THE VEGETABLE WORLD. 315 



holy animals, expresses, under the immediate form of an 

 adoration of God, the recognition of the natural forces most 

 actively operating and most highly blessing among the 

 Egyptians ; thus shapes itself out of the luxuriant Nature of 

 India, the figurative History of Nature of Brahminism, and 

 in the light sunny hills of Iran and Tehran men worshipped 

 the light-bringing sun and its symbol, fire ; while in the 

 Northern mythologies we readily recognize the strife of the 

 icy winter and its storms, with the brief summer. But 

 most beautiful, most refined and cultivated appears this 

 religion of Nature in the so highly spiritually gifted Greeks, 

 in whose, on the whole, dry and serene country, all the 

 fertility of the organic world was connected with the local 

 and yearly distribution of moisture, and thus in the deified 

 personifications of the serene Zeus, the cloud-bringing Here, 

 the warming Apollo, and the lightening Hephaistos, and so 

 on, a wonderfully beautiful imagining and blending of re- 

 ligion, physics and poetry, a Mythus was formed, the rich- 

 ness and plastic beauty of which will be an inexhaustible 

 source of delight through all time. 



But this condition can only exist in a certain stage of 

 culture of Humanity. The inquiring curiosity of Man 

 makes him soon tear the Isis-veil from Nature, and the 

 more completely he succeeds in raising it, the more do the 

 gods disappear from his immediate vicinity, from the earth, 

 and finally from the starry heavens, and all Nature with 

 her machinery of forces and matters devolves upon " the 

 common significance of things," the unspiritualizing Physics. 

 There remains no longer any substance, anything essential 

 in Nature, which requires a God, or contains one ; according 

 to dead, unalterable natural laws runs the clock-work, and 

 winds itself up, without Wants but also without Beauty, 

 without Joy. But strange it is ! the inquirer into Nature 



