energy; while the religious devotee is intent only upon losing himself in infinite being.  True, there have been devout naturalists and men of science; but their devoutness did not date from their Nature studies, but from their training, or from the times in which they lived.  Theology and science, it must be said, will not mingle much better than oil and water, and your devout scientist and devout Nature student lives in two separate compartments of his being at different times.  Intercourse with Nature—­I mean intellectual intercourse, not merely the emotional intercourse of the sailor or explorer or farmer—­tends to beget a habit of mind the farthest possible removed from the myth-making, the vision-seeing, the voice-hearing habit and temper.  In all matters relating to the visible, concrete universe it substitutes broad daylight for twilight; it supplants fear with curiosity; it overthrows superstition with fact; it blights credulity with the frost of skepticism.  I say frost of skepticism advisedly.  Skepticism is a much more healthful and robust habit of mind than the limp, pale-blooded, non-resisting habit that we call credulity.

In intercourse with Nature you are dealing with things at first hand, and you get a rule, a standard, that serves you through life.  You are dealing with primal sanities, primal honesties, primal attraction; you are touching at least the hem of the garment with which the infinite is clothed, and virtue goes out from it to you.  It must be added that you are dealing with primal cruelty, primal blindness, primal wastefulness, also.  Nature works with reference to no measure of time, no bounds of space, and no limits of material.  Her economies are not our economies.  She is prodigal, she is careless, she is indifferent; yet nothing is lost.  What she lavishes with one hand, she gathers in with the other.  She is blind, yet she hits the mark because she shoots in all directions.  Her germs fill the air; the winds and the tides are her couriers.  When you think you have defeated her, your triumph is hers; it is still by her laws that you reach your end.

We make ready our garden in a season, and plant our seeds and hoe our crops by some sort of system.  Can any one tell how many hundreds of millions of years Nature has been making ready her garden and planting her seeds?

There can be little doubt, I think, but that intercourse with Nature and a knowledge of her ways tends to simplicity of life.  We come more and more to see through the follies and vanities of the world and to appreciate the real values.  We load ourselves up with so many false burdens, our complex civilization breeds in us so many false or artificial wants, that we become separated from the real sources of our strength and health as by a gulf.