Good-nature

“ He was so good to women and little children; but the Almighty I can only see in Nature—relentless, unforgiving, always ready to punish a slip, always demon-quick to see a mistake and visit the sins of the fathers on the children. Nature's the stern image of a stern God to me—a thing no more to be blamed than the lightning, but as much to be feared. ”

“ Tell me—where would one derive naturalness but from nature? You grant that?" he asked, as she poised her lips in good-humored stubbornness. "Well, then, we people see nature so little that it affects us not at all, and we are far from natural, which makes that virtue unusual among us. ”

“ We are ourselves the ultimate and irrefutable arbiters of value, and in the world of value Nature is only a part. Thus in this world we are greater than Nature. In the world of values, Nature in itself is neutral, neither good nor bad, deserving of neither admiration nor censure. It is we who create value, and our desires which confer value. In this realm we are kings, and we debase our kingship if we bow down to Nature. It is for us to determine the good life, not for Nature-not even for Nature personified as God. ”

“ Therefore, in the case of every animal, what it wishes is placed in that thing which is adapted to its nature. And so the chief good is to live according to nature, with the best disposition and the most suitable to nature that can be engendered. ”

“ Nothing divine dies. All good is eternally reproductive. The beauty of nature re-forms itself in the mind, and not for barren contemplation, but for new creation. ”

“ It is not now merely the few, who are so favoured. All those who love Nature she loves in return, and will richly reward, not perhaps with the good things, as they are commonly called, but with the best things, of this world ”

“ And yet, right down here in the mountains there is more trouble than anywhere else in the country. Some men say that Nature, God’s open book, will make men good and kind. It takes more than that. It takes—it must take God inside their hearts to accomplish that. ”

“ They lived on good terms with Nature, with whom we have been quarrelling now for some years past; and thus they were prepared to receive such lessons as Nature might give, to aid and illustrate the deeper lessons of Divine Grace. ”

“ Commissioned to illumine the murk wilderness around her with the glow of her Christian loveliness and faith, Nature had touched her with inspirations of refinement, with a culture as unconscious as the growing of the grass, and the clear intuitions of a spiritual life full of heaven-born inclinations. Nature, too, had endowed her with fine lines of beauty, attitudes of grace, movements of dignity and love, and all the charmfulness that had learned its shapes from flowers and its arts from birds. ”

“ Is it possible to doubt that just as we approve and delightedly revel in the beauty created by "natural selection," so we give our admiration and reverence, without question, to "goodness," which also is the creation of Nature's great unfolding? Goodness (shall we say virtue and high quality?) is, like beauty, the inevitable product of the struggle of living things, and is Nature's favourite no less than man's desire. When we know the ways of Nature, we shall discover the source and meaning of beauty, whether of body or of mind. ”

“ Those who observe in this spirit will often experience, from some humble offering to the Muses, the delight felt by the naturalist in the grasses and lichens of some otherwise barren spot. These are the earliest and humblest efforts of nature, but to a discerning eye they indicate the entire range of her energies. ”

“ Therefore is nature glorious with form, color, and motion, that every globe in the remotest heaven; every chemical change from the rudest crystal up to the laws of life; every change of vegetation from the first principle of growth in the eye of a leaf, to the tropical forest and antediluvian coal-mine; every animal function from the sponge up to Hercules, shall hint or thunder to man the laws of right and wrong, and echo the Ten Commandments. Therefore is nature always the ally of Religion: lends all her pomp and riches to the religious sentiment. ”

“ Take a course of good water and air, and in the eternal youth of Nature you may renew your own. Go quietly, alone; no harm will befall you. ”

“ If we are to get the full enjoyment we should expect out of Natural Beauty we must have a clear and firm conception in our minds of what Nature really is, what is her essential character, whether at heart she is cold and callous or warm and loving. So far as we were justified in drawing conclusions regarding the character of Nature as a whole from what we saw of her manifestations in the life of the forest, we came to the conclusion that she was not so hard and repellent as she assuredly would be to us if her guiding principle of action were the survival of the fittest. ”

“ A child toddling along downhill unregardful of the force of gravitation falls on its face and screams with pain. But Nature, represented by the mother, rushes up, seizes the little thing in her arms, presses it lovingly to her bosom, rock it and coaxes it and covers it with kisses.
So if Nature can think and feel and strive and show mercy and loving-kindness, she is entitled to the dignity of personality. And when we stand back and regard Nature as a whole, we shall look upon her as a Person and nothing less. ”

“ In contemplation of the glory of the heavens, in admiration of the beauty of field and stream and forest, we are beholding a loveliness which it was his delight to create, and which it is elevating and ennobling for us to look upon. Nature is the larger, fairer, fuller expression of that same intelligence and love which wells up in the form of consciousness within our own breasts. Nature and the soul of man are children of the same Father. Nature is the interpretation of the longings of our hearts. ”

“ We shall have discovered an identity between what is in Nature and what is in us. In looking on Nature, we shall have been introduced into a Presence, greater than ourselves but like ourselves, which stirs in us this which we feel. When we see Beauty in Nature we are discovering that Nature is not merely a body, but has or is a soul. And the joy we feel is produced by the satisfaction our soul feels in coming into touch and harmony with this soul of Nature. Our soul is recognising samenesses between what is in it and what is in the soul of Nature, and feels joy in the recognition. ”

“ Human beings ought, indeed, to enjoy Nature in another way than oxen and butterflies; they should, as the lords of creation, reverence themselves and their Creator, by contemplating His works with intelligent minds, learning their meaning, and, as priests and priestesses of Nature, explaining her wisdom and interpreting her song of praise. ”

“ THE VICE OF EXCESS.
Affectation the attempt to work up by our own efforts an enthusiasm for Nature.—True love of Nature must be born within us, by the working of Nature herself upon our hearts. By faith, rather than by works; by reception, rather than by conquest; by wise passiveness, rather than by restless haste; by calm and silence, rather than by noise and talk, our sensitiveness to Nature's charms is deepened and developed. That enjoyment of Nature which comes spontaneously and unsought is the only true enjoyment. ”

“ With still greater force might it be said that he who attentively studies nature and fails to see in her ways the workings of Providence must, indeed, be blind. Who the guide of nature, but only the God of nature? In him we live, move, and have our being. Those things which nature is said to do are by divine art performed, using nature as an instrument. ”

“ And though the ideal, with which Nature has inspired us makes us restless and discontented, provokes us to increasing effort, causes us endless pain and suffering, and exacts from us the sacrifice even of our lives, we nevertheless love to have the ideal, and love Nature for implanting it in us. ”

“ This, again, by the stage of agriculture, the era of the war with earth, when men take pleasure in the cornfield and in the garden, but hate everything that is opposed to tillage, such as woodland and rock, or that cannot be subdued to utility, such as mountain and sea. Finally we come to the pure nature-feeling, the free delight in the mere contemplation of the external world, the joy in sense-impressions irrespective of all questions of Nature’s utility and beneficence. ”

“ But that threefold faith is a courageous creed indeed. The first, we said, refers to Nature; he knew Nature in its intimacy, he knew Nature in its glory; "Give me health and a day and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous." And this Nature, that is the assertion, is not what natural sciences teach it to be. ”

“ Much of the wealth and luxuriance of living things, the infinite variety of form and structure, the exquisite grace and beauty in bird and insect, in foliage and flower, may have been mere by-products of the grand mechanism we call nature—the one and only method of developing humanity. ”

“ He saw God through Nature as few men ever saw Him, and he therefore naturally used the beauty and sweetness and glory of Nature to help to reveal the beauty and sweetness and glory of love, the element of the Divine that thrilled him with the deepest joy and the highest reverence. ”

“ Thus under the name, and with some of the attributes of the Goddess of Mythology, the genial force of Nature,—'Natura Naturans' as distinct from the 'rerum summa,' or 'Natura Naturata,'—is apprehended as a living, all-pervading energy, the cause of all life, joy, beauty, and order in the world, the cause too of all grace and accomplishment in man. ”

“ Or we cultivate an intellectual pleasure in nature, and follow up some branch of natural science, as botany, or ornithology, or mineralogy.
Then there is the countryman's love of nature, the pleasure in cattle, horses, bees, growing crops, manual labor, sugar-making, gardening, harvesting, and the rural quietness and repose.
Lastly, we go to nature for solitude and for communion with our own souls. Nature attunes us to a higher and finer mood. This love springs from our religious needs and instincts. ”

“ That was final proof of the strength of nature to soothe, to clarify, to stabilize the tried and weary and upward-gazing soul. Stronger than the recorded deeds of saints, stronger than the eloquence of the gifted uplifters of men, stronger than any words ever written, was the grand, brooding, sculptured aspect of nature. ”

“ Yet year by year he must fill those accursed bags, to please his master and buy the right of living on his land in sordid wretchedness.
Yet nature is eternally young, beautiful, and generous. She pours forth poetry and beauty on all creatures and all plants that are allowed free development. ”

“ This sudden plash into pure wildness--baptism in Nature's warm heart--how utterly happy it made us! Nature streaming into us, wooingly teaching her wonderful glowing lessons, so unlike the dismal grammar ashes and cinders so long thrashed into us. ”

“ Nature, and a due attention to laws of heredity in life, will then rank in equal honour to our eyes with nurture or that attention to the environmental conditions of life which we already regard as so important. ”

“ Nature, God's handiwork, instead of repelling them from God himself, draws them gently but forcibly toward Him, so that they feel themselves to be truly recipients of the blessings of God by being sharers in the blessings of Nature. ”

“ This beautiful world is full of wonders of every kind, full of evidences of the Great Creator's wisdom and skill in adapting each created thing to its special purpose. The whole realm of nature is meant, I believe, to speak to us, to teach us lessons in parables-to lead our hearts upward to God who made us and fitted us also for our special place in creation. ”

“ Nature's powers are explained as passion, will, and love, often in lofty and beautiful comparisons:
'As earth always bears beautiful flowers, plants, and trees, as well as metals and animate beings, and these finer, stronger, and more beautiful at one time than another; and as one springs into being as another dies, causing constant use and work, so it is in still greater degree with the begetting of the holy mysteries [5] ... creation is nothing else than a revelation of the all-pervading superficial godhead ... ”

“ So our love is active, and it vehemently impels us to get to know her better and better, to get ourselves in ever closer touch with her, to discover the utmost fulness of her Beauty, and to communicate to others all that we have come to know and all the Beauty we have seen, so that others may share in our enjoyment and come to love Nature more even than we love her ourselves—love Nature in all her aspects, love physical Nature in the mountains, seas and deserts, the clouds, sunsets and stars, love plant Nature and animal Nature and human Nature ”

“ What is the real aim of what we call Nature-lessons, Nature-teaching, Nature-work? It is surely to foster delight in beauty, so that our hearts shall leap up at sight of the rainbow until we die. For, indeed, if we lose that uplift of the heart, some part of us has died already. ”

“ It gives the kind of joy we find in nature, in the golden-green of light under tree-branches, or the mingled green and gray of tree and rock shadows, or the pearl and rose of sunrise and sunset. We call the deep content which results from such surroundings the influence of nature, and forget to name the less spiritual, the more human condition of well-being which comes to us in our homes from being surrounded with something which in a degree atones for lack of nature's beauty. ”