What we call gravitation, and fancy ultimate,
is one fork of a mightier stream, for which we have yet no name.
Astronomy is excellent; but it must come up into life to have its full
value, and not remain there in globes and spaces. The globule of blood
gyrates around its own axis in the human veins, as the planet in the
sky; and the circles of intellect relate to those of the heavens. Each
law of nature has the like universality; eating, sleep or hybernation,
rotation, generation, metamorphosis, vortical motion, which is seen
in eggs as in planets. These grand rhymes or returns in nature,--the
dear, best-known face startling us at every turn, under a mask so
unexpected that we think it the face of a stranger, and, carrying up
the semblance into divine forms,--delighted the prophetic eye of
Swedenborg; and he must be reckoned a leader in that revolution, which,
by giving to science an idea, has given to an aimless accumulation of
experiments, guidance and form, and a beating heart.
I own, with some regret, that his printed works amount to about fifty
stout octaves, his scientific works being about half of the whole
number; and it appears that a mass of manuscript still unedited remains
in the royal library at Stockholm.
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