ABSTRACT
This is one of the most remarkable books we have read in a long time. As a poem, it has the quality of a bold and exhaustless force of imagination; as an essay on the Material and Spiritual Universe, which it would more properly be termed, it is marked with the keenest analysis and the most singular ingenuity. The greater part of the work, with the central Idea, around which the author's veiling web of argument is so skillfully twined, was contained in a lecture on ‘The Universe’, which he delivered last Winter, in the City. — It is here wrought out into a more perfect shape, with some additional illustrations. The most powerful mental passion,(we know not how else to express it,) to which the highest condition of Man's nature is subject, has been seized upon by the author and ministered to with the most startling propositions which a reasoning imagination ever conceived. The seriousness, and we doubt not sincerity, with which he asserts their truth, adds to the effect he desires to produce, and although the soul, from its very knowledge of abstract truth, (which he regards as superior to any logical demonstration,) rejects a great deal of his theory, there is no part of it which does not chain the attentive and excite the inquiring. The tenacity with which he pursues the subject along the farthest brink of finite knowledge, and the daring with which he throws aside all previous systems of philosophers and theologians, constitute the chief merit of the book. The preface is terse and striking, and the dedication, to Alexander von Humboldt, exceedingly appropriate. We do not admire, however, the attempt at humor, in his description of the contents of a bottle floating in the Mare tenebrarum; it degrades the high aim with which the work sets out. His theory of the Universe is too intricate to be told in a few lines, and we will not do injustice to it by a partial description; but we will give the following wild conjecture with which the book concludes, recommending all who take an interest in the subject, to procure and read the whole of it:
[Quotes Eureka,‘from On the Universal agglomeration and dissolution’ to ‘seems,because it is’,Works,16, 311–12.]
