All our errors and all our sins are caused by substituting one in place of the other. And what is more, the large, the all embracing, the infinite, is present in the small with all his infinitude. Personality as such, in its actuality, does not shrink and restrict itself to the singular and particular man. Within those boundaries which are only visible from the outside, it internally expatiates to infinity, absorbing in itself and surmounting all limitations. The man born blind does not know the marvels and the wondrous beauties of nature which gladden the eyes and the soul of the seeing man. But his soul pours out none the less over the infinity of harmonies and of thought. And the blind man who once saw, in the consciousness of his sightlessness, cherishes the boundless image of the world once seen, and magnifies it indefinitely by the aid of the imagination. He even heals the wounds and soothes the pain of blindness by making it objective through reflection; and the personality, at any event, always victoriously breaks out of the narrow cell in which it might seem to be confined. So that in the depths of even the gloomiest dungeon a ray of light always peers through, to lighten and comfort the soul of man in misery, and to restore to him the entire and therefore infinite liberty of creating for himself a world of his own. We can therefore say that man, he that lives--not the one which is seen from the outside, but the thinking and the willing man, who is a personality in the act--never submits to a nature which is not his own. He shapes his own nature, beginning with his body, and gradually from it magnifying the effect of his power, and crowding the environing space, which is his, with the creatures he gives life to. We must not consider the smaller man whom we see confined to a few square feet and at the mercy of the passing instant. We must intently look upon that other one who has done and still continues to do all the beautiful things on which we thrive, on that one who is humanity, the spirit. We must consider his power, which is thought and work (work, that is, as thought); and ponder over this material world in which we live, all blocked out, as it is, measured, and traversed by forces which we bridle, accumulate and release, at pleasure,--this world which has been altered from its former state, and has been made as we now see it fit for human habitation, which has been joined to us, assimilated to our life, spiritualised. When we have done all this we shall see how impossible it is to disconnect nature from the spirit, and to think the former without the latter. Nature may be dissociated from the natural man, that is, one of its parts may be isolated from the remainder. But such man of nature is not the one who rules over nature: he is not Volta who clutches the electric current and transforms the earth; he is not Michel Angelo who transfigures marble and creates the Moses.