Life is the one pervading principle, and even the thing that seems to die and putrify but engenders new life, and changes to fresh forms of matter.

Reasoning, then, by evident analogy: if not a leaf, if not a drop of water, but is, no less than yonder star, a habitable and breathing world,--nay, if even man himself is a world to other lives, and millions and myriads dwell in the rivers of his blood, and inhabit man's frame as man inhabits earth, commonsense (if your schoolmen had it) would suffice to teach that the circumfluent infinite which you call space--the countless Impalpable which divides earth from the moon and stars--is filled also with its correspondent and appropriate life.

Is it not a visible absurdity to suppose that being is crowded upon every leaf, and yet absent from the immensities of space?
The law of the Great System forbids the waste even of an atom; it knows no spot where something of life does not breathe.

In the very charnel-house is the nursery of production and animation.

Is that true?
Well, then, can you conceive that space, which is the Infinite itself, is alone a waste, is alone lifeless, is less useful to the one design of universal being than the dead carcass of a dog, than the peopled leaf, than the swarming globule?
The microscope shows you the creatures on the leaf; no mechanical tube is yet invented to discover the nobler and more gifted things that hover in the illimitable air.