1

istry to be constructed, being to the eye of mere physical
science more or less dense compactions and crystallizations
of the supposed final elementary atoms into certain mathe-
matical forms, proportions, and equivalents, called bodies,
under the processes of analysis, are increasing in number
in the chemical catalogue, or sometimes diminishing, some
of them being from time to time resolved into other ele-
ments, as nitrogen is reported to have been, lately; thus
diminishing, or increasing, the number of simples, until we
are left in absolute uncertainty whether the sum total will
finally diminish to unity, or increase to infinity; and all
these simple substances, if no further resolvable into kinds,
are yet divisible into parts, as some electricians decompose
electricity into infinitely little spheres, that spontaneously
take on a motion of rotation on an axis, and divide each
sphere into axis, poles, equator, centre, circumference,
tropics, parallels, meridians, hemispheres; but, admitting
the spheres, we have only arrived at a more primary stage
of the proximate materials of construction, being as yet
only secondary forms and modes of substance, even in the
invisible, imponderable, indecomposable, indivisable ethers.
And here ends, it would seem, the entire scope of physical
science, for the present, as to these materials. But then we
have, further, light, heat, electricity (according to some),
magnetism, nervous force, gravitation, and mechanical
power, which are neither ethers, gases, nor clouds of ethe-
real spheres, at all, but, as it seems, merely correlated and
convertible forces 66
exponents of different forms of
force," say the Academicians, that is, we may suppose,
degrees and modes of power, which yet acts under laws
which are found to be mathematical, and, for that matter,
identical with the laws of power as thought; and the power
itself would seem to be identical in nature with the power
of thought as cause. And so, in the last physical analysis,

--

1 De La Rive's Treatise on Electricity, by Walker, London, 1856.
2 Trans. Roy. Soc., Lond. 1850, p. 62.

and at the last stage of the forms and modes of substance, the resolvability, as well as the divisibility, of matter is found passing into an actual totality of power, at the point of beginning of creation, at the very top of Pan's pyramid, where the transition is so easy to things divine; and that power, into which all matter is thus resolved, is found to be of the nature wholly and absolutely of the power of thought as the primal thinking essence and cause of all created things. An actual experimental resolution of these simple elements into this next stage of degrees and modes of power, and these, again, into the still further and last stage of the totality of all power, has not as yet been quite effected, perhaps, by physical science alone; though some late experimentation would seem to amount almost to a sensible demonstration that the fact must be so. The demonstration is rather by the methods of metaphysical science, which transcends the limits of sensible experience, rises into the region of this totality of all power, and beholds the subject from the point of view of the one Eternal Power of Thought; for man can do this, being the image of his Maker, and his soul being so framed as to be "capable of the image of the universal world."

And so, going out with Bacon through physics into metaphysics, we arrive, at last, in the unity and continuity of all science, at Philosophy itself, and at the Divine Soul of the universe, in an eternal state of living activity in the perpetual distribution of variety in the total unity of the creation, in the universal flow of the Providential order; for, says Bacon, "the matter is in a perpetual flux," or as Plato says, again, "Soul is the oldest and most divine of all things, of which a motion, by receiving the generation [taking on generation], imparts an ever flowing existence."1 Certainly, nothing less than this can give any rational and conceivable philosophy of the universe. All science leads directly to such a philosophy; all facts prove its truth; and 1 Laws, Works (Bohn), V. 543.

this comprehensible conception is, at least, better than any incomprehensible absurdity that ever was, or can be, invented. The Baconian caution is a good one: that we are not to give out "a dream of our fancy for an exemplar of the world," but rather, "under divine favor, an apocalyptic revelation and true vision of the tracks and ways of the Creator in Nature and His creatures."1

§ 8. SCIENCE IN POETRY.

That the author of these plays had arrived at a similar view of the constitution of the universe, is made clear in many passages. How else can we understand those remarkable lines of the "Tempest," in which, having brought upon the stage a scene among the gods, and made Juno, Ceres, and Iris enact a play before mortal eyes, when all at once they vanish at the bidding of the magician, Prospero, he makes him say:

"These our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all that it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made of; and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep."- Act IV. Sc. 1.

For, this vision of a world and this vision of the stage are made essentially in the same manner and of the same stuff, are both alike substantial; and yet, they may vanish, like an insubstantial pageant, into oblivion, at the bidding of the Great Magician, when his time shall come.

Again, says Bacon, in the De Augmentis, "This Janus of the imagination has too different faces; for the face towards reason hath the print of truth, but the face towards action hath the print of goodness"; an expression, which 1 Lectori, Works (Boston), VII. 161.

appears again in a letter, in which he prays that, living or dying, "the print of the goodness of King James " may be in his heart; but all Calibans, or other human monsters,

1

and all Stephanos and Trinculos, "abhorred slaves," that "steal by line and level," and

"Which any print of goodness will not take, Being capable of all ill,"

this magician, by the help of his invisible Ariel, would soundly hunt out of his kingdom, when his "Genius" should have "the air of freedom"; and his labors would not cease until all his enemies were laid at his feet. And he was able to make this speech :

"Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves;
And ye, that on the sands with printless foot
Do chase the ebbing Neptune, and do fly him,
When he comes back; you demi-puppets, that.
By moonshine do the green sour ringlets make,
Whereof the ewe not bites; and you whose pastime
Is to make midnight mushrooms, that rejoice
To hear the solemn curfew; by whose aid
(Weak masters though ye be) I have bedimm'd
The noontide sun, call'd forth the mutinous winds,
And 'twixt the green sea and the azur'd vault
Set roaring war: to the dread rattling thunder
Have I given fire, and rifted Jove's stout oak
With his own bolt: the strong-bas'd promontory
Have I made shake; and by the spurs pluck'd up
The pine and cedar: graves, at my command,
Have wak'd their sleepers; oped, and let them forth
By my so potent art. — But this rough magic

The "Tempest" was nearly the last play written, or perhaps

1 Letter of July 30, 1624, Works (Philad.), III. 24.

the last but one or two; and his book would seem to have been drowned for a long time, and buried so deep as to be beyond the reach of any but a " Delian diver.” 1

Well might these deep-sounding revelations and true visions of the traces and stamp of the Creator on his creations wake up whole books in the soul of Jean Paul Richter! These all-comprehending conceptions could come only from the philosopher, the student of Nature as well as of Plato, whose thought had fathomed the depths and hidden mysteries of the universe, and discovered that "God hath framed the mind of man as a mirror or glass, capable of the image of the universal world." For, as he says, again, "that alone is true philosophy, which doth faithfully render the very words of the world, and it is written no otherwise than the world doth dictate, it being nothing else but the image or reflection of it, not adding anything of its own, but only iterates and resounds.": In his scheme, philosophy is the text, and the universe is the book of plates, the illustration and the proof so far; that is, as far as it is visible and knowable to observation and experience: beyond all the scopes of physical science, it is, as it were, the book without the plates, and for illustration, the reader must, like the mathematician, construct his own models, charts, and diagrams. Some men, like children, see nothing but the plates, and continue all their lives to be dazzled with the pictures, scarcely conceiving that there is any text at all; being capable of nothing but miraculous child's fables, mystic revelations, airy charms, and various kinds of spirit-playing and spirit-rapping. Things which fly too high over their heads must be drawn down to their senses. Some others advance to the end of the plates and stop there, finding no more proof of any fact, and so thinking that they have arrived at the land's end, because all around appears to be open sea; while some others, again,

Timæus of Plato, 71; De Aug. Trans., Works (Boston), IX. 22. 2 Wisd. of the Ancts., Works (Mont.), II. 2.