Here is a vivid interpretation of a universal human experience.  Might not any one of us who had endured it turn upon the pagan and sentimentalist, crying in the mood of a Swift or a Voltaire, “Ca vous amuse, la vie”?  The abstract natural rights of the eighteenth century smack of academic complacency before this.  The indignation we feel against the insolent individualism of a Louis XIV who cried “L’etat c’est moi!” or against the industrial overlord who spills the tears of women for his ambition, the sweat of the children for his greed, is as nothing beside the indignation with the natural order which any biological study would arouse except as the scientist perceives that indignation is, for him, beside the point and the religionist believes that it proceeds from not seeing far enough into the process.  This is why there is an essential absurdity in any naturalistic system of ethics.  Even the clown can say,

  “Here’s a night that pities
  Neither wise men nor fools.”

This common attitude of the religionist toward nature as a remote and cruel world, alien to our spirits, is abundantly reflected in literature.  It finds a sort of final consummation in the intuitive insight, the bright understanding of the creative spirits of our race.  What Aristotle defines as the tragic emotions, the sense of the terror and the pity of human life, arise partly from this perception of the isolation always and keenly felt by dramatist and prophet and poet.  They know well that Nature does not exist by our law; that we neither control nor understand it; is it not our friend?

There is, then, the law of identity between man and nature, found in their common physical origin; there is also the law of difference.  It is on that aspect of reality that religion places its emphasis.  It is with this approach to understanding ourselves that preachers, as distinguished from scientists, deal.  Our present society is traveling farther and farther away from reality in so far as it turns either to the outside world of fact, or to the domain of natural law, expecting to find in these the elements of insight for the fresh guidance of the human spirit.  Not there resides the secret of the beings of whom Shelley said,

  “We look before and after
  And pine for what is not,
  Our sincerest laughter
  With some pain is fraught.”

Instinct is a base, a prime factor, part of the matrix of personality.  But personality is not instinct; it is instinct plus a different force; instinct transformed by spiritual insight and controlled by moral discipline.  The man of religion, therefore, finds himself not in one but two worlds, not indeed mutually exclusive, having a common origin, but nevertheless significantly distinct.  Each is incomplete without the other, each in a true sense non-existent without the other.  But that which is most vital to man’s world is unknown in the domain of nature.  Already the perception of a dualism is here.