336 HOLISM AND EVOLUTION chap. 



order of the universe. The Great Society of the universe 

 leaves a place for the most humble inanimate inorganic struc- 

 ture no less than for the crowning glory of the great soul. To 

 conceive the universe otherwise is to indulge in anthropo- 

 morphism, which may be pleasing to our vanity, but in 

 reality detracts from the richness and variety of the universe. 

 The Holistic universe embraces all the real structures from 

 the lowest to the highest in their own right and as they are, 

 without decking them in spiritual habiliments which are alien 

 to their true nature. This world, in the noble language of 

 Keats, is indeed the valley of soul-making; but it could 

 not be that if the valley itself consists of nothing but souls. 

 To those who have the deepest experience of life, this world 

 is not only the upward path for the soul, but a very hard and 

 flinty one. To attempt to pave that rugged way with the 

 roses of the spiritual order would be a profound mistake 

 from every point of view. 



To say this is not to assume that there is anything alien 

 or antagonistic between the human soul and the natural en- 

 vironment in which it finds itself in this world. There is 

 not only poetic value but profound truth in the spiritual 

 interpretation of Nature to which Wordsworth and other 

 great poets of Nature have accustomed us. And that truth 

 is not merely due to the creative part which mind plays in 

 the shaping and fashioning of Nature. It is not merely 

 that we invest Nature with our own emotional attributes. 

 It is, in fact, to be traced to far deeper sources in our human 

 origins. For we are indeed one with Nature; her genetic 

 fibres run through all our being; our physical organs connect 

 us with millions of years of her history; our minds are full 

 of immemorial paths of pre-human experience. Our ear 

 for music, our eye for art carry us back to the early begin- 

 nings of animal life on this globe. Press but a button in our 

 brain, and the gaunt spectres of the dim forgotten past rise 

 once more before us; the ghostly dreaded forms of the 

 primeval Fear loom before us and we tremble all over with 

 inexplicable fright. And then again some distant sound, 

 some call of bird or smell of wild plants, or some sunrise or 



