Note 5 — PART II ÆSTHETIC AND ETHICAL VALUES

It is perhaps to this tendency we may (in part) attribute the eagerness with which poetry and fine art have used and abused the personifications of natural objects provided for them by primitive superstition. If not, it is curious that these tedious mythologies should have been cherished by poets long after they were abandoned by everybody else; and that we still use every expedient for endowing material nature with fictitious sympathies and powers. But it is, I think, an error to see nothing in such metaphors but a trick of style. They represent the same deep-rooted tendency which finds significance in such phrases as “Mother Earth,” which has suggested certain poetic forms of Pantheism; or which gathers a vague, semi-spiritual consolation from the thought that, when we die, our bodies, resolved into their elements, may still share in the new manifestations of life which Nature (half personified) pours out in exhaustless profusion.