Part 5

Spirituality of Nature

§ 10

One thing at least is certain. Of this human race, of which each of us frail and wailing mortals is a fragment, this kindly or unkindly thing we call "external Nature" is at once the mother, the cradle, and the home: out of it we came; in it we play; from it we delve our livelihood; and--to it we go. For it is also our grave. But, unlike the mournful mounds, so pitilessly ranged in regular rows--as if, 'fore God, to accentuate the fact that in Death this impotent thing called sapient man meets at last a uniforming and levelling foe--unlike those mournful mounds we see in cemeteries, external Nature is a grave out of which there is a perpetual and unceasing resurrection. Nature is at once the tomb and the womb of life. What was once soil and rain and sunshine becomes grass--then hay--then beef or mutton or milk--and, in time, the very bone and muscle, the very laughter and tears of the child that plays in those fields. And when bone and muscle lay down that subtle thing called Life, give up the spirit and lie inert, they enter once again into the tomb and womb of Nature, and the mighty cycle begins afresh.

§ 11

And this "spirit" is not a thing apart, a thing outside Nature; breathed into man at his birth, and wafted to some mythical heaven--or hell--at his death. Actually and actively in great Nature, manifesting itself as soil and herb and sunshine, is immanent that which, when metamorphosed into so-called human Life, manifests itself as feeling, imagination, emotion, faith. There cannot be anything in esse in Man that was not aforetime in posse in Nature.

§ 12

Never shall I forget the day upon which--and the walk during which--there flared upon me like a great and sudden light the fact that the whole cosmos was alive--was Life; that it was not composed of two dissimilar things: (a) a gross and ponderable "matter"; and (b) an immaterial imponderable "mind." There is no such dichotomy in Nature. All is immaterial, spiritual, living. Every particle in me is alive; but every particle in me came from Nature; and, as I cannot create life, life must have existed potentially in those particles. My bodily mechanism is merely a transmutation of one form of life into another.

What we call "life" is a process; a process kept agoing by (a) the ingestion of surrounding material; and (b) the reproduction of the individual which so ingests.

Look at that field of oats growing there to the right. You will admit, will you not, that those little green blades just springing from the soil are actually and veritably the matter of the field in which they grow? The silicon and phosphorus and oxygen and nitrogen and carbon and what-not, which were in the air or soil, will by next July be gluten and protein. If you and I should haggle over the origin of the first oat-seed, at least if it did not spring from this particular field, it had not, I take it, any ultra-terrestrial origin.--Or granted it had, as, I think, Arrhenius argues, that origin was not extra-cosmic: it came, certainly, from somewhere within this our visible universe. Good! Let us go back.--The oats then--that is, the gluten and the protein--are but the matter of soil and air and sunshine in another form. So, then, is the porridge in your plate. So, then, are you, surely. You and I are this external Nature in another shape; and if we had n senses and a mind endowed with powers of discernment and of comprehension nthly more powerful than at present, we might be able, not only to see the process of transformation in its every stage, but--to understand that matter is immaterial, is spiritual (whatever that word may connote); and that ourselves, the porridge, the oats, the soil, the earth--the Cosmos, are, is ... one and a Mystery. In Nature, as in Man, resides that Spirit of Eternal Things which we call Life: a thing incomprehensible and divine; transcending thought; one and a unit; one with the thing that is, and one with that which asks itself what it is and whence it came; revealing itself under the aspects of time and space, yet unbounded by time or space; manifesting itself under an infinitude of forms, yet remaining one and the same; at once the revealer and the revealed; the thing thought of and the thing that thinks.

Practical Transcendentalism

§ 13

But of what avail are transcendental themes like these for the conduct and comfort of life? What light are they to our path? To what goal do they point?

It is not a question that needs to be asked. Were no investigation to be undertaken, no theories formed, save for some definite and preconceived purpose, it may be that no new path would be found, no more distant goal discerned.

And yet these meditations, such as they were, crude in matter, inchoate in form, mere adumbrations of a truth all too dimly perceived, brought comfort. Once more they took me away from the trivial and the ephemeral. Above all, they took me away from the geocentric. So many creeds, so many religions, pin me down to this little planet. How many earths are there in the visible heavens? Are there terrestrial sinners on each and all? If so, for how many deaths did the vicarious mercy of the Almighty call? And even if we travel outside the realm of Christendom, still we find our little earth regarded as the centre of thought, the only scene upon which the great drama of Being is enacted: for so many philosophies and religions accentuate the isolated existence of individual human beings, and limit their application to the periphery of this speck in space.

I like the larger aspect. When we look up to the stars and remember that they are suns about which probably revolve an infinitude of habitable earths--earths of every conceivable and inconceivable kind, and peopled probably with an infinitude of beings--also of every conceivable and inconceivable kind--some perhaps as gross as we, others breathing airs of heaven, requiring neither senses nor anatomical organs, enjoying "the communion of saints" by powers and processes outside the ken of touch or speech or vision ... we link ourselves with the immensity of Being; we are not separate little entities trudging a few miles of earth, but particles of Omnipresent Life, partakers in the history and destiny of All that Is.

§ 14

There is a practical side, too, to these transcendental themes. For what is Conscience, that inward monitor which, whatever your creed, bids you walk thus and not otherwise, that applauds you when you do right, and shames you when you go wrong? From one point of view, Conscience is the evolved consensus of mankind, that inherited instinct which declares that only such actions as subserve the welfare of the race are right, and that all others are wrong; and that distributes its sanctions accordingly. From another, and perhaps a rather fanciful, point of view (and yet one that may appeal to those who look forward to a life after death and cling to a possibility of communication between dead and living)--from another point of view, Conscience may be the inaudible voice of myriads of fellow-creatures like unto ourselves, who, having passed through the trials and temptations of this life, and viewing this life from the plane of a life supernal, shout spiritually, warningly, in our psychic ears when they see us doing the things that brought them ill. But from another and cosmic point of view, it is that absolute and categorical imperative which dictates that each attenuated portion of the All shall act in Unison with the All, in the history and destiny of which each attenuated portion partakes.

But I digress.

Spring in Canada

§ 15

My next walks were in quite another hemisphere--to wit, in the great and growing colony of Canada.--From many points of view Canada is one of the most interesting of countries. From the rank of a somewhat humble dependency, made up of a heterogeneous collection of provinces, she has sprung within the last few decades into the rank of a proud and self-conscious nation. The contrast is notable. Indeed the country is one of contrasts. Her climate, her scenery, her sentiments, her people, her politics, all exhibit extremes the most extraordinary. A winter of Arctic severity is followed by a tropical summer. Within sight of luxuriant pastures glide stupendous glaciers. Flattest prairies spread to the feet of mountain ranges the rivals of the Alps; prim fields, orchards, and vineyards encroach upon primæval forests. Along with the hardy apple and the far-famed No. 1 Manitoba wheat, this land produces strawberries, peaches, grapes, and melons. Constitutionally content with British connexion, her people are intimately influenced by ideas and manners American. Indeed, her people are as heterogeneous as herself. The Maritime Provinces of the extreme east hardly call themselves Canadian; Quebec is French; Ontario is Canadian to the core; so is Manitoba; in the North-West Territories are settlers from almost every nationality in Europe; British Columbia, in the extreme west, again, fights shy of the cognomen Canadian. Newfoundland holds aloof altogether. A rude and toilsome social life goes hand in hand with patches of refinement and culture unmistakable. Canadian cheese took the prize at Chicago; Canadian poetry has been crowned by the Academy. Lauding democratic institutions to the skies, Radical to the last degree, Canada nevertheless contains within herself castes and cliques in their horror of such principles almost rabid. With a political system the counterpart of the British, her politics are rife with personalities, election protests, corruption trials.

However, I am not here concerned with political or social tendencies or delinquencies.

§ 16

Soon after I arrived I betook me, one spring, in my canoe, down the banks of the River Otonabee. Pitching a tent, I made this a focus from which I radiated in any direction I chose--dawdling and sauntering and lounging and seeing what there was to be seen.

And what is there to be seen? Well, let me give you here another little photograph.

I write, sitting ensconced, sheltered from sun and wind, between two huge roots of the stump of a burned pine on a bare hill overlooking the river. Not a place in which to see much, you would say. Pardon me, you are wrong. You, shut in between four superficies of wall-paper, a whitewashed ceiling, and a carpet, know absolutely nothing of the clouded sky as I know it, gazing at it unconfined from horizon to zenith. Far overhead, the delicatest vapoury cirri fleck the purest blue; in the distance, bold, rounded, white cumuli rise above a misty haze of grey, against which as a background rise in points and curves and lines dark green firs and round-topped birches and emerald hill-sides; and below these, and nearer, comes the water--in no two spots the same--ruffled and unruffled, wavy and still, dark blue and lead-grey, in eddies and in currents; here dimpled, there like a mirror; now dazzling you with a thousand flashing, floating stars; there sullenly bearing up the reflections and shadows of the great, dark trees above it--at one moment thus, and while you say it, otherwise.--For a symbol of God--serene, shapeless, profound, in eternal repose, unchanging, all-embracing, majestic--give me the blue sky; for a symbol of Man--tossed, shapen, ever at strife, changeful, unresting, evanescent, with dark depths and foul weeds, sombre and woeful when deprived of the light of heaven, and beautiful only when beautified by skyey tints--give me the water. And after the water, and closer, comes my foreground--tufted grass and brown soil, with dandelions and clover and mullein, and here and there a piece of glistering granite or a quaint-shaped, rotting tree trunk. Amongst these hops fearless, while I sit still and silent with half-closed eyes, the thrush or the grey-bird, chasing insects a few feet from my foot; while above me, on the very stump against which I lean, perches the various-coloured high-holder.--Truly, it seems as if Nature had taken me to be one with her, recognised me as part of her manifold immensity, looked upon me as a consort, a co-mate.

And am I not a part of her? It needs not to comprehend the harmonious workings of mighty natural laws to perceive the unity of all things. Each minutest spot on this earth verifies the truth. I need not move a step to find evidences of it. I look at my blackened stump, and not one square inch can I find which is not instinct with evidences of life within life; life interfused with, dependent on, correlated with other life, with signs of the ceaseless being born, growing, dying--with processes interlinked with processes. It is a universe of processes, this in which we live; not a universe in which this, that, and the other separate thing exists for a time, but a universe of subsistences, made up wholly of interdependent existences. Wherever I look on my trunk I see mosses and lichens and creeping ants and beetles, and the holes of boring worms, and the marks of woodpeckers' beaks, chrysalises, seeds, twigs. To each of these the stump is its universe: they regard it as we do the solar system, as a place, a locality, made for them to inhabit. They do not understand that the tree is itself but part of a greater whole of life, of thought; a link in an endless chain of existence. And so we often forget that this infinitely various and changing universe which we call ours, which we look upon as our habitation, our dwelling-house, in which we move about as lords and masters, is after all but an infinitesimal fragment of the real demesne of the true Lord of the Manor. And what if after all we were not even bailiffs of this manor? What if we were but the furniture in some small attic--mirrors, it may be--and that what we call our universe prove to be nothing more than the small part of this attic which is reflected in us!

XII