Our descendants will sooner or later reach, as a race, the condition of cosmic consciousness, just as, long ago, our ancestors passed from simple con… - Richard Maurice Bucke

All things, man included, are parts of one great whole. The object of this chapter is to point out the most obvious and most natural divisions of this whole, which we call the universe. These divisions can never be absolute; the whole is too truly one whole for that, but they are sufficiently real for our present purpose.

Man reacts upon and toward the external universe in three ways, namely, by his active nature ; by his intellectual nature ; by his moral nature — that is, he acts upon it, thinks about it, and feels toward it.

I dedicate this book to the man who inspired it — to the man who of all men past and present that I have known has the most exalted moral nature — to Walt Whitman.