[5] It is perhaps to this tendency we may (in part) attribute the eagerness with which poetry and fine art have used and abused the personifications of natural objects provided for them by primitive superstition. If not, it is curious that these tedious mythologies should have been cherished by poets long after they were abandoned by everybody else; and that we still use every expedient for endowing material nature with fictitious sympathies and powers. But it is, I think, an error to see nothing in such metaphors but a trick of style. They represent the same deep-rooted tendency which finds significance in such phrases as “Mother Earth,” which has suggested certain poetic forms of Pantheism; or which gathers a vague, semi-spiritual consolation from the thought that, when we die, our bodies, resolved into their elements, may still share in the new manifestations of life which Nature (half personified) pours out in exhaustless profusion. LECTURE IV ETHICS AND THEISM I I turn now from contemplation to action; from Æsthetics to Ethics. And in so doing I must ask permission to stretch the ordinary meaning of the term which I use to describe the subject-matter of the present lecture, as I have already stretched the meaning of the term which described the subject-matter of the last. “Æsthetics” there included much besides beauty; “Ethics” here will include much besides morality. As, under the first head, were ranged contemplative interests far lower in the scale than (for example) those of art, so I shall extend the use of the word “Ethics” till it embraces the whole range of what used to be called the “springs of action,” from the loftiest love down to impulses which in themselves are non-moral, instinctive, even automatic. The grounds for this procedure are similar in both cases. I am mainly, almost exclusively, concerned with beliefs and emotions touching beauty and goodness. Yet it is important to remember that, considered as natural products, these shade off by insensible gradations into manifestations of life to which the words “belief” and “emotion” are quite inapplicable, where “beauty” and “goodness” have little meaning or none. And as this larger class, when concerned with action, has at present no better name, I may be permitted to describe it as ethical. I am mainly concerned, however, with that higher part of the ethical scale which all would agree to call Moral, and with the debatable region immediately below it. Of purposive action, or what seems to be such, of a still lower type, I need say little—but we must never forget that it is there.