66 LAWS AND DEVELOPMENTS. 



thus serves as a guide to the erection of the edifice ; or, as a 

 single fossil bone of an extinct and previously unknown 

 animal, enables the comparative anatomist to describe with 

 accuracy, the animal as it lived and moved upon the earth in 

 its organic completeness. Our method, if successfully pur- 

 sued, will, moreover, develop the unity of principle pervading, 

 in different degrees, all creations, from lowest to highest the 

 unity and harmony, therefore, of the one and only system of 

 universal truth; and, as we pursue the revelations of the 

 physical universe, from its rudiments to its higher unfoldings, 

 our thoughts, from the accumulating analogies, will gain such 

 an upward impetus as may hereafter carry them directly 

 through the line of those higher and corresponding truths, 

 which relate to man physiologically, psychologically, spiritu- 

 ally socially, politically, and religiously. 



With respect to the origin, structure, laws, etc., of the uni- 

 versal cosmical system, we commence our reasonings with a 

 postulate which, whether strictly true or not, can not lead us 

 into important error in our subsequent deductions, since we 

 have so many correctives of inharmony, as involved in the 

 general series of corresponding and harmonious octaves of 

 developments through which the path of our investigations 

 will lead us. The postulate is, That God, from the prompt 

 ings of his own interior soul, which is Love, under the 

 direction of his Wisdom, which gave order and form to the 

 operations of Love, formed from the most exterior, or, if the 

 expression may be allowed, the least Divine and most nearly 

 physical, portion of his own personal emanations, as many de- 

 grees, varieties, or perhaps classes of atomic particles, as cor- 

 responded to the general seven-fold harmonies of his own 

 Infinite nature. The supposition that the varieties of these 

 primitive atoms are, in number, just seven, or a multiple of 



