41 



THE SOUL IN NATURE. 



There are certain philosophers who maiatain that all existence is 

 essentially material ; while there are others who hold with equal stub- 

 bornness, that there are no entities but those of a spiritual kind. 

 Not to day only, but from the birthday of the world, have these two 

 opposite doctrines been repeatedly brought into collision ; and the 

 question, as far as philosophers are concerned, is as much unsolved as 

 ever. But it is not always the philosopher who deals most acutely 

 with philosophy ; and it sometimes happens that the idea of a poet, or 

 the tradition of an uncultivated antiquity, throws more light on a 

 topic under dispute than the most elaborate reasonings of men 

 schooled in disputation. So it is in regard to this question of matter 

 and spirit. The ancient poets, in their strange fables, asserted the 

 prevalence of soul in nature, and continually carried back the mind 

 from material to spiritual things. The ancient creeds of the world 

 embodied the same thought ; and whether we refer to the Indian, 

 Egyptian, or Grecian mythologies, we find that a spiritual existence is 

 everywhere granted, and that body and soul in man, body and soul in 

 nature, are unities universally adopted as respectively essential to each 

 other. The Hindoos say — when Brahme sleeps, all existence passes 

 away ; but when Brahme wakes, his thoughts take shape under the 

 agency of Brahma, and creation follows. "What is Brahme but Deity, 

 whose will controls Brahma or Nature, and through thought gives im- 

 pulse to a perennial birth of beauty, each separate birth being the ex- 

 pression of that thought or Will which called it into action ? The 

 Greeks had Proteus, who took many shapes, yet never lost his 

 identity ; and Proteus was an impersonation of the creative power 

 working underneath and continually revealing itself, never in two 

 forms alike, yet ever the same in purport and essence. Proteus is 

 Brahma at three removes, degraded somewhat by his passage through 

 the Egyptian mythology, into which he passes with other gods from 

 India, and so into the fanciful, but scarcely sublime category of Hel- 

 lenic deities. 



