150 0 Les Miserables
and the avalanches of creation? The tiniest worm is of im-
portance; the great is little, the little is great; everything is
balanced in necessity; alarming vision for the mind. There
are marvellous relations between beings and things; in that
inexhaustible whole, from the sun to the grub, nothing de-
spises the other; all have need of each other. The light does
not bear away terrestrial perfumes into the azure depths,
without knowing what it is doing; the night distributes stel-
lar essences to the sleeping flowers. All birds that fly have
round their leg the thread of the infinite. Germination is
complicated with the bursting forth of a meteor and with
the peck of a swallow cracking its egg, and it places on one
level the birth of an earthworm and the advent of Socrates.
Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins. Which
of the two possesses the larger field of vision? Choose. A
bit of mould is a pleiad of flowers; a nebula is an ant-hill of
stars. The same promiscuousness, and yet more unprece-
dented, exists between the things of the intelligence and the
facts of substance. Elements and principles mingle, com-
bine, wed, multiply with each other, to such a point that
the material and the moral world are brought eventually to
the same clearness. The phenomenon is perpetually return-
ing upon itself. In the vast cosmic exchanges the universal
life goes and comes in unknown quantities, rolling entirely
in the invisible mystery of effluvia, employing everything,
not losing a single dream, not a single slumber, sowing an
animalcule here, crumbling to bits a planet there, oscillat-
ing and winding, making of light a force and of thought an
element, disseminated and invisible, dissolving all, except