Livings

“ Central to their discussions is the nature of life. Is it continuous, as it appears in vegetation and the animal kingdom, or is it discontinuous like the rocks on the mountainside or the grains of sand on the seashore? ”

“ But our true Environment is, first of all, the contents of our mind, and especially that part of the contents—whether memories or imaginations—to which we give most attention and interest; secondly, the Divine influence in which, whether we recognise it or not, we “live and move and have our being.” ”

“ Is there, then, a world, a world of law in which 2 and 2 make 4, an animal world in which all the lowest and most disgusting instincts may come to the surface at any moment, and yet in which such revelations of beauty in human life—revelations lasting for a moment, or a day, or a month, or a year, or an eternity of years—occur? ”

“ Outward nature, inner life and passion, town and country, all the features of human nature, as exhibited in every grade of life—from the cottage to the throne—are in him expressed with a truth and a natural strength, that awake in us precisely the same sensations as nature itself. ”

“ And in harmony with that view of his life, you have surrounded him with comparative integrals, only subdivided by the tender hands of their immediate families and neighbours,—your squires and parsons, your Italian exile and his Jemima. With all these, life is, more or less, the life natural, and this is always, more or less, the life integral. Then comes the life artificial, which is always, more or less, the life fractional. ”

“ Naturalists carry mind into matter, and seek the eternal truth of God in the perishing forms of the fossil plant, or the evanescent tides of the sea; she carries love into the lanes and kennels of society, to give bread to the needy, eyes to the blind, mind to the ignorant, and a soul to men floating and weltering in this sad pit of society. ”

“ Feeling my longing, quenched, was but a part
⁠Of nature's ceaseless striving for the race.
But now, I know not what they would with me;
Matter or Force or God, if Gods there be.
I wait; I question; Nature heeds me not. ”

“ Just now you found that you would have no house to live in, and no clothes to wear. So, soon your mind and soul would have no body-house to live in; no flesh-clothes to wear. Every part of you, except the mind and soul part, comes from the earth. ”

“ Life Force.—To every thinking mind the question often recurs, What makes the fragrant flower so different from the dead soil from which it grows? the trilling bird, so vastly superior to the inert atmosphere in which it flies? What subtle power paints the rose, and tunes the merry songster's voice? To explain this mystery, philosophers of olden time supposed the existence of a certain peculiar force which is called life, or vital force, or vitality. ”

“ In the great centres of civilization we admire and study only the results of mind,—the products of human endeavor: here one views only the work of Nature,—but Nature in all her primeval power, as in the legendary frostless morning of creation. ”

“ From this standpoint we see that all is Life and all is Good, and that Nature, from her clearly visible surface to her most arcane depths, is one vast storehouse of life and good entirely devoted to our individual use. ”

“ In nature, which to most eyes is but a dull lifeless mass, impelled by dead mechanic movements, their finer spirits were aware of a breathing life, a living Presence, distinct, yet not alien from, their own spirits, and thence they drank life, and strength, and joy. ”

“ Who knows how many thousands of men have led such a life, shocking, indeed, to the feelings of worldlings, but in reality devoted to the contemplation of what is above Nature—a life, consequently, exalted and holy? ”

“ For, as the sensitiveness to nature means supplementing our physical life by the life of the air and the sun, the clouds and waters, so does this historic habit mean supplementing our present life by a life in the past; a life larger, richer than our own, multiplying our emotions by those of the dead.... ”

“ What need, it may be asked, for a prolonged endeavour to justify belief in the existence of the house in which we live, the planet on which it stands, or the human beings among whom we seem to play our parts? ”

“ As all the multiform varieties of plant life have one common soil from which to draw their sustenance, and by virtue of which they live and thrive, so all the varied activities of human life are rooted in, and draw their vitality from, one common source—the human heart. The cause of all suffering and of all happiness resides, not in the outer activities of human life, but in the inner activities of the heart and mind ”

“ Here, I say, and in these discourses only, shall this be so; for, strictly speaking, and in the higher flights of speculation, Human Life on Earth, and Earthly Time itself, are but necessary Epochs of the One Time and of the One Eternal Life;—and this Earthly Life with all its subordinate divisions may be deduced from the fundamental Idea of the Eternal Life already accessible to us here below. ”

“ The habits of stars and waters, the huge habits of space and time, are the habits of the men.
83The Infinite, at last, which in days gone by hung over us—the mere hiding place of Death, the awful living-room of God—is the neighborhood of human life. ”

“ The great growths of literature spring up in the open, where the air is free and they can be a law unto themselves. The law of life, here as elsewhere, is the law of nourishment: with what was the earth laden, and the atmosphere? ”

“ Here he will be introduced to a world of thought and sentiment almost as fresh, as fair and many-sided as Nature herself,—the fragrant blossoming in myriad hues and forms of the life and mind of the most richly endowed portion of the human race. ”

“ The wise man, in accordance with the usage of his day derived from a higher antiquity, applied this term to anything that gave new life or vigor to understanding, heart, thought or desire. A tree of life was that, whatever it might be, from which mental or moral life refreshed or renewed itself. ”

“ Was it that the struggle of things to survive produced as a sort of necessary by-product these intense preferences and appreciations, or was it that some mystical outer thing, some great force, drove life beautyward, even in spite of expediency, regardless of survival value and all the manifest discretions of life? ”

“ Is life—especially human life—worth living? Undoubtedly, since nature has so abundantly provided the means for its perpetuation, and God has given the commandment, "Be fruitful and replenish the earth."
4. The Symbols of Life and Death: "The Tree of Life.—so called from its symbolic character as a sign and seal of immortal life. Its prominent position in the midst of the garden where it must have been an object of daily observation and interest, was admirably fitted to keep them [Adam and Eve] habitually in mind of God and futurity." ”

“ In every point of our bodies, and at every moment of our existence, all the energies of Nature meet and unite. Yet, such order rules in the course of these wonderful workings, that harmonious blended action, instead of bewildering confusion, characterizes beings endowed with life. ”

“ But the active life which labors for the more and more discovery of God's work, is perfectly happy, and is the life of the terrestrial paradise, being a true foretaste of heaven, and beginning in earth, as heaven's vestibule. ”

“ No account has been taken of all that each human being17 needs to keep his spiritual nature alive. The quiet times in the country or by the sea, the knowledge of Nature’s mysteries, the opportunities for the cultivation of natural affection. ”

“ And then there was the inward relation to Nature, the wisdom and comfort she drew from it to heal the distressful mystery of life; the evidence she found in it of man’s spirit, of a power, however baffled, which transcends material forces. ”

“ The sheer hard matter of living is vividly presented; the toil of existence in village and town, the solace of nature, the joy of respite from labour admirably realised and presented.”—Times, in a review of “Sons and Lovers.” ”

“ This eternal world is about us and within us while we live here. 'Heaven is nearer to our souls than the earth is to our bodies.' The world which we ordinarily think of as real is an arbitrary selection from experience, corresponding roughly to the average reaction of life upon the average man. ”

“ We shall try to distinguish the normal and essential features of a rite or custom from variations and accretions, we shall note which of the constituent elements of folklore enter into it, and which are wanting. We shall take environment into consideration, and, if survival be present, we shall try, (as I have urged before) , to discover what it is a survival from? Some time or other that survival must have fitted into its environment. What was that environment? What period, what state of society does the survival survive from? ”

“ When one has been accustomed to the comforts of civilized life—the small ones, I mean, for they are the only ones that count—the beginning of a wild, free life near to nature's heart begets a series of impressions quite new, and strange—so strange. ”

“ Beneath all this gloss of the world—this cold conventional aspect, which all more or less present, and which the business of life renders necessary—there resides for certain a fountain of goodness, pure in its inner depths as the lymph rock-distilled, and ready on every proper occasion to well out in the exercise of the noblest duties. ”

“ Then I find that the living being has certain powers resulting from its own activities, and the interaction of these with the activities of other things—the knowledge of which is PHYSIOLOGY. Beyond this the living being has a position in space and time, which is its DISTRIBUTION. All these form the body of ascertainable facts which constitute the status quo of the living creature. ”

“ Could one sketch a sounder scaffolding on which to build all the odd divergencies—crankinesses and heroisms, stupidities and engagingnesses—which may go to make the edifice of an average decent soul's material, mental and spiritual habitation? ”

“ These were facts of Nature, of Man as a part of it, of man's nature, habits, history, thoughts, conduct, and social relations,—in fact, all that pertains to the phenomena of Nature and Human Life and Relations. ”

“ These contradict the voice of nature, which, by the regularity of seasons, the succession, growth, and decay, of plants, of animals, and men, by the course of the planets and all its other wonderful works, attest the existence, power, and goodness of a Superior Being, who must have made all these things at the first, and now continues and preserves them. ”

“ Thus have we endeavoured to pre-figure the whole Earthly Life of Man by a comprehension of its purpose;—to perceive why our Race had to begin its Existence here, and by this means to describe the whole present Life of humankind:—this is what we wished to do,—it was our first task. ”

“ But that life receives its modification and change, according to the character of the mind, soul, or spiritual organism into which it flows,—just as the pure rays of light from the sun are changed into different colours, according to the structure of the recipient objects. ”

“ For our existence, thus apparently attached in nature to the sun and the returning moon and the periods which they mark, — so susceptible to climate and to country, so alive to social good and evil, so fond of splendor, and so tender to hunger and cold and debt, — reads all its primary lessons out of these books. ”

“ These three views of life are as follows: First, embracing the individual, or the animal view of life; second, embracing the society, or the pagan view of life; third, embracing the whole world, or the divine view of life. ”

“ But all this is little enough, unless we have also that inner force which sways a period, a generation, and which sometimes inclines us more and more to Nature, reviving in our hearts the desire of the land. ”

“ And that our whole physical life may lie soaking in a spiritual atmosphere, a dimension of Being that we at present have no organ for apprehending, is vividly suggested to us by the analogy of the life of our domestic animals. ”

“ This conception of life, which I have given only in its barest outline, is a very common one. For thousands of years it has persisted in the philosophical field, the nourishment and the torment of the greatest intellects of humanity. ”

“ Then, when the clouds are off the soul,
When thou dost bask in Nature's eye,
[p.88] 15Ask, how she view'd thy self-control,
Thy struggling, task'd morality—
Nature, whose free, light, cheerful air. ”

“ Work, food, and sleep, all life reduced to its bare essentials, uncomplex, honest, healthy. They were strong, these men, with the strength of the soil they worked, in touch with the essential things, back again to the starting point of civilisation, coarse, vital, real, and sane. ”

“ Life pursuing life and in its turn pursued by death, presses to the snow line of the possible, and every form of life, of instinct, thought and action is fixed and determined by conditions, by countless antecedent and co-existing facts. ”

“ So the body and mind and soul are all one Life. There are no divisions in Nature. The form differs, but the essence is uniform. We classify for the sake of convenience and of clear statement. As Sir Oliver Lodge says, in “The Survival of Man”—“Boundaries and classifications must be recognized as human artifices,282 but for practical purposes distinctions are necessary” ”