I consider a tree. |  | I can look on it as a picture: stiff column in a shock of light, or splash of green shot with the delicate blue and silver of the background. |  | I can perceive it as movement: flowing veins on clinging, pressing pith, suck of the roots, breathing of the leaves, ceaseless commerce with earth and air—and the obscure growth itself. |  | I can classify it in a species and study it as a type in its structure and mode of life. |  | I can subdue its actual presence and form so sternly that I recognise it only as an expression of law — of the laws in accordance with which a constant opposition of forces is continually adjusted, or of those in accordance with which the component substances mingle and separate. |  | I can dissipate it and perpetuate it in number, in pure numerical relation. |  | In all this the tree remains my object, occupies space and time, and has its nature and constitution. |  | It can, however, also come about, if I have both will and grace, that in considering the tree I become bound up in relation to it. The tree is now no longer It. I have been seized by the power of exclusiveness. |  | To effect this it is not necessary for me to give up any of the ways in which I consider the tree. There is nothing from which I would have to turn my eyes away in order to see, and no knowledge that I would have to forget. Rather is everything, picture and movement, species and type, law and number, indivisibly united in this event. |  | Everything belonging to the tree is in this: its form and structure, its colours and chemical composition, its intercourse with the elements and with the stars, are all present in a single whole. |  | The tree is no impression, no play of my imagination, no value depending on my mood; but it is bodied over against me and has to do with me, as I with it — only in a different way. |  | Let no attempt be made to sap the strength from the meaning of the relation: relation is mutual.”