in us those ideas which can make reasonable people call them
"persons" with consistency of intention. We can conceive of each
animal and of each plant as a person; we can conceive again of a
compound person like the coral polypes [sic], or like a tree
which is composed of a congeries of subordinate persons,
inasmuch as each bud is a separate and individual plant. We can
go farther than this, and, as I shall hope to show, we ought to
do so; that is to say, we shall find it easier and more agreeable
with our other ideas to go farther than not; for we should see
all animal and vegetable life as united by a subtle and till
lately invisible ramification, so that all living things are one
tree-like growth, forming a single person. But we cannot conceive
of oceans, continents, and air as forming parts of a person at
all; much less can we think of them as forming one person with
the living forms that inhabit them.

To ask this of us is like asking us to see the bowl and the water
in which three gold-fish are swimming as part of the gold-fish.
We cannot do it any more than we can do something physically
impossible. We can see the gold-fish as forming one family, and
therefore as in a way united to the personality of the parents
from which they sprang, and therefore as members one of another,
and therefore as forming a single growth of gold-fish, as boughs
and buds unite to form a tree; but we cannot by any effort of the
imagination introduce the bowl and the water into the
personality, for we have never been accustomed to think of such
things as living and personal. Those, therefore, who tell us that
"God is everything, and everything is God," require us to see
"everything" as a person, which we cannot; or God as not a
person, which again we cannot.