How is this effected? Nature is no spendthrift, but takes the shortest way
to her ends. As the general says to his soldiers, "If you want a fort,
build a fort," so nature makes every creature do its own work and get its
living--is it planet, animal, or tree. The planet makes itself. The animal
cell makes itself; then, what it wants. Every creature--wren or
dragon--shall make its own lair. As soon as there is life, there is
self-direction, and absorbing and using of material. Life is freedom--life
in the direct ratio of its amount. You may be sure, the new-born man is
not inert. Life works both voluntarily and supernaturally in its
neighborhood. Do you suppose he can be estimated by his weight in pounds,
or that he is contained in his skin--this reaching, radiating, jaculating
fellow? The smallest candle fills a mile with its rays, and the papillae
of a man run out to every star.

When there is something to be done, the world knows how to get it done.
The vegetable eye makes leaf, pericarp, root, bark, or thorn, as the need
is; the first cell converts itself into stomach, mouth, nose, or nail,
according to the want; the world throws its life into a hero or a
shepherd, and puts him where he is wanted. Dante and Columbus were
Italians in their time: they would be Russians or Americans to-day. Things
ripen, new men come. The adaptation is not capricious. The ulterior aim,
the purpose beyond itself, the correlation by which planets subside and
crystallize, then animate beasts and men, will not stop, but will work
into finer particulars, and from finer to finest.

The secret of the world is, the tie between person and event. Person makes
event and event person. The "times," "the age," what is that, but a few
profound persons and a few active persons who epitomize the
times?--Goethe, Hegel, Metternich, Adams, Calhoun, Guizot, Peel, Cobden,
Kossuth, Rothschild, Astor, Brunel, and the rest. The same fitness must be
presumed between a man and the time and event, as between the sexes, or
between a race of animals and the food it eats, or the inferior races it
uses. He thinks his fate alien, because the copula is hidden. But the soul
contains the event that shall befall it, for the event is only the
actualization of its thoughts; and what we pray to ourselves for is always
granted. The event is the print of your form. It fits you like your skin.
What each does is proper to him. Events are the children of his body and
mind. We l