Let us now consider the species as having changed places with the individual. In our preceding observations we have seen the relation which Nature holds in respect to man; let us now then take a view in what light she would appear to a being who represented the whole human species. We perceive that in the spring the fields renew their verdure, the buds and flowers expand, the bees revive from their state of torpor, the swallows return to our climates, the nightingale chaunts her song of love, the lamb frisks, and the bull laws with desire, and all animated creatures are eager to unite and multiply their species; and we can then have no ideas but those of reproduction and the increase of life. But when the dark season of cold and frost approaches, these same beings become indifferent to and avoid each other; many of the feathered race desert our clime, and the inhabitants of the waters lose their freedom under the massy congelations of ice; various animals dig retreats for themselves in the ground, where they fall into a state of torpor; the earth becomes hard, the plants wither, and the trees, deprived of their foliage, are covered with frost and snow; every object excites the idea of languor and annihilation. These appearances, however, of renovation and destruction, images, as it were, of life and death, although they seem general, are only individual and particular. Man, as an individual, concludes in this manner, but the being whom we have supposed as a representative of the species, thinks and judges in a manner more exalted and general; in that constant succession of destruction and renovation, and in those various vicissitudes, he perceives only permanence and duration. The different seasons in one year appear to him the same as those of the preceding, the same as those of millions of ages. The animal which may be the thousandth in the order of generation is the same to him as the first. In a word, if man had no period to his existence, and if all the beings by which he is surrounded existed in the same manner as they do at present, the idea of time would vanish and the individual would in fact become the species.