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 ofanthropomorphism,
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
today 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.