[Footnote 368: The latter, like Fechner in our own century, holds that the stars are living organisms, whose "sensibility is full of pleasure."] [Footnote 369: See Illingworth's _Divine Immanence_, where this and other interesting passages are quoted. But Suso was, of course, _not_ a "Protestant mystic." And I cannot agree with the author when he says that Lucretius found no religious inspiration in Nature. The poet of the _Nature of Things_ shows himself to have been a lonely man, who had pondered much among the hills and by the sea, and who loved to taste the pure delights of the spring. Thence came to him the "holy joy and dread" ("quædam divina voluptas atque horror") which pulsates through his great poem as he shatters the barbarous mythology of paganism, and then, in the spirit of a priest rather than of a philosopher, turns the "bright shafts of day" upon the folly and madness of those who are slaves to the world or the flesh. The spirit of Lucretius is the spirit of modern science, which tends neither to materialism nor to atheism, whatever its friends and enemies may say.] [Footnote 370: Christian Platonism has never been more beautifully set forth than in the poem of Spenser named above. Compare, especially, the following stanzas:-- "The means, therefore, which unto us is lent Him to behold, is on His works to look, Which He hath made in beauty excellent, And in the same, as in a brazen book To read enregistered in every nooke His goodness, which His beauty doth declare: For all that's good is beautiful and fair. "Thence gathering plumes of perfect speculation, To imp the wings of thy high-flying mind, Mount up aloft through heavenly contemplation, From this dark world, whose damps the soul do blind, On that bright Sun of glory fix thine eyes, Cleared from gross mists of frail infirmities." Shelley sums up a great deal of Plotinus in the following stanza of "Adonais":-- "The One remains; the many change and pass; Heaven's light for ever shines; earth's shadows fly; Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, Stains the white radiance of eternity." Compare, too, the opening lines of "Alastor."] [Footnote 371: Compare the following sentences in Bradley's _Appearance and Reality_: "Nature viewed materialistically is only an abstraction for certain purposes, and has not a high degree of truth or reality. The poet's nature has much more.... Our principle, that the abstract is the unreal, moves us steadily upward.... It compels us in the end to credit nature with our higher emotions. That process can only cease when nature is quite absorbed into spirit, and at every stage of the process we find increase in reality."] [Footnote 372: "Prelude," viii. 340 sq.] [Footnote 373: "Prelude," viii. 668.] [Footnote 374: La Rochefoucauld.] [Footnote 375: These words, from Milton's "Comus," are applied to Wordsworth by Hazlitt.]