The Soul in Nature

THE LIFE OF H. C. OERSTED.

lively communication with the philosophical and aesthetic excitements of the period. Fichte, who in 1807 spent some time in Copenhagen in search of rest, was also part of this circle.

Oersted undertook another journey to Germany and France in 1812 and 1813. He remained a considerable time in Berlin, and, urged by Niebuhr, he there published his Views of the Chemical Laws of Nature, which he translated into French in Paris original: "Recherches sur l’identité des forces électriques et chimiques" (Research on the identity of electrical and chemical forces).. We perceive by the title of the French work how his thoughts were already fixed in the direction where he would soon make his name famous to the world through a great discovery, whose results are already proved to be of universal value. We need only here allude to the electro-magnetic telegraph, which probably would not yet have existed without Oersted.

Upon his return to Denmark in 1814, he married; the marriage produced three sons and four daughters. His active participation in intellectual life involved him in a keen literary dispute with Grundtwig, in which he asserted with enthusiasm his conviction of the harmony of Reason with the laws of Nature, and of the unfettered power of the judgment, in opposition to the ultramontane A term often used to describe strict, centralized religious or dogmatic authority. paradox of that author, who—in an otherwise intellectual "world-chronicle" (welt-chronick)—chose to employ the Bible, even in its most literal interpretation, as the exclusive standard for deciding on historical characters and events.

In a university program for the year 1814 regarding "the technical language of the Gothic and German tongues employed in chemistry," Oersted published a series of ingenious suggestions in favor of a national scientific terminology, emancipated from the Greek and Latin terminology hitherto employed. This has already, for the most part, become popular.