The physical history of the universe must not, therefore, be confounded with
the 'Encyclopedias of the Natural Sciences', as they have hitherto been
compiled, and whose title is as vague as their limits are ill defined. In
the work before us, partial facts will be considered only in relation to the
whole.
p 56
The higher the point of view, the greater is the necessity for a systematic
mode of treating the subject in language at once animated and picturesque.
But thought and language have ever been most intimately allied. If
language, by its originality of structure and its native richness, can, in
its delineations, interpret thought with grace and clearness, and if, by its
happy flexibility, it can paint with vivid truthfulness the objects of the
external world, it reacts at the same time upon thought, and animates it, as
it were, with the breath of life. It is this mutual reaction which makes
words more than mere signs and forms of thought; and the beneficent
influence of a language is most strikingly manifested on its native soil,
where it has sprung spontaneously from the minds of the people, whose
character it embodies. Proud of a country that seeks to concentrate her
strength in intellectual unity, the writer recalls with delight the
advantages he has enjoyed in being permitted to express his thoughts in his
native language; and truly happy is he who, in attempting to give a lucid
exposition of the great phenomena of the universe, is able to draw from the
depths of a language, which, through the free exercise of thought, and by
the effusions of creative fancy, has for centuries past exercised so
powerful an influence over the destinies of man.
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