t and eat roots, but let us be men instead of wood-chucks, and the
oak and the elm shall gladly serve us, though we sit in chairs of
ivory on carpets of silk.

10. This guiding identity runs through all the surprises and contrasts
of the piece, and characterizes every law. Man carries the world in
his head, the whole astronomy and chemistry suspended in a thought.
Because the history of nature is charactered in his brain, therefore
is he the prophet and discoverer of her secrets. Every known fact in
natural science was divined by the presentiment of somebody, before it
was actually verified. A man does not tie his shoe without recognizing
laws which bind the farthest regions of nature: moon, plant, gas,
crystal, are concrete geometry and numbers. Common sense knows its
own, and recognizes the fact at first sight in chemical experiment.
The common sense of Franklin,[510] Dalton,[511] Davy[512] and
Black,[513] is the same common sense which made the arrangements which
now it discovers.

11. If the identity expresses organized rest, the counter action runs
also into organization. The astronomers said,[514] "Give us matter,
and a little motion, and we will construct the universe. It is not
enough that we should have matter, we must also have a single impulse,
one shove to launch the mass, and generate the harmony of the
centrifugal and centripetal[515] forces. Once heave the ball from the
hand, and we can show how all this mighty order grew." "A very
unreasonable postulate," said the metaphysicians, "and a plain begging
of the question. Could you not prevail to know the genesis of
projection, as well as the continuation of it?" Nature, meanwhile, had
not waited for the discussion, but, right or wrong, bestowed the
impulse, and the balls rolled. It was no great affair, a mere push,
but the astronomers were right in making much of it, for there is no
end of the consequences of the act. That famous aboriginal push
propagates itself through all the balls of the system, and through
every atom of every ball, through all the races of creatures, and
through the history and performances of every individual. Exaggeration
is in the course of things. Nature sends no creature, no man into the
world, without adding a small excess of his proper quality. Given the
planet, it is still necessary to add the impulse; so, to every
creature nature added a little violence of direction in its proper
path, a shove to put it on its way; in every i