He
may rest in that, for the time; he may feel that this is the message of
nature to him, thus and now; and that the more perfectly and
passionately that the beauty of nature comes home to him, the nearer he
comes to the thought of God.
This does not, either in the case of the man of science or the poet,
solve the further mystery--the mystery of complex human relationships.
But the investigation of science ardently pursued is more likely to
tend to isolate the explorer from his kind than the poetical
contemplation of nature, for the simple reason that the scientist's
business is not primarily with emotion but with concrete fact; while to
the poet the emotions of love and friendship, of patriotism and duty,
will all tend to be the object of impassioned speculation too. Both
alike will be apt to be somewhat isolated from the ordinary life of the
world, because both to the poet and the man of science the present
condition of things, the problems of the day, will be dwarfed by the
thought of the vast accumulation of past experience; both alike will
tend to minimise the value of human effort, because they will both be
aware that the phenomenon of human activity and human volition is but
the froth and scum working on the lip of some gigantic forward-moving
tide, and that men probably do not so much choose what they shall do,
as do what they are compelled to do by some unfathomable power behind
and above them.
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