ng far into space, sharing
and uniting the life of Earth and Sky, and full of a most amazing
activity.

(1) Specimen Days, 1882-3 Edition, p. iii.

The reader of this will probably have had some similar experiences.
Perhaps he will have seen a full-foliaged Lombardy poplar swaying in
half a gale in June--the wind and the sun streaming over every little
twig and leaf, the tree throwing out its branches in a kind of ecstasy
and bathing them in the passionately boisterous caresses of its two
visitants; or he will have heard the deep glad murmur of some huge
sycamore with ripening seed clusters when after weeks of drought the
steady warm rain brings relief to its thirst; and he will have known
that these creatures are but likenesses of himself, intimately and
deeply-related to him in their love and hunger longing, and, like
himself too, unfathomed and unfathomable.

It would be absurd to credit early man with conscious speculations
like these, belonging more properly to the twentieth century; yet it is
incontrovertible, I think, that in SOME ways the primitive peoples, with
their swift subconscious intuitions and their minds unclouded by mere
book knowledge, perceived truths to which we moderns are blind. Like
the animals they arrived at their perceptions without (individual) brain
effort; they knew things without thinking. When they did THINK of course
they went wrong. Their budding science easily went astray. Religion
with them had as yet taken no definite shape; science was equally
protoplasmic; and all they had was a queer jumble of the two in the form
of Magic. When at a later time Science gradually defined its outlook and
its observations, and Religion, from being a vague subconscious feeling,
took clear shape in the form of gods and creeds, then mankind gradually
emerged into the stage of evolution IN WHICH WE NOW ARE. OUR scientific
laws and doctrines are of course only temporary formulae, and so also
are the gods and the creeds of our own and other religions; but these
things, with their set and angular outlines, have served in the past
and will serve in the future as stepping-stones towards another kind of
knowledge of which at present we only dream, and will lead us on to
a renewed power of perception which again will not be the laborious
product of thought but a direct and instantaneous intuition like that of
the animals--and the angels.

To return to our Tree. Though primitive man did not speculate in