All forms and modes of
existence are akin, and differ only in their phenomenal
conditions. Whether Schopenhauer has not laid too exclusive an
emphasis on will; whether he has not unnecessarily chosen the
lowest types of will as primitive--these are questions to be
discussed elsewhere. Enough that we have in this theory a
definite return to critical animism. He holds the universe to be
throughout of the same "stuff," and that stuff is psychic or
spiritual. Body and soul, matter and spirit, are but different
aspects of the same underlying Reality.
Nevertheless, one question does press upon the nature-mystic.
Is the will to be conscious of its activities? Schopenhauer's
Ground-will is a blindly heaving desire. If his contention be
granted, Nature Mysticism will be shorn of its true glory.
Communion with nature, though it rest on passive intuition,
must somehow be associated with consciousness, if it is to be
that which we best know. That is to say, nature's self-activity
must be analogous to our own throughout--analogous, not
identical. And such a conclusion commends itself to a thinker as
careful and scientific as Stout, who in his "Manual of
Psychology" writes as follows: "The individual consciousness,
as we know it, must be regarded as a payment of a wider whole,
by which its origin and its changes are determined. As the brain
forms only a fragmentary portion of the total system of natural
phenomena, so we must assume the stream of individual
consciousness to be in like manner part of an immaterial
system.
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