Nature Mysticism | Page 8

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