Stringing words together in incoherent
succession does not make an intelligible sentence; facts are the words
of God, and we may heap them together endlessly, but they will teach
us little or nothing till we place them in their true relations and
recognize the thought that binds them together as a consistent whole.
I have spoken of the plans that lie at the foundation of all the
variety of the Animal Kingdom as so many structural ideas which must
have had an intellectual existence in the Creative Conception
independently of any special material expression of them. Difficult
though it be to present these plans as pure abstract formulae, distinct
from the animals that represent them, I would nevertheless attempt to
do it, in order to show how the countless forms of animal life have
been generalized into the few grand, but simple intellectual
conceptions on which all the past populations of the earth as well as
the present creation are founded. In such attempts to divest the
thought of its material expression, especially when that expression is
multiplied in such thousand-fold variety of form and color, our
familiarity with living animals is almost an obstacle to our success.
For I shall hardly be able to allude to the formula of the Radiates,
for instance,--the abstract idea that includes all the structural
possibilities of that division of the Animal Kingdom,--without
recalling to my readers a Polyp or a Jelly-Fish, a Sea-Urchin or a
Star-Fish.
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