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Sartor Resartus: the life and opinions of Herr Teufelsdrocke by Thomas Carlyle
page 58 of 256 (22%)
O cultivated reader, who too probably art no Psalmist, but a Prosaist,
knowing GOD only by tradition, knowest thou any corner of the world where
at least FORCE is not? The drop which thou shakest from thy wet hand,
rests not where it falls, but to-morrow thou findest it swept away; already
on the wings of the North-wind, it is nearing the Tropic of Cancer. How
came it to evaporate, and not lie motionless? Thinkest thou there is aught
motionless; without Force, and utterly dead?

"As I rode through the Schwarzwald, I said to myself: That little fire
which glows star-like across the dark-growing (_nachtende_) moor, where the
sooty smith bends over his anvil, and thou hopest to replace thy lost
horse-shoe,--is it a detached, separated speck, cut off from the whole
Universe; or indissolubly joined to the whole? Thou fool, that smithy-fire
was (primarily) kindled at the Sun; is fed by air that circulates from
before Noah's Deluge, from beyond the Dog-star; therein, with Iron Force,
and Coal Force, and the far stranger Force of Man, are cunning affinities
and battles and victories of Force brought about; it is a little ganglion,
or nervous centre, in the great vital system of Immensity. Call it, if
thou wilt, an unconscious Altar, kindled on the bosom of the All; whose
iron sacrifice, whose iron smoke and influence reach quite through the All;
whose dingy Priest, not by word, yet by brain and sinew, preaches forth the
mystery of Force; nay preaches forth (exoterically enough) one little
textlet from the Gospel of Freedom, the Gospel of Man's Force, commanding,
and one day to be all-commanding.

"Detached, separated! I say there is no such separation: nothing hitherto
was ever stranded, cast aside; but all, were it only a withered leaf, works
together with all; is borne forward on the bottomless, shoreless flood of
Action, and lives through perpetual metamorphoses. The withered leaf is
not dead and lost, there are Forces in it and around it, though working in
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