“In harmony with Nature?  Restless fool,
  Who with such heat doth preach what were to thee,
  When true, the last impossibility—­
  To be like Nature strong, like Nature cool! 
  Know, man hath all which Nature hath, but more,
  And in that more lie all his hopes of good,
  Nature is cruel, man is sick of blood;
  Nature is stubborn, man would fain adore;
  Nature is fickle, man hath need of rest;
  Nature forgives no debt and fears no grave;
  Man would be mild, and with safe conscience blest. 
  Man must begin; know this, where Nature ends;
  Nature and man can never be fast friends. 
  Fool, if thou canst not pass her, rest her slave!”

Religionist and humanist alike share this clear sense of separateness.  Literature is full of the expression of it.  Religion, in especial, has little to do with the natural world as such.  It is that other and inner one, which can make a hell of heaven, a heaven of hell, with which it is chiefly concerned.  Who can forget Othello’s soliloquy as he prepares to darken his marriage chamber before the murder of his wife?

  “Put out the light, and then put out the light. 
  If I quench thee, thou flaming minister,
  I can again thy former light restore,
  Should I repent me; but once put out thy light,
  Thou cunning’st pattern of excelling nature,
  I know not where is that Promethean heat,
  That can thy light relume.  When I have pluck’d the rose
  I cannot give it vital growth again,
  It needs must wither.”

Indeed, how vivid to us all is this difference between man and nature.  “I would to heaven,” Byron traced on the back of the manuscript of Don Juan,

  “I would to heaven that I were so much clay,
  As I am bone, blood, marrow, passion, feeling.”

Ah me!  So at many times would most of us.  And in that sense that we are not is where the religious consciousness takes its beginning.

Here is the sense of the gap between man and the natural world felt because man has no power over it.  He cannot swerve nor modify its laws, nor do his laws acknowledge its ascendency over them.  But what makes the gulf deeper is the sense of the immeasurable moral difference between a thinking, feeling, self-estimating being and all this unheeding world about him.  Whatever it is that looks out from the windows of our eyes something not merely of wonder and desire but also of fear and repulsion must be there as it gazes into so cruel as well as so alien an environment.  For a moral being to glorify nature as such is pure folly or sheer sentimentality.  For he knows that her apparent repose and beauty is built up on the ruthless and unending warfare of matched forces, it represents a dreadful equilibrium of pain.  He knows, too, that that in him which allies him with this natural world is his baser, not his better part.  This nobly pessimistic attitude toward the natural