It is social consciousness, the child of love, of the instinct
of perpetuation, that leads us to socialize everything, to see society
in everything, and that shows us at last that all Nature is really an
infinite Society. For my part, the feeling that Nature is a society has
taken hold of me hundreds of times in walking through the woods
possessed with a sense of solidarity with the oaks, a sense of their dim
awareness of my presence.
Imagination, which is the social sense, animates the inanimate and
anthropomorphizes everything; it humanizes everything and even makes
everything identical with man.[36] And the work of man is to
supernaturalize Nature--that is to say, to make it divine by making it
human, to help it to become conscious of itself, in short. The action of
reason, on the other hand, is to mechanize or materialize.
And just as a fruitful union is consummated between the individual--who
is, in a certain sense, a society--and society, which is also an
individual--the two being so inseparable from one another that it is
impossible to say where the one begins and the other ends, for they are
rather two aspects of a single essence--so also the spirit, the social
element, which by relating us to others makes us conscious, unites with
matter, the individual and individualizing element; similarly, reason or
intelligence and imagination embrace in a mutually fruitful union, and
the Universe merges into one with God.
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