The mirror. (Stillwater, Minn.) 1894-1925, 1917-03-29
Human Nature

PASSIONS the body with it's passions ruled by the in
telect and the whole dominated by the spirit. HUI
man progress is an upward movement out of the
cellar and basement of human nature into the upper
ranges of mind and spirit. A generation ago some
thing different was described by very intellectual
people, who main tanned that the spiritual world,
called, was mirage. having substantial reality;
but the great Russian Turgenieff broke loose from
materialism and declared that the heart "a
great voice of Nature" and must be reckoned with.
With him and others like minded the tide turned.
When Wkie was asked how he mixed his COL
ors to get such wonderful effects, he made his ia
nous answer, With brains, sir.' All good things
and all lasting things have to be mixed with brains
All great things and all durable things have to be
baasted with great endowments of physical energy
and the sustaining impulse of passion. Through all
great spiritual literature and through all the deeds
of great and women, even the most delicate and
refined, runs an undercurrent of wholesome animal
vitality.
There are many wise and they have made
many discoveries concerning the modes of being in
matter and mind, but not of them has solved
the problem of physical force, intellectual activity,
or spiritual exaltaton. All they do is to note
with wonder and admiration the tides of life Why
does the heart beat, and why does it stop beating?
Whence comes a thought and why is thought
clouded when some obscure organ fails to do its
proper work? Why does the spirit exult in it's free
flight, or waver and falter just when emancipation
seemed to be achieved?
The prophetic soul of the wide world dream
ing of things to Gomez has visions that nterpre-
ted by the husbandman, the poet and the saint The
husbandman finds ready to his hand nnumerabe
seeds that have ancestry running back into
recorded time. OF their history and ancestry hef>
knows little or nothing, but he knows that every
ed is a magical key which, rightly used, will
lock for him the treasures hidden in the earth Let
him take a single square yard of soil and rake it
clean of every sign of life, then let him drop into it
as many seeds as the ground will hold and every
of them will make different draft upon the treas
of the soil; each after it's kind, with instruc
tions from him, will draw of the earth marvel
Gus forms of life, sweet and sour. edible and
ious beautiful and ugly, wind blown flower the
sapllng of sturdy oak. 1t is all wonderful, mys-
FERROUS, and beautiful to those who bring to their
work clean hands and pure heart.
But wonderful and beautiful as all this outside
natural world is, it offer nothing to compare
with the woodworking mind of In his
physical nature he shares the bounty OF nature
with bis next of kin, the birds and beasts but
this is only the beginning of his life. He puts
thought, Mrs. Browning would say, beneath his
rags ennoble the life struggle" and behold
derful world opens before and within him; the
food he eats and the water he drinks in some in
scrutabe way transformed, and noursh not only the
body, but also the mind that anmates the body and
takes note of all things happening in the lower world
of matter we'll as in the spiritual realm which is
in the upper ranges of consciousness. The man
who begins to understand himself practices mental
culture. He puts seed thoughts into his mind and
according the richness of the soil and the of
the husbandman it brings forth, fifty, and
sixty, and hundredfold; and then it hap
pens to the honest, living aectionate thinker
that out Of something that is not matter, and
thing that he did not create, there come and
strange ideas and impulses. He sees, he feels, he
notes, he Classics, and asks, Whence come the
ethical ideas did not create, and the ethical
commands that he dare not disobey; whence the
of obligation to love the unovely, the
ungrateful to make himself of no account if he may
serve the brotherhood; and startling thought, whence
came the claim of brotherhood and does it imply
fatherhood, supreme, loving and commandng?"
With wide sweep of thought the intellect
looks upward and outward beyond itself into in
finite and eternal mystery. 1t learns that when any
puts himself into relations with SIN, sorrow, in
justice, misfortune of any kind, and tries to
that which is evil and correct that which is
wrong, there come into the mind fresh thoughts and
impulses; and out of action and effort there come
evidences, cogent and unmistakable, of spiritual
atmosphere, living presence in which we live and
and have our being. The spirit in man re-
spends to the universal life and spiritual discovery