Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. II.djvu/155

Rh Aanden i Naturen; and that treatise which you gave me in Copenhagen, “Öfver Väsens enheten af Fôrnuftet i hela Verlds Altet,” that little work, which made me so infinitely happy, through the new, joyful light which it caused to arise before me, which brought the whole starry firmament nearer to my heart, and made each star burn with a light kindred to the light of my own spirit; that glorious, little, but large work, which accompanied me across the great sea from the Old World to the New, as one of my dearest treasures, I recognised in this your book, but amplified and rendered more perfect, as I had pre-conceived it capable of being. And I have been unspeakably delighted to recognise here as mature fruit the blossom of our conversation in Copenhagen; to see here my own earnest pre-vision of the subject, rendered yet more clearly and forcibly by your lucid and logical mind.

For what can be clearer, what more rational or more certain, than that when all the stars are governed by the same laws of revolution, when all of them are subject to the same light and the same shadow, and when we, in consequence of this, are able to study them, to discover their courses, &c., to calculate the place of the star and afterwards to find the star (le Verrier), then it is evident that the resemblance between the reason of man and the reason in the universe must go still farther, must embrace all spheres and in a similar manner. If we are necessarily to understand the terms, lines, circles, parabolas, &c., as applied to all those worlds, which we discern in space, as we understand their application to our earth, if their mathematical and physical laws are the same as those which are in force upon this earth, then is it clear that the sense of beauty cannot be essentially dissimilar, and that the moral reason must be fundamentally the same, must recognise the same principles, the same radical idea. You have clearly