5. The perfection of this of latter and higher view involves the
absolute fusion of thought and things. Its full attainment is a new
creation of the world. Yet it is but the discovery of a relationship
which was from the beginning, the adoption by thought of a child which
was never other than its own. The habitual interpretation of natural
events by the analogy of human design, to which every hour's
conversation testifies, is the evidence that to the ordinary man nature
presents itself not as something external, but, like a friend, as
"another himself." The true conquest of nature is but the completion of
the reconciliation thus anticipated in the everyday language and
consciousness of mankind. When the mind has come to see in the endless
flux of outward things, not a succession of isolated phenomena, but the
reflex of its own development into an infinite variety of laws on a
basis of identity--when the laws of nature are raised to the character
of laws which regulate admiration and love--when the experiences of life
are held together in a medium of pure emotion, and the animal element so
fused with the spiritual as to form one organization through which the
same impulse runs with unimpeded energy--then man has made nature his
own, by becoming a conscious partaker of the reason which animates him
and it.[5] The attainment of this consummation is the end of life: but
it is an end that can never be fully realised, while "dualism" remains a
necessary condition of humanity. To most men it is as a land very far
off, of which occasional glimpses are caught from some "specular mount"
of philosophic or poetic thought. It can only approach realisation
through the operation of a power which can penetrate the whole man, and
act on every moment of his life. But that power, which in the form of
religion can make every meal a sacrament, and transform human passion
into the likeness of divine love, is represented at a lower stage, not
only by the unifying action of speculative philosophy, but by the
combining force of art.