The convulsion was invisible, indefinable, and immense, and yet its cause seemed wholly hidden. What was this swarm of vivified instants (lived perhaps millions of years ago) which had drifted into the district of the giant pine? How far had they come, these fulfilled seconds, whose course had once been run? Were they the time- and space-enfeebled echo of a cataclysm in some unknown world? (when? and where?) or the travail of a blind sun lost in space, yet casting its ominous enigmatic messages across the worlds? These very real astral influences, active upon men and also upon all that exists, are understood by us usually in an unworthy and insufficient degree. It is admitted that we are at times bound by the forces of distant heavenly bodies, but this can hardly be as individuals, nor can their waves, when they sway us, be sent forth expressly on our petty account. We must not be so simple as to think that the existence of any one among us can interest or engross the whole activity of a sphere or that its labouring is to make smooth the way of a single man. We feel its influence when our path crosses the direction of its discharged waves; but all beings, all plants, hills, peoples, countries in the same case are influenced at the same time as ourselves, and in a like fashion. This may explain why associations of things are sometimes swayed to a common feeling or purpose by invisible means. We often note that a sense of gaiety or of suffering, of liveliness or of resignation, of calm or disquietude imposes itself on us and on our neighbours, quite independently of our own state of mind. Both animate and inanimate things are subject to such changes of state, which may last a long or a short time, may be restricted or general, but which generally lead their objects in an undesigned direction. Such forms have probably played a wide and yet undetected part in the history of mankind, and also in the physical history of the globe: they may account for some of our unexpected and abrupt departures from the usual manner, for the irregular impulses which make us commit acts foreign to our normal will and nature. So that the unknown, into which pass our dead acts and ideas, may itself conceal also the sources of our resolutions and of our performances.