an ecstasy, an inflatus. With this inflatus, too, I prayed." How strong throughout the activity of the soul—culminating in prayer! And by "prayer," Jefferies distinctly states that he means, not "a request for anything preferred to a deity," but intense soul-emotion, intense aspiration, intense desire for fuller soul-life—all the marks of the highest forms of mysticism, and proportionately strengthened soul-activities.

And what, then, shall be said of Wordsworth?

"I deem that there are Powers
Which of themselves our minds impress;
That we can feed these minds of ours
In a wise passiveness.
Think you, 'mid all this mighty sum
Of things for over speaking,
That nothing of itself will come,
But we must still be seeking."

Is not this, it may be asked, in harmony with the older doctrine? Not so. There is a rightful and wholesome insistence on the necessity for a receptive attitude of mind. Jefferies, too, was intensely receptive as well as intensely active. But Wordsworth is contrasting concentration of the mind on definite studies and on book-lore with the laying of it open to the influences of nature. He calls this latter a "wise passiveness"—a "dreaming": but is nevertheless an active passivity—a waking dream. All the senses are to be in healthy working order; a deep consciousness is to be gently playing over the material which nature so spontaneously supplies. And so it comes that he can tell of

"A Presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts."

Is not this the same experience as that of Jefferies, only passing through a mind of calmer tone. And if at times Wordsworth also is lifted into an ecstasy, when

"the light of sense
Goes out, but with a flash that has revealed
The invisible world,"

his mind is not in an Absolutist state of passivity, but, on the contrary, is stirred to higher forms of consciousness. The experiences may, or may not be such as subsequent reflection can reduce to order—that is immaterial to the issue—but at any rate they imply activity. We may safely conclude, therefore, that intuition in all its grades necessitates a specialised soul-activity as well as a specialised soul-passivity.

It will have been apparent in what has preceded that there are many grades of intuition, rising from sense-perception to what is known as ecstasy. Some may doubt the wisdom of admitting ecstasy among the experiences of a sane, modern nature-mystic. Certainly the word raises a prejudice in many minds. Certainly the fanaticisms of religious Mysticism must be avoided. But Jefferies was not frightened of the word to describe an unwonted experience of exalted feeling; nor was Wordsworth afraid to describe the experience itself:

"that serene and blessed mood
In which the affections gently lead us on—
Until the breath of this corporeal flame,
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul;
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things."

This is in many respects the same type of experience as that described by Plotinus—"the life of the gods, and of divine and happy men"—but shorn of its needless degradation of the body and the senses, which, with Wordsworth are still and transcended, but remain as a foundation for all the rest. There is yet another and very significant point of difference. Porphyry, a disciple of Plotinus, tells us that his master attained to the ecstatic condition four times only in the six years which he spent in his company. How often Wordsworth attained to his form of ecstasy we do not know. But there is the little word "we" which occurs throughout his description: and this evidently links the past on to his readers. That is to say, he does not sever his experience from that which is open to ordinary humanity. He called for and anticipated genuine sympathy. Nor was he wrong in making this demand, for there are few sensitive lovers of nature who are not able to parallel, in some degree, what the English high-priest of Nature Mysticism has so wonderfully described. And as for the lower and simpler grades of feeling for nature, given that the conditions of life are "natural," they are practically universal, though often inarticulate.

CHAPTER VI

DEVELOPMENT AND DISCIPLINE OF INTUITION

Although the outstanding mark of intuition is its immediacy, that does not imply that it is independent of mental development, of culture, or of discipline. So far all classes of mystics would be agreed. Nevertheless a certain amount of comment and criticism will be useful even in this regard. For erroneous conceptions, especially in matters so largely influenced by belief in an unconditioned Absolute, may frequently issue in harmful practices. For proof and illustration of the danger, need one do more than point to the terrible excesses of asceticism still prevalent in India?

And first, of the normal development of the mystic feeling for nature in the case of the individual mind. "The child is father of the man," said Wordsworth. But in what sense is this true? Let us turn to the immortal Ode, which is undoubtedly a record of vivid personal experience.

"Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing boy,
But he beholds the light and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The youth who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature's priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the man perceives it die away
And fade into the light of common day."

Of course the poet was in dead earnest in writing thus; but the two last lines give us pause. How about

"The light that never was on land or sea"?

Was not that with the poet to the end? How about the

"Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears"?

Would those have been possible for the child or growing boy? If there had been a loss, had there not also been a very real gain as the years rolled over his head? Such questions are forced upon us by an examination of the records themselves. Somewhat of the brightness and freshness of "the vision splendid" might evaporate; but the mystic glow, the joy, the exaltation, remained—and deepened—

"So was it when I was a child,
So is it now I am a man,
So may it be when I am old,
Or let me die"—

only that childlike fancy yields place to matured imagination. And if this was so with Wordsworth, whose childhood was so exceptional, still more shall we find it to be true of the average child. The early freshness of the senses may be blunted; the eager curiosity may be satiated; but where the nature remains unspoilt, the sense of wonder and of joy will extend its range and gain in fullness of content.

If we compare Kingsley's development, he was in a way a great "boy" to the end—but a boy with a deepening sense of mystery mellowing his character and his utterances. And thus it was that he could say, looking back on his intercourse with the wonders of nature: "I have long enjoyed them, never I can honestly say alone, because when man was not with me I had companions in every bee and flower and pebble, and never idle, because I could not pass a swamp or a tuft of heather without finding in it a fairy tale of which I could but decipher here and there a line or two, and yet found them more interesting than all the books, save one, which were ever written upon earth."

True, there is another range of experiences to be reckoned with, such as that of Omar Khayyam—

"Yet ah that Spring should vanish with the Rose!
That Youth's sweet-scented manuscript should close!
The Nightingale that on the branches sang,
Ah whence, and whither flown again, who knows?"

Yes, but what might Omar have been with a nobler philosophy of life, and a more wholesome self-restraint. Blasé, toper as he was, how did he begin his Rubáiyat? Thus finely!

"Wake! For the Sun who scatter'd into flight
The stars before him from the Field of Night,
Drives Night along with them from Heav'n and strikes
The Sultan's turret with a Shaft of Light."

There was poetry in the man still—and that, too, of the kind stirred by nature. And from nature likewise comes the pathos of a closing verse—

"Yon rising Moon that looks for us again—
How oft hereafter will she wax and wane;
How oft hereafter rising look for us
Through this same Garden—and for one in vain! "

And if in spite of all that is said, Wordsworth's haunting Ode still asserts its sway, then let there be a still more direct appeal to its author. One of his loveliest sonnets is that which opens—

"It is a beauteous evening, calm and free."

He tells of the holy stillness, the setting of the broad sun, the eternal motion of the sea. He is filled with a sense of mystic adoration. And then there is a sudden turn of thought—

"Dear child! dear girl! that walkest with me here,
If thou appear untouch'd by solemn thought,
Thy nature is not therefore less divine."

What is this but to regard the intuitional faculty as still largely latent, awaiting the maturing processes of the passing years? There is no place for further argument.

What has just been said of the child may be said of the race, especially if there is anything in the theory that the child recapitulates in brief the stages through which the race has passed in its upward progress. In the dawn of civilisation the senses would be comparatively fresh and keen, though lacking in delicacy of aesthetic discrimination; the imagination would be powerful and active. Hence the products, so varied and immense, of the animistic tendency and the mytho-poeic faculty. To these stages succeed the periods of reflective thought and accurate research, which, while blunting to some degree the sharp edge of sensibility, more than atone for the loss by the widening of horizons and the deepening of mysteries. We must be careful, however, not to press the analogy, or parallel, too far. Important modifications of the recapitulation theory are being urged even on its biological side; it is wise, therefore, to be doubly on guard when dealing with the complexities of social development. Still, it is safe to assert that, for the race as for the individual, the modes of cosmic emotion grow fuller and richer in "the process of the suns." Would it be easy to parallel in any previous period of history that passage from Jefferies?—"With all the intensity of feeling which exalted me, all the intense communion I held with the earth, the sun, and the sky, the stars hidden by the light, with the ocean—in no manner can the thrilling depth of these feelings be written—with these I prayed, as if they were the keys of an instrument."

Starting from an acknowledgment that the intuitional faculty is capable of development, it is an easy, and indeed inevitable, step to the conclusion that training and discipline can aid that development. As noted above, mystics have gone, and still go, to lengths which make the world wonder, in their efforts to enjoy the higher forms of mystic communion with the Real. The note of stern renunciation has persisted like a bourdon down the ages in the lives of those who have devoted themselves to the quest of the Absolute. In the East, and more especially in India, the grand aim of life has come to be the release from the appetites and the senses. The Buddhist struggles to suppress all natural desires, and undergoes all manner of self-inflicted tortures, that he may rise above the world of illusion, and attain to absorption in the Universal Spirit. He sacrifices the body that the soul may see. Similar views, though varying much in detail, have flourished at the heart of all the great religions, and have formed almost the sole substance of some of the smaller. Nor has Christianity escaped. An exaggerated and uncompromising asceticism has won for many Christian saints their honours on earth and their assurance of special privileges in heaven.

Contrast with this sterner and narrower type, the mystic who loves the natural world because he believes it to be, like himself, a genuine manifestation of the ultimately Real, and to be akin to his own inmost life. He, too, acknowledges the need for the discipline of the body—he, too, has his askesis—but he cherishes the old Greek ideal which does not call for a sacrifice of sense as such, but for a wise abstinence from those sensual pleasures, or over-indulgences in pleasure, which endanger the balance of the powers of the body and the mind. The nature-mystic, more particularly, maintains that there is no form of human knowledge which may not be of service to him in attaining to deeper insight and fuller experience in his intercourse with nature. He is therefore a student, in the best sense of the word—not a slave to mere erudition, but an alert and eager absorber of things new and old according to his abilities and opportunities. He tries to survey life as a whole, and to bring his complete self, body and soul, to the realisation of its possibilities. And he looks to nature for some of his purest joys and most fruitful experiences. He knows that the outward shows of heaven and earth are manifestations of a Reality which communes with him as soul with soul.

CHAPTER VII

NATURE NOT SYMBOLIC

Mysticism and symbolism are generally regarded as inseparable: some may go so far as to make them practically synonymous. Hence the large space devoted to symbols in most treatises on Mysticism. Récéjac, for instance, in his treatise on the "Bases of the Mystic Belief," devotes about two-thirds of the whole to this subject. Whence such preponderating emphasis? There are, of course, many conspiring causes, but the conception of the Absolute is still the strongest. Given an Unconditioned which is beyond the reach of sense and reason, the phenomenal is necessarily degraded to the rank of the merely symbolical. Nature, being at an infinite distance from the Real, can only "stand for" the Real; and any knowledge which it can mediate is so indirect as to be hardly worthy of the name.

To this degradation of the phenomenal the true nature-mystic is bound to demur, if he is to be faithful to his fundamental principle. He desires direct communion with the Real, and looks to external nature as a means to attain his end. To palm off upon him something which "stands for" the Real is to balk him of his aim; for the moment the symbol appears, the Real disappears: its place is taken by a substitute which at the best is Maya—an illusion; or, to use technical phraseology of the metaphysical sort, is "mere appearance."

But further, the symbolic conception of nature would seem to contradict the requirement of immediacy—a requirement more vital to the Absolutist than to the genuine nature-mystic, and yet apparently lost from the view of those who are the strongest advocates of symbolism. For intuition implies direct insight, independent of reasoning process and conceptual construction. Whereas, a symbol, in any ordinary acceptation of the word, is indisputably a product of conscious mental processes: its very reference beyond itself demands conscious analysis and synthesis, and a conscious recognition of complicated systems of relations. The doctrine of symbols is thus in reality subversive of Mysticism of any kind, and more especially of Nature Mysticism.

Let it not be supposed that to argue thus is to repudiate symbolism as such. Whoever understands the nature and conditions of human knowledge sees that symbolic systems, of endless variety, are necessary instruments in almost every department of theory, research, and practice. We cannot move without them. Some symbols are thoroughly abstract and artificial, but frequently of the utmost value, in spite of their being pure creations of the mind. Other symbols are founded on analogies and affinities deep down in the nature of things, and so come nearer to the matter of genuine intuition. Between the two extremes there are an infinite number of graded systems, some of which enter into the very texture of daily life. But so long as, and in so far as, there is a "standing for" instead of a "being," the mystic, qua mystic, is defrauded of his direct communion with the Ground of things.

But the mystic who champions symbolism may object that the definition of that term must not be taken so narrowly, and that there is the wider sense in which it is taken by writers on aesthetics. Some such definition as this may be attempted: A symbol is something which does not merely "stand for" something else, but one which, while it has a meaning of its own, points onward to another thing beyond itself, and suggests an ideal content which of itself it cannot fully embody. But are we really cleared of our difficulty by substituting "suggests" for "stands for"? Again it must be insisted that the mystic aims at direct communion, not with that which is "suggested," but that which "is." An object may be low or high in the scale of existence, may be rich or poor in content—but it is what it is, and, as such, and in and for itself, may be the source of an intuition. The man lying on the bank of the mill-stream and meditating on the water-wheel wanted the secret of the wheel itself, not what the wheel "suggested." Jefferies, yearning for fuller soul-life, and sensitive to nature's aspects, felt that the life was there—that the universe is the life—that the life is intuited in and through the universe, though not grasped as yet by the conscious reasoning processes.

As an interesting example, the symbol of the cross may be briefly considered. Why should a form so simple and so familiar have acquired an astonishingly wide range and be generally regarded as symbolic of life? Much has to be learnt before the problem is solved. One thing seems fairly certain—the choice has not been wholly arbitrary; there has been at work an intuitional, subconscious factor. Is it possible that the negativing of a line in one direction by a line in another direction raises subliminally a sense of strain, then of effort, then of purposeful will, and so, lastly, of life? Probably a piece of pure imagination! And yet there must be some real power in the symmetrical form itself to account for its symbolic career. Conscious reason, obscurely prompted by this power, evolved the symbolic use; and the strange interminglings of intuition, rational action, and force of circumstance, during the long course of civilised history, have accomplished the rest.

The train of reflection thus started will add special point to a passage from an early letter of Kingsley's, quoted by Inge in a slightly curtailed form, but here given in full. "The great Mysticism is the belief that is becoming every day stronger with me, that all symmetrical natural objects, aye, and perhaps all forms, colours, and scents which show organisation or arrangement, are types of some truth or existence, of a grade between the symbolical type and the mystic type. When I walk the fields I am oppressed every now and then with an innate feeling, that everything I see has a meaning, if I could but understand it. And this feeling of being surrounded with truths which I cannot grasp, amounts to indescribable awe sometimes! Everything seems to be full of God's reflex, if we could but see it."

The passage is of profound significance when taken as a whole, and will serve as a remarkable description of the genuine mystic experience which can be prompted by nature, without going to the length of "vision," still less of ecstasy. But the stress now lies on the words—"a grade between the symbolical type and the mystic type." Kingsley evidently realised the insufficiency of symbolism to meet his demands, while he shrank from the vagueness of what was called Mysticism. Objects for him had a meaning in their own right, and he was casting about for a fitting term to express this fact. He also distinctly states that to him, "Everything seems to be full of God's reflex." Once grant that Nature Mysticism, as denned and illustrated in the preceding chapters, is a genuine form of Mysticism, and his difficulty would be solved. The natural objects which stirred his emotions would be acknowledged as part and parcel of the ultimate Ground itself, and therefore competent to act, not as substitutes for something else not really present, but in their own right, and of their own sovereign prerogative. Nature, in short, is not a mere stimulus for a roving fancy or teeming imagination: it is a power to be experienced, a secret to be wrested, a life to be shared.

The famous "Canticle of the Sun" of St. Francis d'Assisi gives naive and spontaneous expression to the same truth. Natural objects, for this purest of mystics, were no bare symbols, nor did they gain their significance by suggesting beyond themselves. He addressed them as beings who shared with him the joy of existence. "My Brother the Sun"—"my Sister the Moon"—"our Mother the Earth"—"my Brother the Wind"—"our Sister Water"—"Brother Fire." The same form of address is maintained for things living and things lifeless. And it is obvious that the endearing terms of relationship are more than metaphors or figures of speech. His heart evidently goes with them: he genuinely claims kinship. Differences dissolve in a sense of common being. It would be an anachronism to read into these affectionate names the more fully developed mysticism of Blake, or Shelley, or Emerson. But the absence of any tinge of symbolic lore is noteworthy.

Kingsley, as was just seen, was feeling about for something more satisfactory than mystic symbolism; so also was Emerson. "Mysticism" (he writes) "consists in the mistake of an accidental and individual symbol for an universal one. . . . The mystic must be steadily told, 'All that you say is just as true without the tedious use of that symbol as with it.'" Emerson's uneasiness is manifest. He is rebelling, but is not quite sure of his ground. At one time he inclines to think the mystic in fault because he "nails a symbol to one sense, which was a true sense for a moment, but soon becomes old and false." At another time he is inclined to condemn the symbol altogether as being of too "accidental" a character. But it is surely simpler to throw symbolism overboard so far as genuine mystic experience is concerned. What the mystic is in search of is "meaning" in its own right—"meaning" existing in and for itself. Anything less is a fraud. Emerson nearly reached this conclusion, as witness the following passage: "A happy symbol is a sort of evidence that your thought is just. . . . If you agree with me, or if Locke or Montesquieu agree, I may yet be wrong; but if the elm tree thinks the same thing, if running water, if burning coal, if crystals, if alkalies, in their several fashions, say what I say, it must be true." Here Emerson is all but clean out of the tangle. He speaks of a "happy symbol." But inasmuch as this "happy symbol" is to express what the elm tree, the running water, and the rest, actually say in their several fashions, it is safer to drop the idea of symbolism altogether; for what they say, is not what they "stand for," but what they actually are.

If the contention is renewed that the elm tree, running water, and the rest, suggest truths and thoughts beyond themselves, of course the point may be readily granted. But this is only to affirm that every object is linked on to every other object by a multiplicity of relations—that each part is woven into the texture of a larger whole in a universe of interpenetrations. The consistent working out of the organic interdependence of the modes and forms of existence is found in such a system as that of Hegel, where each part pre-supposes correlatives, and where each stage or "moment" includes all the past, and presses on to that which dialectically succeeds. It is not necessary to be a Hegelian to appreciate the grand idea of his doctrine—that all modes and manifestations of the Real are logically and organically connected. But to say that one stage of the evolution of the Idea is dependent on another, or essentially involves another, is not to make the lower of the stages symbolic of the higher. Indeed to introduce the concept of symbolism at all into such a context is to court inextricable confusion. Let symbolism be one thing, and let organic (or dialectic) connection be another—then we know where we are when we claim for natural objects that they have a being and a meaning in their own right, and that they are akin to the soul of man. Emerson had a firm grasp of the nature-mystic's inevitable contention.

"The rounded world is fair to see,
Nine-times folded in mystery:
Though baffled seers cannot impart
The secret of its labouring heart.
Throb thine with Nature's throbbing breast,
And all is clear from east to west.
Spirit that lurks each form within
Beckons to spirit of its kin;
Self-kindled every atom glows,—
And hints the future which it owes."

CHAPTER VIII

THE CHARGE OF ANTHROPOMORPHISM

There are many thinkers who are ready to acknowledge that the contemplation of nature leads to various kinds of emotional and aesthetic experience, but who at the same time deny that the results of such contemplation have any other than a subjective character; they argue that the validity of the results evaporates, so to speak, with the mood which brought them into being. Myths, for example, from this point of view are "simply the objectification of subjective impulses"; and modern sympathy with nature is aesthetic feeling which "breaks free of the fetters laid upon it by mythological thought, constantly to create at its own sovereign pleasure myths which pass with the passing of the end that they have served and give place to other fancies." This "subjective" doctrine will meet us often, and will call for various answers. Let it now be considered in its most general and formidable shape, that to which Wundt has given weighty support in his treatise on the "Facts of the Moral Life." The sentences quoted just above are from those sections of this work which deal with man's aesthetic relation to nature; and it is with their teaching on the subject that this chapter will be chiefly concerned.

Here is a statement which raises a clear issue. The influence of nature, says Wundt, is not immutable. "The same mountains and rivers and forests lie before the modern European that lay before his ancestors thousands of years ago; but the effect which they produce is very different. In this change there is reflected a change in man's aesthetic view of the world, itself connected with a change in his moral apprehension of life." Now every word of this passage may be welcomed by the nature-mystic without his thereby yielding his contention that mountains and rivers and forests have a definite and immanent objective significance of their own. The phenomena of sunrise and sunset, which lay before our European ancestors thousands of years ago, are the same as those which present themselves to the modern astronomer, and yet how differently interpreted! Does the difference imply that the early observer had no objective facts before him, and that modern astronomy has advanced to a freedom which enables it to frame hypotheses at its sovereign will? Such a conclusion is just possible as we meditate on the mutability of many scientific concepts! Still, the conclusion would be regarded as somewhat violent. But if it is allowed that in the latter case, the basis of objective fact gives continuity to the development of astronomic lore, why should the same privilege not be accorded to the objective element in the continuity of mystical lore? As knowledge grows, interpretations become more adequate to the objective facts, but it does not negate them. And Wundt himself allows that "it is from the mythological form of the feeling (for nature), which reaches back to the first beginnings of human civilisation, that the aesthetic feeling for nature with which we are ourselves familiar has been slowly and gradually evolved." How could such continuity be secured without some basis in the world of fact?

And the basis in fact is surely easy of discovery. Man is not a solitary being, suspended between earth and heaven. On the contrary, he is related to all below him and all that is above him by ties which enter into the very fibre of his being. He is himself a child of nature, nurtured on the bosom of Mother Earth and raising his eyes to the height of the Empyrean. Evolution, whatever it may be, is a cosmic process—and man is a link in a chain, or rather, a living member of a living universe. For an evolutionist to argue man's relation to his physical environment to be external in its physical aspects would be deemed arrant folly. Is it less foolish for an evolutionist to isolate man's emotions, feelings, and thoughts?

"In proportion" (says Wundt) "as nature lost her immediate and living reality" (by the passing of mythology) "did the human mind possess itself of her, to find its own subjective states reflected in her features." Much obviously turns on the implications of the word "reflected." We are led to hope much when he speaks of "the kinship of the emotions set up by certain phenomena of nature with moods arising from within"—but he empties his statement of mystic meaning by adding, "at the mind's own instance." "Nature" (says Auerbach in plainer terms)" has no moods, they belong to man alone." Tennyson gives expression to this view (not on his own behalf!):

"all the phantom, Nature, stands,
With all the music in her tone
A hollow echo of my own—
A hollow form with empty hands."

But surely all this negation of moods in nature, this determination to empty natural phenomena of all definite human significance, is invalidated by one very simple consideration. There must be some correspondence between cause and effect. When certain moods are stimulated by certain physical phenomena, there must be some sort of real causation. It is not any scene that can harmonise with or foster any mood. The range of variety in the effects produced by mountains, rivers, sunsets, and the rest, is admittedly great, but it is not chaotic. The nature-mystic admits variety, nay, rejoices in it, but he postulates an equivalent variety of influences immanent in the phenomena. Of course Auerbach is right if by mood in nature he means an experience similar to that of the human observer: but he is wrong if he implies that the mood is wholly a subjective creation, and that the object, or group of objects, which stimulates the mood has no quality or power which corresponds to, or is essentially connected with, the mood.

Turner's famous "Fighting Téméraire" combines into an exquisite whole a group of human moods and natural phenomena. Was his choice of phenomena determined by purely subjective considerations? A veteran warship is being towed by a little steamer to her last berth. The human interest is intense. The problem is to give it a fitting and noble setting. Study the nature-setting which the artist has chosen for his theme—the wealth of glowing, but gently subdued colour—the sun setting, like the old ship, in mellow glory—the crescent moon that speaks of the birth of a new economic era—the cool mists stealing up, precursors of the night when work is done—how marvellously all these tone with the general sentiment. Shall it be maintained that they are arbitrary conventions, mere fanciful products of the association of ideas? Armed with triple brass must be the breast of the critic who could uphold such a view. For the common heart of humanity repudiates it, and intuitively feels that in such a picture there is more than a display of artistic skill embodying subtle symbols—it feels that there is a blending of elements which share a common spiritual nature.

The same conclusion is reached when the matter is brought to the test of science and philosophy. Science, in its own domain, is every whit as anthropomorphic as Nature Mysticism—and inevitably so if it is to exist at all; for it rests upon the assumption that the behaviour of external objects is in harmony with the workings of human reason. In other words, it postulates a vital relationship between man's inner nature and the inner nature of his material environment. Human reason goes out into nature expecting to find there something akin to itself, and is not disappointed of its hope. Man's conceptions of this kinship were at first, like all his other conceptions, crude and confused; but as his experience widened and ripened, his outlook became more adequate to the infinite complexity and variety of the phenomena with which he has to deal. And throughout, both in the lower and in the higher stages of intellectual development, the same truth unchangingly asserts itself, that man is a microcosm. His reason proves it by finding itself in the macrocosm. And what holds good of the imperfect and recently developed rational faculties holds good even more substantially of the fundamental instincts and emotions, and of intuitions and spiritual promptings.

The scientist of a materialistic bent may here object that as the sphere of human knowledge extends it becomes increasingly evident that all the operations in the universe are under the sway of inexorable laws. The issues thus raised are obviously too large to be discussed at any length in the present context. But two observations of a general character will serve to indicate that there are weighty counter-considerations. The first is that the human heart rebels against the conception of a mechanically determined universe while conceiving itself a product of, or integral part of, that universe. That is to say, we reject the strange theory of a mechanical universe rebelling against itself! Some of the inexorable laws must, to say the least, be of a very different character from that which the scientist postulates! The second consideration is almost a corollary of the first, but also occupies new ground. These "laws" which are so indefatigably hurled at us—what are they? Who can say? Even in their simplest manifestations they pass out of our ken. The most fundamental of them all, from the scientific point of view—the law of the conservation of energy—is now being openly questioned. Much more is there uncertainty as to the laws of life, and the obscure trends and impulses grouped under the head of evolution. So strongly does the stream of criticism bear upon the foundations of the house of the physical scientist, that the old temptation to hasty, and sometimes arrogant, dogmatism is rapidly disappearing. The knowledge of "laws" still leaves, and ever will leave, ample breathing room for the poet, the artist, the nature-mystic, and the soul that loves.

There is, however, another aspect of the charge of anthropomorphism—one which is more difficult to deal with because it affects at times the nature-mystic himself. In attempting to deal with it, it will be well to let representative thinkers put their own case. Jefferies, for example, writes thus: "There is nothing human in nature. The earth, though loved so dearly, would let me perish on the ground, and neither bring forth food nor water. Burning in the sky, the great sun, of whose company I have been so fond, would merely burn on and make no motion to assist me. . . . As for the sea, it offers us salt water which we cannot drink. The trees care nothing for us; the hill I visited so often in days gone by has not missed me. . . . There is nothing human in the whole round of nature. All nature, all the universe that we can see, is absolutely indifferent to us, and except to us human life is of no more value than grass."

Now what does the charge, as thus stated, really amount to? There is no implication that nature is hostile, as some (perhaps including Huxley) would have us think. There is simply a feeling that nature is remote from human modes of experience, indifferent to human interests. And it would be puerile to dispute the rightness of this impression so long as the standpoint of the individual human being is adopted. The individual man is a centre of self-consciousness in a peculiar sense. He has numberless and interminable particular wants, hopes, fears, pleasures, pains. Whereas, the infra-human objects in nature have not attained to his particular mode of consciousness: theirs differs from his in degree, perchance in kind. A tree, a cloud, a mountain, a wave—these cannot enter into what we call "personal" relations with each other or with human beings. But this is not to say that they may not possess a consciousness, which though different from man's consciousness, is yet akin to it and linked to it. Nay, the nature-mystic's experiences, as well as the metaphysician's speculations, declare that the linking up must be regarded as a fact. And when we examine more carefully what Jefferies says, we find that he in no way disputes this fact. How could it be, with his vivid sense of communion with forms of being still more remote from the human than the sea-monsters he names? What oppressed him was a feeling of strangeness. In other words, nature was "remote" for him because he felt he did not understand it well enough.

Further discussion of the important issues thus raised will be postponed until certain forms of modern animism come under review. One or two preliminary observations, however, will be in place at this earlier stage. It is wise, for example, not to forget the limitations of our knowledge. A platitude! Yes—but one which even the greatest thinkers are apt to lose sight of, with consequent tendency to hasty generalisation and undue neglect of deep-seated instincts and intuitions. The discovery of some new cosmic law may change the whole face of nature, and set in a new light its apparent remoteness or indifference. Again, as has just been shown, natural phenomena are in definite relationship to human reason. They are comprehensible—therefore not alien. By their aid we can organise our conduct, and even our ideals—therefore they are factors in our self-realisation. Thus, underlying their seeming indifference, it is possible even now to trace their beneficent influences in the evolutionary process. And since they embody reason, beauty, and goodness, we can afford to await in patience the solution of many problems which trouble us, and surrender ourselves trustfully to the calm, resistless forces which are weaving the web of cosmic destinies.

A fine example of the trustful attitude is found in an article of Lord Dunraven's describing his life in the woods of New Brunswick: "The earth sleeps. A silence that can be felt has fallen over the woods. The stars begin to fade. A softer and stronger light wells up and flows over the scene as the broad moon slowly floats above the tree tops. . . . The tree trunks stand out distinct in the lessening gloom; the dark pine boughs overhead seem to stoop caressingly towards you. Amid a stillness that is terrifying, man is not afraid. Surrounded by a majesty that is appalling, he shrinks not nor is he dismayed. In a scene of utter loneliness he feels himself not to be alone. A sense of companionship, a sensation of satisfaction, creep over him. He feels at one with Nature, at rest in her strong protecting arms."

There is no need, then, to be afraid of a charge of anthropomorphism, if only our conceptions of nature do not lag behind our clear knowledge of its forms and forces. Man, being what he is, is, of course, compelled to think as man and to speak as man; he cannot jump off his own shadow. But since he is himself part and parcel of the cosmos, his thinking and speaking are within, not external to, the material cosmos. So completely is he within, that his knowledge of himself comes to him only by seeing himself reflected in the greater whole. And thus, provided we are true to the highest principles we have attained, we shall be safer when we look out on nature with the analogy of human agency in our mind, than when we regard its course as alien and indifferent. In other words, Nature is not merely an AEolian harp which re-echoes tones given out by the human soul—though that would be much!—but an indispensable agent in producing them. The action is reciprocal, just because man and his external world interpenetrate at every point, and are united organically in a common life.

CHAPTER IX

THE IMMANENT IDEA

So much by way of direct answer to the formidable attack upon the nature-mystic's position. In turning to more constructive work, which will furnish many indirect answers, it will be necessary to take another brief but exhilarating plunge into metaphysics.

We found that external objects somehow, through sensations, obtain admission into the mind, and become part of its possessions in the form of experience. Intuition of various grades is at the base of all mental development. Reflective thought goes to work on the material thus provided, and weaves certain portions of it into the structure of systematised knowledge. Much of it, however, never emerges into clear consciousness—it is felt rather than known—sometimes not even felt, though it influences the mind, affects its mood or tone, and largely moulds its character and the products of its more conscious processes. Intuition thus contains implicitly what reflection and reason strive to render explicit.

It will be remembered that, in the first chapter, the metaphysical theory broadly adopted was that which may be called Ideal-Realism. The distinctive teaching is that while Materialism stops short at external objects which can resist, and while Subjective Idealism stops short at the perceiving mind, Ideal-Realism affirms the reality of objects and perceiving mind alike, but regards them as mutually dependent, and as fused in the activity of consciousness. Can the conclusions just summed up and the metaphysical theory adopted be brought into helpful connection?

Yes, if the human mind and the external world are made of the same stuff—if the mind is invisible nature, and nature visible mind. For Materialism cannot bridge the gap between matter and consciousness; Subjective Idealism can never move out into a real world. But if nature and mind are genuinely akin, as the nature-mystic holds, there is no gap to bridge, no mind condemned to hopeless isolation. Nature is then seen to be a manifestation of the same mental factors which we discover when we analyse our inner experience—namely, consciousness, feeling, will, and reason. The nature-mystic's communion with the external world takes its place as a valid mode of realising the essential sameness of all forms of existences and of all cosmic activities. Science is another such valid mode, art another, philosophy another, religion yet another—none of them ultimately antagonistic, but mutually supplementary. Some mystics will say that the union of man with nature is actually at any moment complete, but has to be brought into the light of conscious experience. Other mystics, who hold dualistic, pluralistic, or pragmatic views, will maintain that the union may assume ever new forms and develop ever new potentialities. But such differences are subsidiary, and cannot obscure the fundamental doctrine on which all consistent nature-mystics must be agreed, that man and nature are essentially manifestations of the same Reality.

It is deeply significant to note that, at the very dawn of reflective thought, a conviction of the essential sameness of all existence seized upon the minds of the fathers of Western philosophy, and dominated their speculations. The teaching of these bold pioneers was inevitably coloured and limited by their social environment; but it was also so shot through with flashes of intuition and acute reasonings, that it anticipated many of the latest developments of modern research. A study of its main features will occupy us at a later stage, when we come to deal with certain of nature's most striking phenomena. The simple fact is here emphasised that the earliest effort of human reflective thought was to discover the Welt-stoff—the substance which underlies all modes and forms of existence, and that man was regarded as an integral and organic part of the whole.

Greek philosophy, which started with these crude, but brilliant speculations, had developed a wonderful variety and subtlety, when Plato, animated by the same desire to discover the Ground of things, introduced his doctrine of Ideas. He held that bodies are not, in themselves, the true reality; they are manifestations of something else. Reality, for him, is a system of real thoughts which he calls Ideas, and the world of objects gets its reality by participating in them or by copying them. The senses, under such conditions, cleave to the copies, whereas the mind, in thinking by general ideas, apprehends the true reality. These ideas must not be regarded as mere products of the mind, but as real existences, which, when manifested under conditions of time and space, multiply themselves in innumerable objects. In fact, so real are they that without them there would be no objects at all.

Schopenhauer adopted this doctrine of Ideas, and brought it into connection with his characteristic theory of Will as the ultimate Ground. The Ideas, for him, represent definite forms of existence, manifested in individual things and beings. There are thus, he said, Ideas of the simple elementary forces of nature, such as gravity and impenetrability; there are Ideas of the different forms of individual things; and there are Ideas of the different species of organic beings, including man. He followed Plato in refusing any true reality to individual objects and separated the Idea from its sensuous form. "By Idea, then" (he writes), "I understand every definite and fixed grade of the objectification of will, so far as it is a thing-in-itself, and therefore has no multiplicity. These grades are related to individual things as their eternal forms or prototypes." Hence, the world known to the senses could be nothing other than mere phenomenal appearance.

Now it is manifestly an enormous stride in the direction of Nature Mysticism to recognise in material objects a factor, or element, which is akin to the highest activities of the human mind. But, as already stated, in expounding the view known as Ideal-Realism, the nature-mystic cannot be content to stop here. Nor indeed was Schopenhauer consistent in stopping here. If he had been faithful to his conception of Will as the Ground of all existence, he could not well have denied some degree of reality to objects in their own right. This particular tree, this particular table, this particular cloud—what are they, each in its individual capacity, but objectifications of will?—therefore real! Each individual object is unique, and fills a place of its own in the totality of objects—each is related to all the rest in particular and defined manners and degrees—each exhibits a special kind of behaviour in a special environment. Why, then, deny to each individual thing its own grade and degree of reality?

Thus there is in each object an immanent idea; but this is fused with the sensuous form, and presents itself to conscious human thought as an objective manifestation of the Real. There is an organic interpenetration of the sensuous and the spiritual; and it is by virtue of this interpenetration that the human reason can go out into the external world and find itself there. As Emerson well puts it—"Nature is the incarnation of thought, and turns to a thought again, as ice becomes water and gas. The world is mind precipitated, and the volatile essence is for ever escaping again into the state of free thought. Hence the virtue and pungency of the influence on the mind, of natural objects, whether inorganic or organised."

The nature-mystic is not without authoritative support, even on the Idealist side, in his demand that individual objects shall be allowed some grade and measure of reality. Spinoza, for instance, allows that each individual thing is a genuine part of the total Idea. Hegel also grants to individual things a certain "self-reference," which constitutes them real existences. The nature-mystic, therefore, may be of good cheer in asserting that even the most transient phenomenon not only "participates" in an immanent Idea, but embodies it, gives it a concrete form and place. He thus substantiates his claim that communion with nature is communion with the Ground of things.

CHAPTER X

ANIMISM, ANCIENT AND MODERN

After this metaphysical bath we return invigorated to the world of concrete experience dear alike to the common-sense thinker and the modern investigator. Do the facts of life, as ordinarily presented, or as systematised in reflection, at all point in the direction of the doctrine of immanent ideas? It will be seen that this question admits of an affirmative answer. But the term "idea" must be taken as embracing psychic existence in its entirety—that is to say, feeling and will, as well as reason. The dry bones of reason must be clothed with flesh and blood. The appeal is to actual experience. Let Walt Whitman give us his. "Doubtless there comes a time when one feels through his whole being, and pronouncedly the emotional part, that identity between himself subjectively and Nature objectively which Schelling and Fichte are so fond of pressing. How it is I know not, but I often realise a presence here—in clear moods I am certain of it, and neither chemistry nor reasoning, nor aesthetics will give the least explanation."

Walt Whitman mentions Fechner. Here is James's masterly summary of Fechner's general view in this regard. "The original sin, according to Fechner, of both our popular and our scientific thinking, is our inveterate habit of regarding the spiritual not as the rule but as an exception in the midst of nature. Instead of believing our life to be fed at the breasts of the greater life, our individuality to be sustained by the greater individuality, which must necessarily have more consciousness and more independence than all that it brings forth, we habitually treat whatever lies outside of our life as so much slag and ashes of life only; or if we believe in a Divine Spirit, we fancy him on the one side as bodiless and nature as soulless on the other. What comfort or peace, Fechner asks, can come from such a doctrine? The flowers wither at its breath, the stars turn into stone; our own body grows unworthy of our spirit and sinks into a tenement for carnal senses only. The book of nature turns into a volume on mechanics, in which whatever has life is treated as a sort of anomaly; a great chasm of separation yawns between us and all that is higher than ourselves, and God becomes a nest of thin abstractions."

It is sufficiently well known that primitive man did not indulge in these "thin" views of nature. He interpreted the events and changes around him on the analogy of human activities; he looked upon them as manifestations of living wills. And indeed how could he do otherwise? For as yet he knew of no mode of activity other than his own. At first those objects and happenings were singled out which were of most practical interest, or which most distinctly forced themselves upon the attention. The beast of prey which threatened his life, the noisy brook, the roaring waves, the whisperings and cracklings in the woods—all argued the presence of life and will. So too with mountains, avalanches, sun, moon, stars, clouds, caves, fire, light, dark, life, death. So more especially with the storm which sweeps across the land, the thunder which shakes the solid earth, and the lightning which flashes from the one side of heaven to the other. Such were the phenomena on which his intellect worked, and in which he discovered all manner of useful or harmful causal relations. Such were the phenomena which produced in him emotions of awe and terror, joy and delight. To all of them he ascribed mental life like unto his own. Indeed it was only by such a view that he could at all understand them, or bring himself into living connection with them.

From these primitive times onward, each century in the history of civilisation has brought a wider outlook. But the original tendency to animism has persisted and still persists. It has behind it an undying impulse. It manifests its vitality, not only among the uninstructed masses, but in the most select ranks of scientists and philosophers. And thus it is not too much to say that the idea of a universal life in nature is as firmly rooted to-day as it was in the dawn of man's intellectual development. The form in which the idea has been presented has changed with the ages. Mythology succeeded animism, and has in turn yielded to many curious and vanished theories, polytheistic, gnostic, pantheistic, and the rest. Now, the belief in distinct beings behind natural phenomena has virtually disappeared. Not so the belief in some form of universal life or consciousness—of which belief representative types will be given directly.

Of the persistence of the mental attitude in the modern child, Ruskin gives a charming example, in his "Ethics of the Dust." "One morning after Alice had gone, Dotty was very sad and restless when she got up; and went about, looking into all the corners, as if she would find Alice in them, and at last she came to me, and said, 'Is Alie gone over the great sea?' And I said, 'Yes, she is gone over the great deep sea, but she will come back again some day.' Then Dotty looked round the room; and I had just poured some water out into the basin; and Dotty ran to it, and got up on a chair, and dashed her hand through the water, again and again; and cried, 'Oh, deep, deep sea! Send little Alice back to me.'" On this, Ruskin remarks—"The whole heart of Greek mythology is in that; the idea of a personal being in the elemental power; of its being moved by prayer; and of its presence everywhere, making the broken diffusion of the element sacred." It would seem that Dotty did not definitely personify the element, but was rather in the animistic stage. The identifying of the natural element or object with a definite personality is a further step taken, as Ruskin says, by the Greeks preeminently. But the beauty and the suggestive quality of the incident remain, whichever view be taken.

A still more deeply suggestive example is found in Wordsworth's description of a boyish night adventure of his on Esthwaite Lake. For it shows the inner workings of a mind impressed by specially striking natural objects, and by the obscurely realised powers which they dimly manifest.

"I dipped my oars into the silent lake,
And as I rose upon the stroke my boat
Wont heaving through the waters like a swan;—
When, from behind that craggy steep till then
The horizon's bound, a huge peak, black and huge,
As if with voluntary power instinct
Upreared its head. I struck and struck again;
And, growing still in stature, the grim shape
Towered up between me and the stars, and still,
For so it seemed, with purpose of its own,
And measured motion like a living thing,
Strode after me. With trembling oar I turned,
And through the silent waters made my way
Back to the covert of the willow-tree;
There in her mooring-place I left my bark,
And through the meadows homeward went, in grave
And serious mood. But after I had seen
That spectacle, for many days my brain
Worked with a dim and undetermined sense
Of unknown modes of being."

There we have revealed to us the soul of animism whether ancient or modern!

The older animism was crude and uncritical. In proportion as men learnt to reflect upon their experience, it was bound to be modified, and to submit to reactionary influences. Such was the case at the very beginning of philosophical and scientific enquiry—and such was the case also at the opening of the "modern" era. Speaking generally, it may be said that as knowledge of natural law extended, the idea of mental activities in external nature was ousted. Mechanical views of the universe gradually prevailed, and reached a passing climax in Descartes' contention that even animals are automata!

"A passing climax"—for worse was to come. Man himself was to be brought under the remorseless sway of physics interpreted by mathematics. The Homme Machine idea found stalwart supporters, and gained many adherents. All forms of animism seemed to be overwhelmed once for all. The nature-mystic appeared to be an idle dreamer or a deluded simpleton. Nor is the course of such exaggerations yet ended. In the pages of the "Nineteenth Century," Huxley could seriously propound as a thesis for discussion the question—"Are animals automata?" And books with such titles as "The Human Machine" have still considerable circulation.

But just as criticism undermined the immaturities and exaggerations of the older animism, so is it undermining the more dangerous arrogance of an exaggerated and soulless materialism. Speculation is now trending back to a critical animism, and, enriched by all that physical science has had to give, is opening out new world-views of transcendent interest. The nature-mystic is coming into his own again. It must be his care to keep abreast of thought and discovery, and so avoid that tendency to exaggeration, and even fanaticism, which has, in the past, so greatly damaged the cause of Mysticism at large.

The animistic theory is now being propounded thus. Why should not all transfers of energy, whether in living or non-living bodies, be accompanied by a "somewhat" that is akin to man's mental life? The arguments in favour of such a view are numerous, many-sided, and cumulative. The hypothesis of evolution gives them keen edge and gathering force. Behind the cosmic process men feel there must be a creative power, an animating impulse. The struggle upwards must mean something. Mechanism is but a mode of working—its Ground is soul, or spirit.

Thus a new day is dawning for a soundly critical animism. It is realised that to formulate "laws" in accordance with which certain modes of happening take place is not to pierce to the heart of things, but to rest on the surface. Mechanism explains nothing and leaves us poor indeed! Whereas, the universe is a majestic manifestation of Becoming—of a veritable development of life.

The line between organic and inorganic is fading more and more from the minds of investigators. Protoplasm, for instance, mingles together mechanical, chemical, and vital in a fused whole, which it passes the wit of man to analyse. The connection between body and soul is similarly found to defy the old distinctions between matter and mind. Clearly a universal life is pulsating in the whole; genuine impulses, not mechanical stresses and strains, are the causes of the upward sweep into fuller consciousness and richer complexity of experience. The old conception of a world soul is achieving a new lease of life, and is dowering science with the human interest and the mystic glow it so sorely lacks.

CHAPTER XI

WILL AND CONSCIOUSNESS IN NATURE

The idea that inorganic nature is not merely informed by reason, but is also possessed of will and consciousness, will strike many serious students as bizarre and fanciful. There is an enormous amount of initial prejudice still to be overcome before it can secure a fair general hearing. It will therefore be advisable to pass in review the teachings of certain modern thinkers, of recognised authority, who have espoused and openly advocated this bizarre idea. And with a view to insuring further confidence, the ipsissima verba of these authorities will be freely quoted, where there may be fear of misunderstanding or misrepresentation. The review will be confined to modern thinkers, because the views of the ancients in this regard, though frequently of intense interest, will not carry weight in a matter which so largely depends upon recent research and speculation.

Leibniz profoundly influenced the course of what we may term "animistic" thought by his doctrine of monads. Whereas Descartes had defined substance as extension, Leibniz conceived it as activity, or active force, and as divided up into an infinite number and variety of individual centres, each with its own force or life, and, up to a certain point, each with its own consciousness. All beings are thus essentially akin, but differ in the grades of consciousness to which they attain. But since consciousness depends on organisation, and since organisation is constantly developing, there is continuous progress. Each individual monad develops from within by virtue of a spiritual element which it possesses—that is to say, not mechanically, but from an internal principle, implying sensation and desire. These monads, when looked at from without, are grouped together into various extended objects. If we ask Leibniz how such inwardly developing centres are combined together into a universe, his reply is that God has so ordered things that each monad develops in definite relation to all the rest; they all keep time, like clocks with different works, springs, pendulums, but regulated to mark simultaneously each period of time as it passes. This is the famous theory of pre-established harmony.

This doctrine grants the nature-mystic all he needs, but in an artificial way which fails to carry conviction. The universe is split up into isolated units which have no real connection with each other save through ideas in the mind of God. Communion with nature, however, should be more direct and more organic than that effected by a pre-established harmony. Is it possible to retain the strong points of the theory while securing organic interpenetration of all modes of existence? Lotze, for one, deemed it possible. Here is an interesting and typical passage from his "Philosophy of Religion." "If it is once held conceivable that a single supreme intelligence may exert an influence on the reciprocal relations of the elements of the world, then similar intelligence may also be imagined as immediately active in all these individual elements themselves; and instead of conceiving them as controlled merely by blindly operative forces, they may be imagined as animated spiritual beings, who strive after certain states, and offer resistance to certain other states. In such case there may be imagined the gradual origin of ever more perfect relations, from the reciprocal action of these elements, almost like the reciprocal action of a human society; and that too without necessarily arriving at the assumption to which we are here inclined, of a single, supreme, intelligent Being. Our reasoning issues rather in a sort of polytheistic or pantheistic conception, and that too in quite tolerable agreement with experience."

Lotze, then, conceives the monads to be organically related, and so combined into one world. He himself inclines to regard them as all dependent upon one supreme Being. But it is to be carefully observed that he does not negative the pluralist hypothesis as inconceivable or impracticable. Indeed, a little later in the same context, he allows that "a multiplicity of beings who share with each other in the creation and control of the world" is more in harmony with the immediate impressions of experience than "the hasty assumption of one only supreme wisdom, from which as their source the imperfections of the world, that in fact are manifest to us, are much more difficult to comprehend." Lotze may thus be summoned as a supporter of the contention (urged in an earlier chapter) that the Pluralist may be a genuine mystic. Interpenetration and co-operation may supply the place of the metaphysical unity at which the Absolutists aim. But the main point here is, that Lotze conceives the universe as organically and spiritually related in all its parts. It all shares in a common life.

Of a monadistic character, also, are the two closely related views known as the Mind-Dust theory, and the Mind-Stuff theory. The former postulates particles or atoms of mind, distinct from material atoms, but, like them, pervading all nature, and, under certain conditions, combining to form conscious mind. The latter does not thus separate mind and matter, but assumes that primordial units of mind-stuff sum themselves together and engender higher and more complex states of mind, and themselves constitute what appears to us as matter. James in his larger Psychology keenly criticised this "psychic monadism," and has in his Oxford Lectures on a "Pluralistic Universe," substantially modified his criticism. It is not necessary to enter into further detail, but to grasp the fact that such modern scientists as Clifford inclined to see in the world, at every point, a manifestation of some grade of consciousness, and therefore of kinship. The noted French philosopher, Renouvier, has also resuscitated the monadistic theory in a form more closely allied to that of Leibniz.

Discussion of the merits and demerits of these various views is not now in question, but only their value as evidence of the trend towards a critical animism. The inadequacy of the mechanical view came home even to a mathematician like Clifford!

We turn to a very different form of speculation, yet one equally favourable to the essential contention of the nature-mystic—that of Schopenhauer, a philosopher whose system is attracting closer and keener attention as the years pass by. Certain of his views have been cursorily mentioned in what has preceded, and will find further mention in what is to follow. But here, the aim is to focus attention on his fundamental doctrine, that the Ground of all existence is Will. His line of argument in arriving at this conclusion is briefly to be stated thus. The nature of things-in-themselves would remain an eternal secret to us, were it not that we are able to approach it, not by knowledge of external phenomena, but by inner experience. Every knowing being is a part of nature, and it is in his own self-consciousness that a door stands open for him through which he can approach nature. That which makes itself most immediately known within himself is will; and in this will is to be found the Welt-stoff. Let Schopenhauer speak for himself. "Whoever, I say, has with me gained this conviction . . . will recognise this will of which we are speaking, not only in those phenomenal existences which exactly resemble his own, in men and animals, as their inmost nature, but the course of reflection will lead him to recognise the force which germinates and vegetates in the plant, and indeed the force through which the crystal is formed, that by which the magnet turns to the North Pole, the force whose shock he experiences from the contact of two different kinds of metal, the force which appears in the elective affinities of matter as repulsion and attraction, decomposition and combination, and, lastly, even gravitation, which acts so powerfully throughout matter, draws the stone to the earth and the earth to the sun—all these, I say, he will recognise as different only in their phenomenal existence, but in their inner nature as identical, as that which is directly known to him so intimately and so much better than anything else, and which in its most distinct manifestation is called will."

Here again we have standing ground for the creed and the experiences of the nature-mystic. All forms and modes of existence are akin, and differ only in their phenomenal conditions. Whether Schopenhauer has not laid too exclusive an emphasis on will; whether he has not unnecessarily chosen the lowest types of will as primitive—these are questions to be discussed elsewhere. Enough that we have in this theory a definite return to critical animism. He holds the universe to be throughout of the same "stuff," and that stuff is psychic or spiritual. Body and soul, matter and spirit, are but different aspects of the same underlying Reality.

Nevertheless, one question does press upon the nature-mystic. Is the will to be conscious of its activities? Schopenhauer's Ground-will is a blindly heaving desire. If his contention be granted, Nature Mysticism will be shorn of its true glory. Communion with nature, though it rest on passive intuition, must somehow be associated with consciousness, if it is to be that which we best know. That is to say, nature's self-activity must be analogous to our own throughout—analogous, not identical. And such a conclusion commends itself to a thinker as careful and scientific as Stout, who in his "Manual of Psychology" writes as follows: "The individual consciousness, as we know it, must be regarded as a payment of a wider whole, by which its origin and its changes are determined. As the brain forms only a fragmentary portion of the total system of natural phenomena, so we must assume the stream of individual consciousness to be in like manner part of an immaterial system. We must further assume that this immaterial system in its totality is related to nervous processes taking place in the cortex of the brain."

So, too, James, in his "Varieties of Religious Experience," declares that "our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness; whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded."

A thinker of a very different type, Royce, in his "World and the Individual," concurs in this idea of a wider, universal consciousness. "We have no right whatever to speak of really unconscious Nature, but only of uncommunicative Nature, or of Nature whose mental processes go on at such different time-rates from ours that we cannot adjust ourselves to a live appreciation of their inward fluency, although our consciousness does make us aware of their presence. . . . Nature is thus a vast conscious process, whose relation to time varies vastly, but whose general characteristics are throughout the same. From this point of view evolution would be a series of processes suggesting to us various degrees and types of conscious processes. The processes, in case of so-called inorganic matter are very remote from us, while in the case of the processes of our fellows we understand them better." Again he calls Nature "a vast realm of finite consciousness of which your own is at once a part and an example."

A thinker of still another type, Paulsen, whose influence in Germany was so marked, and whose death we so lately lamented, was whole-heartedly a sympathiser with Fechner's views. How James also sympathised with them we saw at the beginning of the last chapter. Paulsen, on his own account, writes thus: "Is there a higher, more comprehensive psychical life than that which we experience, just as there is a lower one? Our body embraces the cells as elementary organisms. We assume that in the same way our psychical life embraces the inner life of the elementary forms, embracing in it their conscious and unconscious elements. Our body again is itself part of a higher unity, a member of the total life of our planet, and together with the latter, articulated with a more comprehensive cosmical system, and ultimately articulated with the All. Is our psychical life also articulated with a higher unity, a more comprehensive system of consciousness? Are the separate heavenly bodies, to start with, bearers of a unified inner life? Are the stars, is the earth an animated being? The poets speak of the earth-spirit; is that more than a poetic metaphor? The Greek philosophers, among them Plato and Aristotle, speak of astral spirits; is that more than the last reflection of a dream of childish fancy?"

And thus we have come to the fullness of the nature-mystic's position. Reason, will, feeling, consciousness, below us and above us. As Nägeli, the famous botanist puts it, "the human mind is nothing but the highest development on our earth of the mental processes which universally animate and move nature." To this world-view the child of nature and the philosopher return again and again. Deep calls unto deep. The exaggerated and dehumanising claims of purely physical and mechanical concepts may for a time obscure the intuition by their specious clarity, but the feelings and the wider consciousness in man reassert themselves. The stars of heaven no longer swing as masses of mere physical atoms in a dead universe, they shine in their own right as members in a living whole. Wordsworth speaks for the forms of life beneath us when he exclaims:

"And 'tis my faith that every flower
Enjoys the air it breathes."

Emerson speaks for the realm of the inorganic when he assures that:

"The sun himself shines heartily
And shares the joy he brings."

The great world around us is felt to pulse with inner life and meaning. It is seen, not only as real, not only as informed with reason, but as sentient. The old speculations of Empedocles that love and hate are the motive forces in all things gleams out in a new light. And that sense of oneness with his physical environment which the nature-mystic so often experiences and enjoys is recognised as an inevitable outcome of the facts of existence. Goethe is right:

"Ihr folget falsche Spur;
Denkt nicht, wir scherzon!
Ist nicht der Kern der Natur
Menschen im Herzen."

CHAPTER XII

MYTHOLOGY

The materials are now fairly complete for understanding the rise and development of animism. The untrained primitive intellect was stirred by vague intuitions—stimulated by contact with an external world constituted of essentially the same "stuff" as itself—and struggled to find concrete expression for its experiences. The root idea round which all else grouped itself was that of the agency of indwelling powers like unto man's, but endowed with wider activities, and unhampered by many human limitations. The forms of expression adopted often appear to us to be almost gratuitously absurd; but when we put ourselves as nearly as may be at the primitive point of view, we realise that they were not even illogical. The marvel is that out of the seething chaos of sensations and emotions there could arise the solid structure of even the simplest kinds of conceptual, ordered knowledge.

There are few critics, however, who are not now prepared to put themselves into sympathetic touch with the primitive thinker; but there are still many who hesitate, or refuse, to allow any value to the products of his thinking. These products are too frequently dismissed as the fancies and babblings of ages in which real knowledge was not as yet a practicable achievement. Such an estimate is as unfair as it is unphilosophical. It disregards the part played by intuition, and it is blind to the germs of truth which were destined to ripen into noble fruit. Mother Earth, with air and sunshine, and starry heaven above, nurtured men's thoughts and souls as well as their bodies.

There is more than an analogy between the childhood of the race and the childhood of the individual. And just as the child plunges us at times, by questions, into problems of the deepest import, so is it with unexpected flashes of insight preserved for us in the records, written or unwritten, of the earliest workings of the human mind. "The soul of man" (says Caird), "even at its worst, is a wonderful instrument for the world to play on; and in the vicissitudes of life, it cannot avoid having its highest chords at times touched, and an occasional note of perfect music drawn from it, as by a wandering hand on the strings."

It is remarkable how, in spite of the enormous advances made by civilised thought, our concepts and hypotheses, not excepting those deemed most fundamental, are being constantly modified. How much more would change prevail in ages when structured knowledge had hardly come into existence. But whether the pace of change be slow or rapid, the same impelling cause is at work—man's determination to find fuller expression for his intuitional experience. Animism developed into mythology, mythology into gnomic philosophy, and this again became differentiated into science, art, philosophy, and theology. In the earlier stages, the instability of men's imaginings and conceptions was kaleidoscopic; but it was no more governed by wanton fickleness and caprice than is the course of modern thought. The human spirit was striving then, as now, to realise worlds vaguely experienced and dimly surmised. The more imperfect expression was continuously yielding place to the less imperfect—the lower concept continuously yielding place to the higher. And at the base of the whole great movement upwards was sensation, as the simplest mode of intuition—sensation being, in its various forms and developments, the outcome of man's intercourse with an external world that, in its essence, is spiritual like himself.

The main error of animism was its failure to draw distinctions. It tended to look upon nature as equally and fully human in all its parts. It translated its intuitions of kinship into terms of undifferentiated similarity, and thereby entangled itself in hopeless confusions. But by degrees the stubborn facts of existence made their impression, and compelled men to realise that life on the human plane is one thing, and quite another on the plane of external nature. The attempt to absorb the larger truth thus sighted was only partially successful, and gave birth to the wondrous world of mythology. Its chief characteristic was that the will which was at first conceived to be within, or identical with, the object, was separated from the object and accorded a personal, or quasi-personal existence. In other words, the non-human character of external nature was acknowledged, while at the same time the human type of will was preserved. The river, for example, was at first regarded as itself an animated being; then the will it manifests was separated from the material phenomena, and by personification became a river-god who rules the phenomena. So the sun gave rise to the conception of Apollo; and, by a double remove, the lightning became a weapon in the hand of Zeus. There was thus added to man's world of things a second world of spiritual beings who animated and swayed the things. The change was momentous; but it held fast to the original root idea of nature as a manifestation of spiritual powers.

It was inevitable that the mythological system should collapse when once the spontaneous play of imaginative thought gave place to self-conscious, systematising reflection. The mass of incoherent, and often contradictory myths, in which the true was so strangely blended with the false, the beautiful with the ugly or revolting, fell almost by its own weight. The more solid materials it contained were first transmuted into allegories, and then expressed in the language of science and philosophy. The original intuitions, which had been encumbered with degrading superstitions and deadening ceremonies, again declared their power and their persistence, though sometimes under disguises which rendered them hard to recognise.

And very instructive and arresting it is to note how haltingly conscious reflection assimilated the rich store of ideas which spontaneous intuition had seized upon whole ages previously. For instance, Anaxagoras taught that since the world presents itself as an ordered and purposeful whole, the forming force or agency must also be purposeful. Following up this line of thought, and guided by the analogy of human activities, he declared this agency to be Nous, or reason—or, better still, "reason-stuff." This conclusion was rightly deemed to be of profound importance. And yet, when we analyse it, it seems at first sight difficult to see wherein consists its originality. For what else but this had been taught by the age-old animism that had preceded it? And yet all who were fitted to judge hailed the teaching as something radically new. It stirred far-reaching currents in the deep ocean of Greek philosophic thought! How can we explain the apparent anomaly? The fact is we have here a typical instance of the transition from intuition to reflective thought. There is a conscious grasp of promptings dimly felt—a grasp that rendered possible the advance from mythology to science and philosophy. The gain was enormous, and bore abundant fruit; but it should not be allowed to obscure the merit, nor the value, of the primitive intuition on which it was based.

It must be evident that similar examples might be multiplied indefinitely, and certain of them will be adduced when typical nature-myths are under more detailed consideration. It is because of these germ truths enshrined in the ancient myths that so many bygone modes of thought and expression last on into the new order. Ruskin, in genuine mythological style, often used the term "gods," and explains his meaning thus: "By gods, in the plural, I mean the totality of spiritual powers delegated by the Lord of the universe to do in their several heights, or offices, parts of His will respecting man, or the world that man is imprisoned in; not as myself knowing, or in security believing, that there are such, but in meekness accepting the testimony and belief of all ages . . . myself knowing for indisputable fact, that no true happiness exists, nor is any good work ever done by human creatures, but in the sense or imagination of such presences."

The nature-mystic need not be ashamed of mythology. Sympathetically studied, it affords abundant proof of the working of intuition and mystic insight. It enabled multitudes of men, long before science and philosophy became conscious aims, to enter into some of the deepest truths of existence, and to live as members of a vast spiritual hierarchy embracing earth and heaven.

CHAPTER XIII

POETRY AND NATURE MYSTICISM

What a charm the nature deities of Greece and Rome can still exercise! How large the place they still occupy in poetry, art, and general culture! At times some of our moderns are tempted to look back with a very real measure of regret to the golden age of mythology, feeling that in comparison the present is often sadly dull and sordid. Wordsworth's great sonnet gives classical expression to this mood, and rises to a white heat of indignation:

"Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn,—
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn."

It may be said that the poet is carried away by the feeling of the moment. It finds expression, however, more calmly, though no less decidedly, in a less well-known passage:

"O fancy, what an age was that for song!
That age, when not by laws inanimate,
As men believed, the waters were impelled,
The air controlled, the stars their courses held;
But element and orb on acts did wait
Of Powers endued with visible form instinct,
With will, and to their work by passion linked."

Clearly mythology and nature-poetry are closely allied though centuries come between: they breathe the same air though "creeds outworn" have yielded place to deeper faiths. And we are driven to ask—Is poetry in its turn to go?—poetry, at any rate, of the old, simple, direct sort? Reflective reason is asserting itself: critical methods play havoc with the spontaneous creations of imagination. Coleridge, in one of his moods, would almost persuade us so. In his "Piccolomini" Max is conversing with the Countess:

"The intelligible forms of ancient poets,
The fair humanities of old religion,
The power, the beauty and the majesty,
That had their haunts in dale, or piny mountain,
Or forest by slow stream, or pebbly spring,
Or chasms and wat'ry depths; all these have vanished;
They live no longer in the faith of reason."

And yet Coleridge did not allow that the outlook was wholly sad. His young soldier continues:

"But still the heart doth need a language, still
Doth the old instinct bring back the old names."
. . . and even at this day
'Tis Jupiter who brings whate'er is great,
And Venus who brings everything that's fair."

No, poetry is not dead, and never will die. Certain stages in human progress may favour its spontaneity more than others—critical reflection may cloud over the naive and fresh directness of experience—but behind each natural phenomenon is the immanent idea, the phase of cosmic will and consciousness, which science, and logic and critical analysis can never exhaust. The intuition has its rights as well as the syllogism, and will always ultimately assert them. Whereas science reduces the world to mechanism, poetry intuits and struggles to express its inner life; and since this inner life is inexhaustible, poetry is immortal. Emerson seized upon this truth with characteristic keenness of perception allied with feeling.

"For Nature beats in perfect time
And rounds with rhyme her every rune,
Whether she work in land or sea,
Or hide underground her alchemy.
Thou canst not wave thy staff in air,
Or dip thy paddle in the lake,
But it carves the bow of beauty there,
And the ripples in rhymes the oar forsake.
The wood is wiser far than thou;
The wood and the wave each other know
Not unrelated, unaffected,
But to each thought and thing allied
Is perfect Nature's every part,
Rooted in the mighty heart."

And again in his "Ode to Beauty," he rejoices in the

"Olympian bards who sung
Divine Ideas below,
Which always find us young
And always keep us so."

Thank Heaven, we have not yet come to think that the highest form of wisdom is enshrined in the sesquipedalia monstra of chemical formulae, still less in the extreme abstractions of mathematics. Not that such formulae have not a beauty, and even a Mysticism of their own; their harmfulness comes from the exclusiveness of their claims when they are advanced as an adequate description (sometimes explanation!) of existence at large and of life in particular. The biological formulas, based on mathematics, at which Le Dantec, for instance, has arrived, if taken at their author's valuation, and if consistently applied, would make the sublimest poetry to be greater folly than the babble of a child. The nature-mystic may, or may not, allow them a relative value according as he considers them to be valid or invalid abstractions from observed facts; but he knows that the most valid of them are exceedingly limited in their scope and superficial in their bearing: and it remains a standing wonder to him that any trained intellect can fail to realise their miserable inadequacy, in view of the full rich current of living experience.

One of the chief merits of genuine nature-poetry is that it keeps us in close and constant touch with sense experience, and at the same time brings home nature's inner life and meaning. It is not a mere string of metaphors and symbols based on accidental associations of ideas, but an expression and interpretation of definite sensations and intuitions which result from the action of man's physical environment upon his deepest and most delicate faculties. "High art" (says Myers) "is based upon unprovable intuitions; and of all arts it is poetry whose intuitions take the brightest glow, and best illumine the mystery without us from the mystery within."

But more especially, poetry is essentially animistic. It produces its characteristic effect by creating in the mind the sensuous images which best stimulate the mind to grasp the immanent idea, and it presents those images as instinct with life and movement—sometimes it goes so far as to personify them. This is what Matthew Arnold meant when he declared poetry to be "simple, sensuous, passionate." Coleridge has a good illustration (quoted by Nisbet). He observes that the lines:

"Behold yon row of pines that shorn and bowed
Bend from the sea-blast, seen at twilight eve"—

contain little or no poetry if rearranged as a sentence in a book of topography or description of a tour. But the same image, he says, rises into the semblance of poetry if thus conveyed:

"Yon row of black and visionary pines
By twilight glimpse discerned! Mark how they flee
From the fierce sea-blast, all their tresses wild
Streaming before them."

The difference in the two presentations consists in this, that in the second of them there is a suggestion of life and movement which is lacking in the first. But why the different effect upon the mind? Nisbet answers—"the visual and motor centres contribute to the creation of the image"—an answer admirably typical of the fashionable psychology of the day, not necessarily wrong in itself, but so curiously incomplete! Nisbet holds that man himself is a machine, and thus could not easily go farther—especially as his own machinery evidently would not work any farther. The nature-mystic begins at the other end. He holds that even the inorganic world is more than machinery—that it is instinct with life and meaning. When, therefore, life and movement are attributed to seemingly inert or motionless objects, there is a responsive thrill caused by the subconscious play of primitive intuitions that are based on the facts of existence. Spirit realises more vividly than in normal experience that it is in touch with spirit.

Contrast with the psychological dictum the proud claim advanced by Emerson.

"The gods talk in the breath of the woods,
They talk in the shaken pine,
And fill the reach of the old sea-shore
With melody divine.
And the poet who overhears
Some random word they say
Is the fated man of men,
Whom the ages must obey."

There are two claims presented here—one directly, the other indirectly. The direct claim is that there are seers and interpreters who can catch the mystic words that nature utters. The indirect is that the general mass of humanity have the capacity for sharing the experiences of their poet leaders. The one class are endowed to an exceptional degree with receptivity; the other are also receptive, but are dependent on those who can give expression to the intuitions which are, though in varying degrees, a possession common to humanity at large. As Sir Lewis Morris puts it:

"All men are poets if they might but tell
The dim ineffable changes which the sight
Of natural beauty works on them."

He, too, recognises the mediating function of the poet.

"We are dumb,
Save that from finer souls at times may rise
Once in an age, faint inarticulate sounds,
Low halting tones of wonder, such as come
From children looking on the stars, but still
With power to open to the listening ear
The Fair Divine Unknown, and to unseal
Heaven's inner gates before us evermore."

And what is this but to claim for the mass of men, in varying but definite degrees, a capacity for the experiences of the nature-mystic? Poetry and Nature Mysticism are linked together in an imperishable life so long as man is man and the world is the world.

It will have been apparent that in what has been said about the relation of poetry to science, there has been no shadow of hostility to science as such, but only to the exclusive claims so often preferred on its behalf. Let a French philosopher of the day conclude this chapter by a striking statement of the relationship that should exist between these seemingly incompatible modes of mental activity. In a recent number of the "Revue Philosophique," Joussain writes as follows:

"On peut ainsi se demander si le savant, à mesure qu'il tend vers une connaissance plus complète du réel, n'adopte pas, en un certain sens, le point de vue propre au poète. Boileau disait de la physique de Descartes qu'elle avait coupé la gorge à la poésie. La raison en est qu'elle s'en tenait au pur mécanisme et ne definissait la matière que par l'étendue et le mouvement. Mais la physique de Descartes n'a pu subsister. Et, avec la gravitation universelle que Leibniz considérait à juste titre, du point de vue cartésien, comme une qualité occulte, avec les attractions, les répulsions, les affinités chimiques, avec la théorie de l'évolution, la science tend de plus en plus à pénétrer la vie réele des choses. Elle se rapproche, bon gré, mal gré, de la metaphysique et de la poésie, en prenant une conscience plus profonde de la force et du devenir. C'est qu'au fond la pensée humaine est une, quelle que soit la diversité des objets auxquels elle s'applique, art, science, poésie, métaphysique, répondant, chacun à sa façon au même désir, chacun reflétant dans la conscience humaine les multiples aspects de la vie innombrable."

CHAPTER XIV

THE BEAUTIFUL AND THE UGLY

A charge frequently brought against the nature-mystic is that he ignores the dark side of nature, and shuts his eyes to the ugly and repulsive features of the world of external phenomena. If nature can influence man's spiritual development, what (it is asked) can be the effect of its forbidding and revolting aspects? Is the champion of cosmic emotion and of Nature Mysticism prepared to find a place for the ugly in his general scheme? The issue is grave and should not be shirked. It is, moreover, of long standing, having been gripped in its essentials by many thinkers of the old world, more especially by Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus.

Let us begin by examining one or two characteristic statements of the indictment that there are ugly, and even revolting, objects in a world we would fain think fair. Jefferies says of certain creatures captured in the sea: "They have no shape, form, grace, or purpose; they call up a vague sense of chaos which the mind revolts from. . . . They are not inimical of intent towards man, not even the shark; but there the shark is, and that is enough. These miserably hideous things of the sea are not anti-human in the sense of persecution, they are outside, they are ultra and beyond. It is like looking into chaos, and it is vivid because these creatures, interred alive a hundred fathoms deep, are seldom seen; so that the mind sees them as if only that moment they had come into existence. Use has not habituated it to them, so that their anti-human character is at once apparent, and stares at us with glassy eye."

Kingsley, in his "At Last," asks, "Who will call the Puff Adder of the Cape, or the Fer-de-lance, anything but horrible and ugly; not only for the hostility signified, to us at least, by a flat triangular head and heavy jaw, but by the look of malevolence and craft signified, to us at least, by the eye and lip?"

Frederic Harrison puts the case from the more general point of view: "The world is not all radiant and harmonious; it is often savage and chaotic. In thought we can see only the bright, but in hard fact we are brought face to face with the dark side. Waste, ruin, conflict, rot, are about us everywhere. . . . We need as little think this earth all beauty as think it all horror. It is made up of loveliness and ghastliness; of harmony and chaos; of agony, joy, life, death. The nature-worshippers are blind and deaf to the waste and the shrieks which meet the seeker after truth. . . . The poets indeed are the true authors of the beauty and order of nature; for they see it by the eye of genius. And they alone see it. Coldly, literally examined, beauty and horror, order and disorder seem to wage an equal and eternal war."

In considering the substance of these strong statements, characteristic of very different types of mind, we note in the first place that two different problems are to some extent fused—that of the ugly, and that of the morally evil. Of course, it is frequently impossible to separate them; still, for purposes of analysis, the attempt should be made; especially as our present quest is aesthetic rather than ethical.

In the second place it must be remembered that the nature-mystic is by no means a nature-worshipper. His claim of kinship with nature surely implies the contrary! He knows that evil and ugliness (however interpreted) are in man, and he expects therefore to find them permeating the whole.

Confining our attention as far as may be to the aesthetic aspect of the objections raised, let us at once define and face the real issue now before us, namely, the significance for the nature-mystic of what is called "ugliness."

There are certain judgments known as aesthetic—so called because they determine the aesthetic qualities of objects. And it is agreed, with practical unanimity, that they rest much more upon feeling and intuition than upon discursive reason. To this extent they rank as genuine "mystical" modes of experience, and from this point of view have bulked largely in the systems of mystics like Plato and Plotinus. But while claiming them as mystical, it is necessary to note that they possess a characteristic which constitutes them a special class. They imply reference to a standard, or an ideal. The reference need not be made, indeed seldom is made, with any conscious apprehension of the standard; but the reference is none the less there, and a judgment results. The place of reflective reasoning process which characterises the logical judgment is filled by a peculiar thrill which accompanies a feeling of congruence or incongruence, according as the ideal is satisfied or otherwise.

It is in accord with this view of the aesthetic judgment that while, for reason, the outward form and semblance of the object is of subsidiary import, save from the point of view of abstract form and physical quality, for the aesthetic feeling or intuition it is paramount. For example, a botanist, quâ botanist, will reck little of beauty of colour, or curve, or scent—indeed at times his interest in a plant may be in inverse ratio to its beauty. But the lover of flowers, or the poet, or the artist, will fix upon such aesthetic qualities as determining his mood and judgment. Not that the reflective and the aesthetic judgments are antagonistic—they are supplementary, and, when rightly appreciated, they are interdependent; nevertheless, they must not be confused.

The doctrine of Plotinus, the prince of mystics, is very helpful when the problem of the ugly is in debate, and fits in admirably with the considerations just advanced. His theory was that material objects are beautiful in proportion as they share in reason and form. The converse of this proposition is, that objects are ugly in proportion as they lack the capacity for sharing in reason and form. Passing over certain other phases of his doctrine, let us see how far this theory will carry us in answering the question—Is there in nature such a thing as ugliness, in any absolute sense of the term?

Matter, as known to the modern scientist, is universally possessed of form of some kind, and is, moreover, found to share in reason, when tested by its responsiveness, so to speak, to the processes of human ratiocination—or, in other words, by its obedience to natural law. It would seem to follow that there is no object in nature which is absolutely ugly. And the conclusion surely commends itself to common sense. If, in spite of this, certain objects are called "ugly," what is intended? Following up the lead of Plotinus, we seem to be driven to the conception of "degrees of beauty"—of "higher" and "lower" forms of beauty. And the moment the existence of such "degrees" is accepted, the aesthetic horizon is indefinitely extended. The whole problem assumes larger and more generous proportions, especially when viewed in the light of the evolution hypothesis. For where there are degrees, or stages, it is an easy step to conceive of transition from stage to stage. An ugly object is only relatively ugly; and by entering into new relations with its environment may be raised to even higher rank in the aesthetic scale of values. In brief, true progress becomes possible for the whole universe. Herbert Spencer stopped short at progress from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous. It is more interesting, not to say, inspiring, to postulate increase of capacity for sharing in reason and form. The vast process of evolution may then be viewed as an upward sweep into fuller beauty and into correspondingly fuller life.

Of the fact that there is such an upward process, there is abundant and accumulating evidence. The struggle upwards of organic life, culminating so far, in man as we know him—the increasingly complex beauty of natural forms—the haste of nature to conceal her scars—all alike speak of a striving upward. Nay, we are being told that the atoms themselves, so long regarded as ultimates, have been subjected to the evolutionary stress and strain, and have advanced from the simplest forms to higher and more complex symmetries. And in another field, the arts, more particularly painting and the drama, almost demand the recognition of some such principle of progress; for they are constantly and necessarily using elements which in themselves are accounted ugly, for the production of their supremest beauties.

The use of discords in music is singularly suggestive in this regard. There are combinations of musical sounds which, when produced as isolated combinations, are harsh, and even painful. But let them be heralded by other chords, and let them be parted from by suitable resolutions, and they can charm, or thrill, or kindle deep emotion. What does this fact imply? That discords in music, when used with knowledge and mastery, do not take their places as aliens in musical progressions—as insertions of ugliness in a texture of surrounding beauty—but as themselves beautiful. Their aesthetic value is gained by their being linked up in a network of relations which makes them part and parcel of that which is an ordered and rational whole. In short, discords are potential beauties; they have capacity for form and reason.

The ugly, then, is not to be opposed to the beautiful as its contrary, but as standing in the relation to it of the less to the more perfect. There will thus be grades of beauty as there are grades of reality. And mystic intuition will have corresponding grades of dignity and insight. The grand process of evolution is thus revealed as a many-sided whole—the amount of real existence increases in proportion to the increase of capacity for sharing in form and reason; and along with this goes a growth in power to appreciate the ever higher forms of beauty which emerge in the upward-striving universe.

A further thought calls for emphasis. For beings like ourselves, living under conditions which involve so many limitations, a purely aesthetic judgment is practically out of our reach. And on this score also we may venture to tone down the strong expressions used by Jefferies in his estimate of the anti- or ultra-human character of the strange creatures in the sea. Individual likings and dislikings are the resultants of an enormously complex system of impulses, instincts, prejudices, motives, habits, associations, and the rest. Few of these factors appear above the threshold of consciousness, though they are continually and influentially operative. Hence it by no means follows that because a particular object is displeasing or disgusting to one individual, or group of individuals, it will be so to all. So undoubted is the resulting relativity of our aesthetic judgments that Hegel was inclined to hold that below the level of man and art there is no real ugliness at all. "Creatures" (he says) "seem ugly to us whose forms are typical of qualities opposed to vitality in general, or to what we have learnt to regard as their own special or typical form of animate existence. Thus the sloth as wanting in vitality, and the platypus as seeming to combine irreconcilable types, and crocodiles and many kinds of insects, simply, it would appear, because we are not accustomed to consider their forms as adequate expressions of life, are all ugly."

Just as, in music, discords become beautiful by being brought into fitting relations with other parts of an ordered whole, so is it with objects which are usually considered ugly, but which are capable of aesthetic beauty when treated in pictures by masters of their craft. To set them in new and fitting relations of light and shade, of colour and composition, is to transform them. Schopenhauer lays great stress on the transforming power of art. He instances many typical paintings of the Dutch school, simple interiors, homely scenes, fruit, vegetables, the commonest tools and utensils, even dead flesh—all are taken up into material for pictures, and, in their special setting, compel our admiration.

We have in these facts concerning pictorial art, a strong corroboration of the inference from the use of discords in music—the relativity of ugliness, and the possibility of its progressive transformation. But there is a further point to be emphasised, one which music, by reason of its abstractness, could not well enforce, and one which is of profound significance for the nature-mystic. Pictorial art is concerned with the representation of external objects. How explain its transforming power? Schopenhauer has an excellent answer to the question. He says that the artist is endowed with an exceptional measure of intuitive insight. He enjoys a genuine vision of the Idea immanent in the object he reproduces in his particular medium—he fixes attention upon this Idea, isolates it, and reveals much that would otherwise escape notice. The result is that his skill enables others to slip into his mood and share his insight.

It is on some such lines as those tentatively traced in the last few paragraphs that the most hopeful solution of the problem of the ugly must be sought. The heart of the matter is that there is no object in external nature which is absolutely ugly—no object which cannot, even as things are, be transformed to some degree by being set in fitting relation to others—no object which is not capable of progress in its capacity for sharing and manifesting the form and reason towards which the universe is striving. Should there be thinkers who, like Kingsley, cannot quite rid themselves of the feeling that ugliness is an absolute reality—a positive mode of existence over against beauty—they can only take refuge in the wider problem of evil. But care must be exercised, as before observed, to distinguish between moral evil and physical ugliness. To what extent the one may be reflected in the other is a question on which it would not be safe to dogmatise. The main theory, however, stands out clearly, and involves a belief that the material phenomena of the universe, as a grand whole, enjoy a wholesome freedom from positive ugliness. Tennyson's "Ancient Sage" expresses the nature-mystic's hopes concerning the fundamental beauty of the world he loves.

"My son, the world is dark with griefs and graves,
So dark, that men cry out against the Heavens,
Who knows but that the darkness is in man?
The doors of Night may be the gates of Light;
For wert thou born or blind or deaf, and then
Suddenly healed, how wouldst thou glory in all
The splendours and the voices of the world!
And we, the poor earth's dying race, and yet
No phantoms, watching from a phantom shore,
Await the last and largest sense to make
The phantom walls of this illusion fade,
And show us that the world is wholly fair."

CHAPTER XV

NATURE MYSTICISM AND THE RACE

The fundamental postulates and principles of a consistent Nature Mysticism have now been expounded with a fullness sufficient to allow of a soberly enthusiastic study of the detail of our subject. Let it be noted, however, that though a detailed application of general conclusions is henceforth to be the main business, there will be no forsaking of the broadly human standpoint. For it has been shown, more especially in the chapter on poetry, that the nature-mystic does not arrogate to himself any unique place among his fellows, nor seek to enjoy, in esoteric isolation, modes of experience denied to the mass of humanity. Wordsworth, for instance, though a prince among modern mystics, appealed with confidence to his countrymen at large: his "we" was in constant evidence—and an ever-growing multitude of nature-lovers responds to his appeal. That is to say, the faculty of intuition he demands is to be found, in varying degrees, latent at least, if not evolved, in the normal human being. The gifted seer seizes and interprets what his less gifted brother obscurely feels. Can we trace this mystic power of nature on the scale of history at large? If the power is real, it should be possible to recognise its grander workings. Moreover, a wide outlook will help us to avoid exaggerations, preciosities, and fanaticisms.

Here, then, is our starting-point for detailed study. If it be true that all normal members of the race share in varying degrees the faculty of mystic intuition, then nature must have had a moulding effect not only on certain gifted individuals, but on the character and destiny of whole communities, peoples, and empires. As behind the language of the Greeks there were age-long promptings of subconscious metaphysics, so behind the aesthetic and spiritual development of this remarkable people there must have been age-long promptings of subconscious mystical intuitions stimulated by the influences of natural phenomena. The moulding force of the immanent ideas, and of the inner life of things, is, for the race at large, and for certain peoples in particular, continuous, cumulative, massive. True, it takes effect chiefly in the sphere of the subconscious. But he will be a poor student of history who fails to reckon with those subtler forces which, though obscure in their action, often extend so widely and go so deep.

An eloquent evidence of nature's power to mould is to be found in the contrasted characteristics of the great religions. The hardy peoples of northwestern Europe were nurtured under stormy skies, were girt in by stern, avalanche-swept mountains, and struggled strenuously against the hardships of rigorous and lengthy winters. What wonder that they filled their heaven with Sturm und Drang—with titanic conflicts of the gods—and heard it echoing with the whirl of hunting, the riot of feasting, and the clang of battle? Their religion was strenuous as their lives—free and fierce—yet tinged with a melancholy that promised rich developments.

The favoured Greeks of classical times, "ever delicately walking on most pellucid air," or rocked on the isle-strown waters of the sapphire AEgaean, expanded their soul-life in an environment teeming with light and colour, with harmony and form. For them, therefore, Apollo bent his burnished bow and launched his myriad shafts of gold; Aphrodite embodied visions of foam-born beauty; Athene stood forth in panoply of reason and restraint. Nature herself lured them to evolve ideals of law and order, of disciplined thought and perfectly proportioned art. What wonder that, prompted by mystic impulses and visions, they purged their inherited religion of its grosser features, and made it a vehicle for philosophic thought and spiritual aspiration.

Pass to the wandering children of the desert, cradled amid the great silences of space and time, swallowed up of vastness. Above them by day the burning vault of blue, by night the wheeling galaxies—around them the trackless levels of a thirsty land. Such influences sank deep into their souls, and imparted depth and intensity to their views of the source and meaning of that vastness. Nor can we wonder that in such an environment, the premonitions of the spiritual unity of existence, that were stirring in many hearts, found special sustenance.

Let it be clearly understood that in the striking and unmistakable illustrations just adduced, there is no mere question of the influences of physical environment on social organisation or economic development—though these also react in a thousand ways upon ideas and ideals—but a question of moulding spiritual concepts by the direct influence of the ideas and impulses manifested in external nature. Man's soul was in constant, if generally subconscious, communion with his material environment, and his thinking was thereby largely coloured and fashioned. And if the kind and quality of the influence vary from age to age, and from people to people, it is not the less continuously potent. The complexities of modern life, the interminglings of civilisations, tend to obscure its manifestations; science, wrongly pursued, seems hostile to continued vigour. But underneath the play of the cross-currents on the surface, is the resistless swing of the tide.

An illustration of another class is found in Max Müller's brilliant lectures on "Physical Religion," the chief theme of which is the development of Agni, the Vedic god of fire. The starting-point was the sensuous perception of the physical qualities of fire. The Idea and the will immanent in these qualities gradually raised men's thoughts from the material to the spiritual, until the Eastern world attained to what Max Müller calls "a precious line from the Veda"—"He who above the gods was the One God"—composed at least one thousand years before the Christian era. It was not the result of a supernatural revelation, but a natural outcome of man's thoughts guided and moulded by impressions of outward phenomena. That is to say, as Max Müller observes, there was nothing in it artificial—simply that which man could not help saying, being what he was and seeing what he saw.

In the instances just advanced, the broad principle is most assuredly established that nature has a definite and continuous effect upon the development of man's conduct and thought. And as a consequence of this, we may affirm that Wordsworth's experience is true, in its measure, of all normal members of the race who are in touch with nature:

"Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods
And mountains; and of all that we behold
Of this green earth; both what they half create
And what perceive; well pleased to recognise
In nature and the language of the sense,
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being."

Why, even old Dr. Johnson in his Dictionary days would write to his friend Langton, in Lincolnshire: "I shall delight to hear the ocean roar, or see the stars twinkle, in the company of men to whom Nature does not spread her volumes or utter her voice in vain." And let us observe, that the naturalness of his feeling keeps him to the simplest, almost monosyllabic, English!

CHAPTER XVI

THALES

In an earlier chapter mention was made of that truly remarkable group of thinkers who, in the sixth century before the Christian era, made the momentous transition from mythology and tradition to philosophy and science. It was also pointed out that these pioneers, bold as they were, could not shake themselves free from the social and intellectual conditions of their day. And it is precisely this fact of what may be termed contemporary limitations that makes a review of their speculations so valuable to a student of Nature Mysticism. For they lived in times when the old spontaneous nature beliefs were yielding to reflective criticism. Their philosophising took its spring from the fittest products of the mytho-poeic faculty, and thus remained in living contact with the primitive past, while reaching forward, in the spirit of the future, to an ordered knowledge of an ordered whole. The chief object of their search was the Welt-stoff—the substance of the universe—and they were guided in their search by the dominating concepts which had emerged in the long course of the animistic and mythological stages. Certain forms of external existence have impressed themselves upon the general mind, notably those of water, air, and fire; and to these the reflecting mind naturally turned in its earliest efforts to discover the Ground of things. The interest taken by the nature-mystic in this group of thinkers is twofold. Firstly, he finds that in their speculations there is a large element of primitive intuition, embodied in concepts fashioned by the spontaneous play of reflective thought and free imagination. Closeness to nature is thus secured. And secondly, he rejoices in the fact that these speculations, crude and premature as they inevitably were, contained germs of thought and flashes of insight which anticipate the most advanced speculative science and philosophy of the present day. He maintains that here is corroboration of his view of intuition. Nature was the teacher—and it was to intuition that she chiefly addressed herself; and the intellect—keen and fresh, but untrained—was able to seize upon the material presented, and to fix it in concepts and theories which share in nature's universal and unending life.

Water, air, and fire—what an enormous number and variety of natural phenomena range themselves under these heads! If we try to understand why they were singled out in turn, in the search for the Welt-stoff, we shall have penetrated far into the Nature Mysticism of these famous "elements."

Starting, then, with Thales, we ask why he fixed upon water in his attempt (the earliest recorded) to determine the constitution of the universe? What were the properties, qualities, and functions of that "element" which arrested his attention, and governed his crude, but acute and original, speculations? As already remarked, existing cosmological conceptions played an important rôle, more especially that of the great primeval ocean on which the world was supposed to float. This cosmographical ocean and its accompanying myths will be considered in a subsequent chapter. But restricting our view at present to the physical aspects of water, it is not wholly impossible to recover, and sympathise with, his train of reasoning.

Water is wonderfully mobile, incessantly changing, impelled apparently by some inherent principle of movement. Its volatility, also, is very marked; it passes from solid to liquid, and liquid to vapour, and easily reverses the series. More especially would the old-world thinker be struck by the phenomena of the circulation of water. He would see the vapour drawn up by the sun from lake and ocean, seeming to feed the heavenly fires, and returning to earth in the form of rain. He concluded that this must represent the flow of the cosmic process as a whole. Again, in the falling of dew, in the gatherings of mists, and in the welling-up of fountains, the solid materials of the world are apparently passing into a liquid state.

Thales was not the first to note these things. They had been subtly modifying the thoughts of men for untold generations. But he was the first whom we know to have gathered together into a definite theory the vague intuitions which had been so long unconsciously operative. He singled out this mobile element and saw in it the substance of the flux of the world as a whole.

His theory of movement took a wide range. He did not separate the thing moved from the moving force; nor did he draw any distinction between the organic and inorganic—the mechanical and the vital. He regarded all modes of motion as essentially spontaneous and self-determined. Moreover (as Aristotle tells us) he identified this inherent principle of change with what is divine in nature and in the soul. That is to say, the Real, for Thales, is living impulse and continuous process. It is experienced in man's conscious activities, and constitutes the principle of unity in every mode and form of existence.

It is on the organic side of this speculation that Aristotle, probably biased by his biological studies, chiefly dwells. Is it possible to trace the grounds of which Thales based his wider induction? Aristotle helps us. He supposes his predecessor to have noted that water and life seem to be inseparable, and that moisture is necessary to the germination and development of all known organisms. It was natural to conclude that the principle of life is in the water—the conclusion of the reason also harmonising with the intuition stimulated by movement. Nor was the inference altogether unwarranted. Put into historical perspective, it still retains its force and value. The latest biological authorities tell us that all branches of the zoological family tree were formed on the moist shores of large water basins, and that there is no form of life, not only terrestrial, but even of the deep seas which has not passed through a littoral phase. In other words, it is still allowable to hold that the "moist," as Thales generally called his primal element, contains one of the secrets of life. So close is the earliest to the latest pronouncement on the origin of life on the globe!

Reviewing this brief exposition of the leading doctrine of an ancient speculation, what bearing has it on the principles of Nature Mysticism as laid down in preceding chapters? Certain fairly obvious ones. Thales was guided by impressions received from the qualities, behaviour, and functions of water; and they led him to attribute a plastic life to matter. It would be modernising him too severely to style him a hylozoist. But his ascription of a soul to the magnet and to amber carries him far on the way to that metaphysical world-view. Deeply suggestive also is the saying which, if not rightly attributed to him, is at least characteristic of his school—"All things are full of the gods." We may therefore infer that the physical properties of water are such as to suggest the ideas which have culminated in modern animism. That is to say, water is capable of producing intellectual and spiritual, as well as what are termed physical effects. The deeper view of intuition is justified. And Thales, by virtue of the whole trend and outcome of his speculations, may claim an honoured place in the ranks of the nature-mystics.