Now let us try to consider accurately what Dr. Tyndall’s statement means.  Knowledge of Nature, he says, associates him with Nature.  It withdraws him from ‘the hampering details of earth,’ and enables the individual human being to have communion with a something that is beyond humanity.  But what is communion?  It is a word with no meaning at all save as referring to conscious beings.  There could be no communion between two corpses; nor, again, between a corpse and a living man.  Dr. Tyndall, for instance, could have no communion with a dead canary.  Communion implies the existence on both sides of a common something.  Now what is there in common between Dr. Tyndall and the starry heavens, or that ‘power’ of which the starry heavens are the embodiment?  Dr. Tyndall expressly says that he not only does not know what there is in common, but that he ‘dare’ not even say that, as conscious beings, they two have anything in common at all.[26] The only things he can know about the power in question are that it is vast, and that it is uniform; but a contemplation of these qualities by themselves, must tend rather to produce in him a sense of separation from it than of union with it.  United with it, in one sense, he of course is; he is a fraction of the sum of things, and everything, in a certain way, is dependent upon everything else.  But in this union there is nothing special.  Its existence is an obvious fact, common to all men, whether they dwell upon it or no:  and though by a knowledge of Nature we may grow to realise it more keenly, it is impossible to make the union in the least degree closer, or to turn it into anything that can be in any way called a communion.  Indeed, for the positivists to talk about communion or association with Nature is about as rational as to talk about communion or association with a steam-engine.  The starry skies at night are doubtless an imposing spectacle; but man, on positive principles, can be no more raised by watching them than a commercial traveller can by watching a duke—­probably far less:  for if the duke were well behaved, the commercial traveller might perhaps learn some manners from him; but there is nothing in the panorama of the universe that can in any way be any model for the positivist.  There are but two respects in which he can compare himself to the rest of nature—­firstly, as a revealed force; and, secondly, as a force that works by law.  But the forces that are revealed by the stars, for instance, are vast, and the force revealed in himself is small; and he, as he considers, is a self-determining agent, and the stars are not.  There are but two points of comparison between the two; and in these two points they are contrasts, and not likenesses.  It is true, indeed, as I said just now, that a sense of awe and of hushed solemnity is, as a fact, born in us at the spectacle of the starry heavens—­world upon luminous world shining and quivering silently; it is true, too, that