Page:Hans Christian Ørsted - The Soul in Nature - Horner - 1852.djvu/16

Rh lively communication with the philosophical and æsthetic excitements of the period. Fichte also, who in 1807 spent some time in Copenhagen in search of repose, formed one of this circle.

Oersted undertook another journey to Germany and France in 1812 and 1813. He remained a considerable time in Berlin, and, urged by Niebuhr, he there published his Views of the Chemical Laws of Nature, which in Paris he translated into French. We perceive by the title of the French work how his thoughts were already fixed in that one direction in which he was soon to make his name famous to the world by a great discovery, whose results are already proved to be of universal value. We need only here allude to the electro-magnetic telegraph, which probably without Oersted would not yet have existed.

On his return to Denmark in 1814 he married; by which marriage he had three sons and four daughters. His active participation in intellectual life involved him in a keen literary dispute with Grundtwig, in which he asserted with enthusiasm his conviction of the harmony of Reason with the law of Nature, and of the unfettered power of the judgment, in opposition to the ultramontane paradox of that author, who in an otherwise intellectual "world-chronicle" (welt-chronick), chose to employ the Bible, even in its most literal interpretation, as the exclusive standard of final decision on historical characters and events. In a university programme also for the year 1814 on "the technical language of the Gothic and German tongues employed in chemistry," Oersted published a series of ingenious hints in favour of a national scientific terminology emancipated from the Greek and French terminology hitherto employed, which has already for the most part become popular; and in a speech at a festival: (perhaps with allusion to the orthodox Grundtwig), he