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Nothing is dead, and in respect to this our feeble organs deceive us; those mountain skeletons seem to us inert because our eyes are used to the mobile vegetation of the plains; but nature is eternally alive, and its forces struggle together in these sepulchres of granite and snow, as well as in the human hives or the most flourishing forests. Each particle of rock presses or supports its neighbors; their apparent immobility is an equilibrium of forces; everything works and struggles; nothing is calm and nothing uniform. Those blocks that the eye takes to be massive are networks of atoms infinitely removed from each other, drawn by innumerable and contrary attractions, invisible labyrinths where unceasing transformations are wrought out, where ferments the mineral life, as active as other lives, but grander. And ours, what is it, confined within the experience of a few years and the memory of a few centuries? What are we, but a transitory excrescence, formed of a little thickened air, grown by chance in a cleft of the eternal rock? What is our thought, so high in dignity, so little in power? The mineral substance and its forces are the real possessors and the only masters of the world. Pierce below this crust which sustains us as far as that crucible of lava which tolerates us. Here strive and are developed the great forces, the heat and the affinities which have formed the soil, have composed the rocks which support our life, have furnished its cradle for it, and are preparing its tomb. Everything here is transformed and stirs as in the heart of a tree; and our race, nested on a point of the bark, perceives not that silent vegetation which has lifted the trunk, spread the branches, and whose invincible progress brings in turns flowers, fruits and death. Meanwhile a vaster movement bears the planet with its companions around the sun, borne itself toward an unknown goal, in the infinite space wherein eddies the infinite people of the worlds. Who will say that they are not there merely to decorate and fill it? These great rolling masses are the first thought and the broader development of nature; they live by the same right with ourselves, they are sons of the same mother, and we recognize in them our kin and elders.
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But in this family there are ranks. I know I am but an atom; to annihilate me, the least of these stones would suffice; a bone half as thick as my thumb is the wretched cuirass that defends my thought from delirium and death; my entire action and that of all the machines invented within sixty centuries would not avail to scrape one of the leaves of the mineral crust that supports and nurtures me. And yet in this all-powerful nature I count for something. If among her works I am the most fragile, I am also the last; if she confines me within a corner of her expanse, it is in me that she ends. It is in me that she attains the indivisible point where she is concentred and perfected; and this mind through which she knows herself opens to her a new career in reproducing her works, imitating her order, penetrating her work, feeling its magnificence and eternity. In it is opened a second world reflecting the other, reflecting itself also, and, beyond itself and that other, grasping the eternal law which engenders them both. To-morrow I shall die, and I am not capable of displacing any portion of this rock. But during one moment I have thought, and within the limits of that thought nature and the universe were comprehended.