Page:Psychology and preaching.djvu/369

 THE MODERN MIND 351

in natural tropes. Metaphors and similes drawn from natural objects seem to be the customary dress for his pas sionate thought, but the inspiration of his passion is not nature itself, but the purposes and actions of the gods whom he fancies he sees in nature. The thought of the modern writer is not likely to be so gorgeously arrayed in natural tropes, but far more frequently do you find him standing in rapt contemplation before natural objects, deriving his inspiration from them, delighting in them on their own account, and giving a loving, sometimes entrancing, descrip tion of them in confidence that he could not give a keener delight to a large circle of readers. His interest in nature is aesthetic, not religious. It has been pointed out 1 that landscape painting, so important a feature of modern, and so insignificant a feature of early art, has developed in connec tion with the highly artificial conditions of modern city life, under which man has been divorced from his primitive in timacy with nature.

(3) The same writer calls attention to the fact that what might be called the rhythmical adjustment to nature is much less perfect in modern than it was in primitive conditions. Primevally man s food supply was usually abundant and as sured at certain seasons of the year and limited and pre carious at others, and his life expanded and contracted, so to speak, with the seasons. In other respects, also, the variations of his life ran parallel with the seasonal changes much more closely than is the case in civilized lands today ; and the explanation is evident the recent extension of his control over nature, artificializing the conditions under which he lives. Even the adaptation of his life to the diurnal rhythm of nature, the alternations of the waking and the sleeping periods, is to a large extent broken up under the conditions of city life, and through the operation of the same causes. In a word, his life must adapt itself more and more to the varying tides of social life and less to the regu lar alternations of nature.

1 Simmel, &quot; Philosophic des Geldes,&quot; pp. 543-4-

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