Man is a soul, informed by divine ideas, and bodying forth their image. His mind is the unit and measure of things visible and invisible. In him stir the creatures potentially, and through his personal volitions are conceived and brought forth in matter whatsoever he sees, touches, and treads under foot, the planet he spins. He omnipresent is, All round himself he lies, Osiris spread abroad, Upstaring in all eyes: Nature his globed thought, Without him she were not, Cosmos from chaos were not spoken, And God bereft of visible token. A theometer--an instrument of instruments--he gathers in himself all forces, partakes in his plenitude of omniscience, being the Spirit's acme, and culmination in nature. A quickening spirit and mediator between mind and matter, he conspires with all souls, with the Soul of souls, in generating the substance in which he immerses his form, and wherein he embosoms his essence. Not elemental, but fundamental, essential, he generates elements and forces, perpetually replenishing his waste;--the final conflagration a current fact of his existence. Does the assertion seem incredible, absurd? But science, grown luminous and transcendent, boldly declares that life to the senses is a blaze refeeding steadily its flame from the atmosphere it kindles into life, its embers the spent remains from which rises perpetually the new-born Phoenix into regions where flame is lost in itself, and light is its resolvent emblem.[G] [Footnote G: "Man feeds upon air, the plant collecting the materials from the atmosphere and compounding them for his food. Even life itself, as we know it, is but a process of combustion, of which decomposition is the final conclusion. Through this combustion all the constituents return back into air, a few ashes remaining to the earth from whence they came. But from these embers, slowly invisible flames arise into regions where our science has no longer any value."--SCHLEIDEN.] "Thee, eye of heaven, the great soul envies not, By thy male force is all we have, begot."