st worm is of importance; the great is little, the
little is great; everything is balanced in necessity; alarming vision
for the mind. There are marvellous relations between beings and things;
in that inexhaustible whole, from the sun to the grub, nothing despises
the other; all have need of each other. The light does not bear away
terrestrial perfumes into the azure depths, without knowing what it is
doing; the night distributes stellar essences to the sleeping flowers.
All birds that fly have round their leg the thread of the infinite.
Germination is complicated with the bursting forth of a meteor and with
the peck of a swallow cracking its egg, and it places on one level the
birth of an earthworm and the advent of Socrates. Where the telescope
ends, the microscope begins. Which of the two possesses the larger field
of vision? Choose. A bit of mould is a pleiad of flowers; a nebula is an
ant-hill of stars. The same promiscuousness, and yet more unprecedented,
exists between the things of the intelligence and the facts of
substance. Elements and principles mingle, combine, wed, multiply with
each other, to such a point that the material and the moral world are
brought eventually to the same clearness. The phenomenon is perpetually
returning upon itself. In the vast cosmic exchanges the universal life
goes and comes in unknown quantities, rolling entirely in the invisible
mystery of effluvia, employing everything, not losing a single dream,
not a single slumber, sowing an animalcule here, crumbling to bits a
planet there, oscillating and winding, making of light a force and of
thought an element, disseminated and invisible, dissolving all,
except that geometrical point, the I; bringing everything back to the
soul-atom; expanding everything in God, entangling all activity, from
summit to base, in the obscurity of a dizzy mechanism, attaching the
flight of an insect to the movement of the earth, subordinating, who
knows? Were it only by the identity of the law, the evolution of the
comet in the firmament to the whirling of the infusoria in the drop
of water. A machine made of mind. Enormous gearing, the prime motor of
which is the gnat, and whose final wheel is the zodiac.

CHAPTER IV--CHANGE OF GATE

It seemed that this garden, created in olden days to conceal wanton
mysteries, had been transformed and become fitted to shelter chaste
mysteries. There were no longer either arbors, or bowling greens, or
tunnels, or