its best illustration from the newest. It is this: that nature iterates
her means perpetually on successive planes. In the old aphorism, nature
is always self-similar. In the plant, the eye or germinative point
opens to a leaf, then to another leaf, with a power of transforming
the leaf into radicle, stamen, pistil, petal, bract, sepal, or seed.
The whole art of the plant is still to repeat leaf on leaf without
end, the more or less of heat, light, moisture, and food, determining
the form it shall assume. In the animal, nature makes a vertebra, or
a spine of vertebrae, and helps herself still by a new spine, with a
limited power of modifying its form,--spine on spine, to the end of
the world. A poetic anatomist, in our own day, teaches that a snake,
being a horizontal line, and man, being an erect line, constitute a
right angle; and, between the lines of this mystical quadrant, all
animate beings find their place; and he assumes the hair-worm, the
span-worm, or the snake, as the type of prediction of the spine.
Manifestly, at the end of the spine, nature puts out smaller spines,
as arms; at the end of the arms, new spines, as hands; at the other
end, she repeats the process, as legs and feet. At the top of the
column, she puts out another spine, which doubles or loops itself over,
as a span-worm, into a ball, and forms the skull, with extremities
again; the hands being now the upper jaw, the feet the lower jaw, the
fingers and toes being represented this time by upper and lower teeth.
This new spine is destined to high uses. It is a new man on the
shoulders of the last. It can almost shed its trunk, and manage to
live alone, according to the Platonic idea in the Timaeus. Within it,
on a higher plane, all that was done in the trunk repeats itself.
Nature recites her lesson once more in a higher mood. The mind is a
finer body, and resumes its functions of feeding, digesting, absorbing,
excluding, and generating, in a new and ethereal element. Here, in the
brain, is all the process of alimentation repeated, in the acquiring,
comparing, digesting, and assimilating of experience. Here again is
the mystery of generation repeated. In the brain are male and female
faculties; here is marriage, here is fruit. And there is no limit to
this ascending scale, but series on series. Everything, at the end of
one use, is taken up into the next, each series punctually repeating
every organ and process of the last. We are adapted to infinity. We
are hard to please, and love nothing which ends; and in nature is no
end; but everything, at the end of one use, is lifted into a superior,
and the ascent of these things climbs into daemonic and celestial
natures. Creative force, like a musical composer, goes on unweariedly
repeating a simple air or theme now high, now low, in solo, in chorus,
ten thousand times reverberated, till it fills earth and heaven with
the chant.
Gravitation, as explained by Newton, is good, but grandeur, when we
find chemistry only an extension of the law of masses into particles,
and that the atomic theory shows the action of chemistry to be
mechanical also. Metaphysics shows us a sort of gravitation, operative
also in the mental phenomena; and the terrible tabulation of the French
statists brings every piece of whim and humor to be reducible also to
exact numerical rations. If one man in twenty thousand, or in thirty
thousand, eats shoes, or marries his grandmother, then, in every twenty
thousand, or thirty thousand, is found one man who eats shoes, or
marries his grandmother. 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