No reflective or imaginative
person needs to be greatly troubled, therefore, by any purely
mechanical or materialistic conception of the universe. They who
would commend that view of the cosmos have not only to reckon with
philosophical and religious idealism, but also with all the bright
band of poets and artists and seers. Such an issue once resolutely
forced would therewith collapse, for it would pit the qualitative
standards against the quantitative, the imagination against
literalism, the creative spirit in man against the machine in him.
Here, then, is the difference between the naturalist's and the
religionist's attitude toward Nature. The believer judges Nature, well
aware of the gulf between himself and her, hating with inexpressible
depth of indignation and repudiating with profound contempt the
sybarite's identification of human and natural law. But also he comes
back to her, not to accept in wonder her variable outward form, but to
worship in awe before her invariable inner meaning. Sometimes, like
so many of the humanists, he rises only to a vague sense of the mystic
unity that fills up the interspaces of the world, and cries with
Wordsworth:
"... And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.
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