He had studied spars and metals to some purpose. His varied and solid
knowledge makes his style lustrous with points and shooting spicula
of thought, and resembling one of those winter mornings when the air
sparkles with crystals. The grandeur of the topics makes the grandeur
of the style. He was apt for cosmology, because of that native
perception of identity which made mere size of no account to him. In
the atom of magnetic iron, he saw the quality which would generate the
spiral motion of sun and planet.

The thoughts in which he lived were, the universality of each law in
nature; the Platonic doctrine of the scale or degrees; the version or
conversion of each into other, and so the correspondence of all the
parts; the fine secret that little explains large, and large, little;
the centrality of man in nature, and the connection that subsists
throughout all things: he saw that the human body was strictly
universal, or an instrument through which the soul feeds and is fed
by the whole of matter: so that he held, in exact antagonism to the
skeptics, that, "the wiser a man is, the more will he be a worshipper
of the Deity." In short, he was a believer in the Identity-philosophy,
which he held not idly, as the dreamers of Berlin or Boston, but which
he experimented with and established through years of labor, with the
heart and strength of the rudest Viking that his rough Sweden ever
sent to battle.

This theory dates from the oldest philosophers, and derives perhaps
its best illustration from the newest. It is this: that nature iterates
her means perpetually on successive planes. In the old aphorism, nature
is always self-similar. In the plant, the eye or germinative point
opens to a leaf, then to another leaf, with a power of transforming
the leaf into radicle, stamen, pistil, petal, bract, sepal, or seed.