NATURE MYTHS AND ALLEGORIES 303 



way of regarding the universe as a spiritual whole, and man 

 in his relation to it as a part thereof. 



Ill 



Were they wholly fanciful, those myths and allegories of 

 the earliest philosophers and poets? The seers who gave 

 them form lived closer to all-nourishing earth than we do, 

 pent as we are in populous cities and clouded with the culture 

 of four thousand years. Perhaps they hold an element of 

 truth conveyed in symbol, to the significance of which we 

 have been blinded by theological exclusiveness, and by the 

 positive preoccupations of the scientific genius. Their truth, 

 if truth they had, lay in their recognition of the universe as 

 one live thing, and their belief in larger moral forces than 

 those of individual men and women. 



We cannot return to the state of thought about the world, 

 out of which the primitive myths sprang. The habit of 

 attributing a personality like that of a man to everything in 

 nature belongs to the far distant past, and will not be revived. 

 But in its place the modern theory of the universe tends to 

 establish the conviction that men and beasts and plants and 

 inorganic substances are parts of one mind-penetrated unity. 

 That abrupt separation of men from their environment, 

 which formed the leading principle of philosophy and religion 

 during the last two thousand years, begins to disappear. We 

 recognise it as a necessary stage of thought, in the passage 

 from grosser to more refined conceptions of the spirit which 

 sustains and animates the hierarchy of being. We can 

 no longer deny our kinship with the lower lives wherefrom 

 we issued. 



It is interesting to notice how the intuitions of early 

 thinkers tally with the last results of modern science, A poet 

 writing in the mystic East, six centuries ago, described the 

 ascent of man from nature in these verses : * 



First man appeared in the class of inorganic things 

 Next he passed therefrom into that of plants. 



1 From the ' Matlmavi ' of Jalalu 'd Din. 



