He finds that the tree is composed of various atoms, all of which may be found in the soil and in the atmosphere. He concludes, then, that these atoms from soil and atmosphere, began to move up to and down to the acorn. The acorn, passive meanwhile, lets them fall on it. So, of their own free will and accord, the atoms kept piling themselves upon the acorn, until in the process of a hundred years there was a tree. Now a brick column might be carried up after this fashion, but not a tree. The prior and fundamental thing in an oak tree is the acorn. It contains an active, organizing life principle. Falling into the soil, this folded life power begins to stir. It lays hold upon the elements about it, digests them, assimilates them, and turns them into an oak. The mind is to the raw material of knowledge, what the acorn is to the raw material of oak. Through the senses the raw material is conveyed into the mind. It is then appropriated, assimilated, digested, and turned into knowledge. The active, organizing, combining power that turns the raw material presented by the senses into knowledge, does not come from the outside world. It is constitutional, fundamental, original. Just as the organic forces of the plant take up the elements from the outside environment upon which it subsists, so the synthesizing, living power of the mind takes the matter of sensation and turns it into the whole called knowledge. Knowledge is a unifying process. It combines the manifold into one. It reduces multiplicity to unity. All that is real and all that is true in the heavens above or in the earth below, in mind or in matter, in time or in space, in man or in external world, are capable of being reduced to unity in knowledge. Knowledge is the subjective unity in the finite mind that corresponds to the objective unity that lies within the infinite mind. Nothing less than a universal synthesis satisfies the finite mind, because it is a copy of the infinite mind. The finite self-consciousness is a copy of the infinite self-consciousness. The infinite mind knows all things at once; the finite mind comes to knowledge through a gradual process. It can never, through all eternity, know all the infinite mind knows, but it can eternally advance in knowledge, and comfort itself at every stage of the process with the thought that nothing in the mind of the infinite and absolute one is foreign to it, or in contradiction with its capacity to know. In thinking, the finite mind is at home in its father’s realm, and because this realm stretches out illimitably every way should not oppress us or discourage us. For this the finite mind can know, that throughout the limitless domain of God there is order and truth and reality.