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In the first place we mention two women, Helene Böhlau and Clara Viebig. Both have passed through the naturalistic school for the former, indeed, naturalism marked only a period of transition; for the latter it meant conversion to a creed to which she has remained faithful. The cradle of Helene Böhlau stood on classic ground.
As a matter of fact the Stoic had only scorn for naturalism. Physical man was to him a creature to be chained. Trust not the "scelerata pulpa; peccat et haec, peccat!" cries Persius in terror. The earlier naïve animism of Greece and Rome had contained more of aesthetic value, for it was the very spring from which had flowed all the wealth of ancient myths.
He is so absolutely unconventional in his bearing and speech as to seem amateurish, yet he secures with his naturalism some poignant effects. I shan't soon forget his Karl Hetman, the visionary reformer. Wedekind, like Heine, has the faculty of a cynical, a consuming self-irony. He is said to be admirable in Der Kammersänger.
Naturalism is subrational on the one hand or non-imaginative on the other, in that it emphasizes the continuity between man and the physical universe. The religious man is superrational and nobly imaginative as he emphasizes the difference between man and nature.
Old friends were failing, such as Stanfield, Lewis, and Roberts: but new men were growing up, among whom Ruskin welcomed G.D. Leslie, F. Goodall, J.C. Hook, who had come out of his "Pre-Raphaelite measles" into the healthy naturalism of "Luff Boy!" Clarence Whaite, Henry Holiday, and John Brett, who showed the "Val d'Aosta."
He loiters in the printing office or the cafe until his proof is ready, and when that is corrected he loiters in the many cafes of the Faubourg Montmartre, smoking interminable cigars, finding his way back to the Butte between three and four in the morning. Paul is fat and of an equable temperament. He believes in naturalism all the day, particularly after a breakfast over les petits verres.
By a sort of degradation of this notion, a perversion of this instinct, the naturalist assumes that he can violate both the human and the divine law for personal ends, and express himself in fantastic or indecent or impious ways. The older supernaturalism exalts the individualism of the Creator; naturalism the egotism of the creature.
Now, with this selfish individualism which we call naturalism we shall have much to do, for it plays an increasing rôle in the modern world; it is the neo-paganism which we may see spreading about us. Sophistries of all kinds become the powerful allies of this sort of moral and aesthetic anarchy.
The main point for us to-day is to hold fast to the superiority of spiritual life to all that we know concerning the physical universe. Unless this is done, we shall lose the deeper inward connections of life, and shall be in danger of sinking back to the level of naturalism a level from which the culture and religion of the Western world have partially emerged.
Wundt himself, the most notable modern champion of parallelism, admits and defines these limits of the parallelistic theory on both sides. Furthermore, the theory of parallelism, notwithstanding its opposition to materialism, must presuppose that localisation of psychical processes of which we have already spoken, and to which all naturalism appeals with so much emphasis.
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