MANIFOLD NATURE 



traits; always when he speaks of her he speaks as an 

 artist and poet. He says to Eckermann that Nature 

 "is always true, always serious, always severe; she 

 is always right, and the errors and faults are always 

 those of man. The man who is incapable of appre- 

 ciating her, she despises; and only to the apt, the 

 pure, the true, does she resign herself and reveal her 

 secrets. The understanding will not reach her; man 

 must be capable of elevating himself to the highest 

 Reason to come into that contact with the Divinity 

 which manifests in the primitive phenomena which 

 dwell behind them and from which they proceed. 

 The divinity works in the living, not in the dead; in 

 the becoming and changing, not in the become and 

 the fixed. Therefore, reason, with its tendency to- 

 ward the divine, has only to do with the becoming, 

 the living; but understanding has to do with the be- 

 come, the already fixed, that it may make use of 

 it." In this last we see the germ of Bergson's philoso- 

 phy. The divinity that dwells behind phenomena, 

 and from which they proceed, is the attempt of the 

 human mind to find the end of that which has no 

 end, the law of causation. 



