f Activity
which was animated by the ideal, while the ideal on its part had an
innate faculty of perfecting itself.

But the Earth is itself only a minute mite even of the Solar System.
And the Sun is only one of perhaps a thousand million other stars,
some so distant that light travelling at the rate of 186,000 miles a
second must have started from them before the birth of Christ to
reach us to-day. Nevertheless the Earth is composed of the same
ultimate particles of matter that even the most distant stars are made
of. The Earth, the Sun and stars, are composed of electrons which
are all alike. Doubtless there are individual differences between
electrons as there are between men, but in a general way they are as
much alike as all men appear alike to an eagle. And of these
electrons the whole Universe is made as well as the Earth. The same
laws of motion, of gravitation, and of electro-magnetic and chemical
attraction, obtain there as here. The scale of the Stellar World is
immensely larger than the scale we are accustomed to on this Earth.
But the same fundamental laws everywhere prevail, and the Earth
and stars are composed of the same material.

So it must have been from the Heart of Nature as a whole that the
Earth-Spirit must have derived the ideal which actuated it. Deep in
the Heart of Nature must have resided the ideal of the state of the
Earth as it is to-day. In the great world as a whole, as in the
rose-seed, must have been operating an ideal at least of what is on the
Earth to-day, and of what this Earth will become and of what it
might become; and possibly _also_ of greater things which have
already been realised, or _will_ be realised and _might_ be realised
in the planets of other suns than our Sun. There must ever have been
working throughout the Universe an Activity constraining the
ultimate particles in a given direction. There must have been an
Organising Activity, collecting the diffused particles together,
grouping them into concentrated organisms and achieving loftier
and loftier modes of being. Each of those inconceivably numerous
and incredibly minute particles which make up the stars and the
Earth and all on it--each one acted of itself. But each acted of itself
under the influence of its fellows--that is, of every other particle;
that is, of the _whole._ Each acted in response to its surroundings,
but its surroundings were nothing short of the whole of Nature
outside itself. Together they fo