We find further evidence in Goethe's account of an event in his seventh year, which shows how deeply his soul was filled at that time with the knowledge of its kinship with the realm from which nature herself receives its existence. This knowledge led him to approach the 'great God of Nature' through an act of ritual conceived by himself. The boy took a four-sectioned music stand and arranged on it all kinds of natural specimens, minerals and the like, until the whole formed a kind of pyramidal altar. On the top of this pyramid he placed some fumigating candles, the burning of which was to represent the 'upward yearning of the soul for its God'. In order to give nature herself an active part in the ritual, he contrived to kindle the candles by focusing upon them through a magnifying-glass the light of the rising sun. Before this symbol of the unity of the soul with the divine in nature the boy then paid his devotions. 'Unity of the soul with the divine in nature' - this was what lived vividly as a conviction in the seven-year-old boy, impelling him to act as 'nature's priest' (Wordsworth). The same impulse, in a metamorphosed form, impelled the adult to go out in quest of an understanding of nature which, as Traherne put it, was to bring back through highest reason what once had been his by way of primeval intuition. 1 The present writer's interest in Reid was first aroused by a remark of Rudolf Steiner, in his book A Theory of 'Knowledge according to Goethe's World Conception. 2 In a comment on a letter Carlyle had written to him, and in a note dealing with the contemporary philosophy in Germany. 3 This observation of Reid's shows that the origin of language is very different from what the evolutionists since Darwin have imagined it to be. 4 Confessions, Book I, Chapter 8. 5 As we have seen, the word had better luck with Goethe. 6 Wordsworth, with all his limitations, had a real affinity with Goethe in his view of nature. Mr. Norman Lacey gives some indication of this in his recent book, Wordsworth's View of Nature. 7 This same period of life played a decisive part in the spiritual evolution of Rudolf Steiner, as may be seen in his autobiography, The Story of My Life. 8 The difference in spelling between the prose and poetry excerpts arises from the fact that whereas we can draw on Miss Wade's new edition of the poems for Traherne's original spelling, we have as yet only Dobell's edition of the Centuries, in which the spelling is modernized. 9 Oxenford's translation. CHAPTER VII 'Always Stand by Form'