Seconds build up into minutes, and minutes into hours, and these into the days of our life; and so also far-fetched trifles accumulate into occasions. It depends on our circumstances whether they seek us out or whether we go to them. Every being possessing activity, that is, which has a relation with space and a temporary faculty of volition, moves towards change as change moves towards him. The mobile beings, such as men and beasts and birds, as often as they move, make progress towards some small or large point in their history. Their change of position makes them encounter the unexpected, which is itself perhaps coming towards them. Our pine-tree, however, being of the plant class, was rooted in one place, and had to attend its changes there. For of course its history was full of change. In seed-shape it had wandered across the world, its devious course lying sometimes on the surface of the ground, sometimes in the water, sometimes in the air. Now, being a tree, its wanderings were over; but its normal life yet varied nearly from day to day. The scene (to our eyes changeless) in which it stood no doubt changed without our being able to see the differences. We have no bark or needles or sap, and cannot therefore enter into the feelings of the tree which with them knew how clouds modulated its light, how the passing wind varied its scent and texture according to the distance or direction from which it came, how the rain-drops tasted so one time and so another time, their very elements seeming different according as the seasons varied the sensitiveness of the great lonely tree. Anyhow, we should remember that with plants it will not be as with us. Lacking our faculties, they may yet be richer than us in other directions, endowed with senses whose deficiency in ourselves we cannot perceive: and perhaps even things have their senses. There may really be "tears in things." It would be an attractive doctrine that the energies which affect inanimate things may affect them in sensible degrees, that the universe (which is a rounded whole) obeys the same laws in forms which change according to circumstance, but remain alike in force and means. CHAPTER 6 _The Law of Balance_