One thing at least is certain. Of this human race, of which each of us frail and wailing mortals is a fragment, this kindly or unkindly thing we call "external Nature" is at once the mother, the cradle, and the home: out of it we came; in it we play; from it we delve our livelihood; and--to it we go. For it is also our grave. But, unlike the mournful mounds, so pitilessly ranged in regular rows--as if, 'fore God, to accentuate the fact that in Death this impotent thing called sapient man meets at last a uniforming and levelling foe--unlike those mournful mounds we see in cemeteries, external Nature is a grave out of which there is a perpetual and unceasing resurrection. Nature is at once the tomb and the womb of life. What was once soil and rain and sunshine becomes grass--then hay--then beef or mutton or milk--and, in time, the very bone and muscle, the very laughter and tears of the child that plays in those fields. And when bone and muscle lay down that subtle thing called Life, give up the spirit and lie inert, they enter once again into the tomb and womb of Nature, and the mighty cycle begins afresh. § 11 And this "spirit" is not a thing apart, a thing outside Nature; breathed into man at his birth, and wafted to some mythical heaven--or hell--at his death. Actually and actively in great Nature, manifesting itself as soil and herb and sunshine, is immanent that which, when metamorphosed into so-called human Life, manifests itself as feeling, imagination, emotion, faith. There cannot be anything _in esse_ in Man that was not aforetime _in posse_ in Nature. § 12 Never shall I forget the day upon which--and the walk during which--there flared upon me like a great and sudden light the fact that the whole cosmos was _alive_--was Life; that it was not composed of two dissimilar things: (_a_) a gross and ponderable "matter"; and (_b_) an immaterial imponderable "mind." There is no such dichotomy in Nature. All is immaterial, spiritual, living. Every particle in me is alive; but every particle in me came from Nature; and, as I cannot create life, life must have existed potentially in those particles. My bodily mechanism is merely a transmutation of one form of life into another. What we call "life" is a process; a process kept agoing by (_a_) the ingestion of surrounding material; and (_b_) the reproduction of the individual which so ingests.