Nature Mysticism Part 5

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

The main error of animism was its failure to draw distinctions.

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

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

And very instructive and arresting it is to note how haltingly conscious reflection a.s.similated the rich store of ideas which spontaneous intuition had seized upon whole ages previously.

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

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

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

CHAPTER XIII

POETRY AND NATURE MYSTICISM

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

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

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

"O fancy, what an age was that for song!

That age, when not by laws inanimate, As men believed, the waters were impelled, The air controlled, the stars their courses held; But element and orb on _acts_ did wait Of Powers endued with visible form instinct, With will, and to their work by pa.s.sion linked."

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

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

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

"But still the heart doth need a language, still Doth the old instinct bring back the old names."

. . . and even at this day 'Tis Jupiter who brings whate'er is great, And Venus who brings everything that's fair."

No, poetry is not dead, and never will die. Certain stages in human progress may favour its spontaneity more than others-- critical reflection may cloud over the naive and fresh directness of experience--but behind each natural phenomenon is the immanent idea, the phase of cosmic will and consciousness, which science, and logic and critical a.n.a.lysis can never exhaust.

The intuition has its rights as well as the syllogism, and will always ultimately a.s.sert them. Whereas science reduces the world to mechanism, poetry intuits and struggles to express its inner life; and since this inner life is inexhaustible, poetry is immortal. Emerson seized upon this truth with characteristic keenness of perception allied with feeling.

"For Nature beats in perfect time And rounds with rhyme her every rune, Whether she work in land or sea, Or hide underground her alchemy.

Thou canst not wave thy staff in air, Or dip thy paddle in the lake, But it carves the bow of beauty there, And the ripples in rhymes the oar forsake.

The wood is wiser far than thou; The wood and the wave each other know Not unrelated, unaffected, But to each thought and thing allied Is perfect Nature's every part, Rooted in the mighty heart."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"The G.o.ds talk in the breath of the woods, They talk in the shaken pine, And fill the reach of the old sea-sh.o.r.e With melody divine.

And the poet who overhears Some random word they say Is the fated man of men, Whom the ages must obey."

There are two claims presented here--one directly, the other indirectly. The direct claim is that there are seers and interpreters who can catch the mystic words that nature utters.

The indirect is that the general ma.s.s of humanity have the capacity for sharing the experiences of their poet leaders. The one cla.s.s are endowed to an exceptional degree with receptivity; the other are also receptive, but are dependent on those who can give expression to the intuitions which are, though in varying degrees, a possession common to humanity at large. As Sir Lewis Morris puts it:

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

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

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

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

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

"On peut ainsi se demander si le savant, a mesure qu'il tend vers une connaissance plus complete du reel, n'adopte pas, en un certain sens, le point de vue propre au poete. Boileau disait de la physique de Descartes qu'elle avait coupe la gorge a la poesie.

La raison en est qu'elle s'en tenait au pur mecanisme et ne definissait la matiere que par l'etendue et le mouvement. Mais la physique de Descartes n'a pu subsister. Et, avec la gravitation universelle que Leibniz considerait a juste t.i.tre, du point de vue cartesien, comme une _qualite occulte_, avec les attractions, les repulsions, les affinites chimiques, avec la theorie de l'evolution, la science tend de plus en plus a penetrer la vie reele des choses. Elle se rapproche, bon gre, mal gre, de la metaphysique et de la poesie, en prenant une conscience plus profonde de la force et du devenir. C'est qu'au fond la pensee humaine est une, quelle que soit la diversite des objets auxquels elle s'applique, art, science, poesie, metaphysique, repondant, chacun a sa facon au meme desir, chacun refletant dans la conscience humaine les multiples aspects de la vie innombrable."

CHAPTER XIV

THE BEAUTIFUL AND THE UGLY

A charge frequently brought against the nature-mystic is that he ignores the dark side of nature, and shuts his eyes to the ugly and repulsive features of the world of external phenomena. If nature can influence man's spiritual development, what (it is asked) can be the effect of its forbidding and revolting aspects?

Is the champion of cosmic emotion and of Nature Mysticism prepared to find a place for the ugly in his general scheme? The issue is grave and should not be shirked. It is, moreover, of long standing, having been gripped in its essentials by many thinkers of the old world, more especially by Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus.

Let us begin by examining one or two characteristic statements of the indictment that there are ugly, and even revolting, objects in a world we would fain think fair. Jefferies says of certain creatures captured in the sea: "They have no shape, form, grace, or purpose; they call up a vague sense of chaos which the mind revolts from. . . . They are not inimical of intent towards man, not even the shark; but there the shark is, and that is enough.

These miserably hideous things of the sea are not anti-human in the sense of persecution, they are outside, they are ultra and beyond. It is like looking into chaos, and it is vivid because these creatures, interred alive a hundred fathoms deep, are seldom seen; so that the mind sees them as if only that moment they had come into existence. Use has not habituated it to them, so that their anti-human character is at once apparent, and stares at us with gla.s.sy eye."

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

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