Nature Mysticism | Page 9

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