Text: Curtis M. Brooks, “The Cosmic God: Science and the Creative Imagination in Eureka,” Poe as Literary Cosomologer (1975), pp. 60-66 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 60, continued:]

Like Keats, Poe resented science when it tended to destroy the mythic and imaginative world of the poet. But, unlike Keats who had proposed a toast of “confusion to mathematics” at Benjamin Haydon's “immortal dinner,”(1) he was strongly inclined toward the eighteenth-century scientific world-view. Despite Coleridge's warning that poetry was threatened by the “mistaken and unbounded metaphysical pretensions of atomism and mechanism,”(2) he clung to his Lucretian vision of matter and motion. That he would accept no alternative to it is indicated by his dismissal of German idealism and traditional metaphysics. While still at West Point, he lamented that Coleridge's mind ‘'should be buried in Metaphysics, and, like Nyctanthes, waste its perfume upon the night alone.”(3) Since for Poe philosophy was a forbidden tree of knowledge, in Eureka he speaks of secrets which God did not intend for man to probe: “The class of terms to which ‘Infnity’ belongs — the class representing thoughts of thought . . . the Deity has not designed . . . to be solved.” He disdained those “who, busying themselves in attempts at the unattainable, acquire very easily, by dint of the jargon they emit . . . a kind of cuttlefish reputation for profundity.”(4) Thus Poe, without assistance from Platonic or idealistic thought, set out to reconcile his mechanistic universe (matter) with his poetry (spirit) — that is, to convert Keat's disjunctive, “either poetry or science” into the conjunctive “both poetry and science.”(5)

He took the first step with the publication of a “prose poem,” The Island of the Fay, in Graham's Magazine for June, 1841,(6) wherein we find several specific tendencies in the direction of Eureka. First, he delights in thinking of the universe as a living organism, regarding it as “one vast animate and sentient whole.”(7) Second, he also admired physico-theological demonstrations of design in nature, especially when they involved considerations of mathematical forms, the “most perfect and inclusive” of which is the sphere: “The cycles in which the stars move are those best adapted for the evolution, without collision, of the greatest possible number of bodies. The forms of those bodies are accurately such as, within a given surface, to include the greatest possible amount of matter; — while the surfaces themselves are so disposed as to accommodate a denser population than could be accommodated on the same surfaces otherwise arranged.”(8) Finally, unlike the physico-theologians, Poe envisioned God operating from a central position within the universe: “As we find cycle within cycle without end, — yet all revolving around one far-distant center which is the Godhead, may we not analogically suppose in the same manner, life within life, the less within the greater, and all within the Spirit Divine?”(9) Poe is clearly fascinated with the idea of God as a geometrical center, though he has not found a satisfactory way of relating Him to matter.

The Island of the Fay rhapsodically celebrates the beauty of nature and the order of the universe which physical science reveals. Yet, as originally published in Graham's Magazine, it was prefaced by the “Sonnet — to Science,”(10) in which Poe had expressed, as had Keats in Lamia, his contempt for cold, scientific analysis — [page 61:] that vulture which preys on the poet's heart and will not leave him “in his wandering / To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies.”(11) A parenthetical remark, however, presents the possibility of reconciling the poet with science: “Our telescopes, and our mathematical investigations assure us on every hand — notwithstanding the cant of the more ignorant of the priesthood — that space, and therefore bulk, is an important consideration in the eyes of the Almighty.”(12) Not science, then, but the “more ignorant of the priesthood, “its positivist interpreters like Jeremy Bentham and utilitarian writers for the Westminster Review, have “torn the Naiad from her flood.”(13)

With Mesmeric Revelation, first published in the Columbian Magazine in August, 1844,(14) Poe leaves the mythic world of the Fay to speculate on how such a world is possible; how atoms of matter may dream upon God, whether those atoms be of poets or of planets. Here, as in Eureka, the cosmological visions are prefaced by a discussion of the limitations of abstract reasoning and an explanation of the swifter and more mysterious operations of the mind that bypass mere logic. Vankirk, who reveals the atomic structure of the universe while hypnotized, explains that “abstractions may amuse and exercise, but take no hold of the mind.”(15) He tells us that “the mesmeric exaltation enables me to perceive a train of ratiocination which, in my abnormal existence, convinces, but which, in full accordance with the mesmeric phenomena, does not extend, except through its effect, into my normal condition. In sleep-waking, the reasoning and its conclusion — the cause and the effect — are present together.”(16)

The priority of matter in Poe's thought is immediately obvious in Mesmeric Revelation. When Vankirk is asked, “Is not God immaterial, “he answers: “There is no immateriality; it is a mere word. That which is not matter, is not at all”(17) The idea of a living hierarchy (“life within life”) mentioned in The Island of the Fay is here explained in terms of “the law of impulsion and permeation.” Matter exists in gradations of fineness. The atoms of the atmosphere, for example, are larger than the atoms of electricity which are, again, larger than the atoms of ether. Substances made up of smaller atoms can “permeate” matter composed of grosser atoms. Larger atoms, however, “impel” the smaller ones. We behold a reciprocity of impulsion and permeation in the universe wherein grosser atoms impel smaller ones while being permeated by them in turn. The rarefaction of matter continues until one reaches the logical extreme of “unparticled matter” — God, who manifests Himself as spirit. Here the law of impulsion and permeation breaks down. The “unparticled matter, “instead of being impelled, itself impels all matter.(18)

Poe saw two possibilities for the destiny of those bits of unparticled matter that had split off from God to become human souls. Either they must return to God, or they somehow must remain individualized. Poe embraces the latter theory, explaining that man “will never be bodiless, “for he lives in a rudimental body here on earth and, in the afterlife, takes with him an ultimate body which has been imprisoned in the rudimental one.(19) Although he later adopts the idea of a cyclical emanation and return of God, at this stage he regards that possibility as unthinkable because “man thus divested would be God — would be unindividualized. But he can never be thus divested — at least never will be — else we must imagine an action of God returning upon itself — a purposeless and futile action.”(20)

Here, then, is an “atomic” explanation of the life of spirit. Mind is unparticled matter in quiescence; thought is its motion. In The Island of the Fay, poets and planets dream, mountains “watch proudly, “forests “sigh in uneasy slumbers, “and waters “silently smile, “because God, as unparticled matter, informs all creation with life. Yet, unlike the God-Star in The Island of the Fay, this diffused God is unable to assume a place in the geometrical center of existence. Without such a center there can be no design in the motion of unparticled matter and hence, since thought is defined as this motion itself, no ultimate purpose either to the dreams of poets or the hypotheses of scientists.

The logic that led Poe from Mesmeric Revelation to Eureka begins with the premise that scientific theories can be beautiful as well as true and that artistic constructs can be true as well as beautiful. If all thought consists of the motions of unparticled matter, then poems and theories must be related as species of this motion. Science and art also share a common concern with form; and the imagination, as that faculty which enables us to apprehend it, should be central in the creative processes of both artists and scientists. Poe tells us that “the mathematics afford no more absolute demonstrations than the sentiment of his Art yields to the artist. He not only believes, but positively knows, that such and such apparently arbitrary arrangements of matter.. .constitute.. .true Beauty.”(21) The form of the universe, the arrangements and motions of matter, should be such as to give purpose and meaning to the motions of unparticled matter, and hence to human thought and existence. To reconcile science and poetry, Poe knew he would have to show that [page 62:] scientific truth could be reached through the artist's sense of form. He once described the imagination using metaphors from chemistry: “The Pure Imagination chooses, from either Beauty or Deformity only the most combinable things hitherto uncombined; the compound, as a general rule, partaking in the character of beauty or sublimity, in the ratio of the respective beauty or sublimity of the things combined — which are themselves still to be considered as atomic — that is to say, as previous combinations. But, as often analogously happens in physical chemistry, so not unfrequently does it occur in this chemistry of the intellect, that the admixture of two elements results in something that has nothing of the qualities of one of them, or even nothing of the qualities of either.”(22) Hence, we may infer that if the artist choose as his subjects the most sublime objects apprehended by the mind — the facts, laws, and theories of mathematical physics and astronomy — and further, if he fuse these brittle realities into an artistic whole with the pure white heat of the imagination, then this “chemistry of the intellect” would yield a vision of the universe in its individuality, that is, as greater than and different from the mere sum of its planets, stars, and atoms. Insofar as pure imagination created this vision, the power of artistic insight would be vindicated: the artist can reach immediate scientific truth, overtaking the plodding experimenter, leaping across centuries of his slow toil. Such thoughts as these lay behind Poe's headnote to Eureka: “I offer this book of Truths, not in its character of Truth-Teller, but for the Beauty that abounds in Truth; constituting it true To these I present the composition as an Art Product alone: let us say as a Romance; or, if I be not urging too lofty a claim, as a Poem.”(23) As in Mesmeric Revelation, Poe prefaces his speculation with a “discourse on method” explaining the source of the cosmic visions which are to ensue. His prefatory remarks in Eureka assert his independence, as a poet and dreamer, of the sluggish “methods of science.” At the same time, he explains that the true scientific spirit is without method; the most revolutionary advances are made by men of imagination and intuition.(24)

In this whimsical prologue, Poe airily thumbs his nose at toughminded logicians who obstinately seek to relegate all human knowledge to the narrow confines of barren and dogmatic systems. His ridicule has a peculiar impertinence. He says that he has discovered a letter, “corked in a bottle and floating on the Mare Tenebrarum — an ocean well described by the Nubian geographer, Ptolemy Hephestion, but little frequented in modern days unless by Transcendentalists and some other divers for crochets.”(25) The letter supposedly dates from 2848 A. D., and its writer is amazed that “it is scarcely more than eight or nine hundred years ago since the metaphysicians first consented to relieve the people of the singular fancy that there exist but two practicable roads to Truth.”(26) These roads are the “Mode of Aries” and the “Mode of Hog.” The philosophers referred to in these horrible puns are, of course, Aristotle and Bacon, and the methods identified with them are deduction and induction, respectively. Because of the strong infatuation with “Hog” (i.e., with induction and experimental science), “a virtual stop was put to all thinking.. .no man dared utter a truth for which he felt himself indebted to his soul alone. It mattered not whether the truth was even demonstrably such; for the dogmatizing philosophers of that epoch regarded only the road by which it professed to have been attained. The end, with them, was a point of no moment whatever: — ‘the means!’ they vociferated ‘Let us look at the means!’ — and if, on scrutiny of the means, it was found to come neither under the category Hog, nor under the category Aries (which means ram), why, then the savants went no farther, but, calling the thinker a fool and branding him a ‘theorist,’ would never, thenceforward, have anything to do either with him or with his truths.”(27) We are reminded of the conclusion to David Hume's Enquiry: “We take in our hand any volume; of divinity, or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames. For it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.”(28) Hume has attempted, in Poe's words, “a pompous and infatuate proscription of all other roads to truth.”(29)

Continuing his assault on logic, Poe boldly announces that “no such things as axioms ever existed or can possibly exist at all.” Axioms here mean propositions which are “universally and necessarily” true, such as “ex nihilo nihil fit,” “a thing cannot act where it is not, ““there cannot be antipodes, “and “darkness cannot proceed from light.”(30) Poe must have been reading Mill's refutation of Whewell's theory that axioms are a priori truths.(31) Mill objects: “Now I cannot but wonder that so much stress should be laid on the circumstance of inconceivableness, when there is ample experience to show, that our capacity or incapacity of conceiving a thing has very little to do with the possibility of the thing itself; but is in truth very much an affair of accident, and depends on the past history and habits of our own minds.”(32) Poe turns Mill's argument against him by asking upon what grounds Mill accepts the law of contradiction as an axiom: ‘”A tree,’ Mr. Mill asserts, ‘must be either a tree or not a tree.’ Very well: and now let me ask him, Why? To this little query there is but one response — ! defy any man living to invent a second. The sole answer is this: — ‘Because we find it impossible to conceive that a tree can be anything else than a tree or not a tree.’”(33) [page 63:]

When Poe writes, “there is, in this world at least, no such thing as demonstration,”(34) he means that what is ordinarily called “demonstration” can never by itself produce conviction. Only the apprehension of perfect form can do this.(35) This is why he asserts that the soul's true path, if it must have one, is the ‘majestic highway of the Consistent. ‘Is it not wonderful,’ the letter-writer goes on to say, that they should lave failed to deduce from the works of God the vitally momentous consideration that a perfect consistency can be nothing but an absolute truth?’”(36)

Poe has been criticized for abandoning the law of contradiction and then adopting the criterion of consistency.(37) Consistency in a logical system, of course, means simply that there is no theorem whose negation is also a theorem. But this is not what Poe means. Rather, he has in mind an observable order of nature — a consistency which we should be able to “deduce from the works of God.” Again, Poe's debt to physico-theology becomes apparent.(38) But he is not interested in teleological arguments so much as he is m teleology, in the design of nature. From the contemplation of this design he derives his own idea of truth is consistency of form. Hence, it is not the abstract consistency of a logical system that Poe is concerned with, but the concrete consistency of a unified work of art cleared of all that offends the sense of beauty and the instinct for order.

In his view that the workings of the cosmos can be grasped through an instinct for order, Poe is close to Kepler.(39) The letter-writer in Eureka passionately reminisces that “Kepler admitted that these laws he guessed — these laws whose investigation disclosed to the greatest of British astronomers that principle, the basis of all (existing) physical principle, in going behind what we enter at once into the nebulous kingdom of Metaphysics. Yes’ — these vital laws Kepler guessed — that is to say, he imagined them. Had he been asked to point out either the deductive or inductive route by which he attained them, his reply might have been: “1 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 by mere dint of intuition.”(40)

Poe defines intuition twice in Eureka, in the fictitious letter and again in the main body of the essay. “Intuition is but the conviction arising from those inductions or deductions of which the processes are so shadowy as to escape our consciousness, elude our reason, or defy our capacity of expression.”(41) We may think of this as an atomic theory of intuition: the “atoms” of inductive and deductive thought are so quick and so rarefied that they escape the grosser atoms of perception. But the intuition emerges as something more than the mere sum of its parts, something greater than the logical atoms which compose it. Indeed, intuition may achieve heavenly truth with earthly logic, just as the imagination may achieve unearthly beauty through a combination of earth's forms .

The cosmic truths in Eureka, then, like those in Mesmeric Revelation, have their mysterious source. The mind generates fancies too fleeting to impel the slower, heavier atoms of purely discursive thought. In rare moments, we have access to all the shapeless energies — the thoughts of thoughts, dreams within dreams, shadows of shadows — out of which emerges the total world of thought and human creation: poetry and science. Intuition conjures the picture; thought suggests how the picture may be communicated to others; intuition furnishes the swift insight into form; thought is the process of deliberately representing that insight “through a chain of graduated impressions.”(42)

Eureka is Poe's last and best answer to the question which had so haunted him: How is it possible that atoms should dream and think, and what, ultimately, do these dreams and thoughts come to? Poe had established in Mesmeric Revelation that every thought is a motion, every purpose of mind a configuration of matter: teleology in its visible manifestation must therefore be geometrical order. It follows that the universe, a sublimely ordered pattern of matter and motion, is a process of thought.(43) Poe’ s investigations of logic led him to see truth as artistic oneness. As thought moves toward truth, therefore, matter moves toward unity. Geometrical unity is symbolized by a sphere — the controlling image in Poe's long “poem”.(44)

In the beginning, according to Eureka, an undifferentiated primordial particle of matter sprang into existence through the power of divine volition. It had one state, that of absolute simplicity, and one property, oneness. The present diffusion of matter leads us to assume that from the first instant of its existence the particle began to irradiate matter into the surrounding space. This irradiated matter then condensed into stars and planets. Matter is formed of atoms which differ only in shape and in distance from the point of origin of the primordial particle; the observed properties of matter are thus established on a purely geometrical basis.(45) [page 64:]

Since the original particle existed in a state of absolute irrelation (implied by its absolute simplicity), its evolution has but one direction: toward the more complex, the more heterogeneous, its goal being utmost possible multiplicity of relation.”(46) So that complexity or heterogeneity can manifest itself, God intervenes with a repulsive force, spiritual in nature, to prevent the coalescence of clusters of atoms . In its various forms, this force presents itself as heat, magnetism or electricity; at a higher level of complexity (and hence at a later stage of evolution), spirit manifests itself as vitality, consciousness and thought. All purely spiritual effects are thus hierarchical; they proceed “in the ratio of the heterogeneous.”(47)

Only two principles exist: attraction and repulsion. Since all perception and thought is derived ultimately from the spiritual force of repulsion, all our experience of the physical world is but an interaction of attraction and repulsion. What we call “matter” is but this interaction: i.e., “attraction and repulsion are matter.”(48)

The principle of attraction is experienced as gravity. It is a first reaction to the primal force of creation which sent matter radiating outward from the original particle. Since every particle of matter in the universe attracts every other particle, gravity is seen as a tendency of all matter toward the original condition of unity. When this condition is reached, there will be no parts between which attraction and repulsion can operate. But since attraction and repulsion are matter, the particle must be thought of as “matter without matter, “or “matter no more.” Thus matter dissolves into that “Material Nihility” from which it was created by the will of God.(49) The universe is an oscillating one; during the creation phase it radiates outward from an absolutely simple primordial particle to reach the stage of greatest possible complexity and diffusion, only to begin contracting again, at last reaching the nascent state of simplicity, at which instant it disappears. It is a “novel Universe swelling into existence, and then subsiding into nothingness to every throb of the Heart Divine.”(50)

Poe's epilogue to the cosmic drama is startling: “The Heart Divine — what is it? It is our own.” Our souls unite in the Spirit Divine. We have intimations of this because our youthful dreams tell us of a “Destiny more vast” than our worldly life. This is also why it is impossible for the soul to conceive of its own non-existence. Furthermore, Poe insists, one cannot believe that “anything exists greater than his own soul.” These thoughts, together with the fact that man's spiritual strivings toward perfection are “but the spiritual, co-incident with the material, struggles toward original Unity, “lead us inexorably to the conclusion that “each soul is, in part, its own God — its own Creator; in a word, that God — the Material and Spiritual God — now exists solely in the diffused Matter and Spirit of the Universe; and that the regathering of this diffused Matter and Spirit will be but the re-constitution of the purely Spiritual and Individual God.”(51)

Poe's cosmic drama offers an expanding universe of suggestion and wonder. It is not a reductive explanation, as its mechanistic and atomistic form might suggest, but rather a system of correspondences. The rhythms of time -the diurnal flickering of days, the ebb and flow of the tide, the waning-waxing of the months, the slow cycle of the solstices — all serve to count out a single cycle of God, whose cosmic pulse in turn counts the moments of eternity. All the restless and fitful breathing of the world, the joy and despair, growth and decay, sleep and waking, finds its rest in the steady rhythm of the Heart Divine. This hierarchy of rhythms corresponds to a hierarchy of motions, and this again to a hierarchy of “life within life — the less within the greater, and all within the Spirit Divine.” In his diastolic phase, God expands Himself into the beautiful and the complex; in his systolic phase, He subjects the complex and the beautiful to the discipline of an ideal of unity — His own unity as a ‘'Spiritual and Individual God.” What then is God but the cosmic archetype of poet creating poem? Further, in his expanding phase is not God the cosmic enigma itself? Contracted, then, he is the ultimate scientific solution to that enigma. Thus Poe's universe might even be thought of as a cyclic process in which material being disappears in the perfection of divine knowledge, only to reappear as the vast enigma of creation. The poet's longing for supernal beauty and the scientist's restless search for truth are thus aspects of that unquenchable spiritual thirst which “belongs to the immortality of Man, “and which is “at once a consequence and an indication of his perennial existence. It is the desire of the moth for the star.”(52) Finally, all poetry and all science are divine, for man himself is divine and shares in the ‘'Spiritual Capacity of God.” There is only one “truly ultimate principle.. .the consummation of the complex.. .that is to say, of the unintelligible.”(53)

Thus for all its scientific appearances, Eureka is a poem, a romance, a dream, an exercise of the creative imagination, an intuitive leap toward the center of truth. Reading it heightens awareness, makes [page 65:] our pulses beat faster, plunges us into the sublime terror of first and last things. Typical is the reaction of Albert Samain in his Carnets Intimes: “Have read Edgar Poe. Eureka. Overwhelming sensation, especially towards the end. The grandeur of the hypotheses, the limitless nature of the concept terrify me. I wanted to read it through in one night, and this dizzy flight through the incommensurable makes me colon my bed, aching all over, my head splitting.”(54)

Old Dominion University

[[Footnotes]]

1. M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (N.Y., 1953), p. 303.

2. Ibid., p. 310.

3. “Letter to Mr. ——— ,” Margaret Alterton and Hardin Craig, Edgar Allan Poe: Representative Selections (N.Y., 1962), p. 247.

4. Eureka, The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. James A. Harrison (N. Y., 1902), XVI, 203-204. Hereinafter cited as Works. Poe disparagingly classifies transcendentalism with Swedenborgianism and mesmerism in Eureka (p. 233).

5. This is Abrams’ succinct way of putting the problem. See The Mirror and the Lamp, p. 310.

6. Arthur Hobson Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography (N.Y., 1941), p. 313.

7. The Island of the Fay, Works, IV, 194.

8. Ibid., pp. 194-195.

9. Ibid., p. 195. Note that Eureka ends with the words just quoted. The Godhead about which all cycles res was perhaps suggested by the hypothesis of Madler of a giant central sun. See Eureka, Works, XVI, 294ff.

10. Quinn, p. 314.

11. ‘'Sonnet — to Science,” Alterton and Craig, p. 15.

12. The Island of the Fay, Works, IV, 194.

13. “Sonnet — to Science,” Alterton and Craig, p. 15. In The Colloquy of Monos and Una, published in Graham’ s Magazine in August, 1841 — just two months after the appearance of The Island of the Fay — Poe clarifies his view on the “priesthood.” The enemies of poets, and presumably of all seekers of knowledge, including scientists, are the utilitarians. Monos and Una speak to us from beyond the grave; Monos calls the utilitarians “rough pedants” who scorned the poetic intellect which, as he tells us, “we now feel to have been the most exalted of all — since those truths which to us were of the most enduring importance could only be reached by that analogy which speaks in prooftones to the imagination alone. . .” (IV, 202). The utilitarians embody that arrogance which Monos describes as man's “childish exultation at his acquired and still-increasing dominion over [nature] . . .” (IV, 203). Man grows “infected with system, and with abstraction . . . hugh smoking cities arose, innumerable. Green leaves shrank before the hot breath of furnaces” (IV, 203).

14. Quinn, p. 419.

15. Mesmeric Revelation, Works, V, 243. Poe's antipathy to abstraction may reflect his reading of Thomas Dick's The Christian Philosopher (1826): “Mere abstract ideas and reasonings respecting infinity, eternity, and absolute perfection, however sublime we may conceive them to be, completely fail in arresting the understanding and affecting the heart” (p. 56).

16. Ibid., pp. 243-244. Poe has come close to Spencer's “Universal Postulate.” Mill (A System of Logic, eighth edition, 1874, p. 202) quotes Spencer writing in the Fortnightly Review: “An abortive effort to conceive the negation of a proposition shows that the cognition expressed is one of which the predicate invariably exists along with its subject; and the discovery that this predicate invariably exists along with its subject, is the discovery that this cognition is one we are compelled to accept.” For Poe, the human faculty for discovering truth is more inventive and imaginative than strict logic and, in fact, a rigidly imposed system of logic may be a barrier to truth. While Poe was at work in Mesmeric Revelation, he may also have been writing The Purloined Letter (in May of 1844 The Purloined Letter was in the hands of editors; see Quinn, p. 311). Dupin, having solved the mystery of the hidden letter, comments on the failure of the Prefect and his cohort: “They consider only their own ideas of ingenuity; and, in searching for anything hidden, advert only to the modes in which they would have hidden it They have no variation of principle in their investigations; at best, when urged by some unusual emergency — by some extraordinary reward — they extend or exaggerate their old modes of practice, without touching their principles” (Works, VI, 41-42). Dupin's trick of “reading the mind” of the narrator is Poe's way of asserting that all thought processes — those of the poet and those of the mathematician — emerge from an underground stream of unconscious associations. Mesmeric Revelation provides an atomic explanation for Dupin's successes: he can think more quickly and more subtly m the Prefect because he is, like the mesmerized Vankirk, in touch with the quicker and more subtle motions of the more refined and more sentient states of matter. Dupin suggests as much: “The material world . . . abounds with very strict analogies to the immaterial The principle of the vis inertiae, for example, seems to be identical in physics and metaphysics. It is not more true in the former, that a large body is with more difficulty set in motion than a smaller one, and that its subsequent momentum is commensurate with this difficulty, than it is, in the latter, that intellects of the vaster capacity, while more forcible, more constant, and more eventful in their movements than those of inferior grade, are yet the less readily [page 66:] moved, and more embarrassed and full of hesitation in the first few steps of their progress (Works, VI, 46-47). The analogy spoken of here between the material and the immaterial is transformed into an identity in the cosmologies of Mesmeric Revelation and Eureka.

17. Ibid., p. 245.

18. Ibid., pp. 245-246. The speculative genius of Mesmeric Revelation lies in the smooth conceptual progression from operations of matter to operations of spirit. Vankirk explains how to conceive the “unparticled matter”: “Take, now, a step beyond the luminiferous ether; conceive a matter as much more rare than the ether, as this ether is more rare than the metal, and we arrive at once (in spite of all the school dogmas) at a unique mass — an unparticled matter. For although we may admit infinite littleness in the atoms themselves, the infinitude of littleness in the spaces between them is an absurdity. There will be a point — there will be a degree of rarity at which, if the atoms are sufficiently numerous, the interspaces must vanish, and the mass absolutely coalesce. But the consideration of the atomic constitution being now taken away, the nature of the mass inevitably glides into what we conceive of spirit” (Works, V, 247).

19. Ibid., p. 250.

20. Ibid., p. 249.

21. The Landscape Garden, Works, IV, 266.

22. Marginalia, Works, XVI, 155-156.

23. Eureka, Works, XVI, 187-188. Henri Poincare (Science and Method, tr. Francis Maitland, N.Y.: Dover Publications, n.d., p. 22) saw the intellectual beauty which leads the scientist on, but he was aware of its dangers: “It is, then, the search for this special beauty, the sense of the harmony of the world, that makes us select the facts best suited to contribute to this harmony; just as the artist selects those features of his sitter which complete the portrait and give it character and life . . . . We may dream of a harmonious world, but how far it will fall short of the real world! The Greeks, the greatest artists that ever were, constructed a heaven for themselves; how poor a thing it is beside the heaven as we know it!” The poetic picture of the universe in Eureka is very similar to the systems of the pre-Socratic philosophers Anaxagoras and Empedocles. Poe considers the universe a “plot of God” (Works, XVI, 292); Charles H. Kahn points out (Anaximander and the Origins of Greek Cosmology, N.Y.: 1960, p. 199) that natural science in early Greek thought was presented as an epic poem, with beginning, middle, and end. For Empedocles the universe is a dramatic cycle repeated indefinitely: “A twofold tale will I declare: for now does one thing grow to be alone out of many, now again do many draw their growth from one; there is a double generation of mortal things, a double cessation” (Kahn, p. 200). In Empedocles’ system, as in Poe's, there are two forces, one of which, love, unites the elements; the other, strife, separates them again.

24. Alterton and Craig (p. 549) point out that there was a standing debate in the American Journal of Science concerning the role of imagination in science. Joseph Henry, the great experimenter, was sympathetic toward the role of the imagination (Second Series, VI, 288-292), but J. D. Whelpley (Second Series, V, 33-36) objects to any form of hypothesizing: “This host of ‘imponderables’ lies with a ponderous weight upon the mind, though in substance they may be lighter than air, nay, composed of that stuff that dreams are made of. They consume more valuable thought than the syllogisms of the scholastics, and when it is considered how many thousands of ingenious and powerful intellects have exhausted their whole energies in the effort to build worlds out of this dust in the mind's eye, this nebulous matter of intellect, this hypothesis, a mixed feeling of compassion and despair rises in the throat the Reign of the hypothetical method is at an end, and. the true inductive method will soon carry knowledge to its height.” A strong academic tradition in philosophy during the first three quarters of the nineteenth century was Scottish common sense realism, a sternly inductive view of truth, with no room for flights of imagination. Francis Wayland (1796-1865), generally considered representative of the Scottish tradition, gave a lecture at Brown University in 1831, “The Philosophy of Analogy” (reprinted in American Philosophic Addresses: 1700-1900, ed. Joseph L. Blau, p. 538). According to Wayland, “demonstration and induction never discover a law of nature; they only show whether a law has or has not been discovered.” Science, accordingly, depends upon man's skill in finding the right questions to ask nature, since nature merely answers “yes” or “no”. To find the right questions, investigators must proceed by way of analogy. The man who develops a science of analogy will “descend into posterity with a glory in nowise inferior to that of Bacon or Newton.” Wayland, like Poe, sees the poetic and scientific minds as more alike than different: “How closely connected are the analogies of science with those of imagination will be easily seen. In the analogies of science, we commence with a single cause and search throughout the universe for effects which might be brought under its dominion. In the analogies of the imagination, we commence with an effect, and range throughout all that the mind hath conceived in quest of causes which produce a similar effect.”

25. Eureka, Works, XVI, 187-188.

26. Ibid., p. 188.

27. Ibid., p. 190.

28. Quoted by Alfred J. Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic (N.Y.: Dover, n.d.), p. 54.

29. Eureka, Works, XVI, 195.

30. Ibid., p. 192. Mill's Logic is mentioned as “decidedly the cleverest ancient work on its topic” (p. 192).

31. John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic (N.Y., 1874), p. 177.

32. Ibid., pp. 177-178. [page 67:]

33. Eureka, Works, XVI, 194. See Clarence R. Wylie, “Mathematical Allusions in Poe,” The Scientific Monthly, LXIII (1946), 227-235. “The lengthy passage in which Poe presents this attack on Mill should be studied by every embryonic debater. It is a brilliant example of a spurious but highly effective reductio ad absurdum.” Wylie does not say why he thinks it is spurious. Poe's questioning of the laws of logic appears not to have been without foundation. Kurt Godel, in a paper first published in 1931, proved that a logical system, if complete, can be shown to contain contradictory theorems; an account of his famous “Undecidability Theorem” is given by Nagel and Newman in The World of Mathematics, ed. James R. Newman (N.Y., 1956), III, 1668.

34. Ibid., p. 185. Emile Meyerson, Du cheminement de la Pensée (Paris, 1931), writes: “Contrary to the opinion sometimes expressed, but most often only tacitly agreed to, there cannot be any demonstration which forces or compels assent. It is always necessary that the person we wish to convince agree to make the leap which constitutes the essence of the reasoning process, that is, that he agree on the diversity which we wish to exclude” (II, 545). In a note (III, 939), Meyerson quotes Poe's remarks concerning the role of the imagination in science, ending with the letter-writer’ s opinion that the nineteenth-century “repression of the imagination was an evil not to be counter-balanced even by the absolute certainty in the snail process. But their certainty was very far from absolute.” Meyerson then comments: “The reader will have no difficulty in recognizing in the sentences just quoted some at least of the ideas we have developed; but they are in an embryonic state.”

35. What we would call logic, examples of which abound in Eureka, Poe would have us call merely attempts at suggestion. He is very concerned that his argument proceed by “just gradations” (p. 244) or by “graduated steps” (p. 199), but these are not logical steps.

36. Eureka, Works, XVI, 196; 302.

37. Vincent Buranelli, Edgar Allan Poe (N.Y., 1961), Chapter III, “Return to Reality.”

38. Newton's demonstration of the mathematical order of the world in his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687) was followed by a host of popularizations, many of which attempted to elaborate, via design arguments, on the Psalmist's declaration that the firmament shows God's handywork (Psalm 19:1). The tradition of using physical science to bolster faith continued in force through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A short list of the most popular of these physico-theological works is given by Carl Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers (New Haven, 1963), p. 61. The New Testament authority for physico-theological writings in Romans 1:20, “For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead.” Poe was obviously very familiar with Dr. Thomas Dick's Christian Philosopher (1826), from which he borrowed conspicuously in Eureka, as well as in Eiros and Charmion (see Margaret Alterton, Origins of Poe's Critical Theory, Univ, of Iowa Humanistic Studies, Iowa City, 1923, pp. 139-141).

39. “Kepler, although he strongly defends the claims of empirical investigation against the metaphysics of substantial forms, nevertheless reverts to the mathematical teleology of Plato in his final conception of the world. The mathematical ideas are the eternal patterns and ‘archetypes’. Cassirer, Substance and Function (N.Y., 1923), p. 136.

40. Eureka, Works, XVI, 197. Poe's knowledge of Kepler may have been derived from Bethune's Life of Kepler (Alterton, Origins, pp. 142-143). He may also have read Coleridge's enthusiastic recommendation of Kepler in Table Talk: “Galileo was a great genius, and so was Newton; but it would take two or three Galileos and Newtons to make one Kepler There is not a more glorious scientific achievement on record, than Kepler's guesses, prophecies, and ultimate apprehension of the law of mean distances of the planets as connected with the periods of their revolutions around the sun.” (Quoted by F. W. Conner, Cosmic Optimism, Gainesville, Fla., 1949, p. 390.) Kepler's Harmony of the World is described in Arthur Koestler's The Sleepwalkers (London, 1959) as an “all-embracing synthesis of geometry, music, astrology, astronomy and epistemology. It was the first attempt of this kind since Plato, and it is the last to our day. After Kepler, fragmentation of experience sets in again, science is divorced from religion, religion from art, substance from form, matter from mind.” One glance at such a program would convince Poe of its wisdom. Poe's association of Kepler's name with that “intuitive leap” which the greatest scientific minds make in their discoveries of the laws of nature may also have been suggested by his reading of Whewell's On Astronomy and General Physics (N.Y., 1833). Whewell explains that the sudden insight is like “that which takes place when we attempt to read a sentence written in difficult and imperfect characters. For a time the separate parts appear to be disjointed and arbitrary marks; the suggestions of possible markings, which succeed each other in the mind, fail, as fast as they are tried, in combining or accounting for these symbols: but at last the true supposition occurs; some words are found to coincide with the meaning thus assumed; the whole line of letters appears to take definite shapes and to leap into their proper places; and the truth of the happy conjecture seems to flash upon us from every part of the inscription.” Whewell then mentions “the innumerable conjectures and failures, the glimpses of light perpetually opening and as often clouded [page 68:] over, the unwearied perseverance and inexhaustible ingenuity exercised by Kepler in seeking for the laws which he finally discovered. . . .” In his letter from 2848 A.D., Poe writes, “I have often thought, my friend, that it must have puzzled these dogmaticians of a thousand years ago, to determine, even by which of their two boasted roads it is that the cryptographist attains the solution of the more complicated cyphers. . .” (Works, XVI, 196).

41. Ibid., p. 206. A more abbreviated definition is given on p. 197. The history of mathematics provides spectacular cases of the mind's ability to leap across long chains of argument to reach remote conclusions whose certainty is known immediately. The struggle comes in attempting to reconstruct for others the conscious logical processes. Jacques Hadamard discusses such “Paradoxical Cases in Intuition” in Chapter of his The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field (N. Y., 1945). Although Poe considered the processes of intuition “so shadowy as to defy our capacity of expression, “he nevertheless insisted that “abseness is a quality appertaining to no subject per se” (Eureka, Works, XVI, 199). Meyerson has comted on this apparent inconsistency: “We are surprised to see that Poe, who. had realized the intuitive leap involved in every logical process, even that of mathematical demonstration, has nevertheless, on the other hand, yielded to the seduction which this conception of clear thought seems to exert. He has even confirmed this point of view in context with the notion [of intuition] in which the difficulty of justifying it bees to some extent obvious” (Du cheminement de la pensée, III, 942). The atomic basis of Poe's theory of intuition explains the apparent inconsistency. In Marginalia, Poe distinguishes between thought and fancies: “I do not believe that thought is out of the reach of language. There is, however, a class of fancies, of exquisite delicacy, which are not thoughts, and to which, as yet, I.have found it absolutely impossible to pt language. . . . They seem to be rather psychal than intellectual.;.. I am aware of these ‘fancies’ only when I am upon the very brink of sleep, with the consciousness that I am so. I have satisfied myself that condition exists but for an inappreciable point of time — yet it is crowded with these ‘shadows of shadows’; for absolute thought there is demanded time's endurance” (Works, XVI, 88). The mind, then, in rare states, is aware of the subtler atoms whose motions are quicker — i.e., more thought events can take place in a given space of time.

42. Ibid., p. 277.

43. The parallels of Poe's speculations with the thought of the Vedas are noted by W. M. Forrest in Biblical Allusions in Poe (N.Y., 1928), Chapter II.

44. Eureka, Works, XVI, 207ff. Poe rejects the idea that the universe of atoms is infinite: “Unlimited Matter is not only untenable, but impossible and preposterous with the understanding of a sphere of atoms of the sphere, we perceive, at once, a satisfiable tendency to union” (pp. 243-244). The “eureka” of Eureka is a sphere. We have noted Poe's interest in the hypothesis of Mädler, in the central Star Godhead of The Island of the Fay. Part of the reason for Poe's dissatisfaction with Mesmeric Revelation, as we have suggested, was the absence of a center of action for the “unparticled matter” of spirit. In the opening pages of Eureka, Poe accepts Pascal's definition of the universe: “It is a sphere of which the center is everywhere, the circumference nowhere” (p. 205). W. Pauli has pointed out Kepler's obsession with relating God to the image of

the sphere. Pauli investigates those very qualities of Kepler's thought which Poe and Coleridge so much admired — his lively imagination and the overpowering certitude of his intuition. The thesis is that pure logic is incapable of constructing a bridge between sense perceptions and the concepts of science, and that what scientists call hypothesizing is, in many cases, a “matching” of “inner images pre-existent in the human psyche with external objects and their behavior.” This would seem to be support for Poe's contention that order to reason well one must be part poet. See “The Influence of Archetypal Ideas on Kepler's Theories” Jung and Pauli, The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche (N.Y., 1955), pp. 151-212.

45. Ibid., p. 209.

46. Ibid., p. 208.

47. Ibid., p. 213. F. D. Bond has pointed out what seems to be Poe's anticipation of Herbert Spencer's concept of universal evolution: “Evolution is the integration of matter and the concomitant dissipation of motion: ring which the matter passes from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity; and during which the retained motion undergoes a parallel transformation.” See “Poe as Evolutionist,” Popular Science Monthly, LXXI (1907), 267-274.

48. Ibid., p. 310. See also p. 214: “Matter exists only as attraction and repulsion.” Poe says of attraction and repulsion that “the former is the body; the latter is the soul; the one is the material; the other the spirit1, principle of the Universe. No other principles exist” (pp. 213-214). Later on he says, “Attraction and Repulsion — the Material and the Spiritual — accompany each other, in the strictest fellowship, forever. Thus The Body and The Soul walk hand in hand” (p. 244).

49. Ibid., p. 311.

50. Ibid.

51. Ibid., pp. 311-312; 313.

52. The Poetic Principle, in Alterton and Craig, p. 384.

53. Eureka, Works, XVI, 223.

54. Quoted by Patrick F. Quinn, “The Profundities of Edgar Poe,” Yale French Studies, No. 6 (1950), p. 5.