Poe was thoroughly persuaded that he had discovered the great secret: that the propositions of "Eureka" were true; and he was wont to talk of the subject with a sublime and electrical enthusiasm which they cannot have forgotten who were familiar with him at the period of its publication. He felt that an author known solely by his adventures in the lighter literature, throwing down the gauntlet to professors of science, could not expect absolute fairness, and he had no hope but in discussions led by wisdom and candor. Meeting me, he said, "Have you read 'Eureka?'" I answered, "Not yet: I have just glanced at the notice of it by Willis, who thinks it contains no more fact than fantasy, and I am sorry to seesorry if it be truesuggests that it corresponds in tone with that gathering of sham and obsolete hypotheses addressed to fanciful tyros, the 'Vestiges of Creation;' and our good and really wise friend Bush, whom you will admit to be of all the professors, in temper one of the most habitually just, thinks that while you may have guessed very shrewdly, it would not be difficult to suggest many difficulties in the way of your doctrine." "It is by no means ingenuous," he replied, "to hint that there are such difficulties, and yet to leave them unsuggested. I challenge the investigation of every point in the book. I deny that there are any difficulties which I have not met and overthrown. Injustice is done me by the application of this word 'guess:' I have assumed nothing and proved all." In his preface he wrote: "To the few who love me and whom I love; to those who feel rather than to those who think; to the dreamers and those who put faith in dreams as in the only realitiesI offer this book of truths, not in the character of Truth-Teller, but for the beauty that abounds in its truth: constituting it true. To these I present the composition as an Art-Product alone:let us say as a Romance; or, if it be not urging too lofty a claim, as a Poem. What I here propound is true: therefore it cannot die: or it by any means it be now trodden down so that it die, it will rise again to the life everlasting."
When I read "Eureka" I could not help but think it immeasurably superior as an illustration of genius to the "Vestiges of Creation;" and as I admired the poem, (except the miserable attempt at humor in what purports to be a letter found in a bottle floating on the Mare tenebrarum,) so I regretted its pantheism, which is not necessary to its main design. To some of the objections to his work be made this answer in a letter to Mr. C.F. Hoffman, then editor of the Literary World:
"Dear Sir:In your paper of July 29, I find some comments on 'Eureka,' a late book of my own; and I know you too well to suppose for a moment, that you will refuse me the privilege of a few words in reply. I feel, even, that I might safely claim, from Mr. Hoffman, the right, which every author has, of replying to his critic tone for tonethat is to say, of answering your correspondent, flippancy by flippancy and sneer by sneerbut in the first place, I do not wish to disgrace the World; and, in the second, I feel that I never should be done sneering, in the present instance, were I once to begin. Lamartine blames Voltaire for the use which he made of (ruse) misrepresentation, in his attacks on the priesthood; but our young students of Theology do not seem to be aware that in defense or what they fancy to be defense, of Christianity, there is anything wrong in such gentlemanly peccadillos as the deliberate perversion of an author's textto say nothing of the minor indecora of reviewing a book without reading it and without having the faintest suspicion of what it is about.
"You will understand that it is merely the misrepresentations of the critique in question to which I claim the privilege of reply:the mere opinions of the writer can be of no consequence to meand I should imagine of very little to himselfthat is to say if he knows himself, personally, as well as I have the honor of knowing him. The first misrepresentation is contained in this sentence:'This letter is a keen burlesque on the Aristotelian or Baconian methods of ascertaining Truth, both of which the writer ridicules and despises, and pours forth his rhapsodical ecstasies in a glorification of the third modethe noble art of guessing.' What I really say is this:That there is no absolute certainty either in the Aristotelian or Baconian processthat, for this reason, neither Philosophy is so profound as it fancies itselfand that neither has a right to sneer at that seemingly imaginative process called Intuition (by which the great Kepler attained his laws); since 'Intuition,' after all, 'is but the conviction arising from those _in_ductions or _de_ductions of which the processes are so shadowy as to escape our consciousness, elude our reason or defy our capacity of expression.' The second misrepresentation runs thus:'The developments of electricity and the formation of stars and suns, luminous and nonluminous, moons and planets, with their rings, &c., is deduced, very much according to the nebular theory of Laplace, from the principle propounded above.' Now the impression intended to be made here upon the reader's mind, by the 'Student of Theology,' is evidently, that my theory may all be very well in its way, but that it is nothing but Laplace over again, with some modifications that he (the Student of Theology) cannot regard as at all important. I have only to say that no gentleman can accuse me of the disengenuousness here implied; inasmuch as, having proceeded with my theory up to that point at which Laplace's theory meets it, I then give Laplace's theory in full, with the expression of my firm conviction of its absolute truth at all points. The ground covered by the great French astronomer compares with that covered by my theory, as a bubble compares with the ocean on which it floats; nor has he the slightest allusion to the 'principle propounded above,' the principle of Unity being the source of all thingsthe principle of Gravity being merely the Reaction of the Divine Act which irradiated all things from Unity. In fact no point of my theory has been even so much as alluded to by Laplace. I have not considered it necessary, here to speak of the astronomical knowledge displayed in the 'stars and suns' of the Student of Theology, nor to hint that it would be better to say that 'development and formation are, than that development and formation is. The third misrepresentation lies in a foot-note, where the critic says:'Further than this, Mr. Poe's claim that he can account for the existence of all organized beingsman includedmerely from those principles on which the origin and present appearance of suns and worlds are explained, must be set down as mere bald assertion, without a particle of evidence. In other words we should term it arrant fudge.' The perversion at this point is involved in a willful misapplication of the word 'principles.' I say 'wilful' because, at page 63, I am particularly careful to distinguish between the principles proper, Attraction and Repulsion, and those merely resultant sub-principles which control the universe in detail. To these sub-principles, swayed by the immediate spiritual influence of Deity. I leave, without examination, all that which the Student of Theology so roundly asserts I account for on the principles which account for the constitution of suns, &c.