Naturalist

“ When a naturalist, confining himself properly to reason and the laws of Nature, speculates on the origin of species, and attempts to show the correlation of form to form, the evolution of one from another, or the development of many distinct species from a common stock, the reverence of certain minds, which have long run in a certain groove that connects these obscure mysteries of Nature with some imagined interference of Omnipotence, is seriously shocked. ”

“ But the young naturalist who takes his first lessons in the fields, observing the unrivalled scene which creation everywhere displays, is perpetually studying in the power of delight and wonder, and laying up knowledge which can be derived from no other source. ”

“ In whatever direction however the contemplations of the naturalist tend, from race to race or from kingdom to kingdom, he discovers no rude gaps but a beautiful unison, for nihil per saltum is one of the great laws of creation. ”

“ Nature, in one of those whims of hers by which she delights to confound the studious naturalist, had chosen to keep this spot exempt from the law of blood and fear which ruled the rest of her domains. ”

“ When you have to watch an animal instead of a stone, you differ from the naturalist in the same way. He may, perhaps, if he be an amiable naturalist, take delight in having living creatures round him;—still, the major part of his work is, or has been, in counting feathers, separating fibres, and analyzing structures. ”

“ A naturalist with such large views has a wide field before him, which with every step expands, and which alone is worthy of engrossing the earnest attention of his intelligence, and is in itself sufficient to absorb the profoundest contemplation. ”

“ To the pleasing task of enlightening those, who, shut up in close cities, have no opportunity of observing for themselves, and to the still higher enjoyment of directing young minds to an elevating pursuit, the naturalist adds a gratification even better than all, by making known the hidden wonders of nature ”

“ But yet nature kindly, and as if by a special interposition, provides for its maintenance, and the humble naturalist can only exclaim, "God is great, and his ways mysterious," and go on studying and collecting facts, leaving to his successors the more difficult task, but greater joy of discovering the cause and reason of things that are but a puzzle to the philosophers of this day. ”

“ It would be presumption, however, from the standpoint of the naturalist to discuss at length the powers of man's spiritual being. I may refer merely to a few points which illustrate at once his connection with other creatures, and his superiority to them as a higher member of nature. ”

“ The study of nature affords us a succession of “ever-new delights,” such as charmed us in childhood, when everything had the attractions of novelty and beauty; and thus the mind of the naturalist may have its own fresh and vigorous thoughts, even while the infirmities of age weigh down the body. ”

“ The power of the naturalist to distinguish slight differences of form or feature in natural objects is simply the result of a habit, acquired through long experience, of paying attention to what he sees, and the want of this power in students who have been trained solely by literary studies is most marked. ”

“ He is of course a distinguished naturalist, probably the most acute, broad-minded, and understanding observer of Nature living. And this, in an age of specialism, which loves to put men into pigeonholes and label them, has been a misfortune to the reading public, who seeing the label Naturalist, pass on, and take down the nearest novel. ”

“ In doing this, the naturalist creates as many new classes; which are by no means those to which the individual animal is familiarly and spontaneously referred; nor should we ever think of assigning to them so prominent a position in our arrangement of the animal kingdom, unless for a preconceived purpose of scientific convenience. ”

“ But nature designed him for another, and some think a better, field, and endowed him with powers as a naturalist that have won for him recognition among the highest living authorities of his profession. ”

“ A JESUIT with whom I was conversing on educational questions once told me, in depreciation of my position as a man of science, that the naturalist of to-day can be a physiologist or a physicist, mineralogist, geologist, zoologist, botanist, or chemist, and no more; that he can not overlook the whole of science, but can at most only really know a part of his own branch, from which he is not, of course, justified in drawing any general conclusion. ”

“ But I am here to-night as a member of the Naturalists’ Society, and by all of us, in that capacity, they are first to be regarded, not as illustrations of disease, but of the life history of some of nature’s creations—creations which are no doubt as important, as definite, and which play as large a part in the general scheme of life, as do many of the larger forms of animated beings. ”

“ 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. ”

“ "Curious anomaly, fantastic element!" said an ingenious naturalist, "in which the animal kingdom blossoms, and the vegetable does not!" ”

“ Some naturalists, from being deeply impressed with the mental and spiritual powers of man, have divided the whole organic world into three kingdoms, the Human, the Animal, and the Vegetable, thus giving to man a separate kingdom.255 Spiritual powers cannot be compared or classed by the naturalist; but he may endeavour to shew, as I have done, that the mental faculties of man and the lower animals do not differ in kind, although immensely in degree. ”

“ Inspired by his example of dealing thus reverently and lovingly with nature, the great naturalists of our time are reading secrets hitherto hidden from less careful and pious observers. If the results thus far have not satisfied the idealist, it becomes him to consider that his methods are the reverse of theirs, and that when they shall have tracked Life in its manifold shapes and modes of working in nature up to Spirit, their office is fulfilled, their work complete, and their discoveries are passed over to him for a higher generalization and genesis. ”

“ In telling my story, chiefly of facts in Nature, an attempt is made to show how a naturalist does his work, in the hope that perhaps a few readers will find happiness in following the workings of the laws of life. ”

“ These appearances indicate the fact that the universe is represented in every one of its particles. Every thing in nature contains all the powers of nature. Every thing is made of one hidden stuff; as the naturalist sees one type under every metamorphosis, and regards a horse as a running man, a fish as a swimming man, a bird as a flying man, a tree as a rooted man. Each new form repeats not only the main character of the type, but part for part all the details, all the aims, furtherances, hindrances, energies, and whole system of every other. ”

“ They have become ardent “realists” or “naturalists.” “Realists,” because they are occupied with what we are in the habit of calling the realities of life. [12] “Naturalists,” because they love nature and try to represent her actual appearances, as they are enveloped in and affected by light and atmosphere. ”

“ With these it deals and through them it works. Even in the most elementary naturalistic idea, that “everything happens of itself,” there lurks that aversion to purpose which characterises all naturalistic systems. ”

“ Even the production of individual species is not the act of divine Providence, but is a process of nature — in fact, of evolution, in modern parlance. These Naturalists, as they called themselves, denied the existence of miracles ”

“ The name then is perfectly general; for, no matter what the something is that good is held to mean, the theory is still Naturalism. Whether good be defined as yellow or green or blue, as loud or soft, as round or square, as sweet or bitter, as productive of life or productive of pleasure, as willed or desired or felt: whichever of these or of any other object in the world, good may be held to mean, the theory, which holds it to mean them, will be a naturalistic theory. ”

“ Sometimes these naturalists boldly turn to nature, their loved mother, and earn their living in the woods and fields. Sometimes they have a touch of the hermit in them, they prefer nature to man; others are genial, kindly men, albeit possessed of a certain reserve. ”

“ It was this terrible aspect of nature, as I had seen it on that evening, which was uppermost in the mind of the race at an earlier stage of culture before man's cunning brain had found out so many inventions and created new and pleasant conditions for his own species. When animistic promptings survive in him he is now apt to personify nature in its milder beneficent aspects. ”

“ In this these two naturalists seem to us, each in his way, preëminent. There is a characteristic likeness, too—underlying much difference—in their admirable manner of dealing with facts closely and at first hand, without the interposition of the formal laws, vague ideal conceptions, or "glittering generalities," which some philosophical naturalists make large use of. ”

“ Throughout the whole middle decades of the present age, the human mind in all its highest embodiments was eagerly searching, groping, and enquiring after a naturalistic explanation of the origin and progress of organic life. ”

“ But naturalists are now beginning to look beyond this, and to see that there must be some other principle regulating the infinitely varied forms of animal life. ”

“ Very curiously in this the only poetic passage I could recall the author's religion has mixed itself with the sense of a living and intelligent principle in nature—that which at times makes nature seem a person to us. The person may be interested in or indifferent to us, but is all-knowing and all-powerful and cannot be an intercessor. ”

“ For it is in ourselves that the dominating spirit of Nature is most clearly manifested to us. And being ourselves the instruments and agents of Nature, and informed through and through with her spirit, we ought to be able to understand how she works if only we look carefully enough into the working of our own inner selves.
What we find is that under the inspiration of the genius of Nature we are perpetually projecting in front of us a pattern or standard of what we think we ought to be, or should like to be, and of what we think our country and the world ought to be. We set up an ideal. ”

“ Although much remains obscure, and will long remain obscure, I can entertain no doubt, after the most deliberate study and dispassionate judgment of which I am capable, that the view which most naturalists entertain, and which I formerly entertained—namely, that each species has been independently created—is erroneous. I am fully convinced that species are not immutable; ”

“ For this innumerable multitude of things, of which we now-a-days talk as if it were one thing, and had an organic unity of its own, or even as if it were one person, and had a will of its own, and call it Nature—a word which will one day be forgotten by philosophers, with the ‘four elements,’ and the ‘animal spirits;’—this multitude of things, I say, which we miscall Nature, has its dark and ugly, as well as its bright and fair side. ”

“ Whatever the deeper reality behind Nature may turn out to be, — our Nature, the realm of matter and of laws with which our science and our popular opinions have to do, is a realm which we conceive as known or as knowable to various men, in precisely the same general sense in which we regard it as known or as knowable to our private selves. Take away the social factor in our present view of Nature, and you would alter the most essential of the characters possessed, for us, by that physical realm in which we all believe. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But even the domain of the natural itself, as we know it, is by no means simple and capable of a unified interpretation. Nature, especially in the realm of organic life, the animal and plant world, appears to be filled with marvels of purposefulness, with riddles of development and differentiation, in short with all the mysteries of life. ”

“ That is [pg 059] the thought, the idea, the logos of dog. Can there be a thought without a thinker? Did the ideas in nature, the millions of objects which make up our knowledge, fall from the clouds? Did they make themselves or did nature make them? Who, then, is nature? Is it a masculine, feminine, or neuter? If nature can choose, then it can also think and produce. But can it? No, nature is a word, very useful for certain purposes; but empty, intangible, and incomprehensible. Nature is an abstraction, as much as dog or tree, but far more inclusive. ”

“ But pardon, Madam, for I think it a Crime to compare the Creating, Generating and producing Corporeal Life and Wisdom of Nature unto any particular Creature, although every particular Creature hath their share, being a part of Nature. ”

“ So as we take a comprehensive view of Nature both in her outward bodily form and her inner spiritual reality, and find her to be an interconnected whole in which all the parts are interrelated with one another, one body and one mind, self-contained and self-conscious, and driven by a self-organising, self-governing, self-directing Activity—we should regard her as nothing less than a Personal Being. In ordinary language we speak of Nature as a Person, and when we so speak we should not regard ourselves as speaking figuratively: we should mean quite literally and as a fact that she is a Person. ”