“The natural world, so to speak, is the raw material of the spiritual. Therefore, ere man can understand the spiritual, he must understand the natural,” writes Thomas Gentry.
The authors of this book would go a step further and say that the natural world is the spiritual. Soul and body, ephemeral and material, on this plane of existence are ineffably bound together. If you would climb to sublime heights of ghostly exaltation, study first the grass at your feet. If you would unravel the mysteries of the universe, desert the cloistered hearth for the wonders of woods and meadows. Slow-thinking man will never understand the secret of his own existence, until he thoroughly understands the plants outside his window.
For one to examine dead, withered specimens and hope to understand Nature is as if a person should analyze hundreds of Egyptian mummies in order to acquaint himself with the[Pg 12] human race. You must seek the flowers on their native heath and treat them as friends and equals. Too often is the human creature inclined to look upon members of the vegetable kingdom as things apart from the world of life—insensate beings which can be cut down and trampled without offense—mere “growths,” more akin to earth and stone than to himself.
As a matter of fact, among the many forms of matter which exist on this earth of ours, the only clear-cut division is between the organic and the inorganic. The primary characteristic which distinguishes a living creature from inanimate objects about it is, in the words of Arthur Dendy, its power of “reacting toward its environment in such a manner as to conduce to its own well-being; of controlling not only its own behaviour but also the behaviour alike of its fellow creatures and of inanimate objects, in its own interests, thereby maintaining its own position in the universal struggle for existence.”
Royal Dixon (25 March 1885 – 4 June 1962) was an American animal rights activist, botanist, philosopher, and a member of the Americanization movement. He was, along with Diana Belais (1858–1944), a founder of the "First Church for Animal Rights" in 1921.
Dixon was born at Huntsville, Texas on 25 March 1885 to Elijah and Francis Elizabeth Dixon.[1] He was educated at the Sam Houston Normal Institute, Morgan Park Academy, Chicago and later as a special student at the University of Chicago. His earliest career was as a child actor and dancer trained by Adele Fox. His last theatre appearance was in 1903 as an actor with the Iroquois theater in Chicago.[2] He became a curator at the department of botany at the Field Museum of Chicago from 1905 to 1910.[3] He subsequently became a staff writer at the Houston Chronicle. He also made special contributions to the newspapers of New York City, where he lectured for the Board of Education and founded a school for creative writing. His interest and attention were later directed to immigration, as a director of publicity of the Commission of Immigrants in America, and as managing editor of The Immigrants in America Review. He published a book on how immigrants needed to be "americanized" into a single uniform culture.