Ossa videlicet e pauxillis atque minutis
Ossibus sic et de pauxillis atque minutis
Visceribus viscus gigni, sanguenque creari
Sanguinis inter se multis coeuntibus guttis;
Ex aurique putat micis consistere posse
Aurum, et de terris terram concrescere parvis;
Ignibus ex igneis, humorem humoribus esse.
Lib. I. 835.

"The principle of all things entrails made
Of smallest entrails; bone, of smallest bone,
Blood, of small sanguine drops reduced to one;
Gold, of small grains; earth, of small sands compacted
Small drops to water, sparks to fire contracted:"

and which Malpighi had summed in his maxim, that "nature exists entirely
in leasts,"--is a favorite thought of Swedenborg. "It is a constant
law of the organic body, that large, compound, or visible forms exist
and subsist from smaller, simpler, and ultimately from invisible forms,
which act similarly to the larger ones, but more perfectly and more
universally, and the least forms so perfectly and universally, as to
involve an idea representative of their entire universe." The unities
of each organ are so many little organs, homogeneous with their
compound; the unities of the tongue are little tongues; those of the
stomach, little stomachs; those of the heart are little hearts. This
fruitful idea furnishes a key to every secret. What was too small for
the eye to detect was read by the aggregates; what was too large, by
the units. There is no end to his application of the thought. "Hunger
is an aggregate of very many little hungers, or losses of blood by the