There are noble names for them, found and bequeathed by the Classical world. The plant is something _cosmic_, and the animal is additionally _a microcosm in relation to a macrocosm_. When, and not until, the unit has thus separated itself from the All and can define its position with respect to the All, it becomes thereby a microcosm. Even the planets in their great cycles are in servitude, and it is only these tiny worlds that move freely relative to a great one which appears in their consciousness as their world-around (environment). Only through this individualism of the microcosm does that which the light offers to its eyes--our eyes--acquire meaning as “body,” and even to planets we are from some inner motive reluctant to concede the property of bodiliness. All that is cosmic bears the hall-mark of _periodicity_; it has “beat” (rhythm, tact). All that is microcosmic possesses _polarity_; it possesses “tension.” We speak of tense alertness and tense thought, but all wakeful states are in their essence tensions. Sense and object, I and thou, cause and effect, thing and property--each of these is a tension between discretes, and when the state pregnantly called “_détente_” appears, then at once fatigue, and presently sleep, set in for the microcosmic side of life. A human being asleep, discharged of all tensions, is leading only a plantlike existence. Cosmic beat, on the other hand, is everything that can be paraphrased in terms like direction, time, rhythm, destiny, longing--from the hoof-beats of a team of thoroughbreds and the deep tread of proud marching soldiers to the silent fellowship of two lovers, the sensed tact that makes the dignity of a social assembly, and that keen quick judgment of a “judge of men” which I have already, earlier in this work,[2] called physiognomic tact. This beat of cosmic cycles goes on notwithstanding the freedom of microcosmic movement in space, and from time to time breaks down the tension of the waking individual’s being into the _one_ grand felt harmony. If we have ever followed the flight of a bird in the high air--how, always in the same way, it rises, turns, glides, loses itself in the distance--we must have felt the plantlike certainty of the “it” and the “we” in this ensemble of motion, which needs no bridge of reason to unite your sense of it with mine. This is the meaning of war-dances and love-dances amongst men and beasts. In this wise a regiment mounting to the assault under fire is forged into a unity, in this wise does the crowd collect at some exciting occasion and become a body, capable of thinking and acting pitifully, blindly, and strangely for a moment ere it falls apart again. In such cases the microcosmic wall is obliterated. _It_ jostles and threatens, _it_ pushes and pulls, _it_ flees, swerves, and sways. Limbs intertwine, feet rush, _one_ cry comes from every mouth, _one_ destiny overlies all. Out of a sum of little single worlds comes suddenly a complete whole.