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All life simple enough to touch and share the enormous happiness of her deep, streaming, personal Being, dances instinctively for very joy obedient to a greater measure than they know.... The natural movement of the great Earth-Soul is rhythmical.
We should also have to deny Fechner's 'earth-soul' and all other superhuman collections of experience of every grade, so far at least as these are held to be compounded of our simpler souls in the way which Fechner believed in; and we should have to make all these denials in the name of the incorruptible logic of self-identity, teaching us that to call a thing and its other the same is to commit the crime of self-contradiction.
Fechner, with his distinct earth-soul functioning as our guardian angel, seems to me clearly polytheistic; but the word 'polytheism' usually gives offence, so perhaps it is better not to use it.
Now, in the glory of all naked bodily forms, of women, men and children, of swift animals, of flowers, trees, and running water, of mountains and of seas, he understood these partial revelations of the great Earth-Soul that bore them, gave them life. For one and all were channels for her loveliness.
Was loveliness, as men know it, a revelation of the Earth-Soul behind? And were the blinding flash, the dazzling wonder, and the dream men seek to render permanent in music, color, line and language, a vision of her nakedness?
Psychologically, it seems to me that Fechner's God is a lazy postulate of his, rather than a part of his system positively thought out. As we envelop our sight and hearing, so the earth-soul envelops us, and the star-soul the earth-soul, until what?
He marks the various intermediary stages and halting places of collectivity, as we are to our separate senses, so is the earth to us, so is the solar system to the earth, etc., and if, in order to escape an infinitely long summation, he posits a complete God as the all-container and leaves him about as indefinite in feature as the idealists leave their absolute, he yet provides us with a very definite gate of approach to him in the shape of the earth-soul, through which in the nature of things we must first make connexion with all the more enveloping superhuman realms, and with which our more immediate religious commerce at any rate has to be carried on.
But Fechner's earth-soul, or any stage of being below or above that, would have served my purpose just as well: the same logical objection applies to these collective experiences as to the absolute. So much, then, in order that you may not be confused about my strategical objective.
As our mind is not the bare sum of our sights plus our sounds plus our pains, but in adding these terms together also finds relations among them and weaves them into schemes and forms and objects of which no one sense in its separate estate knows anything, so the earth-soul traces relations between the contents of my mind and the contents of yours of which neither of our separate minds is conscious.
A midsummer morning after a night of rain and yet, no bird, no hopeful greenery, no sense of the upward yearning Earth-Soul! When we sighted the Missouri River again, the sun had broken through upon the greengirt, glinting stream. It seemed like Paradise. By almost continuous travel we reached Lismus Ferry on the second morning from Hell Creek. The ferryman had a bit of information for us.
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