Again, the study of the movements of the
universe has led us, from their complex phenomena, to the few simple
forces from which they flow. The falling apple and the rolling planet
are shown to obey the same tendency. The stick of sealing-wax which
draws a feather to it, is animated by the same impulse that convulses
the stormy heavens. These generalizations have simplified our view of
the grandest material operations, yet we do not feel that creative power
and wisdom have been shorn of any single ray, by the demonstrations of
Newton, or of Franklin. On the contrary, the larger the collection of
seemingly heterogeneous facts we can bring under the rule of a single
formula, the nearer we feel that we have reached towards the source
of knowledge, and the more perfectly we trace the little arc of
the immeasurable circle which comes within the range of our hasty
observations, at first like the broken fragments of a many-sided
polygon, but at last as a simple curve which encloses all we know, or
can know, of nature. To our own intellectual wealth, the gain is like
that of the over-burdened traveller, who should exchange hundred-weights
of iron for ounces of gold. Evanescent, formless, unstable, impalpable,
a fog of uncondensed experiences hovers over our consciousness like an
atmosphere of uncombined gases.
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