"Who can be sure to find its true degree, Magister magnus in igne shall he be."
Antique and intuitive nations—Indians, Egyptians, Greeks—sought a solution of this august mystery in the doctrines of Transmigration and Anamnesis or Reminiscence. Nothing is whereto man is not kin. He knows all worlds and histories by virtue of having himself travelled the mystic spiral descent. Awaking through memory, the processes of his mind repeat the processes of the visible Kosmos. His unfolding is a hymn of the origination of the world.
Nature and man having sprung from the same spiritual source, a perfect agreement subsists between the phenomena of the world and man's mentality. This is necessary to the very conception of Science. If the laws of reason did not exist in Nature, we should vainly attempt to force them upon her: if the laws of Nature did not exist in our reason, we should not be able to comprehend them.[1] There is a saying reported of Zoroaster, and, coming from the deeps of fifty centuries, still authentic and intelligible, that "the congruities of material forms to the laws of the soul are divine allurements." Ever welcome is the perception of this truth,—as the sublime audacity of Paracelsus, that "those who would understand the course of the heavens above must first of all recognize the heaven in man"; and the affirmation, that "the laws of Nature are the same as the thoughts within us: the laws of motion are such as are required by our understanding." It remains to say that Kepler, too, had intuition of this lofty thought. At the conclusion of his early work, "The Prodromus Dissertationum Cosmographicarum," he wrote,—"As men enjoy dainties at the dessert, so do wise souls gain a taste for heavenly things when they ascend from their college to the universe and there look around them. Great Artist of the World! I look with wonder on the works of Thy hands, constructed after five regular forms, and in the midst the sun, the dispenser of light and life. I see the moon and stars strewn over the infinite field of space. Father of the World! what moved Thee thus to exalt a poor, weak little creature of earth so high that he stands in light a far-ruling king, almost a god?—for he thinks Thy thoughts after Thee."
[Footnote 1: OERSTED: Soul in Nature.]
It is impossible not to feel freer at the accession of so much power as these laws bring us. They carry farther on the bounds of humanity. The stars are the eternal monitions of spirituality. Who can estimate how much man's thoughts have been colored by these golden kindred? It seems as though it were but required to show man space,—space, space, space,—there is that in him will fill and pass it. There is that in the celestial prodigies—in gulfs of Time and Space—that seems to mate the greed of the soul. There is that greed in the soul to pass through worlds and ages,—through growths, griefs, desires, processes, spheres,—to travel the endless highways,—to pass and resume again. O Heavens, you are but a splendid fable of the elder mind! Centripetal and centrifugal are in man, too, and primarily; and an aspiring soul will ascend into the sweeps and circles, and pass swift and devouring through baffling intervals and steep-down strata of galaxies and stars.
The thought that overarches the centuries with firmamental sweep is the thought of the Ensemble. To this all has led along,—but the disclosures of Astronomy especially. The discovery of the earth's revolution, at once transporting the stars to distances outside of all telluric connection, broke the old spell, and replaced the petty provincialism of the earth as the All-Centre by the vast, sublime conception of the Universe. Laplace has pointed this out, showing how to the fantastic and enervating notion of a universe arranged for man has succeeded the sound and vivifying thought of man discovering, by a positive exercise of his intelligence, the general laws of the world, so as to be able to modify them for his own good, within certain limits. Dawning prophetic on modern times, the thought of the Ensemble holds the seeds of new humanitary growths. This is the vast similitude that binds together the ages,—that balances creeds, colors, eras. Through Nature, man, forms, spirit, the eternal conspiracy works and weaves. This is the water of spirituality. All is bound up in the Divine Scheme. The Divine Scheme encloses all.
PLEASURE-PAIN.
"Das Vergnügen ist Nichts als ein höchst angenehmer Schmerz."—HEINRICH
HEINE
I.
Full of beautiful blossoms
Stood the tree in early May:
Came a chilly gale from the sunset,
And blew the blossoms away,—