This was taught, the microcosm in man, by Empedocles that mighty magician.
Γαίῃ μὲν γὰρ γαῖαν ὀπώπαμεν, ὕδατι δ’ ὕδωρ,
Αἰθέρι δ’ αἰθέρα δῖον, ἀτὰρ πυρὶ πῦρ ἀίδηλον,
Στοργῇ δὲ στοργήν, νεῖχος δέ τε νείχεϊ λυγρῷ.
And Plotinus;
Οὐ γὰρ ἂν πώποτε εἴδεν
ὀφθαλμὸς ἥλιον ἡλιοειδὴς μὴ γεγενημένος,
which Goethe imitated in the famous verse:
“Wär’ nicht das Auge sonnenhaft,
Die Sonne könnt’ es nie erblicken;
Läg’ nicht in uns des Gottes eig’ne Kraft,
Wie könnt uns Göttliches entzücken?”
Man is the only creature, he is the creature in Nature, that has in himself a relation to every thing.
He to whom this relationship brings understanding and the most complete consciousness, not to many things or to few things, but to all things, the man who of his own individuality has thought out everything, is called a genius. He in whom the possibility of this is present, in whom an interest in everything could be aroused, yet who only, of his own accord, concerns himself with a few, we call merely a man.
The theory of Leibnitz, which is seldom rightly understood, that the lower monads are a mirror of the world without being conscious of this capacity of theirs, expresses the same idea. The man of genius lives in a state of complete understanding, an understanding of the whole; the whole world is also in ordinary men, but not in a condition that can become creative. The one lives in conscious active relation with the whole, the other in an unconscious relation; the man of genius is the actual, the common man the potential, microcosm. The genius is the complete man; the manhood that is latent in all men is in him fully developed.
Man himself is the All, and so unlike a mere part, dependent on other parts; he is not assigned a definite place in a system of natural laws, but he himself is the meaning of the law and is therefore free, just as the world whole being itself, the All does not condition itself but is unconditioned. The man of genius is he who forgets nothing because he does not forget himself, and because forgetting, being a functional subjection to time, is neither free nor ethical. He is not brought forward on the wave of a historical movement as its child, to be swallowed up by the next wave, because all, all the past and all the future is contained in his inward vision. He it is whose consciousness of immortality is most strong because the fear of death has no terror for him. He it is who lives in the most sympathetic relation to symbols and values because he weighs and interprets by these all that is within him and all that is outside him. He is the freest and the wisest and the most moral of men, and for these reasons he suffers most of all from what is still unconscious, what is chaos, what is fatality within him.