"Is it possible to avoid imagining that we may be ourselves
atoms, undesignedly combining to form some vaster being, though
we are utterly incapable of perceiving this being as a single
individual, or of realising [sic] the scheme and scope of our own
combination? And this, too, not a spiritual being, which, without
matter or what we think matter of some sort, is as complete
nonsense to us as though men bade us love and lean upon an
intelligent vacuum, but a being with what is virtually flesh and
blood and bones, with organs, senses, dimensions in some way
analogous to our own, into some other part of which being at the
time of our great change we must infallibly re-enter, starting
clean anew, with bygones bygones, and no more ache for ever from
age or antecedents.

"'An organic being,' writes Mr. Darwin, 'is a microcosm, a little
universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms
inconceivably minute and numerous as the stars in Heaven.' As
these myriads of smaller organisms are parts and processes of us,
so are we parts and processes of life at large."

A tree is composed of a multitude of subordinate trees, each bud
being a distinct individual. So coral polypes [sic] form a tree-
like growth of animal life, with branches from which spring
individual polypes [sic] that are connected by a common tissue
and supported by a common skeleton. We have no difficulty in
seeing a unity in multitude, and a multitude in unity here,
because we can observe the wood and the gelatinous tissue
connecting together all the individuals which compose either the
tree or the mass of polypes [sic]. Yet the skeleton, whether of
tree or of polype [sic], is inanimate; and the tissue, whether of