To regard all things and principles of things as inconstant modes or
fashions has more and more become the tendency of modern thought. Let us
begin with that which is without--our physical life. Fix upon it in one
of its more exquisite intervals, the moment, for instance, of delicious
recoil from the flood of water in summer heat. What is the whole physical
life in that moment but a combination of natural elements to which
science gives their names? But these elements, phosphorus and lime and
delicate fibres, are present not in the human body alone: we detect them
in places most remote from it. Our physical life is a perpetual motion of
them--the passage of the blood, the wasting and repairing of the lenses
of the eye, the modification of the tissues of the brain by every ray of
light and sound--processes which science reduces to simpler and more
elementary forces. Like the elements of which we are composed, the action
of these forces extends beyond us; it rusts iron and ripens corn. Far out
on every side of us those elements are broadcast, driven by many forces;
and birth and gesture and death and the springing of violets from the
grave are but a few out of ten thousand resultant combinations.
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