arranged, divided into categories and classified, as though by a careful
apothecary who wants everything about him in order. It is no slight
matter to stow away each one in the drawer that suits him, and I have
heard that certain subjects still remain on the counter owing to their
belonging to two show-cases at once.

And what proves to me, indeed, that these cases exist? What is there to
assure me that the whole world is not one family, the members of which
only differ by trifles which we are pleased to regard as everything?

Have you fully established the fact of these drawers and compartments?
Have you seen the bars of these imaginary cages in which you imprison
kingdoms and species? Are there not infinite varieties which escape
your analysis, and are, as it were, the unknown links uniting all the
particles of the animated world? Why say, "For these eternity, for those
annihilation?"

Why say, "This is the slave, that is the sovereign?" Strange boldness
for men who are ignorant of almost everything!

Man, animal or plant, the creature vibrates, suffers or enjoys--exists
and encloses in itself the trace of the same mystery. What assures me
that this mystery, which is everywhere the same, is not the sign of a
similar relationship, is not the sign of a great law of which we are
ignorant?

I am dreaming, you will say. And what does science do herself when she
reaches that supreme point at which magnifying glasses become obscure
and compasses powerless? It dreams, too; it supposes. Let us, too,
suppose that the tree is a man, rough skinned dreamy and silent, who
loves, too, after his fashion and vibrates to his very roots when some
evening a warm breeze, laden with the scents of the plain, blows through
his green locks and overwhelms him with kisses. No, I do not accept
the hypothesis of a world made for us. Childish pride, which would be
ridiculous did not its very simplicity lend it something poetic, alone
inspires it. Man is but one of the links of an immense chain, of the two
ends of which we are ignorant. [See Mark Twain's essay: 'What is Man.'
D.W.]

Is it not consoling to fancy that we are not an isolated power to which
the remainder of the world serves as a pedestal, that one is not a
licensed destroyer, a poor, fragile tyrant, whom arbitrary decrees
protect, but a necessary note of an infinite harmony? To fancy that the
law of life is the same in the immensity of space and irradiates worlds
as it irradiat