The Heart of Nature; or, The Quest for Natural BeautyYounghusband, Francis Edward, Sir
Philosophy
The Heart of Nature; or, The Quest for Natural Beauty
Younghusband, Francis Edward, Sir
Himalaya Mountains -- Description and travel; Natural history -- Himalaya Mountains; Nature (Aesthetics)
What happens is, we may imagine, much the same as what happened
in the case of Australia. A handful of settlers from the
mother-country formed the germ-seed from which the Australia of to-day
has grown up. There was no external despot ordering each
individual Australian to do this, that, and the other--to come this
way and go that, and to stop in one place this year and in another
place the next. Each Australian acting on his own initiative, and all
in their togetherness, created the Australian spirit, which again
reacting upon each Australian induced him to act in accordance with
that spirit. And so in time Australia, assimilating individuals from
outside and absorbing them into its texture, and imbuing them with
the Australian spirit, grew up into manhood in the Great War and
astonished the world by its strong individuality, its character,
intelligence, determination, and good comradeship.
In the same way these particles of the rose-seed, each acting of itself,
in their collectivity formed the rose-spirit. And each was in turn
imbued by the rose-spirit. They had in them unconsciously the ideal
of the rose-bush with its roots, stem, branches, leaves, flowers, fruit,
seed. In all their activities they were actuated by this ideal. It was
always constraining them in the given direction. By reason of the
working of it in the particles they could by no possibility arrange
themselves into a may tree or a lilac bush. There was an inner core
of activity which persisted through all the countless changes of the
process, which permeated the whole and which kept it directed to
the particular end it had all the time in view. That activity had, in
fact, a well-defined disposition, and that disposition was defined by
the ideal of the rose, and was to form a rose-bush bearing roses.
That the rose-seed developed into the rose was due, therefore, not to
the operation of any outside agent, but was due to the operation of
the rose-spirit that it had within it, and which was persistently
driving it to bring into actual being that ideal of the rose which was
the essence of its spirit. The ideal of the rose was the motive-power
of the whole process.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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