It is useless to seek to deceive ourselves with pagan paeans in praise
of Nature, for as Leopardi, that Christian atheist, said with profound
truth in his stupendous poem _La Ginestra_, Nature "gives us life like a
mother, but loves us like a step-mother." The origin of human
companionship was opposition to Nature; it was horror of impious Nature
that first linked men together in the bonds of society. It is human
society, in effect, the source of reflective consciousness and of the
craving for immortality, that inaugurates the state of grace upon the
state of Nature; and it is man who, by humanizing and spiritualizing
Nature by his industry, supernaturalizes her.
In two amazing sonnets which he called _Redemption_, the tragic
Portuguese poet, Antero de Quental, embodied his dream of a spirit
imprisoned, not in atoms or ions or crystals, but--as is natural in a
poet--in the sea, in trees, in the forest, in the mountains, in the
wind, in all material individualities and forms; and he imagines that a
day may come when all these captive souls, as yet in the limbo of
existence, will awaken to consciousness, and, emerging as pure thought
from the forms that imprisoned them, they will see these forms, the
creatures of illusion, fall away and dissolve like a baseless vision. It
is a magnificent dream of the penetration of everything by
consciousness.
May it not be that the Universe, our Universe--who knows if there are
others?--began with a zero of spirit--and zero is not the same as
nothing--and an infinite of matter, and that its goal is to end with an
infinite of spirit and a zero of matter? Dreams!
May it be that everything has a soul and that this soul begs to be
freed?
_Oh tierras de Alvargonzalez,
en el corazon de Espana,
tierras pobres, tierras tristes,
tan tristes que tienen alma!_
sings our poet Antonio Machado in his _Campos de Castilla_.
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