mean those
circuits which are established between the self and some external
object: mother, father, sister, cat, dog, bird, or even tree or plant,
or even further still, some particular place, some particular
inanimate object, a knife or a chair or a cap or a doll or a wooden
horse. For we must insist that every object which really enters
effectively into our lives does so by direct connection. If I love my
mother, it is because there is established between me and her a
direct, powerful circuit of vital magnetism, call it what you will,
but a direct flow of dynamic _vital_ interchange and intercourse. I
will not call this vital flow a _force_, because it depends on the
incomprehensible initiative and control of the individual soul or
self. Force is that which is directed only from some universal will or
law. Life is _always_ individual, and therefore never controlled by
one law, one God. And therefore, since the living really sway the
universe, even if unknowingly; therefore there is no one universal
law, even for the physical forces. Because we insist that even the sun
depends, for its heartbeat, its respiration, its pivotal motion, on
the beating hearts of men and beast, on the dynamic of the
soul-impulse in individual creatures. It is from the aggregate
heartbeat of living individuals, of we know not how many or what sort
of worlds, that the sun rests stable.

Which may be dismissed as metaphysics, although it is quite as valid
or even as demonstrable as Newton's Law of Gravitation, which law
still remains a law, even if not quite so absolute as heretofore.

But this is a digression. The argument is, that between an individual
and any external object with which he has an affective connection,
there exists a definite vital flow, as definite and concrete as the
electric current whose polarized circuit sets our tram-cars running
and our lamps shining, or our Marconi wires vibrating. Whether this
object be human, or animal, or plant, or quite inanimate, there is
still a circuit. My dog, my canary has a polarized connection with me.
Nay, the very cells in the ash-tree I loved as a child had a dynamic
vibratory connection with the nuclei in my own centers of primary
consciousness. And further still, the boots I have worn are so
saturated with my own magnetism, my own vital activity, that if anyone
else wear them I feel it is a trespass, almost as if another man used
my hand to knock away a fly. I doubt very much if a bl