its later aberrations,
Wordsworth will have no blurred outlines. He tries always to see in
Nature distinction without separation; his principle is the exact
antithesis of Hume's atheistic dictum, that "things are conjoined, but
not connected.[379]" The importance of this caution has been fully
demonstrated in the course of our inquiry. Then, too, he knows that to
imperfect man reason is a crown "still to be courted, never to be
won." Delusions may affect "even the very faculty of sight," whether a
man "look forth," or "dive into himself.[380]" Again, he bids us seek
for real, and not fanciful analogies; no "loose types of things
through all degrees"; no mythology; and no arbitrary symbolism. The
symbolic value of natural objects is not that they remind us of
something that they are not, but that they help us to understand
something that they in part are. They are not intended to transport us
away from this earth into the clouds. "This earth is the world of all
of us," he says boldly, "in which we find our happiness or not at
all.[381]" Lastly, and this is perhaps the most important of all, he
recognises that the still small voice of God breathes not out of
nature alone, nor out of the soul alone, but from the contact of the
soul with nature. It is the marriage of the intellect of man to "this
goodly universe, in love and holy passion," which produces these
raptures. "Intellect" includes Imagination, which is but another name
for Reason in her most exalted mood;[382] these must assist the eye of
sense.

Such is the discipline, and such are the counsels, by which the
priest of Nature must prepare himself to approach her mysteries. And
what are the truths which contemplation revealed to him?

The first step on the way that leads to God was the sense of the
_boundless_, growing out of musings on the finite; and with it the
conviction that the Infinite and Eternal alone can be our being's
heart and home--"we feel that we are greater than we know.[383]" Then
came to him--

"The sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thoughts,
And rolls through all things.[384]"

The worldliness and artificiality which set us out of tune with all
this is worse than paganism.[385] Then