They are like explorers who should
mistake a boundary for the interior of a continent. Man's knowledge of
nature is modern, but it no more endows him with new feeling than
modern knowledge of anatomy supplies him with a new bone or his latest
knowledge about his blood furnishes him with an additional artery.
Old are our instincts and passions about Nature: all are Forest
Memories.
But among the many-twisted mass of them there is one, he said, that
contains the separate buried root of the story: Man's Forest Faith.
When the Spirit of the Forest had finished with the sea-shell, it had
planted in him--there to grow forever--the root of faith that he was a
forest child. His origin in the sea he had not yet discovered; the
science of ages far distant in the future was to give him that. To
himself forest-tethered he was also forest-born: he believed it to be
his immediate ancestor, the creative father of mankind. Thus the
Greeks in their oldest faith were tethered to the idea that they were
descended from the plane tree; in the Sagas and Eddas the human race
is tethered to the world-ash. Among every people of antiquity this
forest faith sprang up and flourished: every race was tethered to some
ancestral tree.
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