Henry Drummond On The Aliveness Of Man

Henry Drummond, Natural Law In The Spiritual World (London: Hodder and Stoughton; 1898), pp. 155-156.

‘Man is a mass of correspondences, and because of these, because he is alive to countless objects and influences to which lower organisms are dead, he is the most living of all creatures. . . .

The tree, in correspondence with a narrow area of environment is to that extent alive; to all beyond, to the all but infinite area beyond, it is dead.

A still wider portion of this vast area is the possession of the insect and the bird.

Their’s [sic] also, nevertheless, is but a little world, and to an immense further area insect and bird are dead.

All organisms likewise are living and dead living to all within the circumference of their correspondences, dead to all beyond. . . . [U]ntil man appears there is no organism to correspond with the whole environment.’

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