Emerson and science

What is nature to him? There is never a beginning, there is never an end, to the inexplicable continuity of this web of God, but always circular power returning into itself. Therein it resembles his own spirit, whose beginning, whose ending, he never can find,--so entire, so boundless. Far, too, as her splendors shine, system on system shooting like rays, upward, downward, without centre, without circumference,--in the mass and in the particle, nature hastens to render account of herself to the mind. Classification begins. To the young mind, every thing is individual, stands by itself. By and by, it finds how to join two things, and see in them one nature; then three, then three thousand; and so, tyrannized over by its own unifying instinct, it goes on tying things together, diminishing anomalies, discovering roots running under ground, whereby contrary and remote things cohere, and flower out from one stem. It presently learns, that, since the dawn of history, there has been a constant accumulation and classifying of facts. But what is classification but the perceiving that these objects are not chaotic, and are not foreign, but have a law which is also a law of the human mind? The astronomer discovers that geometry, a pure abstraction of the human mind, is the measure of planetary motion. The chemist finds proportions and intelligible method throughout matter; and science is nothing but the finding of analogy, identity, in the most remote parts

I've marked up this excerpt in a manner analogous to the way I marked it up in my text. It's interesting to read what Emerson has to say about science. He seems simultaneously to be saying that

• Our minds and nature adhere to the same rules, and therefore we can inherently see order in nature. Because we are organized according to natural laws, the organization of nature is intuitive to us.
• Nature adheres to the rules that the mind imposes on it. In observing nature and subjecting it to classification, we impose order on it. We bring order to the universe by virtue of the fact that we classify. "The astronomer discovers that geometry, a pure abstraction of the human mind, is the measure of planetary motion."

I guess that, for Emerson, they're really the same thing.

I wonder: If we were to find another way of classifying the universe, another kind of math, would the universe continue to behave as it does now? Silly me. Of course it would. Einstein's understanding of the movement of bodies through space (largely) displaced Newton's, and yet nature didn't (that we know of) reorganize itself in the early 20th century. (Hmmm . . . There's an idea for a spot of fiction. Filing that away.) Man Thinking, in the person of Albert Einstein, just found a better way of classifying facts than Man Thinking, as informed by Isaac Newton, had previously been using. Special relativity just enabled us to make better predictions than Newtonian mechanics did. Nature didn't change . . . that we know of. Hee, hee. Maybe it isn't that we got a better understanding of nature -- maybe nature just started working better because we imposed a better system.

Maybe, for Emerson, they really are the same thing.