Some of the ancients thought the earth was an animal. It has its hard and soft parts, its bone and flesh--rock and soil--as the Norse cosmology pictured it; also its blood, of seas, rivers, and the like. To a coast-dwelling people, the rhythmic inflow and outflow of the tides would suggest a huge slow blood-pulsation, or a breathing. And heat increases with depth, in mine or cave; fire spouts from Etna and Vesuvius; evidently the earth is hotter inside than at the surface, as animals are hotter inside than on their skins. Some such animal-notion was held by Plato, and by some of the later Stoics; though it does not seem to have been worked out in detail. And the Greek, Indian, or Egyptian theology which made the earth a goddess and the bride of Heaven or the sun, is still more indefinite, or is crudely anthropomorphic and primitive. Modern approximations have been chiefly in poetry, and are pan-psychic rather than animistic; as in Pope's _Essay on Man_: All are but parts of one stupendous whole, Whose body Nature is, and God the soul, and in Wordsworth's _Tintern Abbey_ where the presence which disturbs him with the joy of elevated thoughts is felt to be the Spirit which has its dwelling in the light of setting suns and the round ocean and the living air: A motion and a spirit that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still A lover of the meadows and the woods, And mountains; and all that we behold From this green earth; of all the mighty world Of eye, and ear. Emerson expresses the same thought in _Pan_ and in much of his prose--_Nature_, _The Over Soul_, _Self-Reliance_. William James, in early days before his pluralistic development, thought that an _anima mundi_ thinking in all of us was a more likely hypothesis than that of "a lot of individual souls"; and Leibnitz, among other metaphysical great ones, Spinozistically speaks of "un seul esprit qui est universel et qui anime tout l'univers". Finally, to quote a modern of the moderns, we find Mr H. G. Wells finely saying that "between you and me as we set our minds together, and between us and the rest of mankind, there is _something_, something real, something that rises through us and is neither you nor me, that comprehends us, that is thinking here and using me and you to play against each other in that thinking just as my finger and thumb play against each other as I hold this pen with which I write". (_First and Last Things_, p. 67.)