He had unchanging faith in selfgovernment.
Both interpretations, " He (who) is (always the same)," and " He (who) is (absolutely, the truly existent)," import into the name all that they profess to find in it; the one, the religious faith in God's unchanging fidelity to his people, the other, a philosophical conception of absolute being which is foreign both to the meaning of the Hebrew verb and to the force of the tense employed.
God is the unchanging essence of the movement, and therefore its eternal cause.
In 1832 he published, jointly with Willer, one of the most famous papers in the history of chemistry, that on the oil of bitter almonds (benzaldehyde), wherein it was shown that the radicle benzoyl might be regarded as forming an unchanging constituent of a long series of compounds obtained from oil of bitter almonds, throughout which it behaved like an element.
He argues against the setting up of classic art as an unchanging type, valid for all peoples and all times.