THE VOICE OF THE DESERT 



218 



from the shops and after school geographies have con- 

 sented to confine themselves exclusively to "things relevant 

 to the child's daily life." Perhaps the mind is not merely a 

 blank slate upon w^hich anything may be v^ritten. Perhaps 

 it reaches out spontaneously tow^ard v^hat can nourish 

 either intelligence or imagination. Perhaps it is part of 

 nature and, w^ithout being taught, shares nature's inten- 

 tions. 



Most of the phrases we use glibly to exorcise or explain 

 away the realities of our intimate experience are of quite 

 recent origin — ^phrases Kke ''emotional conditioning," 

 "complex," "fixation," and even "reflex." But one of the 

 most inclusive, and the most relevant here, is older. It w^as 

 Ruskin, of all people, who invented the term "pathetic 

 fallacy" to stigmatize as in some sense unjustified our 

 tendency to perceive a smiling landscape as "happy," a 

 somber one as "sad." But is it really a fallacy? Are we so 

 separate from nature that our states are actually discon- 

 tinuous with it? Is there nothing outside ourselves which 

 is somehow glad or sad? Is it really a fallacy when we at- 

 tribute to nature feelings analogous to our own? 



Out of the very heart of the romantic feeHng for nature 

 the question arose. And it was Coleridge, again of all peo- 

 ple, who gave the answer upon which the post-romantic 

 "scientific" attitude rests: "Only in ourselves does nature 

 live." But Wordsworth, who recorded Coleridge's dictum, 

 was not himself 'always sure. When he was most himseK it 

 seemed to him that, on the contrary, the joy of nature was 

 older than the joy of man and that what was transitory in 

 the individual was permanent somewhere else. When the 



