The Spiritual Contact With Nature
A useful contact with the earth places man not as superior to nature but as a superior intelligence working in nature as a conscious and therefore as a responsible part in a plan of evolution, which is a continuing creation. It distinguishes the elemental virtues as against the acquired, factitious, and pampered virtues. These strong and simple traits may be brought out easily and naturally if we incorporate into our schemes of education the solid experiences of tramping, camping, scouting, farming, handcraft, and other activities that are not mere refinements of subjective processes.
Lack of training in the realities drives us to find satisfaction in all sorts of make-believes and in play-lives. The “movies” and many other developments of our time make an appeal wholly beyond their merits, and they challenge the methods and intentions of education.
There are more fundamental satisfactions than “thrills.” There is more heart-ease in frugality than in surfeit. There is no real relish except when the appetite is keen. We are now provided with all sorts of things that nobody ever should want.
The good spiritual reaction to nature is not a form of dogmatism or impressionism. It results normally from objective experience, when the person is ready for it and has good digestion. It should be the natural emotion of the man who knows his objects and does not merely dream about them. There is no hallucination in it. The remedy for some of the erratic “futurism” and other forms of illusion is to put the man hard against the facts: he might be set to studying bugs or soils or placed between the handles of a plow until such time as objects begin to take their natural shape and meaning in his mind.
It is not within my purview here to consider the abstract righteous relation of man to the creation, nor to examine the major emotions that result from a contemplation of nature. It is only a very few of the simpler and more practical considerations that I may suggest.
The training in solid experience naturally emphasizes the righteousness of plain and simple eating and drinking, and of frugality and control in pleasures. Many of the adventitious pleasures are in the highest degree pernicious and are indications of weakness.
Considering the almost universal opinion that nature exhibits the merciless and relentless struggle of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, it is significant that one of the most productive ways of training a youth in sensitiveness and in regard for other creatures is by means of the nature contact. Even if the person is taught that the strong and ferocious survive and conquer, he nevertheless soon comes to have the tenderest regard for every living thing if he has the naturist in him. He discards the idea that we lose virility when we cease to kill, and relegates the notion to the limbo of deceits. This only means that unconsciously he has experienced the truth in nature, and in practice has discarded the erroneous philosophy contained in books even though he may still give these philosophies his mental assent.
It is exactly among the naturists that the old instinct to kill begins to lose its force and that an instinct of helpfulness and real brotherhood soon takes its place. From another source, the instinct to kill dies out among the moralists and other people. And yet it is passing strange how this old survival—or is it a reversion?—holds its place amongst us, even in the higher levels. The punishment of a life for a life is itself a survival. Entertainment even yet plays upon this old memory of killing, as in books of adventure, in fiction, in playgames of children, and worst of all on the stage where this strange anachronism, even in plays that are not historic, is still portrayed in pernicious features and in a way that would rouse any community and violate law if it were enacted in real life.
It is difficult to explain these survivals when we pretend to be so much shocked by the struggle for existence. We must accept the struggle, but we ought to try to understand it. The actual suffering among the creatures as the result of this struggle is probably small, and the bloody and ferocious contest that we like to picture to ourselves is relatively insignificant. There is a righteous element in the struggle; or, more truthfully, the struggle itself is right. Every living and sentient thing persists by its merit and by its right. It persists within its sphere, and usually not in the sphere of some other creature. The weeding-out process is probably related in some way with adaptability, but only remotely with physical strength. It is a process of applying the test. The test is applied continuously, and not in some violent upheaval.
If one looks for a moral significance in the struggle for existence, one finds it in the fact that it is a process of adjustment rather than a contest in ambition.
The elimination of the unessentials and of the survivals of a lower order of creation that have no proper place in human society, is the daily necessity of the race. The human struggle should not be on the plane of the struggle in the lower creation, by the simple fact that the human plane is unlike; and those who contend that we should draw our methods of contest from wild nature would therefore put us back on the plane of the creatures we are supposed to have passed. If there is one struggle of the creeping things, if there is one struggle of the fish of the sea and another of the beasts of the field, and still another of the fowls of the air, then surely there must be still another order for those who have dominion.