ing, is subject, like the lilies' beauty, to corruption. I
know not what army of microbes evidently invaded from the beginning the
soul's physical basis and devoured its tissues, so that sophistication
and bad dreams entirely obscured her limpidity.

None the less, spirituality, or life in the ideal, must be regarded as
the fundamental and native type of all life; what deviates from it is
disease and incipient dissolution, and is itself what might plausibly
demand explanation and evoke surprise. The spiritual man should be quite
at home in a world made to be used; the firmament is spread over him
like a tent for habitation, and sublunary furniture is even more
obviously to be taken as a convenience. He cannot, indeed, remove
mountains, but neither does he wish to do so. He comes to endow the
mountains with a function, and takes them at that, as a painter might
take his brushes and canvas. Their beauty, their metals, their
pasturage, their defence--this is what he observes in them and
celebrates in his addresses to them. The spiritual man, though not
ashamed to be a beggar, is cognisant of what wealth can do and of what
it cannot. His unworldliness is true knowledge of the world, not so
much a gaping and busy acquaintance as a quiet comprehension and
estimation which, while it cannot come without intercourse, can very
well lay intercourse aside.

[Sidenote: Primitive consciousness may be spiritual.]

If the essence of life be spiritual, early examples of life would seem
to be rather the opposite. But man's view of primitive consciousness is
humanly biassed and relies too much on partial analogies. We conceive an
animal's physical life in the gross, and must then regard the momentary
feelings that accompany it as very poor expressions either of its extent
or conditions. These feelings are, indeed, so many ephemeral lives,
containing no comprehensive view of the animal's fortunes. They
accordingly fail to realise our notion of a spiritual human life which
would have to be rational and to form some representation of man's total
environment and interests. But it hardly follows that animal feelings
are not spiritual in their nature and, on their narrow basis, perfectly
ideal. The most ideal human passion is love, which is also the most
absolute and animal and one of the most ephemeral. Very likely, if we
could revert to an innocent and absorbed view of our early sensations,
we should find that each was a little spiritual un