Case of Philosophy

8 Pages 2110 Words

Occasionally down the corridor of history, a solitary individual, through dint of his own leaps of logic and intuition, produces a work so astounding and compelling that it shakes an entire community of scholars, indeed the entire human village. We reserve such honors for a Plato, for a Kepler, or a Newton or an Einstein. But consider for a moment the following scenario. What if a great mind, one of the most profound in human history, completes what he considers his penultimate achievement, the acme of his spiritual and intellectual searching; but alas, the revelations presented in his works fall on deaf ears. He arrives at greatness, but has arrived too soon.


Meanwhile, in the century and a half following his death, the concepts presented by the aforementioned great mind gradually occur to a number of other people, the likes of Albert Einstein and George Lemaitre. Unfortunately, the scenario describes the singular contributions, then subsequent neglect of the writer Edgar Allan Poe, who intuited the current modern cosmic theories, yet has never been properly credited for his discoveries. Even today, most people who thrill to Poe's masterfully told tales have never heard of Eureka, the work which Poe believed represented the full flowering of his mind, the precocious prose poem which delivers more modern cosmological theories than any work of the Newtonian era. And beyond scientific import, Poe composes a unified cosmic theory based on his spiritual insight. Unlike many scientific descriptions of the cosmos as a mathematically based machine set in motion, Poe's view of astro-physics resides within, and as a part of God.


Eureka, Poe's essay on, and explanation of the universe, represents his last major work. It is a seldom-read masterpiece, quite scientific in content, especially scientific to have been composed by a writer of short stories and poems. It grew out of a lecture entitled "The Universe," delivered at the Society Li...