146 
WILD SCENES AND SONG-BIRDS. 
It is an old fancy of that science of seeing deepest into 
the millstone, called Metaphysical Philosophy, that the earth 
is an animal — a living thing — of course insensate brute and 
huge, to our apprehension, but to the vision of Higher Intel- 
ligences an apparelled creature in its robes of cloud and light 
— swung on its orbed circuit, amid travelling peers : that to 
them its vast calm front must be forever pregnant with a 
meaning of its own ; and they can, to " the dumbness of its 
very gesture," interpret ; that it has articulations, "joints 
and motives " to its body, which must move, act and obey 
the impulse of the life within it. This active impulse — call 
it the galvanic fluid, or the principle of life — ^lives through 
and animates its own great bulk, as well as through every 
modification of its aggregate mass which we see as forms, 
and know as existences : 
" One sun illumines heaven, one spirit vast 
With life and love makes chaos ever new." 
That this sphered creature must have been itself in chaos 
a thought projected out of the mind of God — the base and 
original of the being of which was a self-modifying vital 
principle. 
This vital force was independent of, and prior to, all or- 
ganization ; yet the law of its energies was the creative or 
self-formative — so that, if it acted through itself at all, it must 
act creatively — ^plastically — expressing this action in forms, 
the combinations of its own constituents. 
Mark you ; the gift of this creative energy was from God, 
who gave it its laws, making it through them self-acting. 
In a word, His higher energy produced here a remote 
modification of some one thought or phase of His own Eter- 
nal might ; and this we call — and it is to us — creative. 
The fact of its being an energy sustained from God, im- 
plies the necessity of action, and this action constitutes its 
development of itself — its entity. 
