United States or Venezuela ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
A Club is the next best thing to this, strung like a harp, with about a dozen ringing intelligences, each answering to some chord of the macrocosm. They do well to dine together once in a while. A dinner-party made up of such elements is the last triumph of civilization over barbarism.
We begin slowly to understand ourselves as the repositories of infinite possibilities! as cosmic units of the larger Cosmos as a perfect microcosm of the macrocosm! With feelings of awe-inspiring adoration, we reflect that we may know ourselves as individuals, only as the extent of our knowledge of the universe around us is increased.
This is the great truth which the ancients set forth under the figure of the Macrocosm and the Microcosm, the lesser I AM reproducing the precise image of the greater, and of which the Bible tells us when it speaks of man as the image of God. Now the immense practical importance of this principle is that it affords the key to the great law that "as a man thinks so he is."
There are at Bruxels yet surviving, some of good repute, that were eye-witnesses of these occurrences." Charleton: Of the Magnetic Cure of Wounds, London, 1650, p. 13. Equally in the history of science and of medicine, 1542 is a starred year, marked by a revolution in our knowledge alike of Macrocosm and Microcosm.
If we remember that nature is always consistent, that her laws are uniform and that whatever exists in the microcosm exists also in the macrocosm, and then study nature, we shall find that all the germs of life which exist in the universe are bound to pass through stages resembling the embryonic types before they can appear in the form of man.
The microcosm of the human body is the lesser image of the macrocosm. The courses of the same and the other affect both; they are made of the same elements and therefore in the same proportions. Both are intelligent natures endued with the power of self-motion, and the same equipoise is maintained in both. The animal is a sort of 'world' to the particles of the blood which circulate in it.
We must come back to the old teaching, that the Macrocosm is reproduced in the Microcosm, with the further perception that this identity of principle can only be produced by identity of cause.
Likewise, the greater world, the macrocosm, is latent and miniatured in the lesser world, or microcosm, of man. This constitutes the universality or perfection of virtues potential in mankind. Therefore, it is said that man has been created in the image and likeness of God.
This is an important step in the direction of the moral and religious life. Even as far as this level we find the deeper life the spiritual life insisting on the validity of its mental and moral conclusions over against the objects of sense. Without this insistence no knowledge would progress and be valid. The macrocosm is mirrored and coloured in a mental and moral microcosm.
Using language of a semi-emblematic kind, we might perhaps express something of Shelley's belief thus: Mankind is the microcosm, as distinguished from the rest of the universe, which forms the macrocosm; and, as long as a man's body and soul remain in combination, his soul pertains to the microcosm: when this combination ceases with the death of the body, his soul, in whatever sense it may be held to exist, lapses into the macrocosm, but there is neither knowledge as to the mode of its existence, nor speech capable of recording this.
Word Of The Day