So poet and believer and mystic find the key to nature, the interpretation of that alien and cruel world, not by sinking to its indifferent level, not by sentimental exaltation of its specious peace, its amoral cruelty and beauty, but by regarding it as the expression, the intimation rather, of a purposive Intelligence, a silent and infinite Force, beyond it all.  So the pagan effuses over nature, gilding with his sentimentality the puddles that the beasts would cough at.  And the scientist is interested in efficient causes, seeing nature as an unbroken sequence, an endless uniformity of cause and effect, against whose iron chain the spirit of mankind wages a foredoomed but never ending revolt.  But the religionist, confessing the ruthless indifference, the amorality which he distrusts and fears, and not denying the majestic uniformity of order, nevertheless declares that these are not self-made, that the amorality is but one half and that the confusing half of the tale.  The whole creation indeed groaneth and travaileth in pain, but for a final cause, which alone interprets or justifies it, and which eventually shall set it free.  As a matter of fact, nearly all poets and artists thus view nature in the light of final causes, though often instinctively and unconsciously so.  For what they sing or paint or mould is not the landscape that we see, the flesh we touch, but the life behind it, the light that never was on land or sea.  What they give us is not a photograph or an inventory—­it is worlds away from such naive and lying realism.  But they hint at the inexpressible behind expression; paint the beauty which is indistinguishable from nature but not identical with Nature.  They make us see that not she, red in tooth and claw, but that intangible and supernal something-more, is what gives her the cleansing bath of loveliness.  No reflective or imaginative person needs to be greatly troubled, therefore, by any purely mechanical or materialistic conception of the universe.  They who would commend that view of the cosmos have not only to reckon with philosophical and religious idealism, but also with all the bright band of poets and artists and seers.  Such an issue once resolutely forced would therewith collapse, for it would pit the qualitative standards against the quantitative, the imagination against literalism, the creative spirit in man against the machine in him.

Here, then, is the difference between the naturalist’s and the religionist’s attitude toward Nature.  The believer judges Nature, well aware of the gulf between himself and her, hating with inexpressible depth of indignation and repudiating with profound contempt the sybarite’s identification of human and natural law.  But also he comes back to her, not to accept in wonder her variable outward form, but to worship in awe before her invariable inner meaning.  Sometimes, like so many of the humanists, he rises only to a vague sense of the mystic unity that fills up the interspaces of the world, and cries with Wordsworth: