Even the ordinary man, even as such, can stand in an indirect relationship to everything: his idea of the “whole” is only a glimpse, he does not succeed in identifying himself with it. But he is not without the possibility of following this identification in another, and so attaining a composite image. Through some vision of the world he can bind himself to the universal, and by diligent cultivation he can make each detail a part of himself. Nothing is quite strange to him, and in all a band of sympathy exists between him and the things of the world. It is not so with plants or animals. They are limited, they do not know the whole but only one element; they do not populate the whole earth, and where they are widely dispersed it is in the service of man, who has allotted to them everywhere the same task. They may have a relation to the sun or to the moon, but they certainly are wanting in respect of the “starry vault” and “the moral law.” For the latter originates in the soul of man, in which is hidden all totality, which can see everything because it is universal itself: the starry heavens and the moral law are fundamentally one and the same. The universalism of the categorical imperative is the universalism of the universe. The infinity of the universe is only the “thought-picture” of the infinity of the moral volition. This was taught, the microcosm in man, by Empedocles that mighty magician. Γαίῃ μὲν γὰρ γαῖαν ὀπώπαμεν, ὕδατι δ’ ὕδωρ, Αἰθέρι δ’ αἰθέρα δῖον, ἀτὰρ πυρὶ πῦρ ἀίδηλον, Στοργῇ δὲ στοργήν, νεῖχος δέ τε νείχεϊ λυγρῷ. And Plotinus; Οὐ γὰρ ἂν πώποτε εἴδεν ὀφθαλμὸς ἥλιον ἡλιοειδὴς μὴ γεγενημένος, which Goethe imitated in the famous verse: “Wär’ nicht das Auge sonnenhaft, Die Sonne könnt’ es nie erblicken; Läg’ nicht in uns des Gottes eig’ne Kraft, Wie könnt uns Göttliches entzücken?” Man is the only creature, he is _the_ creature in Nature, that has in himself a relation to every thing. He to whom this relationship brings understanding and the most complete consciousness, not to many things or to few things, but to all things, the man who of his own individuality has thought out everything, is called a genius. He in whom the possibility of this is present, in whom an interest in everything could be aroused, yet who only, of his own accord, concerns himself with a few, we call merely a man.