Anyhow the Universe is not Chaos (if it were, by the
way, we should be unable to reason about it at all). It stands
and is renewed upon a harmony: and what Plato called 'Necessity'
is the Duty--compulsory or free as you or I can conceive it--the
Duty of all created things to obey that harmony, the Duty of
which Wordsworth tells in his noble Ode.
Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong:
And the most ancient heavens, through Thee, are fresh and
strong.
III
Now the other and second great belief is, that the Universe, the
macrocosm, cannot be apprehended at all except as its rays
converge upon the eye, brain, soul of Man, the microcosm: on you,
on me, on the tiny percipient centre upon which the immense
cosmic circle focuses itself as the sun upon a burning-glass--and
he is not shrivelled up! Other creatures, he notes, share in his
sensations; but, so far as he can discover, not in his percipience
--or not in any degree worth measuring. So far as he can discover,
he is not only a bewildered actor in the great pageant but 'the
ring enclosing all,' the sole intelligent spectator.
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