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Page 30
"In harmony with Nature? Restless fool,
Who with such heat doth preach what were to thee,
When true, the last impossibility--
To be like Nature strong, like Nature cool!
Know, man hath all which Nature hath, but more,
And in that more lie all his hopes of good,
Nature is cruel, man is sick of blood;
Nature is stubborn, man would fain adore;
Nature is fickle, man hath need of rest;
Nature forgives no debt and fears no grave;
Man would be mild, and with safe conscience blest.
Man must begin; know this, where Nature ends;
Nature and man can never be fast friends.
Fool, if thou canst not pass her, rest her slave!"
Religionist and humanist alike share this clear sense of separateness.
Literature is full of the expression of it. Religion, in especial,
has little to do with the natural world as such. It is that other and
inner one, which can make a hell of heaven, a heaven of hell, with
which it is chiefly concerned. Who can forget Othello's soliloquy as
he prepares to darken his marriage chamber before the murder of his
wife?
"Put out the light, and then put out the light.
If I quench thee, thou flaming minister,
I can again thy former light restore,
Should I repent me; but once put out thy light,
Thou cunning'st pattern of excelling nature,
I know not where is that Promethean heat,
That can thy light relume. When I have pluck'd the rose
I cannot give it vital growth again,
It needs must wither."
Indeed, how vivid to us all is this difference between man and nature.
"I would to heaven," Byron traced on the back of the manuscript of
_Don Juan_,
"I would to heaven that I were so much clay,
As I am bone, blood, marrow, passion, feeling."
Ah me! So at many times would most of us. And in that sense that we
are not is where the religious consciousness takes its beginning.
Here is the sense of the gap between man and the natural world felt
because man has no power over it. He cannot swerve nor modify its
laws, nor do his laws acknowledge its ascendency over them. But
what makes the gulf deeper is the sense of the immeasurable moral
difference between a thinking, feeling, self-estimating being and all
this unheeding world about him. Whatever it is that looks out from the
windows of our eyes something not merely of wonder and desire but also
of fear and repulsion must be there as it gazes into so cruel as well
as so alien an environment. For a moral being to glorify nature as
such is pure folly or sheer sentimentality. For he knows that her
apparent repose and beauty is built up on the ruthless and unending
warfare of matched forces, it represents a dreadful equilibrium of
pain. He knows, too, that that in him which allies him with
this natural world is his baser, not his better part. This nobly
pessimistic attitude toward the natural universe and toward man so far
as he shares in its characteristics, is found in all classic systems
of theology and has dominated the greater part of Christian
thinking. If it is ignored today by the pseudo-religionists and
the sentimentalists; it is clearly enough perceived by contemporary
science and contemporary art. The biologist understands it. "I know of
no study," wrote Thomas Huxley, "which is so unutterably saddening
as that of the evolution of humanity as set forth in the annals of
history. Out of the darkness of prehistoric ages man emerges with the
marks of his lowly origin strong upon him. He is a brute, only more
intelligent than the other brutes; a blind prey to impulses which as
often as not lead him to destruction; a victim to endless illusions
which make his mental existence a terror and a burden, and fill his
physical life with barren toil and battle. He attains a certain degree
of comfort, and develops a more or less workable theory of life in
such favorable situations as the plains of Mesopotamia or of Egypt,
and then, for thousands and thousands of years struggles with various
fortunes, attended by infinite wickedness, bloodshed and misery, to
maintain himself at this point against the greed and ambition of his
fellow men. He makes a point of killing and otherwise persecuting all
those who first try to get him to move on; and when he has moved
a step farther he foolishly confers post-mortem deification on his
victims. He exactly repeats the process with all who want to move a
step yet farther."[22]
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