be shed, as it were, in a world where it could not be used?



II

It is well to let down our metropolitan pride a little. Man thinks
himself at the top, and that the immense display and prodigality of
Nature are for him. But they are no more for him than they are for
the birds and beasts, and he is no more at the top than they are.
He appeared upon the stage when the play had advanced to a certain
point, and he will disappear from the stage when the play has
reached another point, and the great drama will go on without him.
The geological ages, the convulsions and parturition throes of the
globe, were to bring him forth no more than the beetles. Is not all
this wealth of the seasons, these solar and sidereal influences,
this depth and vitality and internal fire, these seas, and rivers,
and oceans, and atmospheric currents, as necessary to the life of
the ants and worms we tread under foot as to our own? And does the
sun shine for me any more than for yon butterfly? What I mean to
say is, we cannot put our finger upon this or that and say, Here is
the end of Nature. The Infinite cannot be measured. The plan of
Nature is so immense,--but she has no plan, no scheme, but to go on
and on forever. What is size, what is time, distance, to the
Infinite? Nothing. The Infinite knows no time, no space, no
great, no small, no beginning, no end.

I sometimes think that the earth and the worlds are a kind of
nervous ganglia in an organization of which we can form no
conception, or less even than that. If one of the globules of blood