Look at that field of oats growing there to the right. You will admit, will you not, that those little green blades just springing from the soil are actually and veritably the matter of the field in which they grow? The silicon and phosphorus and oxygen and nitrogen and carbon and what-not, which were in the air or soil, will by next July be gluten and protein. If you and I should haggle over the origin of the first oat-seed, at least if it did not spring from this particular field, it had not, I take it, any ultra-terrestrial origin.--Or granted it had, as, I think, Arrhenius argues, that origin was not extra-cosmic: it came, certainly, from somewhere within this our visible universe. Good! Let us go back.--The oats then--that is, the gluten and the protein--are but the matter of soil and air and sunshine in another form. So, then, is the porridge in your plate. So, then, are _you_, surely. You and I _are_ this external Nature in another shape; and if we had _n_ senses and a mind endowed with powers of discernment and of comprehension _n_thly more powerful than at present, we might be able, not only to see the process of transformation in its every stage, but--to understand that matter is immaterial, is spiritual (whatever that word may connote); and that ourselves, the porridge, the oats, the soil, the earth--the Cosmos, are, is ... one and a Mystery. In Nature, as in Man, resides that Spirit of Eternal Things which we call Life: a thing incomprehensible and divine; transcending thought; one and a unit; one with the thing that is, and one with that which asks itself what it is and whence it came; revealing itself under the aspects of time and space, yet unbounded by time or space; manifesting itself under an infinitude of forms, yet remaining one and the same; at once the revealer and the revealed; the thing thought of and the thing that thinks. X Practical Transcendentalism § 13 But of what avail are transcendental themes like these for the conduct and comfort of life? What light are they to our path? To what goal do they point? It is not a question that needs to be asked. Were no investigation to be undertaken, no theories formed, save for some definite and preconceived purpose, it may be that no new path would be found, no more distant goal discerned.