“Out of it!” cried the wise old corpuscle. “Why not out of him? Then you don’t believe that the Man we inhabit is a living creature? You think that because his life is not like our life, he has no life? And you think that, when you can feel the element of him that we inhabit, pulsate?”
“Oh, that’s only the tide!”
“You have never heard his voice?”
“Nothing but thunder!”
“You think he never moves?”
“Nothing but a manquake, now and then.”
“You doubt that he is kept alive by internal heat, just as we are? For, without heat, there could not be life.”
A studious white corpuscle had become so interested that he permitted a fine plump pneumonia germ to pass him without pouncing upon it. He stepped forward and said, learnedly:
“Yes, there is internal heat in the world we inhabit, but we are taught that the Man was once a ball of fire and is now gradually cooling off. It is ridiculous to say it is alive like us. Look how fine and delicate is our flesh; see the Man made of coarse, rough substance forming banks along every river we navigate. Think of how tremendous its heat is, when it is great enough to keep these teeming millions of us from perishing! Could any living creature produce such heat? You say we can feel it move? It must move very infrequently then, for these manquakes are far apart. And you regard as a pulsating, the coming and going of the tide? Why, our hearts beat thousands of times in the span of one ebb and flow of the tide we are familiar with!”
Said the wise old corpuscle: “I say that not only is this Man alive, but that he, and millions like him, inhabit a world as vast to him as he is to us.”