A Comprehensive Collection - Swami Vivekananda

THE COSMOS: THE MACROCOSM. 251philosophers of Jndia, in harmony with modern humanknowledge.We find that in this oldest of questions a few pointshaVe been already known. First is, that when there wasneither aught nor naught, there was a time when thisworld did not exist, these planets and luminaries, ourmother earth, the seas and oceans, the rivers and mountair^ffcities and villages, human races, animals, plants, birds,all this infinite variety of creation there was a time when;to traceit did not exist. Are we sure of that ? We will tryhow this conclusion is arrived at. What does man seearound him? Take a little plant. He finds the plant comesout, lift itself slowly from beneath the sods, grow, andgrow, and grow,till it becomes perhaps a gigantic tree.Again it dies, leaving only the seed. It completes thecircle ;it comes out of the seed, it becomes the tree, andit ends in the seed again. Look at a bird, how from theegg-shell it springs, becomes a beautiful bird, lives a life,and then dies again, leaving only other eggs, seeds offuture birds. So with the animals, so with men. Everything begins, as it were, from certain seeds, certain rudiments, certain fine forms, becomes grosser and grosser, anddevelops, goes on that way for a certain time, again goesback to that fine form, and subsides. The rain drop inwhich the beautiful sunbeam is playing now has beendrawn up in the form of vapour from the ocean, goes faraway into the air, reaches the mountain ;there it changesinto snow, again into water, again rolls back down throughhundreds of miles to the mother ocean. So with everything in Nature with which we are surrounded, and inmodern times we know that the huge mountains are beingworked upon by the glaciers and rivers, slowly but surelypounding them, pulverizing them into sands, that sand