from us the sacrifice even of our lives, we nevertheless love to have
the ideal, and love Nature for implanting it in us.

* * *

And now that we have seen what is the nature of Nature, what is the
end she has before her, and how she works to accomplish her end,
we feel that we have gone a long way towards knowing and
understanding her. We have had a vision of the hidden Divinity by
which she is inspired. And this mysterious Power we have not found
reigning remote in the empty spaces of the heavens. We have found
it dwelling in every minutest particle of which this Earth and all the
world is built, and of which we ourselves also are made--dwelling in
the earth, and in the air, and in the stars; and in every living thing, in
beast and bird and insect, in flower, plant, and man--and dwelling in
them all in their togetherness. We have found it to be both immanent
and transcendent. It only exists--and can only exist--in these its
single self-active representations. But in relation to each of them it is
transcendent. Each star and flower, each beast and man, is its partial
representation. But the whole together is that Power which while it
transcends is yet resident in, and inspires, each single part which
goes to its making. In the inmost heart of Nature, as the ground and
source of Nature, yet permeating Nature to the uttermost confines,
and reigning supreme over the whole, we find God; actuating the
heart of God we find an ideal; and actuating the heart of the ideal we
find an imperative urge towards perfection, an inborn necessity to
perfect itself for ever--just as inside the rough exterior of Abraham
Lincoln was the real Abraham Lincoln, at his heart was an ideal, and
at the heart of the ideal an inner impulse towards perfection; or as
within the exterior France is the real France, in the heart of France
an ideal, and in the heart of the ideal the determination to perfect
itself.

This view of Nature is very different from that view of her which
would regard the world as having been originally created by, and
now being governed by, an always and already perfect Being, living
as apart from it as the Sun is from the Earth, and being as distinct
and separate from it as a father is from his son. And the difference in
view must make a profound difference in our attitude to Nature, and
therefore in our capacity for seeing and enjoying Natural Beauty.
We may admire and worship but we can scarcely love, in any true
sense o