and not in
the slighest degree to _itself_. In this view, when the irradiation
shall have returned into its source--when the reaction shall be
completed--the gravitating principle will no longer exist. And, in fact,
astronomers, without at any time reaching the idea here suggested, seem
to have been approximating it, in the assertion that "if there were but
one body in the Universe, it would be impossible to understand how the
principle, Gravity, could obtain:"--that is to say, from a consideration
of Matter as they find it, they reach a conclusion at which I
deductively arrive. That so pregnant a suggestion as the one just quoted
should have been permitted to remain so long unfruitful, is,
nevertheless, a mystery which I find it difficult to fathom.

It is, perhaps, in no little degree, however, our propensity for the
continuous--for the analogical--in the present case more particularly for
the symmetrical--which has been leading us astray. And, in fact, the
sense of the symmetrical is an instinct which may be depended upon with
an almost blindfold reliance. It is the poetical essence of the
Universe--_of the Universe_ which, in the supremeness of its symmetry, is
but the most sublime of poems. Now symmetry and consistency are
convertible terms:--thus Poetry and Truth are one. A thing is consistent
in the ratio of its truth--true in the ratio of its consistency. _A
perfect consistency, I repeat, can be nothing but an absolute truth._ We
may take it for granted, then, that Man cannot long or widely err, if he
suffer himself to be guided by his poetical, which I have maintained to
be his truthful, in being his symmetrical, instinct. He must have a
care, however, lest, in pursuing too heedlessly the superficial symmetry
of forms and motions, he leave out of sight the really essential
symmetry of the principles which determine and control them.

That the stellar bodies would finally be merged in one--that, at last,
all would be drawn into the substance of _one stupendous central orb
already existing_--is an idea which, for some time past, seems, vaguely
and indeterminately, to have held possession of the fancy of mankind. It
is an idea, in fact, which belongs to the class of the _excessively
obvious_. It springs, instantly, from a superficial observation of the
cyclic and seemingly _gyrating_, or _vorticial_ movements of those
individual portions of the Universe which come most immediately and most
closely under our obser