For us, who happen to live while the World-Phoenix is burning herself, and burning so slowly that, as Teufelsdrockh calculates, it were a handsome bargain would she engage to have done “within two centuries,” there seems to lie but an ashy prospect.  Not altogether so, however, does the Professor figure it.  “In the living subject,” says he, “change is wont to be gradual:  thus, while the serpent sheds its old skin, the new is already formed beneath.  Little knowest thou of the burning of a World-Phoenix, who fanciest that she must first burn out, and lie as a dead cinereous heap; and therefrom the young one start up by miracle, and fly heavenward.  Far otherwise!  In that Fire-whirlwind, Creation and Destruction proceed together; ever as the ashes of the Old are blown about, do organic filaments of the New mysteriously spin themselves:  and amid the rushing and the waving of the Whirlwind element come tones of a melodious Death-song, which end not but in tones of a more melodious Birth-song.  Nay, look into the Fire-whirlwind with thy own eyes, and thou wilt see.”  Let us actually look, then:  to poor individuals, who cannot expect to live two centuries, those same organic filaments, mysteriously spinning themselves, will be the best part of the spectacle.  First, therefore, this of Mankind in general:—­

“In vain thou deniest it,” says the Professor; “thou art my Brother.  Thy very Hatred, thy very Envy, those foolish Lies thou tellest of me in thy splenetic humor:  what is all this but an inverted Sympathy?  Were I a Steam-engine, wouldst thou take the trouble to tell lies of me?  Not thou!  I should grind all unheeded, whether badly or well.

“Wondrous truly are the bonds that unite us one and all; whether by the soft binding of Love, or the iron chaining of Necessity, as we like to choose it.  More than once have I said to myself, of some perhaps whimsically strutting Figure, such as provokes whimsical thoughts:  ’Wert thou, my little Brotherkin, suddenly covered up within the largest imaginable Glass bell,—­what a thing it were, not for thyself only, but for the world!  Post Letters, more or fewer, from all the four winds, impinge against thy Glass walls, but have to drop unread:  neither from within comes there question or response into any Post-bag; thy Thoughts fall into no friendly ear or heart, thy Manufacture into no purchasing hand:  thou art no longer a circulating venous-arterial Heart, that, taking and giving, circulatest through all Space and all Time:  there has a Hole fallen out in the immeasurable, universal World-tissue, which must be darned up again!’

“Such venous-arterial circulation, of Letters, verbal Messages, paper and other Packages, going out from him and coming in, are a blood-circulation, visible to the eye:  but the finer nervous circulation, by which all things, the minutest that he does, minutely influence all men, and the very look of his face blesses or curses whomso it lights on, and so generates ever new blessing or new cursing:  all this you cannot see, but only imagine.  I say, there is not a red Indian, hunting by Lake Winnipeg, can quarrel with his squaw, but the whole world must smart for it:  will not the price of beaver rise?  It is a mathematical fact that the casting of this pebble from my hand alters the centre of gravity of the Universe.