f the nature-mystic's inevitable contention.

"The rounded world is fair to see,
Nine-times folded in mystery:
Though baffled seers cannot impart
The secret of its labouring heart.
Throb thine with Nature's throbbing breast,
And all is clear from east to west.
Spirit that lurks each form within
Beckons to spirit of its kin;
Self-kindled every atom glows,--
And hints the future which it owes."

CHAPTER VIII

THE CHARGE OF ANTHROPOMORPHISM

There are many thinkers who are ready to acknowledge that the
contemplation of nature leads to various kinds of emotional and
aesthetic experience, but who at the same time deny that the
results of such contemplation have any other than a subjective
character; they argue that the validity of the results evaporates,
so to speak, with the mood which brought them into being.
Myths, for example, from this point of view are "simply the
objectification of subjective impulses"; and modern sympathy
with nature is aesthetic feeling which "breaks free of the fetters
laid upon it by mythological thought, constantly to create at its
own sovereign pleasure myths which pass with the passing of
the end that they have served and give place to other fancies."
This "subjective" doctrine will meet us often, and will call for
various answers. Let it now be considered in its most general
and formidable shape, that to which Wundt has given weighty
support in his treatise on the "Facts of the Moral Life." The
sentences quoted just above are from those sections of this work
which deal with man's aesthetic relation to nature; and it is with
their teaching on the subject that this chapter will be chiefly
concerned.

Here is a statement which raises a clear issue. The influence of
nature, says Wundt, is not immutable. "The same mountains and
rivers and forests lie before the modern European that lay
before his ancestors thousands of years ago; but the effect
which they produce is very different. In this change there is
reflected a change in man's _aesthetic_ view of the world, itself
connected with a change in his moral apprehension of life."
Now every word of this passage may be welcomed by the
nature-mystic without his thereby yielding his contention that
mountains and rivers and forests have a definite and immanent
objective significance of their own. The phenomena of sunrise
and sunset, which lay before our European ancestors thousands
of years ago, ar