John Edward Mercer

“ How could such continuity be secured without some basis in the world of fact?
And the basis in fact is surely easy of discovery. Man is not a solitary being, suspended between earth and heaven. On the contrary, he is related to all below him and all that is above him by ties which enter into the very fibre of his being. He is himself a child of nature, nurtured on the bosom of Mother Earth and raising his eyes to the height of the Empyrean. Evolution, whatever it may be, is a cosmic process—and man is a link in a chain, or rather, a living member of a living universe. ”

“ J'ai touché la terre et je suis un nouvel homme, et voici qu'à soixante-dix ans de nouvelles curiosités naissent dans mon âme comme on voit des rejetons s'élancer du tronc creux d'un vieux saule."
"May I live long enough to solve the secret of your harmonies!" There is the spirit of the true nature-mystic! But how will it be solved? By intuition first—if ever the intellect does seize the secret, it will be on the basis of intuition. It is with this conviction in his mind that Maeterlinck meditates on the same theme as that which arrested Anatole France. ”

“ An object may be low or high in the scale of existence, may be rich or poor in content—but it is what it is, and, as such, and in and for itself, may be the source of an intuition. The man lying on the bank of the mill-stream and meditating on the water-wheel wanted the secret of the wheel itself, not what the wheel "suggested." Jefferies, yearning for fuller soul-life, and sensitive to nature's aspects, felt that the life was there—that the universe is the life—that the life is intuited in and through the universe, though not grasped as yet by the conscious reasoning processes. ”

“ The human interest is intense. The problem is to give it a fitting and noble setting. Study the nature-setting which the artist has chosen for his theme—the wealth of glowing, but gently subdued colour—the sun setting, like the old ship, in mellow glory—the crescent moon that speaks of the birth of a new economic era—the cool mists stealing up, precursors of the night when work is done—how marvellously all these tone with the general sentiment. Shall it be maintained that they are arbitrary conventions, mere fanciful products of the association of ideas? ”

“ The heart of the matter is that there is no object in external nature which is absolutely ugly—no object which cannot, even as things are, be transformed to some degree by being set in fitting relation to others—no object which is not capable of progress in its capacity for sharing and manifesting the form and reason towards which the universe is striving. Should there be thinkers who, like Kingsley, cannot quite rid themselves of the feeling that ugliness is an absolute reality—a positive mode of existence over against beauty—they can only take refuge in the wider problem of evil. ”

“ Instead of believing our life to be fed at the breasts of the greater life, our individuality to be sustained by the greater individuality, which must necessarily have more consciousness and more independence than all that it brings forth, we habitually treat whatever lies outside of our life as so much slag and ashes of life only; or if we believe in a Divine Spirit, we fancy him on the one side as bodiless and nature as soulless on the other. What comfort or peace, Fechner asks, can come from such a doctrine? The flowers wither at its breath, the stars turn into stone ”

“ Yes, the Nile, the Ganges, the Rhine, the Thames, and a thousand other rivers of renown have had, and still have, their part to play in the cosmic drama and in the development of man's spiritual nature. Generation after generation has found them to be capable of stirring peculiar emotions, and of stimulating profound thoughts on the mystery of life. And all these powers are concentrated and sublimated in this glorious vision of "the river of water of life that flows from the throne of God." ”

“ The nature-mystic, however, does not linger long on the merely aesthetic plane. He goes deeper down to the heart of things, and holds that to lose touch with nature is to lose touch with Reality as manifested in nature. It is sad, he declares, to miss the pure enjoyment of forms and colours, of sounds and scents; it is sadder to miss the experience of communing with the spirit embodied in these external phenomena. ”

“ There was a reservoir of infinite, inexhaustible forces there. How deeply I felt the impotency of man to arrest the effort of that whole ocean in movement! A dike might break one of the waves; it could break hundreds and thousands of them; but would not the immense and indefatigable ocean gain the victory? And this rising tide seemed to me the image of the whole of nature assailing humanity, which vainly wishes to direct its course, to dam it in, to master it. Man struggles bravely; he multiplies his efforts. Sometimes he believes himself to be the conqueror. ”

“ Tell us what you will of existence above and beyond that which is known to us; but do not deny some measure of ultimate Reality to that which falls within our ken. Leave us not alone with the Absolute of the orthodox mystic, or we perish of inanity! Clearly the élan vital—the will to live—gives us a more hopeful starting-point in our search for the Real. Clearly the inexhaustible variety of the universe of sense need not be dubbed an illusion to save the consistency of a logic which has not yet succeeded in grasping its own first principles. ”

“ How crammed are these lines with the purest Nature Mysticism as moderns understand it! The sense of living process reigns supreme. They are the offspring, not of fancy, nor even of imagination as ordinarily conceived—but of insight, of vision, of living communion with a living world.
It is tempting, while dealing with the airy realms of cloud-land, to dwell at length on the mystic influence of the queen of aerial phenomena—the rainbow. That influence in the past has been immense; it still is, and ever will be, a power to be reckoned with. Science cannot rob it of its glories. ”

“ No, poetry is not dead, and never will die. Certain stages in human progress may favour its spontaneity more than others—critical reflection may cloud over the naive and fresh directness of experience—but behind each natural phenomenon is the immanent idea, the phase of cosmic will and consciousness, which science, and logic and critical analysis can never exhaust. The intuition has its rights as well as the syllogism, and will always ultimately assert them. Whereas science reduces the world to mechanism, poetry intuits and struggles to express its inner life ”

“ Is our psychical life also articulated with a higher unity, a more comprehensive system of consciousness? Are the separate heavenly bodies, to start with, bearers of a unified inner life? Are the stars, is the earth an animated being? The poets speak of the earth-spirit; is that more than a poetic metaphor? The Greek philosophers, among them Plato and Aristotle, speak of astral spirits; is that more than the last reflection of a dream of childish fancy? ”

“ Man's soul was in constant, if generally subconscious, communion with his material environment, and his thinking was thereby largely coloured and fashioned. And if the kind and quality of the influence vary from age to age, and from people to people, it is not the less continuously potent. The complexities of modern life, the interminglings of civilisations, tend to obscure its manifestations; science, wrongly pursued, seems hostile to continued vigour. But underneath the play of the cross-currents on the surface, is the resistless swing of the tide. ”

“ Granted their premisses, the world of sense can teach nothing. It is well to face this issue squarely—let the mystic choose, either the Absolute and Maya, or a Ground of existence which can allow value to nature, and which therefore admits of limitations. Or, if there is to be a compromise, let it be on the lines laid down by Spinoza and Schelling. That is to say, let the name God be reserved for the phenomenal aspect of the Absolute. But the nature-mystic will be wise if he discards compromise, and once for all repudiates the Unconditioned Absolute. ”

“ Moving water, it has been shown, is suggestive of life. But over against it we find a suggestion of death. Indeed there has been a widely diffused belief in a river of death—a striking foil to the inspiring mysticism of the river of life. The old-world mythology taught, in varying forms, but with underlying unity of concept, that there is a river, or gulf, which must be crossed by the departing soul on its way to the land of the departed. Evidently the extension of the original thought to cover its seeming opposite has a basis in the nature of things. ”

“ If, with certain scientists, we stop short at the conservation of energy, there is nothing ahead but a blank. But if we hold to the conservation of values, as at least a parallel to this conservation of energy, we are impelled to hold also to the conservation of all that is ultimate in individualities. For values imply modes of being which can allow of the experience of values as such. And the Nature-Mystic's direct communion with his environment is seen to be one mode by which the individual centre of life learns to live increasingly in the life of the Whole—the total Reality. ”

“ The one is that the air has furnished the primary type of the soul as the principle of life—man's fleeting breath has suggested and fostered the idea of immortality; the wind that bloweth where it listeth, the idea of a realm of changeless spirit! The other result is that certain of nature's most obvious phenomena, when seized by intuition, can supply a key to some of her profoundest secrets. ”

“ Nature, as will be shown, is a manifestation of immanent ideas which touch life at every point. Ugliness, for example, has its place as well as beauty, and will be dealt with in due course. So with ideas of life and death, of power and weakness, of hope and despondency—these and a thousand others, immanent in external phenomena, have stimulated the powerful imaginations of the infant race, and still maintain their magic to move the sensitive soul. The wonderful mythological systems of the past enshrine science, philosophy, and poetry—and they were prompted by physical phenomena. ”

“ And on the other hand the purity and beauty, the colour and effulgence of the light—above all, its joy-giving, life-giving, though noiseless, energy.
Coming down to the present, we ask if these mystic influences of light and of darkness still retain their power. Can we doubt it? We have Milton's Melancholy, "of Cerberus and blackest Midnight born"—"where brooding darkness spreads his jealous wings." All this no mere refurbishing of classical lore, but the outcome of deep sympathy with the poets of the prime. ”

“ But to say that one stage of the evolution of the Idea is dependent on another, or essentially involves another, is not to make the lower of the stages symbolic of the higher. Indeed to introduce the concept of symbolism at all into such a context is to court inextricable confusion. Let symbolism be one thing, and let organic (or dialectic) connection be another—then we know where we are when we claim for natural objects that they have a being and a meaning in their own right, and that they are akin to the soul of man. Emerson had a firm grasp of the nature-mystic's inevitable contention. ”

“ It is that of pure and unconditioned Being—the One—the Absolute. By a ruthless process of abstraction they have abjured the world of sense to vow allegiance to a mode of being of which nothing can be said without denying it. For even to allow a shadow of finiteness in the Absolute is to negate it; to define it is to annihilate it! It swallows up all conditions and relations without becoming any more knowable; it embraces everything and remains a pure negation. It lies totally and eternally beyond the reach of man's faculties and yet demands his perfect and unreasoning surrender. ”

“ Ruskin's teachings have affected the views and lives of thousands who have never read his books. Those who have penetrated most deeply into the play of aesthetic cause and effect, well know that the very existence of truly great and creative art is at stake. Science, literature, politics, and a thousand specialised distractions tend to "saturate our limited attention," and to absorb our energies, to the detriment of our feeling for nature and of our enjoyment of her beauties. And yet it is only by keeping in living touch with nature that fine art can renew its inspiration or scale the heights. ”

“ They are primitive intuitions embodied to form a primitive philosophy of life. They glow with mystic insight. Under the forms of subterranean fountains that well forth life, physical, aesthetic, spiritual, is mirrored the life of the universe, which wells from unknown depths, and returns to the deeps from which it emanated. And inasmuch as these ideas were largely suggested by the circulation of the waters of the globe, the Teutonic child of nature joins hands with the nature-philosopher Thales. The Reality is ultimately the same for both; the substance of the universe is living movement. ”

“ The abstract conception of "the all-pervading creative and formative power is evidently later than that of the storm-god, rushing through the air in the midst of the howling tempest—later even than that of the god who quaffs the draught of inspiration and shares it with seers, bards, and faithful fallen warriors. The idea of life or soul emerges, and frees itself from its cruder elements; the tempest god yields place to the All-Father, sitting on the throne of the world. The same evolution is seen in the case of the cloud-compelling Zeus. ”

“ It most assuredly recognises the multi-tudinousness and reality of phenomena. This world as it is, is real, not void. This life, as we live it, is true, and not a dream. We Buddhists believe that all these particular things surrounding us come from one Ultimate Source, all-knowing and all-loving. The world is the manifestation of this Reason, or Spirit, or Life, whatever you may designate it. However diverse, therefore, things are, they all partake of the nature of the Ultimate Being. Not only sentient beings, but non-sentient, reflect the glory of the Original Reason. ”

“ Human reason goes out into nature expecting to find there something akin to itself, and is not disappointed of its hope. Man's conceptions of this kinship were at first, like all his other conceptions, crude and confused; but as his experience widened and ripened, his outlook became more adequate to the infinite complexity and variety of the phenomena with which he has to deal. And throughout, both in the lower and in the higher stages of intellectual development, the same truth unchangingly asserts itself, that man is a microcosm. ”

“ The fountain of Urd may be regarded as the embodiment of impressions of a spiritual force which upholds and renews the universe.
Mimur, the king of the lower world, is the warder of the central fountain, and round its waters are ranged his golden halls. The fountain itself is seven times overlaid with gold, and above it the holy tree spreads its sheltering branches. It is the source of the precious liquid, the mead, which belongs to Mimur alone, and rises from an unknown depth to water the central root. In its purity, it gives the gods their wisdom and power. ”