puzzled eyes and a mind obviously groping, "is our next step. Reason
has done its best for centuries, and gets no further. It _can_ get no
further, for it can do nothing for the inner life which is the sole
reality. We must return to Nature and a purified intuition, to a greater
reliance upon what is now subconscious, back to that sweet, grave
guidance of the Universe which we've discarded with the primitive
state--a spiritual intelligence, really, divorced from mere
intellectuality."

And by Nature he did not mean a return to savagery. There was no idea
of going backwards in his wild words. Rather he looked forwards, in some
way hard to understand, to a state when Man, with the best results of
Reason in his pocket, might return to the instinctive life--to feeling
_with_--to the sinking down of the modern, exaggerated intellectual
personality into its rightful place as guide instead of leader. He called
it a Return to Nature, but what he meant, I always felt, was back to a
sense of kinship with the Universe which men, through worshipping the
intellect alone, had lost. Men today prided themselves upon their
superiority to Nature as beings separate and apart. O'Malley sought, on
the contrary, a development, if not a revival, of some faultless
instinct, due to kinship with her, which--to take extremes--shall direct
alike the animal and the inspired man, guiding the wild bee and the
homing pigeon, and--the soul toward its God.

This clue, as he called it, crystallized so neatly and so conclusively
his own mental struggles, that he had called a halt, as it were, to his
own intellectual development.... The name and family of the snake, hence,
meant to him the least important things about it. He caught, wildly yet
consistently, at the psychic links that bound the snake and Nature and
himself together with all creation. Troops of adventurous thoughts had