ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE 



He says that the naturalistic superstition, the wor- 

 ship of God in nature, has begun to lose its hold 

 upon the educated mind; that the first step toward 

 getting into healthy relations with the universe is 

 the act of rebellion against the God of nature. 



Poor James Thomson, the British poet whose 

 pessimism, perhaps, caused him to commit suicide, 

 whom our James loves to quote, hurled his scorn 

 at a fiction of his own brain when he wrote: 



"Not for all thy power, furled or unfurled, 

 For all thy temples to thy glory built. 

 Would I assume the ignominious guilt 

 Of having made such men in such a world." 



The whole value of philosophy is to help us to a 

 rational view of the universe, and when it fails to 

 do this, it falls short of fulfilling its proper function. 

 Tne contradictions of which James speaks do not 

 disturb the naturalist at all. Nature would not be 

 Nature without these contradictions ; they do not 

 disturb the unity of Nature. 



Empedocles taught that "there is no real crea- 

 tion or annihilation in the universal round of things, 

 but an eternal mixing — due to the two eternal 

 powers, Love and Hate — of one world-stuff in its 

 sum unalterable and eternal." And Whitman's 

 large lines mean the same thing: 



" There was never any more inception than there is now. 

 Nor any more youth or age than there is now, 

 And will never be any more perfection than there is now* 

 Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now." 



