5. The perfection of this of latter and higher view involves the absolute fusion of thought and things. Its full attainment is a new creation of the world. Yet it is but the discovery of a relationship which was from the beginning, the adoption by thought of a child which was never other than its own. The habitual interpretation of natural events by the analogy of human design, to which every hour's conversation testifies, is the evidence that to the ordinary man nature presents itself not as something external, but, like a friend, as "another himself." The true conquest of nature is but the completion of the reconciliation thus anticipated in the everyday language and consciousness of mankind. When the mind has come to see in the endless flux of outward things, not a succession of isolated phenomena, but the reflex of its own development into an infinite variety of laws on a basis of identity--when the laws of nature are raised to the character of laws which regulate admiration and love--when the experiences of life are held together in a medium of pure emotion, and the animal element so fused with the spiritual as to form one organization through which the same impulse runs with unimpeded energy--then man has made nature his own, by becoming a conscious partaker of the reason which animates him and it.[5] The attainment of this consummation is the end of life: but it is an end that can never be fully realised, while "dualism" remains a necessary condition of humanity. To most men it is as a land very far off, of which occasional glimpses are caught from some "specular mount" of philosophic or poetic thought. It can only approach realisation through the operation of a power which can penetrate the whole man, and act on every moment of his life. But that power, which in the form of religion can make every meal a sacrament, and transform human passion into the likeness of divine love, is represented at a lower stage, not only by the unifying action of speculative philosophy, but by the combining force of art. FOOTNOTE: [5] The same thought may be found, in concrete and poetic form, in Wordsworth's lines: "And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man; A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still A lover of the meadows and the woods, And mountains." F. THE ARTIST AS IDEALIZER