t by nature? Does it mean
inanimate nature? If so, is a love of nature clearly good or 'natural?'
Was Wordsworth justifiable _prima facie_ for telling us to study
mountains rather than Pope for announcing that

The proper study of mankind is man?

Is it not more natural to be interested in men than in mountains? Does
nature include man in his natural state? If so, what is the natural
state of man? Is the savage the man of nature, or the unsophisticated
peasant, or the man whose natural powers are developed to the highest
pitch? Is a native of the Andaman Islands the superior of Socrates? If
you admit that Socrates is superior to the savage, where do you draw the
line between the natural and the artificial? If a coral reef is natural
and beautiful because it is the work of insects, and a town artificial
and ugly because made by man, we must reject as unnatural all the best
products of the human race. If you distinguish between different works
of man, the distinction becomes irrelevant, for the products to which we
most object are just as natural, in any assignable sense of the word, as
those which we most admire. The word natural may indeed be used as
equivalent simply to beneficial or healthy; but then it loses all value
as an implicit test of what is and what is not beneficial. Probably,
indeed, some such sense was floating before the minds of most who have
used the term. We shall generally find a vague recognition of the fact
that there is a continuous series of integrating and disintegrating
processes; that some charges imply a normal development of the social or
individual organism leading to increased health and strength, whilst
others are significant of disease and ultimate obliteration or decay of
structure. Thus the artificial style of the Pope school, the appeals to
the muse, the pastoral affectation, and so forth, may be called
unnatural, because the philosophy of that style is the retention of
obsolete symbols after all vitality has departed, and when they
consequently become mere obstructions, embarrassing the free flow of
emotion which they once stimulated.

But, however this may be, it is plain that the very different senses
given to the word nature by different schools of thought were
characteristic of profoundly different conceptions of the world and its
order. There is a sense in which it may be said with perfect accuracy
that the worship of nature, so far from being a fresh doctrine of the
new s