Gravity and
heat-conduction are such all-uniting influences, so far as the
physical world goes. Electric, luminous and chemical influences
follow similar lines of influence. But opaque and inert bodies
interrupt the continuity here, so that you have to step round them,
or change your mode of progress if you wish to get farther on that
day. Practically, you have then lost your universe's unity, SO FAR
AS IT WAS CONSTITUTED BY THOSE FIRST LINES OF INFLUENCE. There are
innumerable kinds of connexion that special things have with other
special things; and the ENSEMBLE of any one of these connexions
forms one sort of system by which things are conjoined. Thus men are
conjoined in a vast network of ACQUAINTANCESHIP. Brown knows Jones,
Jones knows Robinson, etc.; and BY CHOOSING YOUR FARTHER
INTERMEDIARIES RIGHTLY you may carry a message from Jones to the
Empress of China, or the Chief of the African Pigmies, or to anyone
else in the inhabited world. But you are stopped short, as by a non-
conductor, when you choose one man wrong in this experiment. What
may be called love-systems are grafted on the acquaintance-system. A
loves (or hates) B; B loves (or hates) C, etc. But these systems are
smaller than the great acquaintance-system that they presuppose.
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