IX Spirituality of Nature
Reading edition
§ 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.