On Life

Life and the world, or whatever we call that which we are and feel,
is an astonishing thing. The mist of familiarity obscures from us
the wonder of our being. We are struck with admiration at some of
its transient modifications, but it is itself the great miracle.
What are changes of empires, the wreck of dynasties, with the
opinions which supported them; what is the birth and the extinction
of religious and of political systems to life? What are the revolutions
of the globe which we inhabit, and the operations of the elements
of which it is composed, compared with life? What is the universe
of stars, and suns, of which this inhabited earth is one, and their
motions, and their destiny, compared with life? Life, the great
miracle, we admire not, because it is so miraculous. It is well
that we are thus shielded by the familiarity of what is at once
so certain and so unfathomable, from an astonishment which would
otherwise absorb and overawe the functions of that which is its
object.

If any artist, I do not say had executed, but had merely conceived
in his mind the system of the sun, and the stars, and planets, they
not existing, and had painted to us in words, or upon canvas, the
spectacle now afforded by the nightly cope of heaven, and illustrated it
by the wisdom of astronomy, great would be our admiration. Or had
he imagined the scenery of this earth, the mountains, the seas,
and the rivers; the grass, and the flowers, and the variety of
the forms and masses of the leaves of the woods, and the colours
which attend the setting and the rising sun, and the hues of the
atmosphere, turbid or serene, these things not before existing,
truly we should have been astonished, and it would not have been a
vain boast to have said of such a man, 'Non merita nome di creatore,
se non Iddio ed il Poeta.' But now these things are looked on with
little wonder, and to be conscious of them with intense delight is
esteemed to be the distinguishing mark of a refined and extraordinary
person. The multitude of men care not for them. It is thus with
Life--that which includes all.

What is life? Thoughts and feelings arise, with or without our will,
and we employ words to express them. We are born, and our birth is
unremembered, and our infancy remembered but in fragments; we live
on, and in living we lose the apprehension of life. How vain is it
to think that words can penetrate the mystery of our being! Rightly
used they may make evident our ignorance to ourselves, and this is
much. For what are we? Whence do we come? and whither do we go? Is
birth the commencement, is death the conclusion of our being? What
is birth and death?

The most refined abstractions of logic conduct to a view of life,
which,