eed and support it; of the whole universe that
touches you through its life. A mere cataloguing of all the plants--
though this were far better than your old game of indexing your
own poor photographs of them--will never give you access to the
Unity, the Fact, whatever it may be, which manifests itself
through them. To suppose that it can do so is the cardinal error of
the "nature mystic": an error parallel with that of the psychologist
who looks for the soul in "psychic states."

The deeper your realisation of the plant in its wonder, the more
perfect your union with the world of growth and change, the
quicker, the more subtle your response to its countless
suggestions; so much the more acute will become your craving
for Something More. You will now find and feel the Infinite and
Eternal, making as it were veiled and sacramental contacts with
you under these accidents--through these its ceaseless creative
activities--and you will want to press through and beyond them,
to a fuller realisation of, a more perfect and unmediated union
with, the Substance of all That Is. With the great widening and
deepening of your life that has ensued from the abolition of a
narrow selfhood, your entrance into the larger consciousness of
living things, there has necessarily come to you an instinctive
knowledge of a final and absolute group-relation, transcending
and including all lesser unions in its sweep. To this, the second
stage of contemplation, in which human consciousness enters
into its peculiar heritage, something within you now seems to
urge you on.

If you obey this inward push, pressing forward with the "sharp
dart of your longing love," forcing the point of your wilful
attention further and further into the web of things, such an
ever-deepening realisation, such an extension of your conscious
life, will indeed become possible to you. Nothing but your own
apathy, your feeble and limited desire, limits this realisation.
Here there is a strict relation between demand and supply--your
achievement shall be in proportion to the greatness of your
desire. The fact, and the in-pressing energy, of the Reality
without does not vary. Only the extent to which you are able to
receive it depends upon your courage and generosity, the measure
in which you give yourself to its embrace. Those minds which set
a limit to their self-donation must feel as they attain it, not a sense
of satisfaction but a sense of constriction. It is useless to