CHAPTER IV NATURE AND A NATURAL LIFE

" And Death no longer terrible, but fnll Of poignant strange Expansion ; Labour too (Which is onr daily death And resorrection in tfae tliing cceated) An ever-abiding joy — A life 8o near to Nature, ail at one with bird and plant

and swimming thing, So near to allits lellows in sweet love-* In joy nnboonded and nndying love."

Edward Cakpsiitbr.

ARGUMENT

" Towards Democracy " issues fram a soûl which had homed itself in the heart of Nature. It évinces, therefore, an intimate love of ail naiural things, and pleads for a life in doser co-operaiion and association with the Great Mother. Carpenter's feeling for Nature is simple, direct, glomng ; to live in her bosom is the Open Secret ; she is intensely alive and even Personal ; at times she will take her lover into her embraces, and the boundaries of individuality will be transcended. AU natural things are pure, ail natural functions are sacred ; the Body is the dwelling-place of the gods ; and Death can only be an erUargement of life. The modem Western world is largely divorced froni Nature ;

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thê centralixation of population, the élaboration of machinery, the hardening of conventions, and the teaching of the Church help to account for this ; the resuU is much unreality and infidelity. A return to a more natural life is imperative : the way of this return is not easily indicated, and Carpenter contents himself for the most part with depicting the kind of human society which would thereby arise; he would create and reinforce the mil to a more natural life, sure that it would find its own way,

WE hâve now to examine some of the principal characteristics of this Democracy in the heart, as evidenced in Carpenter's own expérience.

Référence has several times been made to a surface consdousness and a de^er consciousness, to an outer self and an inner self, and to this latter as being a. social self ; and it will be convenient to retain for a time this notion of an inward descent, as it were, along a vertical Une. The figure is of a cône whose sectional circles continuaUy increase in radius as the perpendicular from the apex approaches the base. If we imagine consdousness deepening from the apex of separate individuality, it is natural to suppose that it picks up the strands of a wider and ever wider life as it descends, and passes from smaller to greater unities. Moments of pause in this Une of descent are artifidal enough, and are simplf{ points in a logical analysis ; if any ^' schéma ''

THE THREE UNITIES Tr* M

of the expérience is offered, it must be with the necessary proviso that the " spirit bloweth where it listeth/' and irregularity hère may be the raie ; and further, that the particular kind of expérience hère referred to is, as yet, comparativdy so rare, and the scientific study of it so rudimentary, that its tjrpe or norm — if there be such — ^has not yet been clearly defined.

But there is a certain a priori probability, if the evolutionary hjrpothesis be accepted, that. since human individuality has arisen from the cosmic life as the term of a certain process, the retum joumey (if we may so speak of it) into conscious union with the universai should pass through similar stages in the reverse order. That is to say, the first unity realized by the deepening consciousness would be a unity with one's fellow-men, in narrower and wider groups — the family, for example, the clan, the tribe, the nation. The second and profounder unity would be that of the spiritual continuiun which is the basis of humanity as a whole, and which may be called the Idéal Hiunanity, or the Christ, or the Son of Man. The third unity would be that of the still wider organism of Nature.

It is not suggested that this logical order is the actual psychological order ; nor is it affirmed that every individual who attains " cosmic consciousness " passes through thèse varions strata with any definite quality of feeling relating to each in tum. Most probably this is not the case.