§ 12
Never shall I forget the day upon which—and the walk during which—there flared upon me like a great and sudden light the fact that the whole cosmos was alive—was Life; that it was not composed of two dissimilar things: (a) a gross and ponderable "matter"; and (b) an immaterial imponderable "mind." There is no such dichotomy in Nature. All is immaterial, spiritual, living. Every particle in me is alive; but every particle in me came from Nature; and, as I cannot create life, life must have existed potentially in those particles. My bodily mechanism is merely a transmutation of one form of life into another.
What we call "life" is a process; a process kept agoing by (a) the ingestion of surrounding material; and (b) the reproduction of the individual which so ingests.
Look at that field of oats growing there to the right. You will admit, will you not, that those little green blades just springing from the soil are actually and veritably the matter of the field in which they grow? The silicon and phosphorus and oxygen and nitrogen and carbon and what-not, which were in the air or soil, will by next July be gluten and protein. If you and I should haggle over the origin of the first oat-seed, at least if it did not spring from this particular field, it had not, I take it, any ultra-terrestrial origin.—Or granted it had, as, I think, Arrhenius argues, that origin was not extra-cosmic: it came, certainly, from somewhere within this our visible universe. Good! Let us go back.—The oats then—that is, the gluten and the protein—are but the matter of soil and air and sunshine in another form. So, then, is the porridge in your plate. So, then, are you, surely. You and I are this external Nature in another shape; and if we had n senses and a mind endowed with powers of discernment and of comprehension nthly more powerful than at present, we might be able, not only to see the process of transformation in its every stage, but—to understand that matter is immaterial, is spiritual (whatever that word may connote); and that ourselves, the porridge, the oats, the soil, the earth—the Cosmos, are, is ... one and a Mystery. In Nature, as in Man, resides that Spirit of Eternal Things which we call Life: a thing incomprehensible and divine; transcending thought; one and a unit; one with the thing that is, and one with that which asks itself what it is and whence it came; revealing itself under the aspects of time and space, yet unbounded by time or space; manifesting itself under an infinitude of forms, yet remaining one and the same; at once the revealer and the revealed; the thing thought of and the thing that thinks.
X
Practical Transcendentalism
§ 13
But of what avail are transcendental themes like these for the conduct and comfort of life? What light are they to our path? To what goal do they point?
It is not a question that needs to be asked. Were no investigation to be undertaken, no theories formed, save for some definite and preconceived purpose, it may be that no new path would be found, no more distant goal discerned.
And yet these meditations, such as they were, crude in matter, inchoate in form, mere adumbrations of a truth all too dimly perceived, brought comfort. Once more they took me away from the trivial and the ephemeral. Above all, they took me away from the geocentric. So many creeds, so many religions, pin me down to this little planet. How many earths are there in the visible heavens? Are there terrestrial sinners on each and all? If so, for how many deaths did the vicarious mercy of the Almighty call? And even if we travel outside the realm of Christendom, still we find our little earth regarded as the centre of thought, the only scene upon which the great drama of Being is enacted: for so many philosophies and religions accentuate the isolated existence of individual human beings, and limit their application to the periphery of this speck in space.
I like the larger aspect. When we look up to the stars and remember that they are suns about which probably revolve an infinitude of habitable earths—earths of every conceivable and inconceivable kind, and peopled probably with an infinitude of beings—also of every conceivable and inconceivable kind—some perhaps as gross as we, others breathing airs of heaven, requiring neither senses nor anatomical organs, enjoying "the communion of saints" by powers and processes outside the ken of touch or speech or vision ... we link ourselves with the immensity of Being; we are not separate little entities trudging a few miles of earth, but particles of Omnipresent Life, partakers in the history and destiny of All that Is.