Eureka: A Prose Poem — Edgar A. Poe, 1848 — reading text

their Hogs and Rams, that in spite of the eternal prating of their savans about roads to Truth, none of them fell, even by accident, into what we now so distinctly perceive to be the broadest, the straightest and most available of all mere roads — the great thoroughfare — the majestic highway of the Consistent ? Is it not wonderful that they should have failed to deduce from the works of God the vitally momentous consideration that a perfect consistency can be nothing but an absolute truth ? How plain — how rapid our progress since the late announcement of this proposi tion ! By its means, investigation has been taken out of THE UNIVERSE. 19 the hands of the ground-moles, and given as a duty, rather than as a task, to the true — to the only true thinkers — to the generally-educated men of ardent imagination. These latter — our Keplers — our Laplaces — ' speculate' — ' theorize' — these are the terms — can you not fancy the shout of scorn with which they would be received by our progenitors, were it possible for them to be looking over my shoulders as I write ? The Keplers, I repeat, speculate — theorize — and their theories are merely corrected — reduced — sifted — cleared, little by little, of their chaff of inconsistency — until at length there stands apparent an unencumbered Consist ency — a consistency which the most stolid admit — because it is a consistency — to be an absolute and an unquestion able Truth. " I have often thought, my friend, that it must have puz zled these dogmaticians of a thousand years ago, to deter mine, even, by which of their two boasted roads it is that the cryptographist attains the solution of the more compli cate cyphers — or by which of them Champollion guided mankind to those important and innumerable truths which, for so many centuries, have lain entombed amid the phone- tical hieroglyphics of Egypt. In especial, would it not have given these bigots some trouble to determine by which of their two roads was reached the most momentous and sub lime of all their truths — the truth — the fact of gravitation ? Newton deduced it from the laws of Kepler. Kepler ad mitted that these laws he guessed — these laws whose inves tigation disclosed to the greatest of British astronomers that principle, the basis of all (existing) physical principle, in going behind which we enter at once the nebulous kingdom 20 EUREKA. of Metaphysics. Yes ! — these vital laws Kepler guessed — that is to say, he imagined them. Had he been asked to point out either the Reductive or inductive route by which he attained them, his reply might have been — ' I know nothing about routes — but I do know the machinery of the Universe. Here it is. I grasped it with my soul — I reached it through mere dint of intuition. Alas, poor ignorant old man ! Could not any metaphysician have told him that what he called ' intuition ' was but the conviction resulting from deductions or inductions of which the processes were so shadowy as to have escaped his consciousness, eluded his reason, or bidden defiance to his capacity of expression ? How great a pity it is that some ' moral philosopher ' had not enlightened him about all this ! How it would have comforted him on his death-bed to know that, instead of having gone intuitively and thus unbecomingly, he had, in fact, proceeded decorously and legitimately — that is to say Hog-ishly, or at least Ram-ishly — into the vast halls where lay gleaming, untended, and hitherto untouched by mortal hand — unseen by mortal eye — the imperishable and price less secrets of the Universe ! " Yes, Kepler was essentially a theorist ; but this title, now of so much sanctity, was, in those ancient days, a de signation of supreme contempt. It is only now that men begin to appreciate that divine old man — to sympathize with the prophetical and poetical rhapsody of his ever- memorable words. For my part," continues the unknown correspondent, " I glow with a sacred fire when I even think of them, and feel that I shall never grow weary of their repetition : — in concluding this letter, let me have the THE UNIVERSE. 21 real pleasure of transcribing them once again : — ' / care not whether my work be read now or by posterity. I can afford to wait a century for readers when God himself has waited six thousand years for an observer. I triumph. I have stolen the golden secret of the Egyptians. I will indulge my sacred fury.' ' Here end my quotations from this very unaccountable and, perhaps, somewhat impertinent epistle ; and perhaps it would be folly to comment, in any respect, upon the chimerical, not to say revolutionary, fancies of the writer — whoever he is — fancies so radically at war with the well- considered and well-settled opinions of this age. Let us proceed, then, to our legitimate thesis, The Universe. This thesis admits a choice between two modes of dis cussion : — We may ascend or descend. Beginning at our own point of view — at the Earth on which we stand — we may pass to the other planets of our system — thence to the Sun — thence to our system considered collectively — and thence, through other systems, indefinitely outwards ; or, commencing on high at some point as definite as we can make it or conceive it, we may come down to the habita tion of Man. Usually — that is to say, in ordinary essays on Astronomy — the first of these two modes is, with cer tain reservation, adopted : — this for the obvious reason that astronomic &\ facts, merely, and principles, being the object, that object is best fulfilled in stepping from the known because proximate, gradually onward to the point where all certitude becomes lost in the remote. For my present pur pose, however, — that of enabling the mind to take in, as if from afar and at one glance, a distinct conception of the EUREKA. individual Universe — it is clear that a descent to small from great — to the outskirts from the centre (if we could establish a centre) — to the end from the beginning (if we could fancy a beginning) would be the preferable course, but for the difficulty, if not impossibility, of presenting, in this course, to the unastronomical, a picture at all compre hensible in regard to such considerations as are involved in quantity — that is to say, in number, magnitude and dis tance. Now, distinctness — intelligibility, at all points, is a pri mary feature in my general design. On important topics it is better to be a good deal prolix than even a very little obscure. But abstruseness is a quality appertaining to no subject per se. All are alike, in facility of comprehension, to him who approaches them by properly graduated steps. It is merely because a stepping-stone, here and there, is heedlessly left unsupplied in our road to the Differential Calculus, that this latter is not altogether as simple a thing as a sonnet by Mr. Solomon Seesaw. By way of admitting, then, no chance for misapprehen sion, 1 think it advisable to proceed as if even the more obvious facts of Astronomy were unknown to the reader. In combining the two modes of discussion to which I have referred, I propose to avail myself of the advantages pecu liar to each — and very especially of the iteration in detail which will be unavoidable as a consequence of the plan. Commencing with a descent, I shall reserve for the return upwards those indispensable considerations of quantity to which allusion has already been made. Let us begin, then, at once, with that merest of words, THE UNIVERSE. 23 "Infinity." This, like "God," "spirit," and some other expressions of which the equivalents exist in all languages, is by no means the expression of an idea — but of an effort at one. It stands for the possible attempt at an impossible conception. Man needed a term by which to point out the direction of this effort — the cloud behind which lay, forever invisible, the object of this attempt. A word, in fine, was demanded, by means of which one human being might put himself in relation at once with another human being and with a certain tendency of the human intellect. Out of this demand arose the word, " Infinity ; " which is thus the representative but of the thought of a thought. As regards that infinity now considered — the infinity of space — we often hear it said that " its idea is admitted by the mind — is acquiesced in — is entertained — on account of the greater difficulty which attends the conception of a limit." But this is merely one of those phrases by which even profound thinkers, time out of mind, have occasion ally taken pleasure in deceiving themselves. The quibble lies concealed in the word " difficulty." " The mind," we are told, " entertains the idea of limitless, through the greater difficulty which it finds in entertaining that of lim ited, space." Now, were the proposition but fairly put, its absurdity would become transparent at once. Clearly, there is no mere difficulty in the case. The assertion in tended, if presented according to its intention and without sophistry, would run thus : — " The mind admits the idea of limitless, through the greater impossibility of entertaining that of limited, space." It must be immediately seen that this is not a question 24 EUREKA. of two statements between whose respective credibilities — or of two arguments between whose respective validities — the reason is called upon to decide : — it is a matter of two conceptions, directly conflicting, and each avowedly im possible, one of which the intellect is supposed to be capa ble of entertaining, on account of the greater impossibility of entertaining the other. The choice is not made between two difficulties ; — it is merely fancied to be made between two impossibilities. Now of the former, there are degrees — but of the latter, none : — just as our impertinent letter- writer has already suggested. A task may be more or less difficult ; but it is either possible or not possible : — there are no gradations. It might be more difficult to overthrow the Andes than an ant-hill ; but it can be no more impossi ble to annihilate the matter of the one than the matter of the other. A man may jump ten feet with less difficulty than he can jump twenty, but the impossibility of his leap ing to the moon is not a whit less than