last century but initiated long before. Poetry has been growing
naturalistic, and is to-day disposed to reject all severance of body
and spirit. The great nature movement which we associate with the
names of Cowper, Burns, and Wordsworth, has withdrawn man's attention
from conscious responsibility, and has taught him to adore blind and
vast forces which he cannot fully comprehend. We all know the
refreshment and the deepening of life which this mystic new poetry has
brought. But it is hard to say whether poetry is nowadays a spiritual
or a natural art. Many of us would incline to the latter view, and
would hold that even in dealing with persons it treats them as
embodiments of natural forces. Our instincts and unguided passions,
the features which most identify us with the physical world, are
coming more and more to be the subjects of modern poetry.



IV

Nature, meanwhile, that part of the universe which is not consciously
guided, has become within a century our favorite field of scientific
study. The very word science is popularly appropriated to naturalistic
investigation. Of course this is a perversion. Originally it was
believed that the proper study of mankind was man. And probably we
should all still acknowledge that the study of personal structure is
as truly science as study of the structure of physical objects. Yet so
powerfully is the tide setting toward reverence for the unconscious
and the sub-conscious that science, our word for knowledge, has lost
its universality and has taken on an almost exclusively physical
character.