"In what follows," writes he, introducing a long
string of hypotheses, the fallacy of which he had already discovered,
"let the reader pardon my credulity, whilst working out all these
matters by my own ingenuity. For it is my opinion that the occasions by
which men have acquired a knowledge of celestial phenomena are not less
admirable than the discoveries themselves." His tentatives, failures,
leadings, his glimpses and his glooms, those aberrations and guesses
and gropings generally so scrupulously concealed, he exposes them all.
From the first flashing of a discovery, through years of tireless toil,
to when the glorious apparition emerges full-orbed and resplendent, we
follow him, becoming party to the process, and sharing the ejaculations
of exultation that leap to his lips. Seventeen years were required for
the discovery of the harmonic law, that the squares of the times of the
planetary revolutions are proportional to the cubes of their mean
distances; and no tragedy ever equalled in affecting intensity the
account he has written of those Promethean years. What rays does he let
into the subtile paths where the spirit travels in its interrogations
of Nature! We should say there was more of what there is of essential
in metaphysics, more of the structural action of the human mind, in his
books, than in the concerted introspection of all the psychologists.
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