Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/102

92 to be caught in contrast with the character of physics; just as man is best read in the antagonism which prevails between him and nature as she exists both without him and within him; this strife conducing in the former case to his natural, and in the latter to his moral aggrandisement.

Without a figure, the whole universe may be said to be inspired. A power not its own drives its throbbing pulses. All things are dependent on one another; each of them is because something else has been. Nowhere is there to be found an original, but everywhere an inherited activity. Nature throughout all her vicissitudes is the true type of hereditary and inviolable succession. The oak dies in the forest-solitudes, having deposited the insignia of its strength in an acorn, from which springs a new oak that neither exceeds nor falls short of the stated measure of its birthright. The whole present world is but a vast tradition. All the effects composing the universe now before us were slumbering, ages ago, in their embryo causes. And now, amid the derivative movements of this unpausing machinery, what becomes of man? Is he too the mere creature of traditionary forces?

Yes; man in his earlier stages violates not the universal analogy, but lives and breathes in the general inspiration of nature. At his birth he is indeed wholly nature's child; for no living creature is born an alien from the jurisdiction of that mighty mother. Powerless and passive, he floats entranced