dge, thinks that all
creation was formed for him. For several ages he saw in the countless
worlds that sparkle through space like the bubbles of a shoreless ocean
only the petty candles, the household torches, that Providence had
been pleased to light for no other purpose but to make the night more
agreeable to man. Astronomy has corrected this delusion of human vanity;
and man now reluctantly confesses that the stars are worlds larger and
more glorious than his own,--that the earth on which he crawls is a
scarce visible speck on the vast chart of creation. But in the small as
in the vast, God is equally profuse of life. The traveller looks upon
the tree, and fancies its boughs were formed for his shelter in the
summer sun, or his fuel in the winter frosts. But in each leaf of these
boughs the Creator has made a world; it swarms with innumerable races.
Each drop of the water in yon moat is an orb more populous than a
kingdom is of men. Everywhere, then, in this immense design, science
brings new life to light. Life is the one pervading principle, and even
the thing that seems to die and putrify but engenders new life, and
changes to fresh forms of matter. Reasoning, then, by evident analogy:
if not a leaf, if not a drop of water, but is, no less than yonder star,
a habitable and breathing world,--nay, if even man himself is a world to
other lives, and millions and myriads dwell in the rivers of his blood,
and inhabit man's frame as man inhabits earth, commonsense (if your
schoolmen had it) would suffice to teach that the circumfluent infinite
which you call space--the countless Impalpable which divides earth
from the moon and stars--is filled also with its correspondent and
appropriate life. Is it not a visible absurdity to suppose that being is
crowded upon every leaf, and yet absent from the immensities of space?
The law of the Great System forbids the waste even of an atom; it
knows no spot where something of life does not breathe. In the very
charnel-house is the nursery of production and animation. Is that true?
Well, then, can you conceive that space, which is the Infinite itself,
is alone a waste, is alone lifeless, is less useful to the one design of
universal being than the dead carcass of a dog, than the peopled leaf,
than the swarming globule? The microscope shows you the creatures on the
leaf; no mechanical tube is yet invented to discover the nobler and more
gifted things that hover in the illimitable air. Ye