To him, then, we listen, when, after having sounded every note in the wide gamut of Nature, after reading the story of life as it stands written in the long series of records reaching from Cambrian fossils to ovarian germs, after tracing the divine principle of order from the starlike flower at his feet to the flower-like circle of planets which spreads its fiery corolla, in obedience to the same simple law that disposes the leaves of the growing plant,--as our eminent mathematician tells us,--he relates in simple and reverential accents the highest truths he has learned in traversing God's mighty universe. For him, and such as him,--for us, too, if we read wisely,--the toiling slaves of science, often working with little consciousness of the full proportions of the edifice they are helping to construct, have spent their busy lives. All knowledge asserts its true dignity when once brought into relation with the grand end of knowledge,--a wider and deeper view of the significance of conscious and unconscious created being, and the character of its Creator.
We shall close this article with some remarks upon the great doctrines that dominate all the manifold subordinate thoughts which fill these crowded pages. The plan of creation, Mr. Agassiz maintains, "has not grown out of the necessary action of physical laws, but was the free conception of the Almighty Intellect, matured in his thought before it was manifested in tangible, external forms." Before Mr. Agassiz, before Linnaeus, before Aristotle, before Plato, Timaeus the Locrian spake; the original, together with the version we cite, is given with the Plato of Ficinus:--"Duas esse rerum omnium causas: mentem quidem, earum quae ratione quadam nascuntur, et necessitatem, earum quae existunt vi quadam, secundum corporum potentias et faculitates. Harrum rerum, id est, Natunae bonorum, optimum esse quoddam rerum optimarum principium, et Deum vocari.... Esse praeterea in hac Naturae universitate quiddam quod maneat et intelligible sit, rerum genitarum, quae quidem in perpetuo quodam mutationum fluxu versantur, exemplar, Ideam dici et mente comprehendi.... Permanet igitur mundus constanter talis qualis est creatus a Deo ... proponente sibi non exemplaria quaedam manuum opificio edita, sed illam Ideam intelligibilemque essentiam."--So taught the half-inspired pagan philosopher whom Plato took as his guide in his contemplations of Nature.