NATURE MYTHS AND ALLEGORIES 305 



understanding with the creatures of another stage. Man, so 

 long as he is man, has his most distinct affinities to man 

 alone, and is forced to think of spirit as human. This does 

 not, however, prevent him from entering into a sub -conscious 

 intercourse with beings which are not human, and from 

 recognising their essential spirituality. But when he does 

 this in faith and earnestness, he represents his sense of their 

 kinship with himself in terms of his own existence. To put 

 it otherwise, he feigns men and women in the objects of the 

 outer world the trees, the flowers, the stars, the rivers, and 

 the mountains. Their participation in the divine life, of which 

 he too is part, inevitably is expressed as personality, because 

 he knows himself to be a person. He cannot even escape 

 from thinking of God, or the spirit of the whole, as a person. 

 This may or may not correspond to the fact ; for what 

 personality is, we cannot define. It is only a term for denot- 

 ing the conditions under which alone consciousness is known 

 to us at present. And we are compelled, being what we call 

 persons, recognising personality as the sine qua non of our 

 conscious life, to find personality in natural things whenever 

 we confess their common essence with ourselves. 



Thus, then, we obtain a theory for the validity of ancient 

 nature myths. The truth that they contained was the per- 

 ception of spirituality in the material world ; and though the 

 crude imagery (zoomorphic and anthropomorphic) in which 

 that truth was veiled may deprive them now of all but a 

 symbolical value, yet they claim reverent consideration in an 

 age which has to reappropriate their underlying principle. 



Dryads, oreads, fauns, nymphs of wave and fountain, satyrs 

 and Pan, Narcissus, Hyacinth, and Clytia, are but forms found 

 for uttering man's sense of his affinity to woods and flowers 

 and waters. When the Greek boy saw the hamadryad step- 

 ping from her oak upon the anemone-starred sward around 

 it, he did not wholly indulge a vision or yield to an hallucina- 

 tion. The oak-tree has a life, a soul, a particle of the divine 

 aura, and with the recognition of this fact a nymph starts 

 from the graceful stem to greet the soul of child-like man. 

 When the Thessalian shepherd climbed at eve the crags of 



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