Others! How full the world was of existences, each perfect after its kind, the laws of God's nature freely producing every conception of His infinite intellect. In man alone how many genera, species, individuals--from saints to criminals, from old philosophers to gallant young livers, all to be understood, none to be hated. And man but a fraction of the life of one little globe, that turned not on man's axis, nor moved wholly to man's ends. This sea that stretched away unheaving was not sublimely dead--even to the vulgar apprehension--but penetrated with quivering sensibility, the exquisite fresh feeling of fishes darting and gliding, tingling with life in fin and tail, chasing and chased, zestfully eating or swiftly eaten: in the air the ecstasy of flight, on the earth the happy movements of animals, the very dust palpitating pleasurably with crawling and creeping populations, the soil riddled with the sluggish voluptuousness of worms; each tiniest creature a perfect expression of the idea of its essence, individualized by its conatus, its effort to persist in existence on its own lines, though in man alone the potentiality of entering through selfless Reason into the intellectual ecstasy of the love with which God loves Himself--to be glad of the strength of the lion and the grace of the gazelle and the beauty of the woman who belongs to another. Blessings on the happy lovers, blessings on all the wonderful creation, praise, praise to the Eternal Being whose modes body forth the everlasting pageant. Beginningless æons before his birth It had been--the great pageant to whose essence Being belonged--endless æons after his ephemeral passing It would still throb and glow, still offer to the surrendered human soul the supreme uplift. He had but a moment to contemplate It, yet to understand Its essence, to know the great laws of Its workings, to see It _sub specie aeternitatis_, was to partake of Its eternity. There was no need to journey either in space or time to discover Its movement, everywhere the same, as perfect in the remotest past as in the farthest future, by no means working--as the vulgar imagined--to a prospective perfection; everywhere educed from the same enduring necessities of the divine freedom. Progress! As illusory as the movement of yon little vessel that, anchored stably, seemed always sailing out towards the horizon. And so in that trance of adoration, in that sacred Glory, in that rapturous consciousness that he had fought his last fight with the enslaving affects, there formed themselves in his soul--white heat at one with white light--the last sentences of his great work:--