To which there is a twofold reply. In the first place, to go outside
what we call Nature is not to go outside Environment. Nature, the
natural Environment, is only a part of Environment. There is another
large part which, though some profess to have no correspondence with it,
is not on that account unreal, or even unnatural. The mental and moral
world is unknown to the plant. But it is real. It cannot be affirmed
either that it is unnatural to the plant; although it might be said that
from the point of view of the Vegetable Kingdom it was _supernatural_.
Things are natural or supernatural simply according to where one stands.
Man is supernatural to the mineral; God is supernatural to the man. When
a mineral is seized upon by the living plant and elevated to the organic
kingdom, no tresspass against Nature is committed. It merely enters a
larger Environment, which before was supernatural to it, but which now
is entirely natural. When the heart of a man, again, is seized upon by
the quickening Spirit of God, no further violence is done to natural
law. It is another case of the inorganic, so to speak, passing into the
organic.
But, in the second place, it is complained as if it were an enormity in
itself that the spiritual correspondence should be furnished from the
spiritual world. And to this the answer lies in the same direction.
Correspondence in any case is the gift of Environment. The natural
Environment gives men their natural faculties; the spiritual affords
them their spiritual faculties. It is natural for the spiritual
Environment to supply the spiritual faculties; it would be quite
unnatural for the natural Environment to do it. The natural law of
Biogenesis forbids it; the moral fact that the finite cannot comprehend
the Infinite is against it; the spiritual principle that flesh and blood
cannot inherit the kingdom of God renders it absurd. Not, however, that
the spiritual faculties are, as it were, manufactured in the spiritual
world and supplied ready-made to the spiritual organism--forced upon it
as an external equipment. This certainly is not involved in saying that
the spiritual faculties are furnished by the spiritual world. Organisms
are not added to by accretion, as in the case of minerals, but by
growth. And the spiritual faculties are organized in the spiritual
protoplasm of the soul, just as other faculties are organized in the
protoplasm of the body. The plant is made of materials which have once
been inorganic. An organizing principle not belonging to their kingdom
lays hold of them and elaborates them until they have correspondences
with the kingdom to which the organizing principle belonged. Their
original organizing principle, if it can be called by this name, was
Crystallization; so that we have now a distinctly foreign power
organizing in totally new and higher directions. In the spiritual world,
similarly, we find an organizing principle at work among the materials
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