, are
prefigured. We must account him one of the chief of those prophetic
spirits who, by attempting to give phenomena a necessary root in ideas,
have breathed into Science a living soul. The new Transcendental
Anatomy,--the doctrine of Homologies,--the Embryologic scheme,
revealing that all animate forms are developed after one
archetype,--the splendid Nebular guess of Laplace,--the thought of the
Metamorphosis of Plants,--the attempts at profounder explanations of
Light and Colors,--the rising transcendentalism of Chemistry,--the
magnificent intuition of Correspondence, showing a grand unity of
design in the nodes of shells, the phyllotaxism of plants, and the
serialization of planets,--are all signs of the presence of a spirit
that is to usher in a new dispensation of Science, fraught with
divinest messages to the head and heart of man.
Kepler regarded Analogy as the soul of Science, and he has made it an
instrument of prophecy and power. Thus, he inferred from Analogy that
the sun turned on its axis, long before Galileo was able to direct his
telescope to the solar spots and so determine this rotation as an
actual fact. He anticipated a planet between Mars and Jupiter too small
to be seen; and his inference that the obliquity of the ecliptic was
decreasing, but would, after a long-continued diminution, stop, and
then increase again, afterwards acquired the sanction of demonstration.
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