290 LANDSCAPE 



With Wordsworth and the poets of his time, nature owns 

 something correspondent to man's consciousness. A positive 

 mythology, importing the imagination into science if I may 

 so express this revolution in thought about the universe 

 replaces the anthropomorphism of the Greeks, and fills at 

 last the vacuum created by mediaeval theology. 



IV 



Of Goethe's pantheism no better example can be found 

 than the Proemium to ' Gott und Welt.' This poem has been 

 already quoted in a previous essay ; l and for this reason I 

 shall not reproduce my English version of it here, contenting 

 myself with the observation that this sublime hymn is the 

 poetical counterpart of that philosophy which Bruno preached 

 so fervently, and which Spinoza in his colder mood denuded 

 of its religious elements faith, hope, enthusiasm, inspiration. 

 It expresses in lofty verse what Herbert Spencer has condensed 

 in well-weighed words of prose. 



Amid the mysteries which become the more mysterious the more 

 they are thought about, there will remain the one absolute certainty, 

 that he (man) is ever in presence of an Infinite and Eternal Energy, 

 from which all things proceed. 



The scientific philosopher does not qualify that Energy by 

 any other name. The poet calls it God. 



From Wordsworth we must not expect the deliberate 

 pantheism of a Bruno or a Goethe. Through whatever pro- 

 cesses of thought he passed, this man was at bottom a 

 believing Christian. On that very account his passion for 

 nature, and the deep conviction expressed in his earlier works 

 that the external universe is penetrated by a spirit which 

 also fills the soul of man, have greater value for our present 

 purpose. They prove how instinctively the modern intellect, 

 at the beginning of our century, opened to the cosmic 

 enthusiasm. 



1 At the end of ' The Philosophy of Evolution,' p. 26. 



