"UNTIL SCIENCE OPENED OUR EYES WE DID NOT KNOW THAT THE CELESTIAL AND THE TERRESTRIAL WERE ONE AND THAT WE WERE ALREADY IN THE HEAVENS AMONG THE STARS"

BURROUGHS, John. Original autograph manuscript signed. Experiment, Georgia, February 1914. Three leaves removed from a notebook, measuring 6 by 9 inches, writing in ink on rectos; with a calligraphic title page in another hand. $3500.

Autograph manuscript signed by naturalist John Burroughs.

These three leaves are from the last chapter of his 1915 work The Breath of Life. They read: "It is easy for me to believe that the sources of life are near at hand they may be under our feet while we are look afar from them. We seek them in the mysterious, the transcendental while they are doubtless in the common, the familiar, the universal. To the true inwardness of matter are strangers of its ceaseless molecular activities and transformations which are going on all about us and in our own bodies. Our senses give us no hint. The creative energy is immanent in all things; that is what the bible and the sacred legends finally mean; that is what science is disclosing every day.

Though the secret of life is under our feet, yet how strange and mysterious it seems; it draws our attention away from matter. It arises among the inorganic elements like a visitant from another sphere. It is a new thing in the world. Consciousness is a new thing, yet Huxley makes it one of his trinity of realities—matter, energy and consciousness. We are so immersed in these realities that we do not see the divinity they embody. We feel that sacred and divine whole is far off and unattainable. Life and mind are so impossible of explanation in terms of matter and energy, that it is not to be wondered that mankind have no longer looked upon their appearance upon this earth as a miraculous event. But until science opened our eyes we did not know that the celestial and the terrestrial were one and that we were already in the heavens among the stars. When we emancipate ourselves from the bondage of want and use, and see with clear vision our relations to the cosmos all our ideas of materialism and spiritualism are made over and we see how the two are one. How life and death play into each other's hands and how the whole truth of things can not be compassed by any number of finite minds. John Burroughs. Experiment, Ga. Feb. 1914."

With numerous corrections in Burroughs' hand. Excellent condition.