The darkness deepens. The mist grows thick apace, heavy and sombre. The keen jagged edge that cut the horizon is blunted. The mystic play is withdrawn; the persons of the drama vanish; and spectators and stage, proscenium and scene, the ampitheatre, the open earth, and the illimitable sky, are blent into one dark and invisible whole.
Then in the silence of night I heard the soundless voice of that Spirit of Eternal Things: that Mystery, impenetrable as the dark, impalpable: revealing itself as one with the shapes it took and one with the impulse they obeyed; in the grass blade and the leaf, and in the wind to which they swayed; in the ponderous earth that, darkling, rolls through space, and in the subtle mind that holds this earth in fee. The vast and the far-off were embraced in the vision, for from the remotest star came rays that united me with it. The minute and the trivial were summoned from their hiding to prove themselves near and akin. Magnitude and proportion were swallowed up in unity; number and computation disappeared in a stupendous integer. Not a leaf shook, not a bud burst, but was moved to motion and to life by forces infinite and remote, ante-dating sun or star, one with sun and star, older than the Milky Way, vaster than the limits of vision. For in each leaflet of the boscage ran a sap ancient as ocean; and but yesterday, in the history of Time, that whole assemblage was something far other than it is. Bud and leaf were but manifestations of a something supreme—a Force, a Spirit, a God; a mysterious Thing that took hold of dew and sunshine and soil and transformed them into shape and perfume. And sunshine and dew and soil were in turn themselves but mutations of things, chemical elements or movements of molecules; and these again but mutations of things more subtle still—atoms or electrons, infinitesimal and innominate particles; till ultimately, surely, we arrive at something immense, immutable.—Something there must be behind all change; behind all appearances Something that Appears. And the last appearance, and the sum-total of appearances, must be potential in the first, as in the acorn is contained a potential forest. Given one acorn, and enough of space and time, and there is actually possible a cosmos of oaks; and every oak different, and no two twigs alike. So, could we explain the electron, we should comprehend the inane; in the moment lies concealed the æon. Indeed, it is only to time-fettered space-bound man that these are not one and identical. And, if in leaf and bud, then in perceiving mind. For somehow mind, this wondering mind of man, arose upon this planet; uprose, appeared, became. No trailing comet, surely, in wanton sport, showered mind upon this world. Whencesoever it arose, being here, and fed and nurtured by all things here, emergent from matter, a fragment of earth and sea and sky, surely in this mind of man must also be that self-same hidden power....
I, too, then, was one of a mystic band, was in the hands of the self-same power, was indeed but a mutation amid its mutations, and had a part to play on my little stage, a part without which the mighty drama would be incomplete, however lowly it were. For, as by inexorable law the youngest leaflet in that dell was potentially existent from before all time, could not help but be and sway and flutter in the breeze, so I in my little world. But what the mighty drama portended or portrayed I knew as little as did the heedless beetle that had crept out of sight; and surely, he, poor little soul, had as much right to know as I—not many mutations, on this paltry planet, separated me from him. Only I saw, behind all, some ineffable power enacting an ineffable drama: playwright and protagonist in one; conceiving and enacting an endless plot; manifesting itself to itself, yet ever remaining the thing unmanifest; sundering itself into innumerable myriads, yet remaining one and a whole—incomprehensible—divine.[17]
By degrees the great sky broke up into clouds. A half moon, cut into fantastic shapes by the twigs, peered through the trees; and as I thridded the boles—I miscomprehending, obtuse, merely a larger atom in a small inane, finding my devious way by a doubly reflected light—the scene was shifted, fresh actors called, and the great drama went on, unfolding for ever a tale without end.
XVI
The Unity of Nature
§ 24
The lesson I learned was this: Nature is vast. Nature knows nothing of Time. Nor does Nature know anything of Space. It is we who import spatial and temporal limitations into Nature. Because we look up with two eyes, and feel forth with two arms, and walk about with two legs, we think, not only that our, but that the, universe is an infinite sphere!—an actual objective sphere of which each stupidly assumes that he is the centre! Which means that there are, supposedly, millions of centres, and each centre changing its place by millions of miles a day!—positive proof of the preposterousness of the assumption.—To an animalcule born and bred inside an old garden hose, the universe, I suppose, is an endless tunnel. To a baby cockroach hatched between floor and carpet, the universe is a limitless plane. Well, we are animalcules on a little rolling clod; and this clod may bear the same relation to some supernal, n-dimensional mansion and garden—and gardeners and Owner, as does my supposititious caoutchouc hose or patterned carpet to some terrestrial demesne.