d and must be. We have the sufficient
reason.

The difference between men is in their principle of association.
Some men classify objects by color and size and other accidents of
appearance; others by intrinsic likeness, or by the relation of cause
and effect. The progress of the intellect is to the clearer vision
of causes, which neglects surface differences. To the poet, to the
philosopher, to the saint, all things are friendly and sacred, all
events profitable, all days holy, all men divine. For the eye is
fastened on the life, and slights the circumstance. Every chemical
substance, every plant, every animal in its growth, teaches the unity of
cause, the variety of appearance.

Upborne and surrounded as we are by this all-creating nature, soft and
fluid as a cloud or the air, why should we be such hard pedants,
and magnify a few forms? Why should we make account of time, or of
magnitude, or of figure? The soul knows them not, and genius, obeying
its law, knows how to play with them as a young child plays with
graybeards and in churches. Genius studies the causal thought, and far
back in the womb of things sees the rays parting from one orb, that
diverge, ere they fall, by infinite diameters. Genius watches the monad
through all his masks as he performs the metempsychosis of nature.
Genius detects through the fly, through the caterpillar, through the
grub, through the egg, the constant individual; through countless
individuals the fixed species; through many species the genus; through
all genera the steadfast type; through all the kingdoms of organized
life the eternal unity. Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and
never the same. She casts the same thought into troops of forms, as
a poet makes twenty fables with one moral. Through the bruteness and
toughness of matter, a subtle spirit bends all things to its own will.
The adamant streams into soft but precise form before it, and whilst
I look at it its outline and texture are changed again. Nothing is so
fleeting as form; yet never does it quite deny itself. In man we still
trace the remains or hints of all that we esteem badges of servitude in
the lower races; yet in him they enhance his nobleness and grace; as
Io, in Aeschylus, transformed to a cow, offends the imagination; but how
changed when as Isis in Egypt she meets Osiris-Jove, a beautiful woman
with nothing of the metamorphosis left but the lunar horns as the
splendid ornament of her brows!

The id