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slumbering on, hidden, as it were, in embryo, in the womb of medical art and lore. The physical, geographical, and astronomical observations of this whole period of gestation, form, it is true, a rich treasury of valuable materials, but they do not give us that profound knowledge, of which alone the physician’s penetrating glance into life and its constitution furnishes the first commencement and essay, however weak.

      With respect to natural science in general, and the possibility of our attaining to it, the case stands thus:—If nature be a living force—if the life which reigns within it be in a certain though still very remote degree akin to the life of man and the human soul—then is a knowledge of nature easily conceivable, and right well possible (for nothing but the like, or at least the similar and cognate, can be known by the like) even though this cognition may still be extremely defective, and at best can never be more than partial. But if nature be a dead, stony mass, as many seem to suppose, then would it be wholly inconceivable how this foreign mass of petrifaction could penetrate into our inmost Ego; then at least would there seem to be good grounds for the idealistic doubt whether ultimately this external world be any thing but a mere phantom, having no existence save in our own thoughts—the outward reflection of ourselves—the pure creation of our own Me.

      The question of innate ideas has been often mooted in philosophy. As, however, the essential functions and different acts of thought, together with its several notions, are, properly speaking, nothing but the natural division of man’s cogitative faculty, it is not on their account necessary to suppose such a preliminary intercalation of general ideas into the human mind. And as little necessary is it, in order to explain the universal belief in the existence of a Deity, to suppose that there is in the minds of all men an implanted idea of God; for this would lead to the purely arbitrary hypothesis, of that which is so difficult to conceive—the pre-existence of the spirit or soul of man. And as no created beings can have an idea of God, but those to whom He vouchsafes to communicate it, and to accord a knowledge of His existence, so can He bestow this privilege the very instant He pleases, without the intervention of any innate idea expressly for that end. And yet I am disposed, and not, I think, without reason, to assume that man, as at present constituted, does possess one, though only one, species of inborn ideas, viz., an innate idea of death. This, as a false root of life, and a true mental contagion, produces a dead cogitation, and is the origin of all dead and dead-born notions. For this idea of death, whether hereditary or inoculated in the soul, is, as its peculiar but fundamental error, transferred by the mind of man to every object with which it comes in contact. And thus, in man’s dead cogitation, the surrounding world and all nature appears to him a similar lifeless and inert mass, so long as sitting beneath this shadow of spiritual death, his mind [geist] has not sufficient strength to work its way out of its dark prison-house into the light. For not at all without higher aid, and even with it only slowly and tardily, does man discover that all that is really and naturally dead is within himself, or learn to recognize it for what it truly is, a something eminently null and naught. Another species of this false and dead conception of nature presents itself under the form of multiplicity. In this view nature is represented as forming something like a vast sandhill, where, apart from the pile they thus form together and their aggregation in it, the several grains are supposed to have no connection with each other; while, however, they are so diligently counted, as if every thing depended on their right enumeration. But through the sieve of such an atomistic, which would break up the universe into a number of separate and absolute individualities, the sand will ever run, however often and painfully man may strive to reckon or to measure the infinity of these grains of nature. Mathematical calculation and measuring hold the same place in physical science that is held in every living language by conjugating and declining, and other grammatical rules, which, in truth, are but a species of mathematical formulæ. In learning a foreign and especially a dead language, these are indispensable and necessary aids, which greatly promote and facilitate its acquisition; so also mathematics furnish indispensable helps and a most valuable organon for the cognition of nature. But with them alone man will never learn to understand even a word, not to talk of a whole proposition, out of nature’s strangely-sounding and most difficult hieroglyphics.

      Somewhat different is it, when man seeks to understand the true living geometry in nature herself, i.e., attempts to discover the place which the circle and eclipse (passing from these up to the spheres in their sidereal orbits), or which the triangle, the square, the hexagon, and so forth, assume in the scale of its creations—or when, in a similar spirit, he investigates and ascertains the really dominant rule in the arithmetic of life; those numbers which the physician observes in the periodic developments of life, and which, in the fluctuating states of an abating and heightening malady, enable him, under certain conditions, to predict the moment of its crisis. Of a still higher kind is that spiritual, we might almost call it divine chronology, which, in universal history, marks out definite epochs of the mental development of the human race, and traces therein the influence of certain grades of life, or ages of the world, and the alternating phases of disease in whole communities, and those decisive moments and great critical emergencies in which God Himself appears as the healing Physician and Restorer of life. It was, in all probability, in reference to such an arithmetic, or in some similar sense, that Pythagoras taught that numbers are, or contain the essence of things. For such an arithmetic of life and geometry of nature do afford a positive cognition and a real knowledge. As commonly understood, however, mathematics are nothing more than a formal science—in other words, they are simply a scientific organon, rather than a science. But now, if nature be not regarded as dead, but living, who can doubt that it—or, as we are now speaking of man’s nearest neighbor—that the earth is akin to man? Was he not formed out of the dust of the earth, and is he not therefore the son, nay, in truth, the first-born of the earth?—does he not receive from it food and nourishment? and when the irrevocable summons goes forth from above, does he not give back again to its bosom the earthly tabernacle of his flesh? Do not chemists tell us that the principal constituent of the purest wheat-corn has a great affinity to the substance of man’s blood? and does not the blood, moreover, derive one of its ingredients from iron—the principal among the metals of the earth? And are not gold and other metallic substances either wholesome medicines or deadly poisons? And is there not also an inexhaustible store of both in the wonderful varieties of herbs and plants? Do not invigorating and healing springs burst from numberless rocks and fissures of the earth? Is not—to speak only of the heavenly bodies nearest to and immediately connected with our globe—is not the sun’s heat so specifically different from every other kind of warmth, the quickener of all that lives and moves, and for man under a milder clime, as it were, a soft renovating bath? And is not the other and lesser light—earth’s mighty satellite and companion, the moon—the cause of all those changes in the weather and atmosphere, which, from the earliest times, have been acknowledged to be most serviceable and highly beneficial to agriculture? Is not the great pulse of the ocean, in its ebb and flow, measured by it, as well as many periods, of the development of life? And is it not, when its operation is too powerful or violently exciting, the cause of a peculiar disease among men? As, therefore, the musical unisons in the melodious songs of birds, both find and wake a concordant echo in the heart of man, so, too, in a larger scale, the blood-soul of man, with its living pulsation and organic sensibility, is most nearly akin to and sympathizes with the earth and the whole earthly frame. And is not, in all probability, this sympathetic influence between the earth and man reciprocal? Must not, for instance, the respiration of nine hundred millions of human beings have affected the atmosphere? Has not the very air degenerated with the human race, and like it become corrupt and deteriorated? Are not certain pestilential diseases propagated by the air alone, being carried in fixed telluric directions, without material contact or pollution? And if, in answer to the inference which we would draw from these facts, any one should sit down to calculate the number of cubic miles in the atmospheric belt, and argue that the breath and evaporation from ever so many myriads of human beings would be insufficient to have any effect thereon, we might easily retort upon him the equally vast reckoning of the millions of seconds which make up a hundred and more generations, and by which these respirations must be counted. But, however this may be, it does appear that the air must, in primitive times, have been far more pure and balsamic, and more vital and more nutritive, than at present. For before the Flood men required neither flesh nor wine to recruit their strength, and yet, in duration of life and bodily vigor, and above all in energy of

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