Nature Mysticism | Page 4

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 elan 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
Recejac, 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