332 
if we 
give 
Philosophy 
and poetry 
love and “ fol- 
low Nature.” 
in his 
the 
KaXXiora 
own 
great 
his final indictment against “ Nature” 
words. How utterly he fails to perceive 
philosopher’s ru Kara (j)vcnv u>q olov re 
t'yav ( Eth . i. 8) will thus fully appear. 
“Fancied dictates,” “supposed standard,” “ so-called law of 
Nature,” are our Essayist’s scornful terms. He rejects the thought 
that a man should be blamed for being “ unnatural although 
even the poets of Atheism, Lucretius or Shelley, had amidst all 
their wreck of ethical feeling shrunk from this, and retained 
reverence for Nature, as parent and mother. Nay, barbarians 
(Xenoph., Cyrop ., viii.) ( tliemselves have not been untouched with 
affection to Nature as the source of so much happiness that most 
men at least desire to live. To defend the “ unnatural ” is for Mr. 
Mill only. Let any one who would fully see his position in the 
rejection of the “ sequi Naturam ,” compare the sweet reverence 
for Nature’s laws, (in itself a “ religion,” binding philosophers, 
saints, and psalmists to the order around), with the passage which 
we are about to quote. Let us think of those who have de- 
lighted in the beautiful, from Albert the school-philosopher down 
to Newton, Kepler, Faraday — and may we not include some 
-and then read the 
following ebullition 
Mill, “ a tenth part of the pains which 
finding beneficent adaptations in all 
in 
greatest living names ?- 
of unnatural hatred : 
21. “ If,’’ says Mr. 
“ have been expended 
“ Nature had been employed in collecting evidence to blacken 
“ the character of the Creator, what scope for com- 
“ ment would not have been found, in the entire 
“ existence of the lower animals, divided with scarcely 
“ any exception into devourers and devoured, and a 
prey to a thousand ills, from which they are denied the faculties 
“ for protecting themselves. If we are not obliged to believe the 
“ animal creation to be the work of a demon, it is because we 
“ need not suppose it to have been made by a Being of Infinite 
Power.” 
Mr. Mill 
brings this in- 
dictment 
against Na- 
ture. 
a 
a 
22. In this alternative, to my own mind very revolting in its 
terms, there is a kind of perverseness, too, like that of a wayward 
child crying for an impossibility. It reminds one, too, of the 
Brahmin whose untaught soul sickened at the microscopic reve- 
lations of “life preying on life” in the cup of water which he 
refused to drink ; or the wrong-headed Manichee exposed by St. 
Augustin. But we have here, however unconsciously, an ac- 
knowledgment of Nature’s having undergone injury of some 
kind, and a dim recognition of what, in the language of Chris- 
tians, is called “ Original Sin,” the fearful catastrophe first 
wrought by a “ demon ” of evil. 
