I2i6 LIFE : OUTLINES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 



normal, even to super-saintly, and, on the other hand, too simply 

 ignored as outside conventional psychology, has first been well 

 appreciated by William James, and next interpreted by the 

 Freudian psychologists, as a return to the elemental sub-conscious- 

 ness of embryonic life, and that of simpler beings. Yet are not both 

 conceptions complement al ? Are they not respectively elemental 

 and culminant in the continuity of life, and in its development 

 throughout nature to humanity; indeed, to humanity at its highest? 

 Is not this the state to which the great poets have attained, and 

 throughout their vast range, as from the Book of Job to the Divine 

 Comedy, or again in Shelley and Wordsworth, Emerson and Whit- 

 man; and is it not to this that they owe their greatness? Yet the 

 like comes to the nature-lover, in his best moments of fullest appre- 

 ciation of nature, from the sublimities of the heavens to the lofty 

 snows and floral beauties of his mother eartli. Is not this the ulti- 

 mate inspiration, indeed the very soul, of all our nature-studies, 

 and that which we share with the poets and the mystics; as at once 

 transcendent to us, in Nature., and immanent in it and in ourselves; 

 and these in their compenetrance and interaction, which is Life, 

 and in the rhythmic intensification of these, which is surely of the 

 essence of its evolution ? 



As poetry, like the life it voices, has varied range, varied musal 

 inspiration and expression, as from simplest lyric to fullest music- 

 drama-cycle, so the intellectual life has its kindred and parallel 

 ranges; as from mathematics and throughout the sciences, to the 

 emotioned syntheses of great philosophies, as the very word philo- 

 sophy implies. Yet all these are akin to the child's first thrillings to 

 the sunrise or the flower, and indeed have developed from them. 

 Varied yet one is the spirit underlying the simple nature-lore of 

 Gilbert White of Selborne, the more impassioned pages of Hudson, 

 or the veritable ecstasy of Richard Jefferies; yet higher also within 

 the thought of Newton or of Einstein, or the cosmic and human 

 meditation of Kant. The epilogue to the Origin of Species reveals 

 the like spirit; at times even the sober Linnaeus, or the critical 

 Huxley could not but yield to it; in a word, it pervades science, 

 since immanent in its very nature. Here, too, we have the interest 

 of naturalist friendships, as of old, with our teachers, as from 

 Haeckel or Lacaze or Wallace, and to living masters of to-day; or 

 indeed of our own lifelong collaboration. It is thus time for men 

 of science to shake off their conventional and academic repressions, 

 and so at once see more fully, feel more deeply, utter more openly 

 that fundamental joy of nature in evolution which they contem- 

 platively share; and even to know their ever-increasing practical 

 applications and powers of controlling nature through obeying her, 

 as their part of Creative Evolution, and as expressions of its 

 strenuous joys, triumphant over all pains and toils. 



