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Show Page 3 Mormon - put simply, man exists on earth to learn how to be like God in heaven. For Orson Pratt, the cosmos was a "great school of progress." Mormonism taught him that history rears man up to God through a cycle of dispensations 7 - that the"Lord of the Fields" visits each kingdom "in his own order" and then withdraws, until the fulness, the final glorious dispensation, is achieved. In Joseph Smith's revelations, Orson Pratt found this culmination and set out to elaborate upon it. The modern Mormon intellectual sees his own birth in the travails of Orson Pratt. To vindicate the Prophet's cosmology, he plumbed its implications for philosophy and science in a number of publications, exploring such concepts as primordial "intelligences," the Mormon corporeal God (as contrasted with the "immaterial" God of the creeds), and what he perceived as the immanence in matter of personality and intellect. In "Absurdities of Immaterialism," a theological tract, and a new theory of celestial mechanics entitled "Key to the Universe," he displays no small erudition in the astronomy, philosophy, and mathematics of his day. Scholarship was a theological imperative for Orson, and, though he encountered embarrassing resistance to his ideas even among his own people, he was known as "the Mormon Polymath" and "the Gauge of Philosophy." Under his beaten-up straw hat and Walt Whitman beard, he constructed a theological exposition which interpreted to the world, for the first time in rational terms, the revolutionary thought of Joseph Smith. In the currents of his mind the Mormon world-view was nurtured to maturity. Apostle Pratt shaped the doctrine and history of the Mormon people to such a great extent that he can only be compared to Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. Indeed, had he not faltered briefly in the early 1840s, he might have followed these two as head of the Church. Though he never presided, his works were as incalculably important to Mormon history as |