upernatural; nor is it a
name for peculiar forms of ecstatic experience which claim to
break away from the spheres of the senses and the intellect. It
will simply be taken to cover the causes and the effects involved
in that wide range of intuitions and emotions which nature
stimulates without definite appeal to conscious reasoning
processes. Mystic intuition and mystic emotion will thus be
regarded, not as antagonistic to sense impression, but as
dependent on it--not as scornful of reason, but merely as more
basic and primitive.

Science describes nature, but it cannot _feel_ nature; still less
can it account for that sense of kinship with nature which is so
characteristic of many of the foremost thinkers of the day. For
life is more and more declaring itself to be something fuller
than a blind play of physical forces, however complex and
sublimated their interactions. It reveals a ceaseless striving--an
_elan vital_ (as Bergson calls it) to expand and enrich the forms
of experience--a reaching forward to fuller beauty and more
perfect order.

A certain amount of metaphysical discussion will be necessary;
but it will be reduced to the minimum compatible with
coherency. Fortunately, Nature Mysticism can be at home with
diverse world-views. There is, however, one exception--the
world-view which is based on the concept of an Unconditioned
Absolute. This will be unhesitatingly rejected as subversive of
any genuine "communion" with nature. So also Symbolism will
be repudiated on the ground that it furnishes a quite inadequate
account of the relation of natural phenomena to the human
mind. The only metaphysical theory adopted, as a generalised
working basis, is that known as Ideal-Realism. It assumes three
spheres of existence--that which in a peculiar sense is _within_
the individual mind: that which in a peculiar sense is _without_
(external to) the individual mind: and that in which these two
are fused or come into living contact. It will be maintained, as a
thesis fundamental to Nature Mysticism, that the world of
external objects must be essentially of the same essence as the
perceiving minds. The bearing of these condensed statements
will become plain as the phenomena of nature are passed in
review. Of formal theology there will be none.

The more certain conclusions of modern science, including the
broader generalisations of the hypothesis of evolution, will be
assumed. Lowell, in one of his sonnets, says: