He had that subtile chemistry that
turns even failures to account, consumes them in its flaming ascent to
new reaches. After years of labor on his theory of Mars, he found it
failed in application to latitudes and longitudes "out of opposition."
Remorselessly he let his hypothesis go, and drew from his failure an
important inference, the first step towards emancipation from the
ancient prejudice of uniform, circular motion.
Such a genius for Analogy the world never before saw. The perception of
similitude, of correspondence, shot perpetual and prophetic in this
man's glances. To him had been opened the subtile secret, key to
Nature, that Man and the Universe are built after one pattern, and he
had faith to believe that the laws of his mind would unlock the
phenomena of the world.
The law of Analogy flows from the inherent harmonies of Nature. Of this
wise men have ever been intuitive. The eldest Scriptures express it. It
is in the Zend-Avesta, primal Japhetic utterance. It vivified that
subtile Egyptian symbolism. The early Greeks and the Mystics of
Alexandria knew it. Jamblicus reports of Pythagoras, that "he did not
procure for himself a thing of this kind through instruments or the
voice, but, by employing a certain inevitable divinity, and which it is
difficult to apprehend, he extended his ears and fixed his intellect in
the sublime symphonies of the world,--he alone hearing and
understanding, as it appears, the universal harmony and consonance of
the spheres and the stars that are moved through them, and which
produce a fuller and more intense melody than anything effected by
mortal sounds.
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