What Goethe had seen in vision rises before him now in sharp, almost hard outline from his own real life-work. He has succeeded in bringing nature and its forces to his feet, because it was flesh of his flesh and blood of his blood. He is its child. A thousand tongues proclaim the truth to him, a naïve, almost simple, revelation of reality. He digs in the earth, and ancient bones and skulls tell him vaguely of the past. Such once was he, devoid of civilisation, at the verge of the animal world. He searches his frame through and through for further light. There is the brain, where the thoughts crowd together. There is the cell, that builds up the whole body, the cell that so closely resembles the lowest of all living things, not yet distinct enough to be either animal or plant. Here are the forms that he successively assumes in his mother’s body, before he is born—forms that can hardly be distinguished from those of the animal at the same stage of development. From almost divine heights he has sunk down to the beast, to the primitive cell—nay, deeper still, to the elementary, force-impelled matter of the universe. But this early picture dissolves at once in an ennobling and inspiring truth. Nature becomes man. In this he presses once more to the heart of the most-high. Nature is God. Goethe sang of God-Nature. The new God pulses in every wave of man’s blood. In Michael Angelo’s picture God breathes his spirit into Adam. The new Adam of the nineteenth century is God’s spirit, in body and soul, from the very first, for he is Nature. He needs no more. When he looks up to the shining stars, he looks into the eyes of God and his own. He has come down from those stars like the bright dew in which they are now mirrored. He belongs to them, but they also are in him. All-Nature: and he is a part of Nature. All-development: and he is a phase of the development. That is the great philosophical dream of the nineteenth-century worker. His hand is black with labour, but his spirit is full of light, the light of the stars and of the world.