It is conceivable that the form of every natural being is a full report of its constitution and use, but as yet, tedious and dubious chemical analysis, observation, and experiment are our directory to the hidden truth. In some things it is otherwise. We know perfectly a passion or emotion, and the meaning of the attitudes, colors, and forms of limb, person and feature which denote them; and the interior qualities of texture, also, as they are intimated to the sight and touch, lead us without reasoning, to definitive judgments of human character. Of animals, in their degree, we receive similar impressions and with equal conviction, but we know so little more about these things, than that we know them, that we can make no advantage of such knowledge beyond its most immediate purpose in our commerce with the living beings which surround us.
It remains, therefore, for mind to explore the philosophy of form, that all which lies implied in it, waiting but still undiscovered, may come out into use, and all that we instinctively possess of it may take a scientific method, and so render the service of a law thoroughly understood.
The principle gives us familiar aid every day, yet without revealing its own secret, in physiognomy, painting, statuary, architecture, and elocution. It is obeyed in all the impersonations of metaphor, fable and myth; it is active every instant in the creations of fancy, and supplies, so to speak, the material for all the structures of thought—ruling universally in the earth, and fashioning and peopling the heavens. To the most delicate movements of the imagination it gives a corresponding embodiment of beauty; and it helps, as well, to realize the monstrous mixtures of man and beast occurring in human character by the answering monstrosity of centaur, syren, sphinx, and satyr. The old Greek theology held that the eternal Divinity made all things out of an eternal matter, after the forms of eternal, self-subsisting patterns; a statement, in its utmost depth beyond the discovery of human faculties, certainly, but not too strong to express the universal prevalence of this law in the creation. To the human intellect all things must exist in space, bounded and determined by figure appropriate to the subject; in fact, we can conceive of nothing except under such conditions; and our doctrine but refers this necessity of mind to a primordial necessity of being, ranking it among the harmonies of existence, as an adaptation of sense, thought, and feeling to the correspondent truth in the constitution of the universe.
E.
ON THE DEATH OF GENERAL TAYLOR.
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BY R. T. CONRAD.
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Quid me mortuum miserum vocas, qui te sum multo felicior? aut quid acerbi mihi putas contigisse?