Page:Henry Mulford Tichenor - A Guide to Emerson (1923).djvu/15

 12 its lessons in quarries and forges, in the smelting-pot and crucible, in ship-yards and dissecting rooms. … He anticipated much science of the nineteenth century; anticipated, in astronomy, the discovery of the seventh planet—but, unhappily, not also of the eighth; anticipated the views of modern astronomy in regard to the generation of the earth by the sun; in navigation, some important experiments and conclusions of later students; in chemistry, the atomic theory; in anatomy, the discoveries of Schlichting, Monro, and Wilson; and first demonstrated the office of the lungs. … A colossal soul, he lies vast abroad on his times, uncomprehended by them, and requires a long local distance to be seen. …

"The thoughts in which he lived, were the universality of each law in Nature; the Platonic doctrine of the scale or degrees; the version or conversion of each into the other; the fine secret that little explains large, and large little; the centrality of man in Nature, and the connection that subsists throughout all things; he saw that the human body was strictly universal, or an instrument through which the soul feeds and is fed by the whole of matter; so that he held, in exact antagonism to the skeptics, that 'the wiser a man is, the more will he be a worshipper of the Deity.' In short. he was a believer in the identity-philosophy, which he held not idly, as the dreamers of Berlin or Boston, but which he experimented with and established through years of labor, with the heart and strength of the rudest Viking that his rough Sweden ever sent to battle.