"Nature," as Schelling remarks in his poetic
discourse on art, "is not an inert mass; and to him who can comprehend her
vast sublimity, she reveals herself as the creative force of the universe --
before all time, eternal, ever active, she calls to life all things, whether
perishable or imperishable."
By uniting, under one point of view, both the phenomena of our own globe and
those presented in the regions of space, we embrace the limits of the
science of the 'Cosmos', and convert the physical history of the globe into
the physical history of the universe, the one term being modeled upon that
of the other. This science of the Cosmos is not, however, to be regarded as
a mere encyclopedic aggregation of the most important and general results
that have been collected together from special branches of knowledge. These
results are nothing more than the materials for a vast edifice, and their
combination can not constitute the physical history of the world, whose
exalted part it is to show the simultaneous action and the connecting links
of the forces which pervade the universe. The distribution of organic types
in different climates and at different elevations -- that is to say, the
geography of plants and animals -- differs as widely from botany and
descriptive zoology as geology does from mineralogy, properly so called.
Pages:
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117