He Would Be
Thrilled To The Marrow, But Not Terrified If He Knew That It Would
Take No Visible Shape Nor Speak To Him Out Of The Silence.
This faculty or instinct of the dawning mind is or has always seemed
to me essentially religious in character; undoubtedly it is the root
of all nature-worship, from fetishism to the highest pantheistic
development.
It was more to me in those early days than all the
religious teaching I received from my mother. Whatever she told me
about our relations with the Supreme Being I believed implicitly, just
as I believed everything else she told me, and as I believed that two
and two make four and that the world is round in spite of its flat
appearance; also that it is travelling through space and revolving
round the sun instead of standing still, with the sun going round it.
as one would imagine. But apart from the fact that the powers above
would save me in the end from extinction, which was a great
consolation, these teachings did not touch my heart as it was touched
and thrilled by something nearer, more intimate, in nature, not only
in moonlit trees or in a flower or serpent, but, in certain exquisite
moments and moods and in certain aspects of nature, in "every grass"
and in all things, animate and inanimate.
It is not my wish to create the impression that I am a peculiar person
in this matter; on the contrary, it is my belief that the animistic
instinct, if a mental faculty can be so called, exists and persists in
many persons, and that I differ from others only in looking steadily
at it and taking it for what it is, also in exhibiting it to the
reader naked and without a fig-leaf expressed, to use a Baconian
phrase.
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