The termination of the world in a man appears to be the last victory of intelligence.… The great Pan of old, who was clothed in a leopard-skin to signify the beautiful variety of things, and the firmament, his coat of stars—was but the representative of thee, O rich and various Man ! thou palace of sight and sound, carrying in thy senses the morning and the night and the unfathomable galaxy; in thy brain, the geometry of the City of God; in thy heart, the bower of love and the realms of right and wrong. An individual man is a fruit which it cost all the foregoing ages to form and ripen. … Each individual soul is such, in virtue of its being a power to translate the world into some particular language of its own.—EMERSON, The Method of Nature.
If we now relate this unique characteristic of man in a definite and explicit way with the general Time-and-Space picture which we have been drawing, we shall see plainly the full significance of this last step—where mind in man emerges to freedom from space and time, and encompasses them in its grasp—in the unfolding life and mind of the world.
Recall again our working hypothesis, the organic unity of the world from matter to man. For aeons, if science speaks truly, our earth, to human perception at least, stood stark and naked, a mineral mass. In the process of time this seeming mineral mass clothed itself in life, in sensitivity, in mind. These later emergents, if the world is, as science asserts, an organic whole, are not adventitious decorations like tinsel on a Christmas tree, nor alien visitants extraneous to reality. They are the children of the earth who owe to her creating and shaping energy their multivarious forms and powers, physical and mental, and derive from her directly and indirectly their hourly nourishment, all without design on their own part.
