we do. We can never really enter into life if we do. We must be willing to give up the material, to give up the physical life, for the sake of spiritual realities if we really would have worth. No prosperity for the individual, for the community, for the nation, is worth having if gained by loss of social justice and human right. We can not love our goods, we can not even love our physical life, enough to have them at the expense of the eternal right. No, we can not love others to the point of being unjust for their sakes and keep worth in our souls, and value in the process of our giving ourselves to them. There is a fact of sacrifice for the sake of spiritual values which is important enough to demand all that we have and are. We can only save our souls by being willing to lose them for the eternal right and truth and beauty.

If we would recognize spirit in ourselves, and in the universe, and keep spiritual value in life, we continually must make this choice of the highest. We must really enter into the whole of spiritual life and work with God, the Spirit, for the bringing in of the reign of spiritual reality. In this we are privileged to be free creators with the divine. We are spirits and we have the power and the right to choose to make spiritual worth prevail. As children of the Infinite Spirit we find ourselves in this world as workers together, and as workers with Him, to bring more and more a completion of the spiritual life, to make prevail the one reality which is shown to us through all the forms of Truth and Goodness and Beauty. This is our high task, our high privilege. "It is not yet revealed" what shall be our greater task in a continued life.

THE PHILOSOPHER

CHARLES COKE WOODS

With seeing eyes he searches near and far,
For Truth, in dust or weed, or burning star;
And often where the sullen shadow lowers
He finds amid the dark the brightest flowers;
The flowers of the fields are all alive

With Bees of Truth that swarm about his hive;
He senses voices in the wind and rain,
And hears a music on his window pane;
He finds Truth hiding in the flinty stone,

And hears a song where troubled tempests moan;
Some message that no man has heard before,
The wireless word speaks at his open door;
This Wisdom-lover climbs with steady feet
To summits where the stars and mountains meet;
Or dives for Pearls of Truth in deepest seas,
And catches health where others catch disease;
He is the Lochinvar in love with Truth,
And keeps the spirit of eternal youth;

He knows where music sings, some Master strong
Must stand near by to build the sounds to song;
He knows the waiting harp must silent be,
Until some Harpist sets the music free;
He knows some builder makes the ocean bars,
And some sure-moving hand must light the stars;

He has no fear of silences and night,

For bravest hopes flood all his path with light;
This Wisdom-man, or on the sea or sod,

Leans ever upward to the Voice of God.

JOHN BURROUGHS, A REVERSION TO THE

GREEK SPIRIT

GEORGE LAW

For the past decade some of us have been pondering Burroughs' hard gospel of nature. But probably few realized that what he called his "excursions into the world of semi-philosophical speculation" were integrating into a system until his recent book, "Accepting the Universe," appeared. Burroughs, the naturalist, herein becomes the nature-prophet. In the life of the trees, the animals, man, he reads the hard, cold facts of nature after that method of unbiased observation and careful inference in which he has had a lifetime of practice.

That the name Naturalism should assemble his ideas seems quite as fortuitous as that the eye should assemble the etheric vibrations. The word is not new. It is defined in philosophy as the doctrine that all phenomena may be referred to natural as opposed to supernatural causes. Burroughs discards myth, metaphysics, supernaturalism, while he holds rigidly to knowledge as revealed by science. Yet he seems to keep all the essentials of religion. This is the first time, I believe, that any one has succeeded in foreshadowing a religion without a background of metaphysics. Burroughs discards precedents, smashes traditions in an ardent simplicity: Knowledge of Nature-Science-and Nature is God. What a marvelous theology!

I

Naturalism-if we look upon it as a possible philosophy or religion-may be examined in the usual manner. We may question it as to cosmogony, creed (or better in this instance, attitude), and finally, ethics.

For the description, if we are not already well acquainted with nature, Naturalism refers us to our own observations and to science. But we are required to dis

card preconceptions, discredit flights of the imagination and approach nature with the open, teachable, slightly skeptical mind of the seeker after truth. A certain surveillance of our mental tendencies and a disciplining of the reason are needed. Only such knowledge as we may gain through the five senses, aided and supplemented by science, can be credited without reservation. We may think beyond science as Burroughs does; but to be true to Naturalism we can accept no theories or hypotheses that are incompatible with the verified conclusions of science.

Thus nature is simply what we find it to be-sweet air, sunshine, singing birds; but it is also poisonous gases, inclement weather, savage beasts. Nature is the entire arena of our experience inclusive of all the good, bad and indifferent that may be found therein. As to matters of morality, virtue, beneficence, dear to the aspiring heart of man,—nature is silent. These things are fruits of the human intelligence, pertaining solely to the social life of man; elsewhere not justice and order, as we conceive of them, rule, but chance and necessity.

Man's place in nature is natural; man, like everything else, is a product of evolution. His full-blooded kin, differing from himself only in development, are the animate creatures below him and before him. It is quite possible that man is simply an accident in the cosmic drama. Nature as a whole is indifferent to his life and to his presence. Man is no more necessary to the Universe than is a caravan to the desert or an exploring party to the polar regions. Man is important only to himself. Why he appeared at all is beside the question. He is here, a product of the organizing tendency in nature. This tendency may go farther and higher; but that is of no concern to us. Immediate practical means of welfare and betterment, clear vision and sane understanding, are our issues.

When we perceive the greatness of the Universe and our own insignificance, and behold the cosmic law and order active in nature as a whole but with no particular reference to us-except as we may utilize natural forces and laws to our own advantage; then we perceive beyond

the shadow of a doubt that there is no such thing as special providence. There is no intervening medium between man and the things that menace his life and welfare no medium except his own intelligence and directive skill.

Such a view may give us what Burroughs calls "a cosmic chill." "Naturalism is true," he declares, "but the truths of naturalism do not satisfy the moral and religious nature."

As to God, Burroughs states that his god is nature. But the word "God" is inadequate to the presentation of the idea intended. God is straddled with inevitable anthropomorphic associations. There is no hope of arriving at a conception of the God of Naturalism. It is bound to be different and greater than anything conceivable by finite minds. The wonder of the Universe, the virility of life, God is called by Burroughs, after the manner of the Indians, The Great Mystery.

It may be asked, of what use is such a God to man? Naturalism patiently answers that no use was intended. God, or Nature, was and will be before and after man was thought of. In fact man was not thought of, and it is highly doubtful whether God (speaking in the old way) knows man is here.

But the situation is not as bad as it sounds. Man can associate with God as much as he pleases. For God is everywhere and everything. There can be gain, however, only when we cast off our common familiar and disrespectful attitude toward nature and recognize the mystery and miracle incarnate in all things. Contrasting natural with theological miracles, Burroughs says: "If I knew how the meat and bread which the poet eats is turned into poetry, or how the pond-lily weaves its satin and gold out of the muck and slime of the creek-bottom, I should possess a secret that would make me cease to wonder at the so-called miracles." The closest contact with God, Burroughs believes, is to be attained through action. "We are here to act, to do, not to reason abstractedly." In an earlier book he compares action to the motion of a brook. "In motion it soon leaves all mud