Nature Mysticism Part 4

After this metaphysical bath we return invigorated to the world of concrete experience dear alike to the common-sense thinker and the modern investigator. Do the facts of life, as ordinarily presented, or as systematised in reflection, at all point in the direction of the doctrine of immanent ideas? It will be seen that this question admits of an affirmative answer. But the term "idea" must be taken as embracing psychic existence in its entirety--that is to say, feeling and will, as well as reason. The dry bones of reason must be clothed with flesh and blood. The appeal is to actual experience. Let Walt Whitman give us his.

"Doubtless there comes a time when one feels through his whole being, and p.r.o.nouncedly the emotional part, that ident.i.ty between himself subjectively and Nature objectively which Sch.e.l.ling and Fichte are so fond of pressing. How it is I know not, but I often realise a presence here--in clear moods I am certain of it, and neither chemistry nor reasoning, nor aesthetics will give the least explanation."

Walt Whitman mentions Fechner. Here is James's masterly summary of Fechner's general view in this regard. "The original sin, according to Fechner, of both our popular and our scientific thinking, is our inveterate habit of regarding the spiritual not as the rule but as an exception in the midst of nature. Instead of believing our life to be fed at the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of the greater life, our individuality to be sustained by the greater individuality, which must necessarily have more consciousness and more independence than all that it brings forth, we habitually treat whatever lies outside of our life as so much slag and ashes of life only; or if we believe in a Divine Spirit, we fancy him on the one side as bodiless and nature as soulless on the other.

What comfort or peace, Fechner asks, can come from such a doctrine? The flowers wither at its breath, the stars turn into stone; our own body grows unworthy of our spirit and sinks into a tenement for carnal senses only. The book of nature turns into a volume on mechanics, in which whatever has life is treated as a sort of anomaly; a great chasm of separation yawns between us and all that is higher than ourselves, and G.o.d becomes a nest of thin abstractions."

It is sufficiently well known that primitive man did not indulge in these "thin" views of nature. He interpreted the events and changes around him on the a.n.a.logy of human activities; he looked upon them as manifestations of living wills. And indeed how could he do otherwise? For as yet he knew of no mode of activity other than his own. At first those objects and happenings were singled out which were of most practical interest, or which most distinctly forced themselves upon the attention. The beast of prey which threatened his life, the noisy brook, the roaring waves, the whisperings and cracklings in the woods--all argued the presence of life and will. So too with mountains, avalanches, sun, moon, stars, clouds, caves, fire, light, dark, life, death. So more especially with the storm which sweeps across the land, the thunder which shakes the solid earth, and the lightning which flashes from the one side of heaven to the other. Such were the phenomena on which his intellect worked, and in which he discovered all manner of useful or harmful causal relations. Such were the phenomena which produced in him emotions of awe and terror, joy and delight. To all of them he ascribed mental life like unto his own.

Indeed it was only by such a view that he could at all understand them, or bring himself into living connection with them.

From these primitive times onward, each century in the history of civilisation has brought a wider outlook. But the original tendency to animism has persisted and still persists. It has behind it an undying impulse. It manifests its vitality, not only among the uninstructed ma.s.ses, but in the most select ranks of scientists and philosophers. And thus it is not too much to say that the idea of a universal life in nature is as firmly rooted today as it was in the dawn of man's intellectual development.

The form in which the idea has been presented has changed with the ages. Mythology succeeded animism, and has in turn yielded to many curious and vanished theories, polytheistic, gnostic, pantheistic, and the rest. Now, the belief in distinct beings behind natural phenomena has virtually disappeared. Not so the belief in some form of universal life or consciousness--of which belief representative types will be given directly.

Of the persistence of the mental att.i.tude in the modern child, Ruskin gives a charming example, in his "Ethics of the Dust."

"One morning after Alice had gone, Dotty was very sad and restless when she got up; and went about, looking into all the corners, as if she would find Alice in them, and at last she came to me, and said, 'Is Alie gone over the great sea?' And I said, 'Yes, she is gone over the great deep sea, but she will come back again some day.' Then Dotty looked round the room; and I had just poured some water out into the basin; and Dotty ran to it, and got up on a chair, and dashed her hand through the water, again and again; and cried, 'Oh, deep, deep sea! Send little Alice back to me.'" On this, Ruskin remarks--"The whole heart of Greek mythology is in that; the idea of a personal being in the elemental power; of its being moved by prayer; and of its presence everywhere, making the broken diffusion of the element sacred." It would seem that Dotty did not definitely personify the element, but was rather in the animistic stage. The identifying of the natural element or object with a definite personality is a further step taken, as Ruskin says, by the Greeks preeminently. But the beauty and the suggestive quality of the incident remain, whichever view be taken.

A still more deeply suggestive example is found in Wordsworth's description of a boyish night adventure of his on Esthwaite Lake. For it shows the inner workings of a mind impressed by specially striking natural objects, and by the obscurely realised powers which they dimly manifest.

"I dipped my oars into the silent lake, And as I rose upon the stroke my boat Wont heaving through the waters like a swan;-- When, from behind that craggy steep till then The horizon's bound, a huge peak, black and huge, As if with voluntary power instinct Upreared its head. I struck and struck again; And, growing still in stature, the grim shape Towered up between me and the stars, and still, For so it seemed, with purpose of its own, And measured motion like a living thing, Strode after me. With trembling oar I turned, And through the silent waters made my way Back to the covert of the willow-tree; There in her mooring-place I left my bark, And through the meadows homeward went, in grave And serious mood. But after I had seen That spectacle, for many days my brain Worked with a dim and undetermined sense Of unknown modes of being."

There we have revealed to us the soul of animism whether ancient or modern!

The older animism was crude and uncritical. In proportion as men learnt to reflect upon their experience, it was bound to be modified, and to submit to reactionary influences. Such was the case at the very beginning of philosophical and scientific enquiry--and such was the case also at the opening of the "modern" era. Speaking generally, it may be said that as knowledge of natural law extended, the idea of mental activities in external nature was ousted. Mechanical views of the universe gradually prevailed, and reached a pa.s.sing climax in Descartes'

contention that even animals are automata!

"A pa.s.sing climax"--for worse was to come. Man himself was to be brought under the remorseless sway of physics interpreted by mathematics. The _Homme Machine_ idea found stalwart supporters, and gained many adherents. All forms of animism seemed to be overwhelmed once for all. The nature-mystic appeared to be an idle dreamer or a deluded simpleton. Nor is the course of such exaggerations yet ended. In the pages of the "Nineteenth Century," Huxley could seriously propound as a thesis for discussion the question--"Are animals automata?"

And books with such t.i.tles as "The Human Machine" have still considerable circulation.

But just as criticism undermined the immaturities and exaggerations of the older animism, so is it undermining the more dangerous arrogance of an exaggerated and soulless materialism. Speculation is now trending back to a critical animism, and, enriched by all that physical science has had to give, is opening out new world-views of transcendent interest.

The nature-mystic is coming into his own again. It must be his care to keep abreast of thought and discovery, and so avoid that tendency to exaggeration, and even fanaticism, which has, in the past, so greatly damaged the cause of Mysticism at large.

The animistic theory is now being propounded thus. Why should not all transfers of energy, whether in living or non-living bodies, be accompanied by a "somewhat "that is akin to man's mental life? The arguments in favour of such a view are numerous, many-sided, and c.u.mulative. The hypothesis of evolution gives them keen edge and gathering force. Behind the cosmic process men feel there must be a creative power, an animating impulse. The struggle upwards must mean something.

Mechanism is but a mode of working--its Ground is soul, or spirit.

Thus a new day is dawning for a soundly critical animism. It is realised that to formulate "laws" in accordance with which certain modes of happening take place is not to pierce to the heart of things, but to rest on the surface. Mechanism explains nothing and leaves us poor indeed! Whereas, the universe is a majestic manifestation of Becoming--of a veritable development of life.

The line between organic and inorganic is fading more and more from the minds of investigators. Protoplasm, for instance, mingles together mechanical, chemical, and vital in a fused whole, which it pa.s.ses the wit of man to a.n.a.lyse. The connection between body and soul is similarly found to defy the old distinctions between matter and mind. Clearly a universal life is pulsating in the whole; genuine impulses, not mechanical stresses and strains, are the causes of the upward sweep into fuller consciousness and richer complexity of experience. The old conception of a world soul is achieving a new lease of life, and is dowering science with the human interest and the mystic glow it so sorely lacks.

CHAPTER XI

WILL AND CONSCIOUSNESS IN NATURE

The idea that inorganic nature is not merely informed by reason, but is also possessed of will and consciousness, will strike many serious students as bizarre and fanciful. There is an enormous amount of initial prejudice still to be overcome before it can secure a fair general hearing. It will therefore be advisable to pa.s.s in review the teachings of certain modern thinkers, of recognised authority, who have espoused and openly advocated this bizarre idea. And with a view to insuring further confidence, the _ipsissima verba_ of these authorities will be freely quoted, where there may be fear of misunderstanding or misrepresentation. The review will be confined to modern thinkers, because the views of the ancients in this regard, though frequently of intense interest, will not carry weight in a matter which so largely depends upon recent research and speculation.

Leibniz profoundly influenced the course of what we may term "animistic" thought by his doctrine of monads. Whereas Descartes had defined substance as extension, Leibniz conceived it as activity, or active force, and as divided up into an infinite number and variety of individual centres, each with its own force or life, and, up to a certain point, each with its own consciousness. All beings are thus essentially akin, but differ in the grades of consciousness to which they attain. But since consciousness depends on organisation, and since organisation is constantly developing, there is continuous progress. Each individual monad develops from within by virtue of a spiritual element which it possesses--that is to say, not mechanically, but from an internal principle, implying sensation and desire. These monads, when looked at from without, are grouped together into various extended objects. If we ask Leibniz how such inwardly developing centres are combined together into a universe, his reply is that G.o.d has so ordered things that each monad develops in definite relation to all the rest; they all keep time, like clocks with different works, springs, pendulums, but regulated to mark simultaneously each period of time as it pa.s.ses. This is the famous theory of pre-established harmony.

This doctrine grants the nature-mystic all he needs, but in an artificial way which fails to carry conviction. The universe is split up into isolated units which have no real connection with each other save through ideas in the mind of G.o.d. Communion with nature, however, should be more direct and more organic than that effected by a pre-established harmony. Is it possible to retain the strong points of the theory while securing organic interpenetration of all modes of existence? Lotze, for one, deemed it possible. Here is an interesting and typical pa.s.sage from his "Philosophy of Religion." "If it is once held conceivable that a single supreme intelligence may exert an influence on the reciprocal relations of the elements of the world, then similar intelligence may also be imagined as immediately active in all these individual elements themselves; and instead of conceiving them as controlled merely by blindly operative forces, they may be imagined as animated spiritual beings, who strive after certain states, and offer resistance to certain other states. In such case there may be imagined the gradual origin of ever more perfect relations, from the reciprocal action of these elements, almost like the reciprocal action of a human society; and that too without necessarily arriving at the a.s.sumption to which we are here inclined, of a single, supreme, intelligent Being. Our reasoning issues rather in a sort of polytheistic or pantheistic conception, and that too in quite tolerable agreement with experience."

Lotze, then, conceives the monads to be organically related, and so combined into one world. He himself inclines to regard them as all dependent upon one supreme Being. But it is to be carefully observed that he does not negative the pluralist hypothesis as inconceivable or impracticable. Indeed, a little later in the same context, he allows that "a multiplicity of beings who share with each other in the creation and control of the world" is more in harmony with the immediate impressions of experience than "the hasty a.s.sumption of one only supreme wisdom, from which as their source the imperfections of the world, that in fact are manifest to us, are much more difficult to comprehend." Lotze may thus be summoned as a supporter of the contention (urged in an earlier chapter) that the Pluralist may be a genuine mystic. Interpenetration and co-operation may supply the place of the metaphysical unity at which the Absolutists aim. But the main point here is, that Lotze conceives the universe as organically and spiritually related in all its parts. It all shares in a common life.

Of a monadistic character, also, are the two closely related views known as the Mind-Dust theory, and the Mind-Stuff theory. The former postulates particles or atoms of mind, distinct from material atoms, but, like them, pervading all nature, and, under certain conditions, combining to form conscious mind. The latter does not thus separate mind and matter, but a.s.sumes that primordial units of mind-stuff sum themselves together and engender higher and more complex states of mind, and themselves const.i.tute what appears to us as matter. James in his larger Psychology keenly criticised this "psychic monadism," and has in his Oxford Lectures on a "Pluralistic Universe," substantially modified his criticism. It is not necessary to enter into further detail, but to grasp the fact that such modern scientists as Clifford inclined to see in the world, at every point, a manifestation of some grade of consciousness, and therefore of kins.h.i.+p. The noted French philosopher, Renouvier, has also resuscitated the monadistic theory in a form more closely allied to that of Leibniz.

Discussion of the merits and demerits of these various views is not now in question, but only their value as evidence of the trend towards a critical animism. The inadequacy of the mechanical view came home even to a mathematician like Clifford!

We turn to a very different form of speculation, yet one equally favourable to the essential contention of the nature-mystic--that of Schopenhauer, a philosopher whose system is attracting closer and keener attention as the years pa.s.s by. Certain of his views have been cursorily mentioned in what has preceded, and will find further mention in what is to follow. But here, the aim is to focus attention on his fundamental doctrine, that the Ground of all existence is Will. His line of argument in arriving at this conclusion is briefly to be stated thus. The nature of things-in-themselves would remain an eternal secret to us, were it not that we are able to approach it, not by knowledge of external phenomena, but by inner experience. Every knowing being is a part of nature, and it is in his own self-consciousness that a door stands open for him through which he can approach nature. That which makes itself most immediately known within himself is will; and in this will is to be found the _Welt-stoff_.

Let Schopenhauer speak for himself. "Whoever, I say, has with me gained this conviction . . . will recognise this will of which we are speaking, not only in those phenomenal existences which exactly resemble his own, in men and animals, as their inmost nature, but the course of reflection will lead him to recognise the force which germinates and vegetates in the plant, and indeed the force through which the crystal is formed, that by which the magnet turns to the North Pole, the force whose shock he experiences from the contact of two different kinds of metal, the force which appears in the elective affinities of matter as repulsion and attraction, decomposition and combination, and, lastly, even gravitation, which acts so powerfully throughout matter, draws the stone to the earth and the earth to the sun--all these, I say, he will recognise as different only in their phenomenal existence, but in their inner nature as identical, as that which is directly known to him so intimately and so much better than anything else, and which in its most distinct manifestation is called will."

Here again we have standing ground for the creed and the experiences of the nature-mystic. All forms and modes of existence are akin, and differ only in their phenomenal conditions. Whether Schopenhauer has not laid too exclusive an emphasis on will; whether he has not unnecessarily chosen the lowest types of will as primitive--these are questions to be discussed elsewhere. Enough that we have in this theory a definite return to critical animism. He holds the universe to be throughout of the same "stuff," and that stuff is psychic or spiritual. Body and soul, matter and spirit, are but different aspects of the same underlying Reality.

Nevertheless, one question does press upon the nature-mystic.

Is the will to be conscious of its activities? Schopenhauer's Ground-will is a blindly heaving desire. If his contention be granted, Nature Mysticism will be shorn of its true glory.

Communion with nature, though it rest on pa.s.sive intuition, must somehow be a.s.sociated with consciousness, if it is to be that which we best know. That is to say, nature's self-activity must be a.n.a.logous to our own throughout--a.n.a.logous, not identical. And such a conclusion commends itself to a thinker as careful and scientific as Stout, who in his "Manual of Psychology" writes as follows: "The individual consciousness, as we know it, must be regarded as a payment of a wider whole, by which its origin and its changes are determined. As the brain forms only a fragmentary portion of the total system of natural phenomena, so we must a.s.sume the stream of individual consciousness to be in like manner part of an immaterial system. We must further a.s.sume that this immaterial system in its totality is related to nervous processes taking place in the cortex of the brain."

So, too, James, in his "Varieties of Religious Experience,"

declares that "our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness; whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded."

A thinker of a very different type, Royce, in his "World and the Individual," concurs in this idea of a wider, universal consciousness. "We have no right whatever to speak of really unconscious Nature, but only of uncommunicative Nature, or of Nature whose mental processes go on at such different time-rates from ours that we cannot adjust ourselves to a live appreciation of their inward fluency, although our consciousness does make us aware of their presence. . . . Nature is thus a vast conscious process, whose relation to time varies vastly, but whose general characteristics are throughout the same. From this point of view evolution would be a series of processes suggesting to us various degrees and types of conscious processes. The processes, in case of so-called inorganic matter are very remote from us, while in the case of the processes of our fellows we understand them better." Again he calls Nature "a vast realm of finite consciousness of which your own is at once a part and an example."

A thinker of still another type, Paulsen, whose influence in Germany was so marked, and whose death we so lately lamented, was whole-heartedly a sympathiser with Fechner's views. How James also sympathised with them we saw at the beginning of the last chapter. Paulsen, on his own account, writes thus: "Is there a higher, more comprehensive psychical life than that which we experience, just as there is a lower one?

Our body embraces the cells as elementary organisms. We a.s.sume that in the same way our psychical life embraces the inner life of the elementary forms, embracing in it their conscious and unconscious elements. Our body again is itself part of a higher unity, a member of the total life of our planet, and together with the latter, articulated with a more comprehensive cosmical system, and ultimately articulated with the All. Is our psychical life also articulated with a higher unity, a more comprehensive system of consciousness? Are the separate heavenly bodies, to start with, bearers of a unified inner life? Are the stars, is the earth an animated being? The poets speak of the earth-spirit; is that more than a poetic metaphor? The Greek philosophers, among them Plato and Aristotle, speak of astral spirits; is that more than the last reflection of a dream of childish fancy?"

And thus we have come to the fullness of the nature-mystic's position. Reason, will, feeling, consciousness, below us and above us. As Nageli, the famous botanist puts it, "the human mind is nothing but the highest development on our earth of the mental processes which universally animate and move nature."

To this world-view the child of nature and the philosopher return again and again. Deep calls unto deep. The exaggerated and dehumanising claims of purely physical and mechanical concepts may for a time obscure the intuition by their specious clarity, but the feelings and the wider consciousness in man rea.s.sert themselves. The stars of heaven no longer swing as ma.s.ses of mere physical atoms in a dead universe, they s.h.i.+ne in their own right as members in a living whole. Wordsworth speaks for the forms of life beneath us when he exclaims:

"And 'tis my faith that every flower Enjoys the air it breathes."

Emerson speaks for the realm of the inorganic when he a.s.sures that:

"The sun himself s.h.i.+nes heartily And shares the joy he brings."

The great world around us is felt to pulse with inner life and meaning. It is seen, not only as real, not only as informed with reason, but as sentient. The old speculations of Empedocles that love and hate are the motive forces in all things gleams out in a new light. And that sense of oneness with his physical environment which the nature-mystic so often experiences and enjoys is recognised as an inevitable outcome of the facts of existence. Goethe is right:

"Ihr folget falsche Spur; Denkt nicht, wir scherzon!

Ist nicht der Kern der Natur Menschen im Herzen."

CHAPTER XII

MYTHOLOGY

The materials are now fairly complete for understanding the rise and development of animism. The untrained primitive intellect was stirred by vague intuitions--stimulated by contact with an external world const.i.tuted of essentially the same "stuff" as itself--and struggled to find concrete expression for its experiences. The root idea round which all else grouped itself was that of the agency of indwelling powers like unto man's, but endowed with wider activities, and unhampered by many human limitations. The forms of expression adopted often appear to us to be almost gratuitously absurd; but when we put ourselves as nearly as may be at the primitive point of view, we realise that they were not even illogical. The marvel is that out of the seething chaos of sensations and emotions there could arise the solid structure of even the simplest kinds of conceptual, ordered knowledge.

There are few critics, however, who are not now prepared to put themselves into sympathetic touch with the primitive thinker; but there are still many who hesitate, or refuse, to allow any value to the products of his thinking. These products are too frequently dismissed as the fancies and babblings of ages in which real knowledge was not as yet a practicable achievement.

Such an estimate is as unfair as it is unphilosophical. It disregards the part played by intuition, and it is blind to the germs of truth which were destined to ripen into n.o.ble fruit.

Mother Earth, with air and suns.h.i.+ne, and starry heaven above, nurtured men's thoughts and souls as well as their bodies.

There is more than an a.n.a.logy between the childhood of the race and the childhood of the individual. And just as the child plunges us at times, by questions, into problems of the deepest import, so is it with unexpected flashes of insight preserved for us in the records, written or unwritten, of the earliest workings of the human mind. "The soul of man" (says Caird), "even at its worst, is a wonderful instrument for the world to play on; and in the vicissitudes of life, it cannot avoid having its highest chords at times touched, and an occasional note of perfect music drawn from it, as by a wandering hand on the strings."