“Our lives are like islands in the sea,” wrote William James, “or like trees in the forest. The maple and the pine may whisper to each other with their leaves . . . But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground, and the islands also hang together through the ocean’s bottom. Just so there is a continuum of cosmic consciousness, against which our individuality builds but accidental fences, and into which our several minds plunge as into a mother-sea or reservoir.”63
