Nevertheless, one question does press upon the nature-mystic. Is the will to be conscious of its activities? Schopenhauer's Ground-will is a blindly heaving desire. If his contention be granted, Nature Mysticism will be shorn of its true glory. Communion with nature, though it rest on passive intuition, must somehow be associated with consciousness, if it is to be that which we best know. That is to say, nature's self-activity must be analogous to our own throughout--analogous, not identical. And such a conclusion commends itself to a thinker as careful and scientific as Stout, who in his "Manual of Psychology" writes as follows: "The individual consciousness, as we know it, must be regarded as a payment of a wider whole, by which its origin and its changes are determined. As the brain forms only a fragmentary portion of the total system of natural phenomena, so we must assume the stream of individual consciousness to be in like manner part of an immaterial system. We must further assume that this immaterial system in its totality is related to nervous processes taking place in the cortex of the brain." So, too, James, in his "Varieties of Religious Experience," declares that "our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness; whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded." A thinker of a very different type, Royce, in his "World and the Individual," concurs in this idea of a wider, universal consciousness. "We have no right whatever to speak of really unconscious Nature, but only of uncommunicative Nature, or of Nature whose mental processes go on at such different time-rates from ours that we cannot adjust ourselves to a live appreciation of their inward fluency, although our consciousness does make us aware of their presence. . . . Nature is thus a vast conscious process, whose relation to time varies vastly, but whose general characteristics are throughout the same. From this point of view evolution would be a series of processes suggesting to us various degrees and types of conscious processes. The processes, in case of so-called inorganic matter are very remote from us, while in the case of the processes of our fellows we understand them better." Again he calls Nature "a vast realm of finite consciousness of which your own is at once a part and an example."