Ill-nature

“ Earth has no trial, hell has no torture, ruthless enough to inflict upon this fabric. Fragile, weak, perishable, sensitive of all, it stands subjective to the wild hand of Nature, piteous, unpitied, terrible, undeterred, supreme still over its vehement adversaries, indefatigable, steadfast, tolerant, and debonair, prolific and populous, the most eminent and sanest apparition upon the whole globe. ”

“ Tush! the poor wretch spoke of a Demon. Who can tell? Nature herself is a grand destroyer. See that pretty bird, in its beak a writhing worm! All Nature’s children live to take life; none, indeed, so lavishly as man. What hecatombs slaughtered, not to satisfy the irresistible sting of hunger, but for the wanton ostentation of a feast, which he may scarcely taste, or for the mere sport that he finds in destroying! We speak with dread of the beasts of prey: what beast of prey is so dire a ravager as man,—so cruel and so treacherous? ”

“ Nature set no store on human life—earthquake, tempest, pestilence, famine, swept human beings into the jaws of death by the thousand and tens of thousands. And mankind was as contemptuous of human life as nature herself. ”

“ The spirits of evil in whom they believed were localized in the objects of nature and to their presence all natural phenomena were due. Nature was therefore lawless and hostile. But these demons have all been cast out by the presence and power of God in nature. ”

“ Did Nature destroy all those infants? did Nature breed all those defects and deformities? did Nature bring forth all those idiocies and lunacies? or, was not rather their chief destroyer and producer the ignorance of Man outraging Nature? And the poor, the prisoners, the soldiery, the ascetics, the priests, the nobles, the kings; were these the work of Nature, or of the perversity of Man? And I asked: Were not the very ignorance and perversity of Man also from Nature? ”

“ Goodness and Malignity.—At first men imposed their own personalities on Nature: everywhere they saw themselves and their like, i.e. their own evil and capricious temperaments, hidden, as it were, behind clouds, thunder-storms, wild beasts, trees, and plants: it was then that they declared Nature was evil. ”

“ You are alone; you hear no human voice,—no sounds but the rushing of the river over its volcanic rocks, and the creeping of millions of lizards and tree-frogs and little toads. You see no human face; but you see all around you the labor of man being gnawed and devoured by nature,—broken bridges, sliding steps, fallen arches, strangled fountains with empty basins;—and everywhere arises the pungent odor of decay. This omnipresent odor affects one unpleasantly;—it never ceases to remind you that where Nature is most puissant to charm, there also is she mightiest to destroy. ”

“ But those beasts to whom Nature has granted naught of these same things— Beasts quite unfit by own free will to thrive And vain for any service unto us In thanks for which we should permit their kind To feed and be in our protection safe— Those, of a truth, were wont to be exposed, Enshackled in the gruesome bonds of doom, As prey and booty for the rest, until Nature reduced that stock to utter death. ”

“ At length to life, they need not be the same!
Fancy “improved” them from real freaks, born,
Living, if lives scarce human, and forlorn.
From instinct creative, but cross-grained, Earth
Brought monsters—aspect and limbs strange—to birth;
Abnormal the whole—some with parts too few,
Some with more, though all human, than were due. [127]
Horse-men, mermaids, dragons, gold-streams, gemmed trees.
For Nature are impossibilities.
Had they once existed, there is no cause
Why the race should have ceased through Nature’s laws.
The freaks of Earth were actual, and led
Earthly men’s lives ”

“ Nature impales men, breaks them as if on the wheel, casts them to be devoured by wild beasts, burns them to death, crushes them with stones like the first Christian martyr, starves them with hunger, freezes them with cold, poisons them by the quick or slow venom of her exhalations.... ”

“ Still another change—the earth was clad in a robe of spotless ermine, and the gray dawn opened her pale eye on iciness and desolation; men hurried to and fro as nature were a plague, and they its victims ”

“ In her malevolent mood, nature is a callous and capricious and frightful monster, raging and thundering, wasting and withering, scorching and burning, drowning and burying, devastating and destroying, devouring and killing. Her catastrophes and cataclysms work havoc upon earth. Her magic wand spells destruction and death all around. With appalling suddenness, in one terrific moment, she razes to the ground marvels of man, raised by his toil and industry of years. ”

“ Nature's glorious structure seemed to him ravaged like a wall rent by a storm, the speaking mouth of all these people struck him as nothing but a chasm convulsively and repellently opening and shutting, darkness invaded his spirit, he burned with a feeling of shame, he felt ashamed in the name of the nameless God, ashamed that his body was molded like that of these creatures around him. ”

“ Accordingly we are told that the devils appear clad in filthy and tattered garments; that they dwell in deserts, bogs, and miry places—some of them in caves and dens like those of wild beasts; that among the objects by which they are surrounded, are dreary deserts, rocky and barren wastes, thorns and thistles, ferocious beasts and venomous reptiles, dirty pools and heaps of filth. And these things (all of which are spiritual in their nature) are but the embodied forms, under the law of correspondence, of the filthy and infernal loves of the evil spirits themselves. ”

“ Nature, blind, unfeeling and silent, ignoring individual existence and taking to her bosom with equal indifference, a poor little animal or a million corpses, was beginning to smile under the late winter suns. ”

“ These violent extremes of any kind—ascetic, religious, barbaric, or repulsive—which affect life and irritate our souls, or the souls of some of us, are not at all offensive to Nature in Her entirety apparently. She appears to like extremes as well as a median line, the latter as a fence or break between them, and will have nothing of perpetual anything in any one direction. ”

“ And that the physical result of that mental vileness is a total carelessness of the beauty of sky, or the cleanness of streams, or the life of animals and flowers: and I believe that the powers of Nature are depressed or perverted, together with the Spirit of Man; and therefore that conditions of storm and of physical darkness, such as never were before in Christian times, are developing themselves, in connection also with forms of loathsome insanity, multiplying through the whole genesis of modern brains. ”

“ And, since on the other hand, they correspond to the affections and thoughts of man's life, and thus to the spiritual world which is the outbirth and correspondent of his natural mind, it follows that all evil affections and thoughts pervert the inflowing life, and tend to disturb order and to produce evil and noxious things in nature. In the hells, and from the hells to some extent in the world of spirits, appear poisonous and hurtful animals, as serpents, scorpions, owls, mice, locusts, frogs, spiders, flies, lice and various parasites ”

“ Thus evil, in fact, is a perversion of the mental faculties—distortion, so to speak, of the spiritual substances and forms, which constitute the mind. These ugly and fierce mental existences flowing forth into nature, and putting on correspondent material forms, presented to view those noxious and hateful things, animal and vegetable, and mineral also, which astonish and shock us, when beheld in the midst of God's beautiful creation. ”

“ The trees will be fruitless, lacking beauty and symmetry; wild animals, noxious insects and reptiles will abound in its dark recesses. This is the incompleteness and imperfection of the world of nature. ”

“ Nature asserted her rights, not in a peaceful, normal manner, but with horrible degeneracy,--stupefaction in the place of sleep, the delirium of fury instead of dreams. The animal developed itself in forms of hideous distortion, and the most dangerous madness took possession of the soul: joy in cruelty, pleasure in destruction. ”

“ Thus the very climate is changed from what it ought to be; the elements become hostile to man in an extreme degree, and the whole system of nature, originally designed to give life and happiness to the human race, is, through their own misconduct, changed into a system of misery, disease and death. ”

“ So, too, a vicious and depraved nature, or a nature which is hard, narrow, and unsympathetic, will tend, much less by calculation or indolence than by natural affinity, to low and degrading views of human nature. ”

“ But how oft do they break their bounds, and cause the greatest convulsions in society? There is nothing so advantageous in the universe, but what frequently becomes pernicious, by its excess or defect; nor has Nature guarded, with the requisite accuracy, against all disorder or confusion. The irregularity is never perhaps so great as to destroy any species; but is often sufficient to involve the individuals in ruin and misery.
On the concurrence, then, of these four circumstances, does all or the greatest part of natural evil depend. ”

“ This is a picture—a horrible picture, such as old artists used to make in the fifteenth or sixteenth century to illustrate the temptations of a saint by devils, or the terrors of a sinner about to die, and surrounded by ghastly visions. Really [Pg 354] if you hate Nature, the universe will at once for you become what it seemed to the superstitious of the past ages and to the disordered fancies of insane fanatics. The very sun itself will no longer appear as a glorious star, but as a creature of prey, devouring the dead. ”

“ Organic Evil—Disease.—But there is a more dreadful form of evil than that which results from external physical nature—an evil far more subtle and difficult to understand, and therefore to conquer. I mean368 internal organic evil—disease in its diversified forms and with its attendant weakness and suffering, inscrutable often in its causes, insidious in its approaches, contagious, infectious, spreading from house to house, carrying suffering and death in its course, and leaving sorrow and desolation behind. ”

“ For in such regions wild beasts range, evil herbs flourish, and demons go about. If in very deed he lived and moved and had his being in God, then assuredly there ought not to be one cranny in his nature, one realm of his consciousness, one well-spring of thought, where the will of God was a stranger. ”

“ Curious that his vision sees only the lowest forms of natural life. Insects, snakes and birds he glimpses in their own mystery, their own pristine being. And straightway gives the lie to Innocent Nature. ”

“ There are not two worlds—a world of Nature and a world of human nature—standing over against one another, in a sort of antagonism, but one world of Nature, in the orderly evolution of which human nature has its subordinate part. Disease, hallucinations, idiosyncrasies of whatever sort, are the product of disobedience to law—discordant notes in the Divine harmony, which result from an unskillful or careless touch. ”

“ Such appearances are a puzzle alike to the physiologist and the philosopher; their frequency shows that they are based on some weak spot in human nature; and in proportion as we pity the victims we have a right to condemn those who sow the seeds of the pestilence. ”

“ In the world of the mind as well as in the wonders of the visible creation, in streams and passions, in woods and dreams, wherever the children of Nature sought a god, the anti-naturalists feared a devil ”

“ The evils and falsities thus originated in and by man produce their correspondences in the world around him; and wherever there are excrementitious, decaying and malarious atmospheres and matters, they flow in with nature and give rise to the destructive, noxious and poisonous animal, vegetable and mineral creations there. ”

“ But there are more facts in nature than these. There is premature death, pestilence, famine. And if you answer: Man has control over these; they are caused by man’s ignorance and sin, and by his breaking of natural laws—what will you make of those destructive powers over which he has no control; of the hurricane and the earthquake; of poisons, vegetable and mineral; of those parasitic Entozoa whose awful abundance, and awful destructiveness in man and beast, science is just revealing—a new page of danger and loathsomeness? ”

“ Nature Conscience heard, and came out of the planets, and sent forth his fore-goers, fevers and fluxes, coughs and cardiacles, cramps and toothaches, rheums and radegoundes and roynous scalls, boils and botches and burning agues, frenzies and foul evils—foragers of Nature had ypricked and preyed polls of people that largely a legion lose their life soon. Eld the hoary, he was in the vanguard, and bare the banner before Death, by right he it claimed. Nature came after, with many keen sores, as pokkes and pestilences, and much people shent. So Nature through corruptions killed many. ”

“ His cheek grow pale?
and if it is a vice to dread the dissolution of nature so excessively, (and the same thing on the same principle may be asserted of our aversion to pain,) still the fact that nearly every one is affected in this manner, is a sufficient proof that nature abhors destruction. And though some men show this dread or aversion to such a degree that they are deservedly blamed for it, still this may show us that such feelings would not be so excessive in some people, if a moderate degree of them were not implanted in mankind by nature. ”

“ Death Tick. Thus the student is constantly led astray by the wanton freaks Nature plays, and becomes sceptical as regards the truth of a natural system, though there is one to be discovered; and at last disgusted with the stiff and arbitrary systems of our books,—a disgust we confess most wholesome, if it only leads him into a closer communion with nature. ”