ws. How James also sympathised with them we saw at the
beginning of the last chapter. Paulsen, on his own account,
writes thus: "Is there a higher, more comprehensive psychical
life than that which we experience, just as there is a lower one?
Our body embraces the cells as elementary organisms. We
assume that in the same way our psychical life embraces the
inner life of the elementary forms, embracing in it their
conscious and unconscious elements. Our body again is itself
part of a higher unity, a member of the total life of our planet,
and together with the latter, articulated with a more
comprehensive cosmical system, and ultimately articulated with
the All. Is our psychical life also articulated with a higher unity,
a more comprehensive system of consciousness? Are the
separate heavenly bodies, to start with, bearers of a unified
inner life? Are the stars, is the earth an animated being? The
poets speak of the earth-spirit; is that more than a poetic
metaphor? The Greek philosophers, among them Plato and
Aristotle, speak of astral spirits; is that more than the last
reflection of a dream of childish fancy?"

And thus we have come to the fullness of the nature-mystic's
position. Reason, will, feeling, consciousness, below us and
above us. As Naegeli, the famous botanist puts it, "the human
mind is nothing but the highest development on our earth of the
mental processes which universally animate and move nature."
To this world-view the child of nature and the philosopher
return again and again. Deep calls unto deep. The exaggerated
and dehumanising claims of purely physical and mechanical
concepts may for a time obscure the intuition by their specious
clarity, but the feelings and the wider consciousness in man
reassert themselves. The stars of heaven no longer swing as
masses of mere physical atoms in a dead universe, they shine in
their own right as members in a living whole. Wordsworth
speaks for the forms of life beneath us when he exclaims:

"And 'tis my faith that every flower
Enjoys the air it breathes."

Emerson speaks for the realm of the inorganic when he assures
that:

"The sun himself shines heartily
And shares the joy he brings."

The great world around us is felt to pulse with inner life and
meaning. It is seen, not only as real, not only as informed with
reason, but as sentient. The old speculations of Empedocles that
love and hate are the motive forces in all things gleams out