shadow, a medley of impish and elfish friendly and inimical
powers. 'Close to nature' though they live, they are anything but
Wordsworthians. If a bit of cosmic emotion ever thrills them, it is
likely to be at midnight, when the camp smoke rises straight to the
wicked full moon in the zenith, and the forest is all whispering with
witchery and danger. The eeriness of the world, the mischief and the
manyness, the littleness of the forces, the magical surprises, the
unaccountability of every agent, these surely are the characters most
impressive at that stage of culture, these communicate the thrills
of curiosity and the earliest intellectual stirrings. Tempests and
conflagrations, pestilences and earthquakes, reveal supramundane
powers, and instigate religious terror rather than philosophy. Nature,
more demonic than divine, is above all things _multifarious_. So many
creatures that feed or threaten, that help or crush, so many beings
to hate or love, to understand or start at--which is on top and which
subordinate? Who can tell? They are co-ordinate, rather, and to adapt
ourselves to them singly, to 'square' the dangerous powers and keep
the others friendly, regardless of consistency or unity, is the chief
problem. The symbol of nature at this stage, as Paulsen well says,
is the sphinx, under whose nourishing breasts the tearing claws are
visible.

But in due course of time the intellect awoke, with its passion for
generalizing, simplifying, and subordinating, and then began those
divergences of conception which all later experience seems rather
to have deepened than to have effaced, because objective nature has
contributed to both sides impartially, and has let the thinkers
emphasize different parts of her, and pile up opposite imaginary
supplements.