But the very
fact constitutes in itself a special charm. If what we see is so
wonderful, what must that be which is behind!
CHAPTER V
MYSTIC RECEPTIVITY
The general character of the nature-mystic's main contention
will now be sufficiently obvious. He maintains that man and his
environment are not connected in any merely external fashion,
but that they are sharers in the same kind of Being, and
therefore livingly related. If this be sound, we shall expect to
find that wherever and whenever men are in close and constant
touch with nature they will experience some definite sort of
influence which will affect their characters and their thoughts.
Nor, as will already have been obvious, are we disappointed in
this expectation. Let us turn to a somewhat more detailed study
of the evidence for the reality and potency of the mystic
influence continuously exercised by physical phenomena on
man's psychic development.
As has been stated, the nature-mystic lays considerable, though
by no means exclusive, stress upon what he calls "intuition."
His view of this faculty or capacity is not quite that of the
strict psychologist. Herbert Spencer, for instance, in his
"Psychology," uses the term intuition in what he deems to be its
"common acceptation"--"as meaning any cognition reached by
an undecomposable mental act." Of course much would turn on
what is implied by cognition, and it is impossible to embark on
the wide sea of epistemology, or even on that of the intuitional
controversy, with a view to determining this point.
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