Have you fully established the fact of these drawers and compartments?
Have you seen the bars of these imaginary cages in which you imprison
kingdoms and species? Are there not infinite varieties which escape your
analysis, and are, as it were, the unknown links uniting all the
particles of the animated world? Why say, "For these eternity, for those
annihilation?"

Why say, "This is the slave, that is the sovereign?" Strange boldness
for men who are ignorant of almost everything!

Man, animal or plant, the creature vibrates, suffers or enjoys--exists
and encloses in itself the trace of the same mystery. What assures me
that this mystery, which is everywhere the same, is not the sign of a
similar relationship, is not the sign of a great law of which we are
ignorant?

I am dreaming, you will say. And what does science do herself when she
reaches that supreme point at which magnifying glasses become obscure and
compasses powerless? It dreams, too; it supposes. Let us, too, suppose
that the tree is a man, rough skinned dreamy and silent, who loves, too,
after his fashion and vibrates to his very roots when some evening a warm
breeze, laden with the scents of the plain, blows through his green locks
and overwhelms him with kisses. No, I do not accept the hypothesis of a
world made for us. Childish pride, which would be ridiculous did not its
very simplicity lend it something poetic, alone inspires it. Man is but
one of the links of an immense chain, of the two ends of which we are
ignorant. [See Mark Twain's essay: 'What is Man.' D.W.]

Is it not consoling to fancy that we are not an isolated power to which
the remainder of the world serves as a pedestal, that one is not a