The man had always seen Life in its relation to himself; he came, now, to consider his own life in its relation to all Life; which point of view has all the difference that lies between a low valley and the mountain peaks that shut it in. He felt his relation, too, not alone to all human life but to all created things. With everything that lived he felt himself kin. With the very dray horses on the street, dragging with patient courage their heavily loaded trucks; with the stray dog that dodged in and out among the wheels and hoofs of the crowded traffic; even with the sparrow that perched for a moment on the ledge outside the window near his desk, he felt a kinship that was new and strange. Had they not all, he reflected, horse and dog and sparrow and man--had they not all one thing in common--Life? Was not Life the one thing supreme to each? Were they not, each one, a part of the whole? Was not the supreme object of every life, of all life, to live? Is the life of a man, he asked himself, more mysterious than the life of a horse? Can science--blind, pretentious, childish science--explain the life of a dog with less uncertainty than it can explain the life of a man? Or can the scientist make a laboratory sparrow more easily than he can produce a laboratory man? With the very trees that lined the streets near where he lived, he felt a kinship for they, too, within their trunks and limbs, had life--they, too, were parts of the whole even as he was a part--they, too, belonged even as he belonged. Thus the man saw Life from a loftier height than he had ever before attained. Thus he sensed, as never before, the bigness, the fullness, the grandness, the awfulness, of Life. And so the man became very humble with a proud humbleness. He became very proud with a humble pride. He became even as a child again. And then, standing thus upon this new height that he had gained, the man looked back into the ages that were gone and forward into the ages that were to come and so saw himself and his age a link between the past and the future; linking that which had been to that which was to be. All that Life had ever been--the sum of all since the unknown beginning--was in the present. In the present, also, was all that Life could ever be, even unto the unknown end. Within his age and within himself he felt stirring all the mighty forces that, since the beginning, had wrought in the making of man. Within his age and within himself he felt the forces that would work out in the race results as far beyond his present vision as his age was beyond the ages of the most distant past.