The Works of Edgar Allan Poe Volume 9 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1903 edition. Excerpt: ... preface 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 realities--I orfer this book of Truths, not in its character of Truth-Teller, but for the Ueauty that abounds in its Truth, constituting it true. To these 1 present the composition as an Art-Product alone, --let us say as a Romance; or, if I be not urging too lofty a claim, as a Poem. What I here propound is true: --therefore it cannot die; or if by any means it be now trodden down so that it die, it will " rise again to the Life Everlasting." Nevertheless, it is as a Poem only that I wish this work to be judged after I am dead. E. A. P. eureka an essay on the material and spiritual universe It is with humility really unassumed--it is with a sentiment even of awe--that I pen the opening sentence of this work; for of all conceivable subjects, I approach the reader with the most solemn, the most comprehensive, the most difficult, the most august. What terms shall I find sufficiently simple in their sublimity--sufficiently sublime in their simplicity--for the mere enunciation of my theme? I design to speak of the Physical, Metaphysical, and Mathematical--of the Material and Spiritual Universe; of its Essence, its Origin, its Creation, its Present Condition, and its Destiny. I shall be so rash, moreover, as to challenge the conclusions, and thus, in effect, to question the sagacity, of many of the greatest and most justly reverenced of men. In the beginning, let me as distinctly as possible announce, not the theorem which I hope to demonstrate--for, whatever the mathematicians may assert, there is, in this world at least, no such thing as demonstration--bu