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Notwithstanding this, contrary opinions and materialistic views are set forth which would relegate man completely to physical subservience to nature’s laws. This is equivalent to saying that the comparative degree exceeds the superlative, that the imperfect includes the perfect, that the pupil surpasses the teacher—all of which is illogical and impossible.
But this thing, this grotesque, incredible, terrible attempt to engraft treachery on one of nature’s most amazing laws this secret, cunning Teutonic reasoning, this scientific scoundrelism, this criminal enterprise based on patient, plodding and German efficiency, still bewildered the girl.
It is idle to complain of cities, however they sully the air, and deface the land, and pollute the water, and rear the weak and vicious and the wicked—to remind us how low and depraved human nature can become when it is cut off from communion with Nature and Nature’s God. Borrow owed much to cities, and was best appreciated by the men who dwelt in them.
“The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, And, like the baseless fabric of a vision, Leave not a rack behind.” Cast thine eye around thee, and see the thousands of nature’s productions.
The second corroboration of the theory is by direct experiment, according to the canon of the Method of Difference. Here, too, therefore, the causation is directly proved. We can, it is true, accomplish this only on a small scale; but we have ample reason to conclude that the same operation, if conducted in Nature’s great laboratory, would equally produce the effect.
The great bulky elephant with its massive strength has no power to disobey the restrictions nature has laid upon him; but man, weak and diminutive in comparison, empowered by mind which is an effulgence of Divinity itself, can resist nature’s control and apply natural laws to his own uses.
Only think of land coroners and water coroners imagine the law defining the jurisdiction of the Tellurian as far forth into the sea as he could sit on a corpse without danger, and the Neptunian ruling the waves beyond in absolute sway conceive the “solidist” revelling in all the accidents that befall life upon the world’s highways, and the “fluidist” seeking his prey like a pearl diver, five fathoms low, beneath “the deep, deep sea.” What a rivalry theirs, who divide the elements between them, and have nature’s everlasting boundaries to define the limits of their empire.
But the essence is of the living sort. With this conceded and the fact that nature’s appeal is always strongest when made through association with man it is for us to cultivate these associations. “Study nature attentively,” says Reynolds, “but always with the masters in your company; consider them as models which you are to imitate, and at the same time as rivals, with whom you are to contend.”
With the book of nature before him he is eager to sit down anywhere and read, attracted by each separate item of the vast pattern, but he finds he has opened nature’s dictionary and that to make poetry or even good prose he must put the separate words and phrases together.
Quæ bruta non faciunt, sed sola ratione hominis propria, non affectione communis naturæ, omnes homines faciunt, fierique opportere intelligunt hoc fit jure gentium. Sect. 4. For my part, I take the law of nature and the law of nations to be one and the same. For what is the law of nations but that which nature’s light and reason hath taught so to all nations?
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