But take the Kosmos with a grosser faith, as our senses give it us.

We behold space sown with rotatory islands, suns and worlds and the

shards and wrecks of systems: some, like the sun, still blazing;

some rotting, like the earth; others, like the moon, stable in

desolation. All of these we take to be made of something we call

matter: a thing which no analysis can help us to conceive; to

whose incredible properties no familiarity can reconcile our minds.

This stuff, when not purified by the lustration of fire, rots

uncleanly into something we call life; seized through all its atoms

with a pediculous malady; swelling in tumours that become

independent, sometimes even (by an abhorrent prodigy) locomotory;

one splitting into millions, millions cohering into one, as the

malady proceeds through varying stages. This vital putrescence of

the dust, used as we are to it, yet strikes us with occasional

disgust, and the profusion of worms in a piece of ancient turf, or

the air of a marsh darkened with insects, will sometimes check our

breathing so that we aspire for cleaner places. But none is clean:

the moving sand is infected with lice; the pure spring, where it

bursts out of the mountain, is a mere issue of worms; even in the

hard rock the crystal is forming.

In two main shapes this eruption covers the countenance of the

earth: the animal and the vegetable: one in some degree the

inversion of the other: the second rooted to the spot; the first

coming detached out of its natal mud, and scurrying abroad with the

myriad feet of insects or towering into the heavens on the wings of

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