Smith, Fi hcis TT.
ITature, V v.'itncs^ for the unit;/, the power,
the goocLiess of God.
Chapel !'ill,Il\. ,1908.

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Mp£i5L SmE

< Y^LE«¥lMH¥IlIESIBir¥«' - ILEMR&IRir •

1921

NATURE, A WITNESS

FOE

THE UNITY, THE POWER, AND
THE GOODNESS OF GOD

BY

FEANOIS H. SMITH, LL.D., D.O.L.
Professor Emeritus in the University op Virginia

1908

THE UNIVERSITY PRESS
PRINTERS TO THE UNIVERSITY
CHAPEL HILL, N. C.

(Aff 15"
.Styi5"

The John Calvin McNair Lectures were founded through a bequest of Rev.
John Calvin McNair of the class of 1849. The will was drawn .up in 1858. The
University of North Carolina received the fund in 1906, thus rendering it possible
for the first course of lectures to be delivered in 1908.
The extract from the will referring to the gift is as follows :
"As soon as the interest accruing thereon shall by said Trustees be deemed
sufficient they shall employ some able scientific gentleman to deliver before the stu
dents then in attendance at said University, a course of lectures, the object of which,
lectures shall be to show the mutual bearing of science and theology upon each other,
and to prove the existence- of attributes (as far as may be) of God from, nature.
The lectures which must be prepared by a member of some one of the evangelic
denominations of christians, must be published, within twelve months after deliv
ery, either in pamphlet or book form." *
Under this gift, Professor Francis H. Smith, Emeritus Professor of Physics in
the University of Virginia was selected to deliver the first course of three leotures.

To the Faculty and Students of the
University of North Carolina
for whom these lectures are prepared
they are respectfully inscribed

Ta yap aopara airov airb KTicrews Koapov tois
Troerjpaatv voov/xtva KuOoparai rf te dioios
avrov Sijva/xis Kal OuaTrfi, — Romans I, 20.

Katroi ovk apAprvpov airov a<brJKtv ayaOovp-
yG>v, oipavoOtv vpXv verovs StSovs ko.l Kaipov<s
Kapir<f>6pov<;, ep.irnr\5>v rpotprjs Kai cifbpocrv-
vr/s ras KttpSta? vpiiu. — Acts XIV, 17.

INTRODUCTORY
Our age is many-sided. It is characterized by different names from different
standpoints, and each name may hold a partial truth. The man in a hurry calls
it a mechanical age, with much ground for his epithet. The financier says it is a
money-getting age, and surely there are richer men, and many more of them than
the world ever knew before. The statesman calls it the age of advancing political
freedom, for dynasties are crumbling or quickly changing, and democracy is per
vading the earth. The preacher calls it the age of missions, and the very ends of
the world do seem to have become our neighbours.
Many students would be apt to pass by all these aspects, and call it the age of
criticism. Many leaders of thought in our times show a marked tendency to question
fundamental statements. Propositions, which for centuries have been accepted as
established truth by thinking men, are abruptly summoned before the tribunal of
criticism and subjected to merciless examination. No creed is so venerable or
so dear, that, some alert student of our day does not challenge its validity, and
end, it may be, by denying its accuracy. Nay, some critics are so rash, that they
seem to regard age as synonymous with error, so that if a statement be old it
must to them, of necessity be wrong. The ultra-radical is as unreasonable as the
ultra-conservative. To be old is not necessarily to be either good or bad ; but that
a proposition has been accepted by generations of thoughtful men and used by
them with advantage, is surely no reason for rejecting it, but seems to entitle it to
respectful treatment.
The criticism of which we speak has almost always been destructive. This
appears to give it a fascination for a great body of restless men who are not leaders
themselves, but who are ready to follow those who have the courage and the ability
to assail accepted beliefs. These ardent recruits occupy our platforms and our
presses with statements often far more positive than would be made by their mas
ters, and so it comes to pass that timid conservatives are everywhere filled with
apprehensions that have little or no real foundation . When the smoke of the
battle has cleared away, and "the tumult and the shouting dies", it may be found
that all that is best in the old remains unshaken and is set into clearer light by
the happy removal of what was really unessential rubbish.
No department of human thought has been exempt from this search among
its foundations. Even the oldest and simplest of the sciences has had its postu-

lates' questioned, and some of its most venerable conclusions denied. We were
always safe, we supposed, in taking a straight line to be the shortest distance
between two points, but we are taught by no less a man than Helmholtz that there
are easily conceivable environments even in Euclidean space, in which the propo
sition would not be axiomatic but false. That a closed surface could not be turned
inside out without rupture, is a proposition so elementary and self-evident that it
appears to need no demonstration: but that is, a modern geometer will tell us,
because we limit ourselves to space of only three dimensions, and that it would be
quite possible in space of four dimensions. Again, when we were boys we were
taught in chemistry that there were certain bodies called "elements" because they
had up to that time defied all the efforts of men to decompose them , and moreover
that it was highly improbable that, on this planet, they would ever be reduced to
other and simpler bodies. Alchemy was regarded by the mass of scientists as the
dream of a dark age and its pursuit as a foolish waste of time. When a great
man, Dumas, and later a greater one, Faraday, confessed that they had experi
mented on the transmutation of inferior metals into gold, their readers were sur
prised, and received the acknowledgment as an apology, which it wras doubtless
meant to be. So firmly established and widely accepted was the belief that the
elementary bodies were really undecomposable, that no less an authority than
Clerk-Maxwell (who was not a chemist, however) declared in an important paper
only thirty years ago that they were outside of the sphere of evolution, and were
as old in the universe as matter itself. Sir John Herschel had before this in his
classical Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy, maintained that the
elementary bodies bore the marks of "manufactured articles" in an identity and
permanency of properties for each that only things made to be so by superior out
side direction ever showed. It is true that in the same decade with Maxwell, Sir
William Crookes who, in two instances at least had the distinction of anticipating
discovery by announcements received with incredulity by his contemporaries,
amazed us by suggesting a genetic relation between the elements as pointed to by
the Periodic Law. Yet it remained for the twentieth century really to effect a
downward transmutation of a body regarded as an element into one known to be
such; namely of uranium into radium with actinium as a branch element and of
radium into possible polonium with helium on the way, and more recently of
copper when in presence of radium into lithium and sodium, as Professor Ramsay
is inclined to believe. Fancy, as often happens, is far out-running fact, and
enthusiasts leaping out of sight in front of real patient pioneers are rashly turnin
in imagination our silver into lead and our gold into copper by a kind of anti-
alchemy. Similar striking instances could be adduced of the upturning of fundamental
propositions in Physics, which is not more safe than Chemistry from the skepti
cism of our times. The same is doubtless true of the more advanced and higher
sciences. The biologists, the teachers of ethics, economics, and of social science,
10

nay, even those who deal with letters and art could give in their own special lines
many instances of that spirit in our age which holds nothing, however widely
accepted, as being free from challenge.
This intellectual activity is not in itself to be deprecated. It is a necessary
concomitant of freedom of thought. Our age is in some important respects a
youthful and therefore a' growing age. Its hunger for new truth, like the unap
peasable and often inconvenient appetite of a hearty boy, is at once a sign and
condition of health. We cannot stop it if we would, and ought not if we could.
Truth only is sa.cred, not age or assent, for truth is the coveted goal of all honest
effort in any world. It is the food of the Soul and the voice of God. We pardon
rashness or roughness, if the critic finally leads us to truth. We only venture to
desire in him three qualities : a reverence that recognizes the debt we owe to the
generations of great and wise men who have lived before us, and that will not
flippantly assail conclusions which they have reached and tested, especially as
regards matters in which the phenomena Were as open to them as to ourselves;
a humility which recognizes the critic's own limitations and the possible errancy of
the most honest mind: which also realizes" that in our condition, the highest
truths may not be matters of demonstration but of intuition; and, finally, a love
of truth which disdains mere applause and despises the seeking for it ; which will
keep him from confounding attack upon error with attack upon the errorist, and
finally will announce his success, should it come, with neither conceit nor arro
gance. After all, is it not true that in many cases the criticism of truths heretofore
regarded as fundamental is an attempt to pass behind them to simpler statements
regarded as more admissable, and that however far the analysis goes, one must
stop somewhere at a proposition of which we can give no account? All lines
of reasoning begin with postulates. To replace our present assumptions with
others . considered better and simpler, leaves at last something to be taken for
granted. It is so in the most perfect of the sciences. Euclid began with postu
lates which he could not prove but only beg that they should be allowed. Had he
been obliged to assume nothing he could never have advanced, because he could
never have begun. The ladder by which he mounted must at the bottom rest
upon something which is not ladder.
The point made here will be more clear if we remember that our teachers
have told us that the mind in reasoning is concerned with the relations of things
and not otherwise with the things themselves. The things may be imaginary or
even impossible, while their relations are real and simple. The most important
things even in science are impossible of definition — Space, Time, Matter, Energy,
Life. Yet their ratios or other relations are not only definable, but so definite
that the general statement of these are the Laws of Science.

11

As with these primary concepts, so it is with certain elementary statements,
as for instance, "like effects have like causes and like causes have like effects"* —
statements which we believe because they never lead us into error — but to conclu
sions which harmonize with experience. Our conclusions from these data form a
mental picture which is for each of us the world. The progress of knowledge con
sists largely in improving the picture, as time goes on, by a correcter restatement
of our data and by correcter reasoning from them, and so in bringing it more and
more nearly into accord with the world of truth as we know it better and better.
We must, therefore, begin with postulates, however far back we may pene
trate. If they lead us to truth, they are verified for us. If they thus safely lead
us, not in one line of inference only, but in several different ones, our confidence
in them grows stronger. In any new field to which they apply, we use them, as
we use the sunshine, in exploring a new territory. That they have done the same
for many generations before us confirms our faith in them. In this regard we are
heirs to the wealth of countless ancestors. To discard it and begin where they
were first obliged to begin, would be like expecting the heir of Astor to refuse his
patrimony and become a dealer in furs.
Such a condition, if we do not err, confronts us in the highest sphere of
human thought, where conscience sits on the throne, and man meets his Maker.
Many of our studies seem to begin and end in our existing relation to the present
life and world. There are some studies which refuse to be so confined, and con
nect us with another world and with infinite time. We belong to a land called
Christian, and we inherit, with or without our consent, the result of nineteen cen
turies of Christian thought and work. We have then come into the possession of
certain fundamental statements which, we are taught, came in old times from a
higher sphere and not from human reason. Though not the gift of science, they
have given us sound scientific evidence of their truth in that many generations
have been led by them to consistent conclusions. Being practical truths, they
have been verified by trial in the conduct of life, and have been found by the nob
lest of men to be the only help to a higher life. These truths have changed the
Saxon 'races from barbarians to men of culture. In the mutilated form in which
they pervade the Oriental religions they have furnished to multitudes in those
countries supports to virtue and alleviation of misfortune. Where they have been
most honoured and followed, the Church and her daughter, the Schoolhouse, have
led in social progress, and in these times of teeming wealth and its dangers', they
constitute our best security for the perpetuity of the Republic. 'They
are for us more firmly settled than the foundations of great cathedrals
which have for centuries withstood the storms. We deem it needless to be'
excavating about their bottom courses to verify their stability. That is proved by
the permanence of the superstructure.
•Elements of Logic, by Prof. N. K. Davis. 12

What are these statements? They are such as these: There is a God and
He cares for man. He manifests Himself in His Word and in His works. He
reveais himself in the heart of man, and so in society and in history, and also in
the Physical Universe. These are all partial mirrors of Him, without which no
man has ever fully seen Him. If we seek to see Him in any one of these His
partial mirrors, it would seem to be wise to come to the examination with some
knowledge of what has been shown by the others. All together cannot complete
the representation of Him for He is infinite and they are finite. The study of the
material world as revealing its Author may therefore be greatly aided by knowing
something of the other and higher revelations. It is true that one may profit by
examining a great picture without knowing its author or its theme. He may
admire its wealth of colour and harmony of tints, and dwell upon the grace and
truth of the drawing, but he will feel that he has gotten but a little way beneath
the surface. Very different would be his feelings if he came to the picture with a
knowledge of its subject and a familiarity with other famous paintings by the
same Artist. Then the canvass glows with new meaning, its finer touches are
detected, and the painter stands revealed in his work. Somewhat so, I fancy, it
is with the world picture about us. It is wonderful and beautiful, apart from any
reference to its Maker. Men have spent their lives, with satisfaction, in the scru
tiny of a small portion of it without ever thinking of Him. But how much fuller,
deeper, richer is it in every part as well as in the whole sweep of its amazing
extent, when, as did Newton and Faraday, we view it as the handiwork of a
Creator, known to us in the lineaments of His character by other ways of mani
festing Himsjslf. Surely the astronomer reaches a higher plane if he rises from
the study of the starry host regarded as an intricate mechanism, straining and
rewarding his mathematics, to the vision of the Almighty and the conviction that
the heavens declare the glory of God. The undevout astronomer may not be mad.
He is only unfortunate, playing with jewels, of whose real value he is ignorant.
He knows as much of the heavens as a wingless bird knows of the air.
It is in this view that I seek in an humble and, at best, fragmentary way to
contemplate the material world in some of its simpler aspects as being an expres
sion of its Maker's character, limiting myself of necessity to such knowledge as
pertains to my own studies in an elementary field . And even then I must beg the
indulgence of those before me who are cultivators of that field. They will doubt
less find much in my brief statements that is unsatisfactory. How sad I am to
miss here the face of Joshua Walker Gore*, from whose sympathy and advice I
should have derived so much aid.
In these lectures I shall reverently attempt to follow the suggestion of St.
Paul as to the highest lesson taught by the material world. He told the Romans
that they might see there the Godhead and Power of their Maker, while to the
Lystrians he spoke of the world as revealing His Goodness. My three topics will
be the Unity, Power, and Goodness of God, as plainly seen in his works.
•Professor of Physics, University of N. C. 13

FIRST LECTURE
The Unity of the Material World Disclosed in Some of its Familiar Features
If the world were "a fortuitous concourse of atoms", as the old-time atheists
termed it, there would seem to be no reason to expect a resemblance between one
part of it and another. Our own region could not be taken safely as a speci
men of a distant portion. Accident appears to be inconsistent with system.
The latter inevitably suggests plan and purpose. If the collocation of bodies
forming the world is a matter of accident, we must know every separate bit of it to
know it all, and we must at every point begin our study with no help from what
ever acquaintance we may have made with other portions. That this is not the
case with the Physical Universe, as we know it, is evinced by many striking facts.
Science does not find it incoherent but in several great respects a system ; of num
berless parts it is true, but those parts are not independent. We must begin with
a caution and a distinction.
The student of Physical Science is apt to be oppressed by the growing multitude
of facts that meet him and bar his progress in whatever line of research he starts.
He begins with one question. The first step towards its solution often suggests
several others, and these in turn cannot be satisfactorily answered, or at any rate
completely answered without giving place to many others. His only chance of
success is, in his first analysis, to ignore all but the leading cause, and thus reach
at least an approximate solution. Thus in weighing a body he first ignores the
effect of the air and assumes that he is working in a vacuum. Next he takes the
air into account, but neglects the effect of his own vicinity. He then improves
his result by standing at a distance from his balance. But now he has forgotten
that gravity is not perhaps the only field in which he is working, and new refine
ments must be introduced. He will finally stop, not by coming to the end of his
progression, but to the end of his knowledge of it or to the end of the sensibility of
his balance. Thus the richness and variety of Nature are inexhaustible and the
endless multiplication of phenomena seems to lead us farther and farther away
from unity and simplicity.
But while increasing complexity may be the character of the phenomena the
opposite seems to be true of their causes. In tracing causation the progress is
rather from the more to the less complex. The physical forces known to us mav
be counted on the fingers of our two hands. Their effects in the world are endless
14

in variety, and constitute the universe, to which, science can scarcely set up any
bounds in space or time. Thus simplicity of cause and multiplicity of effects,
which in any mechanism are thought to be the glory of its maker, are silent char
acteristics of the material world as we know it. We follow the diverging line of
phenomena back. The farther we go the closer they get. The mind outstripping
and perhaps anticipating science descries in their undoubted convergence an indi
cation that they may have one centre. The unity of the world is not a strange
proposition to the thoughtful student of nature. It is to the evidence of this unity,
as indicated in several of the elementary and familiar truths of Physical Science,
that I respectfully ask your attention at this time.
The Unity of the World as Indicated in the Universal Laws of Motion
The material universe may be contemplated as a splendid picture. So the
beginner regards it, and many features of the spectacle, the "everlasting hills"
and the fixed stars, easily suggest such a view. A little more observation shows
that, if regarded as a picture, it must be a moving, not a stationary, one. The
world is rather a theatre than a panorama. Relative motion is universal ; seen
at a glance around us; and by a more protracted watching, even in the stars,
apparently so still. In the early days of science, when to be earthy was to be vile,
and to be heavenly was to be perfect, it was quite easy for intellects as strong as
Aristotle's to regard terrestial and celestial motions as belonging to different cate
gories, and subject to different laws. The heavens, apparently, gave us motion in
the perfect curve, the circle, and perpetual motion too, in utter contrast with
movements here, which are forced and shortlived. It was reserved for a transcen
dent genius of our own race, after more than twenty centuries had elapsed, to
detect Aristotle's fallacy and announce a simple triad of laws, to which all motions,
whether in heaven or earth, are obedient. The chasm between Astronomy and
Physics was filled up. The astronomer could be helped by the work in the physi
cal and chemical laboratories, while the physicist found in the celestial movements
and the chemist in the stellar spectra the action of his laboratory forces under
far simpler conditions than he could command on the earth. Hence, both
astronomy and physics have made in the two centuries since Newton, far more
progress than in all the centuries before his era. Astronomy has become Astro
physics. This with Geo-physics forms one science today. Geo-physics has given
to the astronomer the spectroscope and the camera, while Astro-physics has given
to the physicist here, a laboratory of grander scale and simpler conditions than
prevail- on earth. Motion is one and the same thing in all the universe
and its features studied here make us know it everywhere else. Were we trans
ferred to a remote star we should not be in this respect in foreign territory. The
world is a unit as regards the laws of the motions possible to its parts.
But we may rise a step higher. The motions about us are ever changing and
do not change spontaneously. Bodies have a strange power of altering one
15

another's motion, while they cannot alter their own. This influence in its action
we call force. Newton's three laws of motion give us throe corresponding laws of
force. Force is therefore as universal as motion in the laws which govern it.
Celestial forces may therefore be studied on the earth. The universe is a _ unit
as to the forces playing between its constituents.
The end of the argument is not yet. We may rise yet another step. Force
is regarded as the agent for the transfer of energy, the name given to the power
we have just spoken of, which one body has of changing another, and justly
regarded by the modern student as the loftiest property possessed by a material
body. The three laws of motion, having behind them three laws of force, pass us
on to three laws of energy, of which the two other triads are merely the necessary
consequences and manifestations. Hence if motion and force are the same
throughout the universe, so also is energy. The world is a unit as to the energy
which is its highest characteristic. Its laws are the same in Physics, Chemistry
and Biology, and the same on earth as in the star Sirius or the nebula of Orion.
Unity in Physics is often associated with a trinity,
The Unity of the Material World as Revealed in the Force of Gravity
The force we first become acquainted with in our lives is doubtless that called
gravity. It takes part in every movement we make, or which we observe
other bodies to make. It is so familiar to us that we cease to think of it and deal
with it as automata . Our efforts to neutralize its effects or avail ourselves of its
help, in standing, walking, running, are so constant that they become at last sub
conscious. Our physical life is, however, largely a struggle with this unremitting,
ubiquitous influence — a struggle in which we call a truce every night and to which,
in the end, we yield a victory. Earth finally goes to earth, and dust to dust. In
our familiarity with this force we forget perhaps the amazing complexity of the
problem it sets us. The equilibrium of a jointed structure, composed of many
flexible parts, is an engineering problem of far greater difficulty than that of a
sky-scraper or a cantilever bridge. For these are treated as rigid and fixed, while
the human body in existing conditions, must have a mobile equilibrium or none
at all. Yet how soon does the human infant by practice, aided perhaps by
inherited capacity, achieve the solution.
The force of gravity differs from all other physical forces in several striking
points. It has but one sign and is everywhere and always attractive. Cohesion
is connected with elastic repulsion, and electric and magnetic attractions are asso
ciated with their opposites. But gravity is unipolar. The hasty inference5 of the
ancients as to the existence of a force of levity was quickly seen to lie fallacious
and Lucretius early and triumphantly exposed it.
Gravity differs from all other forces in another fundamental point. They
are different for different kinds of matter, and for different conditions of the same
16

kind. Gravity takes no account at all of these differences, but inquires solely as to
the quantity of matter in the body, its place being the same. Thus a pound of
copper could replace a pound of iron without disturbance in the gravity field but
in no other.
Again, while the electric and magnetic attractions are between unlike charges,
and like ones at rest always repel, gravity emphasises its singularity by being an
attraction operating between bodies which are alike in having mass. So that here
like things attract.
Another contrast is this. Gravity is by far the weakest of all the physical
forces. But for the immensity of the mass of the earth, the weight of bodies at
its surface would be perhaps altogether imperceptible. Great as is the earth, one
stroke of the silk upon a glass rod enables it to overcome the attraction of the huge mass
upon a pith ball between them. A final difference is this. Some other forces are
propagated in time. Thus electric and magnetic forces press through space with
the speed of light. Gravity seems to be instantaneous, at least its velocity cannot
be less than fifty million times that, of light.*
Feeble as is this force of gravity in comparison with the others dealt with in
Physics, it is the best known to us in its laws. So well are they known, that cal
culations from them of events many years ahead, are constantly verified. So
strong is the confidence of men in their truth that governments freely spend great
sums in having these predictions made, and life and property are unhesitatingly
ventured on their accuracy.
Being then the best known of the physical forces, it is a startling paradox to
find that in its cause gravity is far the most inscrutable and mysterious of them
all. Philosophers have given some guesses more or less satisfactory, of the origin
of chemical affinity. The physicists throughout the world are now getting, we
hope, some interesting light on the nature and relation of electricity and ordinary
matter. But the cause of gravitation remains an unsolved riddle, baffling the
efforts of the experimenter and the mathematician alike to penetrate the secret.
Speculation about it seems to be left by great men to their inferiors; for here, as
in so many other places, pigmies rush in where giants fear to tread. t
The force of gravity then appears, from the elementary enumeration of its
properties, to be unique in the world. Being so unlike the others we are not sur
prised to find that it differs from them in another and grander peculiarity. It is
universal, and we cannot say this so positively of other forces. Their fields are
local and confined. Its field appears to include the whole space occupied by mat
ter, in other words, to be co-extensive with the universe.
The proof of the universal play of gravity is a part of rigorous science, yet to
thoughtful minds it has the interest of a stirring romance. That gravity was more
•Laplace, System du Monde, Book V, Chap. V.
tStudents will hardly regard the speculation of LeSage in former times or of Osborne Rey
nolds in our own time, to be exceptions to the preceding statement although we are far from
calling these men pigmies. 17

than a terrestrial force was a thought slowly born into the world. The announce
ment by Copernicus, and later by Kepler that the tangle of motions resulting
from taking the earth as the center of the Solar System, disappeared and left
charming simplicity when the sun was so taken, drew the attention of able men
like Huyghens and Hooke to the existence of an attraction in the planetary sys
tem, not directed to the earth. It was reserved for their mighty contemporary,
Sir Isaac Newton, to create the mathematical apparatus needed and so to use it as
to disclose the meaning of Keplers's Laws, and thus do for the world in a few
years what Kepler was willing to wait a century for. The argument of Newton
in its wonderful sweep and final conclusiveness, is justly regarded as one of the
greatest achievements of the human intellect in all scientific history.* Newton
had proved that Kepler's laws led infallibly to the conclusion that a force of attrac
tion existed between every pair of particles in the solar system, varying directly as
the product of their masses and inversely as the square of their distance apart. Let
us, for our own convenience, call this the Kepler force. What this force was:
whether there was any force like it on the earth, remained to be discovered. New
ton suspected that it was gravity. To decide this point he must find out what the
two forces respectively would do with equal masses at the same place. If the Kep
ler force on a body has always the same direction and amount as the gravity of an
equal mass at the same place, then the two forces are identical. But what place
shall he select for the comparison? He only knew gravity at the earth's surface
and not yet knowing its law of distance, he could not tell what it was beyond the
earth. But he did know the law of the Kepler force and could transfer it from the
moon to his own locality. Hence the comparison must be made here. Newton,
after waiting patiently for twenty years to get better data, was finally able to
prove that at the earth's surface a bit of the moon operated on by the Kepler
force would, if unresisted, descend toward the centre of the earth 15 1-12
Paris feet in one second. But that is exactly what a bit of earth actuated by grav
ity, does. The effects of the Kepler force and of gravity at the same place are
identical and undistinguishable.f A piece of the moon with its Kepler force could
replace the weight that ran a clock or the pendulum that regulates it. If pro
jected, it would describe the same parabola which a heavy body, started in the
same line with the same speed, would do. We could weigh it in our balances or
use it for weights in weighing other masses. In short, it would seem to us to be
gravity, and we could not possibly by experiment tell the difference. It is grav
ity, and we have found the law of gravity by identifying it with the Kepler force.
•Misquoted and even turned wrong side forward bv most writers oinw iksk ;„„i j-
of the greatest, such. as LaPlace and Clerk-Maxwell Only ^ K^-nS 8Mne
known tome as giving Newton's argument in Newton's way Mackirin Sh ^/¦f
That Newton thought his own way was the best is ahowiTby the f£t to'at iUs ^i™ fT"*"
times in the Pnncipia. ' uml n ls g»en three
tNewtom Principia Mathematics Philosophiae Naturalis. Book III Proo TV- „ia h
Schol.um. See also the "System of the AVorld" where the Scholimn is reoeatoT' ' S° the

ilium is repeated.
18

It extends throughout the Solar System. Does it extend farther? The comet of
1680, was found by Newton to obey Kepler's laws. Dashing far beyond the Solar
System, it carried Ihe force toward the frontier of the fixed stars. Here Newton
was obliged to leave the law, and so it remained for a century after the issue of
the Principia. It seemed impossible to find Kepler's laws, even if they were
obeyed there, in a region so distant that its bodies seemed motionless. But about
1780 Sir William Herschel discovered that certain very close stars were not merely
optically double, but were physically so, and they revolved, the one about the
other. The orbits proved to be ellipses, in which the assumed stationary star
occupied one focus, and the relatively moving star moved according to Kepler's
laws. Thus Herschel took up the thread where Newton stopped, and at one
stroke carried it beyond the frontiers into depths of stellar space of which we can
give no estimate in familiar units. There is obviously no stopping place this side
of the boundary of the Universe. If it have none, gravity has none, and the great
Marquis LaPlace was justified when in his Mecanique Celeste he dropped the word
gravity and called this force Universal Attraction .
Surely the world is a unit as to the familiar force of Gravity.*
The Unity of the World Indicated by the Phenomena of Light
Light comes to us from many sources. On the earth we have our electric
arcs and bulbs, our flames and jets — all involving highly heated matter — and the
firefly, glow worm and vacuum tube which do not seem to do so. Beyond the
earth, the sun and stars, planets, meteors, comets and the whole train making up
the heavens form an aggregate, countless in the number of its individuals, and not
far less than that in the variety of classes into which we may sort these light-
bearers. Were we coming to these facts for the first time today, considering the
remarkable difference in the sources, it would appear to be reasonable to expect an
equally striking difference in the "light they send us. What an impression would
it make upon us, were we now hearing it for the first time, to learn that from
whatever source light comes, from the firefly, or taper or electric arc: from the sun
or star or meteor, it is in essence one and the same thing, composed of the same
simple elements, the difference between one source and another being merely in
the relative intensity of these elements. We may analyze the light with the
•While gravity is the ruling force in the motions in the Solar System and beyond it, we must
not forget that for excessively minute particles in presence of the sun, there is a repulsive force
of light, anticipated by Maxwell and realized by Lebedew and Nichols, which is superior to
gravity and may account for the Coronal streamers, the tails of comets and the Zodiacal Light.
In a remarkable paragraph of the Principia, which seems to have escaped the notice of
many Newton quotes Kepler as ascribing the direction of comets' tails toward the parts oppo
site to the sun, to the action of the rays of light carrying along with them the matter of the tails.
Newton adds "without any great incongruity we may suppose that in so free spaces, so fine a
matter as that of the ether may yield to the action of the rays of the sun's light, though those
rays are not able sensibly to move the gross substance in our parts." [Motte's translation of
the Principia.] 19

simplest of physical instruments, a prism or a grating, After we have thoroughly
examined a shining electric arc, the sun or star has nothing new for us as to con
stituents. Differences thereafter, as each new source comes into presence, are
merely its relative richness or poverty in some of the components. These differ
merely by suppression, not by addition. The red of the sun is identical in all but
intensity with the red of the taper that falls at the same place in the spectrum.
The light from Aldebaran is reflected, refracted and interferes by the same laws
precisely as that from the Edison bulb. The universe is a unit as to the light by
which it is revealed to us. If in any ancient cosmogony light were spoken of as
one thing in its origin before its apparent sources were mentioned, we should regard
that account in this respect to be remarkable for its anticipation of truth.*
But this is by no means all that the phenomena of light teach us about the
unity of the material world. We are taught that when its source is a gas its light
is accumulated in a few restricted parts of the spectrum, forming practically a col
lection of bright lines instead of an interrupted band. Each gas has its own char
acteristic" series of lines both as to number and place and relative brightness, thus
giving to the chemist a new and delicate means of detecting the gas when in quan
tities too minute to be weighed or otherwise tested, or where it is in positions
where the only means of communication is the light it may send him. He has
thus a means of examining chemically the gases in the sun, stars and nebulae, by
their direct or reversed spectra. The science is scarcely fifty years old, but it has
added immensely to our knowledge of the world." The chemical laboratory has
become a necessary part of a complete astronomical observatory. The scientific
surprises of our times are so many and so important that wonder is almost a lost
sensation among educated people. Yet there are many living who recall the aston
ishment with which the reading public received the announcement that the atmos
phere of the sun had in it iron and sodium and carbon and so on through a list of
forty elements. The analysis has been applied to hundreds of stars. The history
of any one is now incomplete without its spectrum. The startling fact is that the
elements studied in our laboratories here are largely the elements met with every
where in the heavens. A very few lines in the stellar spectra had then no earthly
counterpart, and one of these, Helium, (D,), has since been found here and Coro-
nium and Nebulum are perhaps not far behind. It would not be rash to say that
the material universe might, as to its materials, have been derived from one and
the same mass of matter. The world is a unit, by the testimony of Light.
The Unity of the World in rrs Ultimate Material Suggested as a Possibility
by the Facts already Given
The universe is a unit in the elements of which its stars, comets, meteors and
nebulae are composed, but there is a further and deeper unity in these very mate
rials only as yet conjectured, and perhaps if true at all, only to be a part of estab-
•(¦Jenesis I. :!.
20

lished science centuries hence, to which, however many facts, some long known and
others of recent discovery, seem to point, that students from the earliest times have
allowed themselves to dream of it, and able men have made it the starting point
of their atomic theories. The dream thus became a hypothesis of such unex
pected fruitfulness that in our day, while not a part of science, it may be said to
be a part of that penumbral light that envelopes the bright cone of established truth.
It is simply that the great unities of which I have spoken may have their root
in this, that at bottom there is possibly but one kind of matter in the world: so
that if we could resolve the most diverse bodies — say, gold, iron, lead, water,
hydrogen, without cessation, we should at last, in each, come to the same final
substar.ee, and could not tell from it with what material we began.
It seems to be a paradox that bodies so unlike should be identical in their
ultimate substance, yet paradox is often the disguise which truth takes to awaken
her votaries to activity. Our teachers pointed out to us the wonderful variety of
properties exhibited by the same substance often in different conditions, just as a
city may be built of bricks and yet no two houses be alike. The solid, liquid, and
gaseous states of the same body have often nothing in common but their chemical
composition. Ice, water, and steam would at first appear to be of different matter.
So charcoal, graphite, and the diamond differ as widely in their physical proper
ties as bodies do which are chemically different, and yet they are radically the
same in substance. Organic chemistry is full of light as to the astounding variety
of property caused by variation in the proportions of the same three or four
elements or even a variation in their relative place in the compound molecule
when the proportion is the same. We cannot help the inquiry whether, if colloca
tion, must account for the great differences in the water substances or the carbon
substances it is not possible that all differences in property may be the result of
collocation or condition of motion and not of ultimate differences in the material
itself. To say that hydrogen differs from chlorine because the molecule of hydro
gen differs the same way from the molecule of chlorine, seems to be no explanation
but simply an attempt to escape from explanation.
To establish this theory of physical monism would require that its advocates
should either show by exact reasoning that if assumed to be true it leads of neces
sity to the very differences of property we observe in the world, [and this has never
been done. Boscovich indeed showed that it would lead to as many,, though not
perhaps always the precise differences that we see;] or they must by actual labora
tory analysis derive one and the same substance from two different chemical
elements. In view of some recent work about which able men are not yet certain,
while we cannot perhaps with universal consent say this has been done, many
students think it would be rash to say that it has not been done. Meanwhile,
consider the tendency of some statements which we have already noticed. Through
out the world the same force produces the same acceleration in equal masses of
whatever material those masses may be composed — say, copper and iron. If the
21

equal masses of copper and iron be made of the same ultimate particles, they would
have exactly the same number of them, and their equal acceleration by the same
force would be a necessary consequence.
Again, gravity as we have seen, takes no account of these specific differences
between bodies. It has an eye only for mass. Copper and iron are alike as to
gravity. They must be alike in some hidden quality to account for this. If that
hidden quality be the ultimate atoms of which they consist, their like behavior as
to weight is at once explained. Atomic masses are simply proportional to the
number of those primordial units of which the atoms are composed. Their num
bers would doubtless be vast, but their ratios might be simple.
The last two decades have, to most minds, furnished irresistible evidence of
the existence of the "materia prima" of the Peripatetics, or the Urstoff or Protyle
of later speculators. That evidence is found in the remarkable discoveries of J. J.
Thomson. While dealing with the conduction of electricity through gases,
under such exceedingly small pressure that the free path of the gas mole
cules was not less than the dimensions of the containing glass vessel, and the
discharge took the radiant form observed by Crookes, he found that the radiant
streams of faint luminous matter were entirely independent in mass and behavior
in electric and magnetic fields of the nature of the gas in the vessel and of the ma
terial of the electrode at which the radiation began. Thus, says an enthusiastic
commentator, "the dream of an ultimate particle common to all kinds of matter,
has at length come true."
These great physical truths seem to point unerringly one and the same way.
Many partial truths and subordinate facts appear to be difficult of reconciliation
with them: but we take the direction of the wind, not from the vanes in our gar
den, but from those which occupy the summits of our steeples.
Did our limit of time permit it would be interesting to notice some of the
most prominent speculations in the history of science, founded upon this postulate
of the monism of Nature. Perhaps the most celebrated of them — certainly the
most consistent and complete in meeting the demands of the Physics of its time —
was the "Theoria" of Roger Joseph Boscovich published in Venice in 1762. Its
first postulate was that the ultimate atom was one and the same throughout the
world. Its next was that while inert it was without magnitude, a mobile point-
atom that occupied no space except by its powers which filled all space. A third
was that each atom was the centre of a like but very great number of spheres of
force, passing from attraction to repulsion and back again, many times in a small
space about the centre, being invincible repulsion next to it and attraction solely
for all sensible distances. The points of equilibrium were many. The theory
gave at once tetrahedral forms as the primary molecules of three dimensions and
we know the fertility of shaping crystalline figures from a primitive tetrahedron 
but an unlimited number of other molecules — according to the number of the
primordial atoms employed. There is a fascination about this speculation of the
22

Jesuit father, to which students in all lands, since 1762, have yielded. Boscovich
is quoted by Faraday and Kelvin, and others of that rank, and never with disre
spect, for among statical theories it stands without a rival. Its only misfortune
was that it came a century too soon. The great discovery of Faraday in 1846, of
Zieman in the nineties and of the Curies just afterward, seemed to the leaders
in science to require a kinetic molecule. And now following Kelvin and Thomson
and Lorentz and their associates, we have no longer the crystalline model for our
molecule but atoms of ordinary matter associated with whirling electrons, which
are perhaps elementary matter. The simplicity of Boscovich has given place to a
complexity that may lead to a higher and more pregnant simplicity. If, as some
sanguine lovers of nature allow themselves to imagine, the coming century or cen
turies should disclose that the ordinary atom is itself a cluster of that more ele
mentary matter termed electricity, and that the electron itself finally is only modi
fied ether, leaving us a universe reduced to one universal primitive homoge
neous substance — ether, that would be a glorious uplift from the atomic homogene
ity of Boscovich to the uniform continuous unatomic medium, filling space, giving
rise to electrons and ordinary matter, and being the real nidus of the ever change
able, so-called potential energies of these forms of matter.
Whether the dream of the oneness of the primordial matter of the world is
ever to come into science as a fact, or whether it is doomed to vanish as a beauti
ful vision and give place to something nobler because true, we can at least say
that it may be true, and that many men of mark in the ages reaching down to our
own have speculatively held it, and that there are truths known to us in both the
old and the new Physics which point to it.
We have thus given some reasons for believing that the material universe, as
we know it, has a certain unity which differentiates it from an assemblage of
bodies brought together by accident. As Humboldt phrased it, it has the attri
butes of a Cosmos and not a Chaos. One step, and a short one, would advance us
to the conviction that there is a plan, and if a plan, a purpose in this world.
That step would place us at once in the presence of intelligent Power and that
Power a Personality. The unity of the work denotes the unity of the Maker. If
the lower world be a witness for its author, its voice is an echo of the cry of Moses,
"Hear, 0 Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord."

23

SECOND LECTURE
Nature Reveals the Power of its Author.
It is common to speak of the Physical World as one world. In some funda
mental respects it is so. Yet with regard to man it easily divides itself into two.
There is the world above us of which the distances, if not inexpressible in their
vastness, are yet inconceivable. Then there is the world beneath us, the measures
of which appear to be the reciprocals of the others, and while often numerically
stated, are equally inconceivable, if to conceive a thing is to realize it. The mac
rocosm and the microcosm together make the Universe. They answer one to
another. Indeed one is the spring of another, so that out of the indefinitely
small grows the indefinitely great. We can know neither well
without knowing the other. Man holds an intermediate position. But the
two worlds would exist independently of his exact place. Were he big enough to
call the earth a. bauble, the greater world would still stretch inimitably above him;
were his body a single cell, there would still be a seemingly infinite world beneath
him. Every point is the middle of an infinite straight line.
The two worlds answer to one another so closely that the Author of one must
be the Author of the other. Separately and together they disclose His power.
The contemplation of each in turn appears to be like the reversal of a telescope,
giving a mere alteration of scale without change of law. If we mistake not, to the
humble seeker after truth the result will be much the same should he confine his
studies to either world, a reverent self-forgetting homage before a Power that
makes for order, and is as perfect in a molecule as in a, star cluster.
Let us first look at the macrocosm.
The Greater World, as Revealing the Power of its Author.
The starry heavens have in all ages interested the thoughtful and reverent
Poets have sung of them, preachers have found rich lessons in them, and teachers
have found no other subject so attractive to their pupils. Like all very great
things, they cannot be appropriated. They belong to the race. The child with
wondering eyes, may regard their circles of light as only openings through which
streams the glory from beyond: the rustic may regard them merely as shinine
points that strangely keep their places, and serve to tell him the time of night
24

while the mature philosopher may be so stirred by their inexhaustible meaning
as to lift them to the level of the moral law in power to awaken his veneration.
They are the only great spectacle that is always and everywhere accessible.
If* one would see the Pacific Ocean or the Himalayas or the Grand Canon , a great
journey at great expense would doubtless be required, but the starry skies — far
greater than any or all of these together — may be and are seen by any, rich or
poor, and not once only but from youth to age. Yet to the thoughtful they never
grow stale. They are rather like the flowers of spring that become more inviting
and precious as we grow older. In the day time the stars retire from view and
the earth, with its petty movements and cares, occupies the field; but when the
latter becomes invisible the stars shine out, speaking to us of peace and eternity.
Similar emotions are felt by many in the presence of the ocean. Its magnificent
extent, its mighty mass and power, its perpetuity fill us with awe. But the
heavens do this and more. Their silence is uninterrupted by deafening storms.
There is something melodramatic about the sea, but not about the stars, the
mightiest events of which address only the eye and belong to a higher class.
Segnius irritant animos, demissa per aurem
Quam quae sunt oculis subjecta fidelibus, et quae
Sibi ipsi tradit spectator. * * * *
So said a wise and witty singer.
A great astronomer (Professor Newcomb) declares that the serious observer
"must not be satisfied with a hurried glance or occasional survey. What he
should do on a clear and moonless summer evening is to escape from his usual
surroundings and go to a place, whether field or housetop, where there is nothing
to obstruct his vision or disturb the current of his thoughts. There he must
recline upon his back so as to take in as much as possible of the starry vault at
one view. One doing this for the first time will be surprised at the magnificence
of the spectacle. As he looks upon the "Universal Frame" and reflects that it has
stood as he now sees it through ages, compared with which the whole period of
human history is but a fleeting moment, the mind will be filled with a consciousness
of infinity and eternity which never before entered it."*
The first effect of the transcendent spectacle is the disposition in the observer
to be silent. The solemn stillness above forbids sound below. In the presence of
royalty one waits to be spoken to. It is only when the stars are hidden that the
lecturer from the desk or platform seeks to make up for their absent glories by the
help of brilliant rhetoric. In their presence such decoration is needless and inef
fectual. We do not cover the Venus or the Apollo in the gallery with ribbons.
Even great Thomas Chalmers could hardly have uttered those splendid sentences
given at the outset of his career, in his Astronomical Discourses, had he spoken,
not from the pulpit of the Tron Church, but from a rock near the Kelvin on a
* The Stars, Chapter III.

clear Scottish night. The majesty of the upper world is so great that in its pres
ence silence, or the greatest simplicity of language, when we have to speak of it,
seems most suitable.
Another thought is this— that solitary as the observer may be, he may profit
ably remember that not he alone, but at that moment thousands of others are gaz
ing at the same scene with him. Astronomers from many observatories are
scanning or photographing perhaps the very constellations he is marking. The
lonely traveller on many roads, the shepherd keeping his flock, and perhaps the
distant friend meet him in the stars. Indeed, so great is the multitude of such
watchers, that no lucid star can vanish or appear, or even materially change its bright
ness without its being detected, as has often happened, by more than one such obser
ver, and they are often unprofessional. In 1S66 a new star appeared in the constella
tion called Corona, Boreal is, and was caught "independently by at least five
observers in Europe and America"; among them by Henry Tutwiler of Alabama.
Not only so, but in a high sense the gazer at the stars meets there all who
in past time have studied the same scene, and the multitudes who in ages to come
may do like them. Especially if he be a reader of history will he meet those dis
tinguished men who have left their names associated with special stars. He will
meet Hall, and Lowell in Mars, Barnard in Jupiter, Bond in Sirius, and the
Herschels everywhere. While if he be also a student of Astro-Physics, he cannot
fail to recall Campbell and Pickering, Yogel and Hale and a long list of men of
similar rank. Indeed to the student of Astronomy the stars are a veritable Hall
of Fame. As in a great library we realize in a certain sense the living- presence of
a vast number of authors, flourishing perhaps in widely different times, so when
we look at the skies at night we join our race there. As a gifted Englishman
(James Montgomery) has said in Johnsonian phrase, "In the perpetuity of the
heavens successive generations are contemporary."
But to return to our observer. What must he see, should he have patience
to spend some liours in the survey and return to the scrutiny several times during
the year? The "lucid stars", omitting seven or eight called planets, are irregular
in their distribution, and very different in brightness, increasing rapidly in num
ber as they grow fainter, and collecting at last into delicate clouds, where they are
so small and so close that they cannot lie- seen separate without a telescope. These
cloudy patches are found to girdle the sky and while irregular in detail, yet as a
whole they form a belt of the heavens of varying breadth, but divided into nearly
equal parts, by a great circle of the heavens the poles of which are one north and
the other south of the equator.
The fleecy belt is familiar to us as the Milky Way or galaxy, and in some
fundamental respects is the most important, as it is the largest collection of stars
in the heavens. About it the great problem of the structure of the universe cen
ters, and when we shall be be able to read its meaning, the problem will be near
lution. "The Milky Way," says the, astronomer Seeliger, "is no merely local
26

so

phenomenon, but is closely connected with the entire constitution of our stellar
system." The other stars often appear to be somehow related to it. ^ For the
lucid stars, some six thousand in number, taking them all together'get decidedly
closer to one another in direction as they near the galactic circle, while the tele
scopic stars, of which there are certainly tens of millions and probably hundreds of
millions, show a still more decided tendency to accumulate toward the galaxy and
to be fewer near its poles. So marked is this, that were the Milky Way removed,
its median line could virtually be recovered by tracing the locus of the maximum
density of the remaining stars. If we assume that on the whole, dealing with
great classes and not individuals, faintness of light is due to increased distance and
not to small intrinsic brightness, we may declare with many astronomers that the
visible universe seems to be flattened at the galactic poles and to have the form pos
sibly of an oblate spheroid familiar to us in revolving planets. If so, we seem to
be near the galactic plane and not far from its centre.
But is it safe t< i say that faintness of light implies great distance from us?
Surely not for any one star. For we know that while the nearest star to us is one
of the brightest, yet the four or five stars next in order of distance are either invis
ible to the naked eye or barely seen without a telescope. Yet for a host of stars
which have the same color and spectrum and therefore doubtless the same temper
ature, it is perhaps fair to presume that on the whole the faintest ones are far
thest off.
But our prostrate watcher of the heavens, if he be persistent, will see more
than the single stars and the galaxy. His eye will be arrested here and there by a
few condensed collections of stars, so close as to suggest that they really form a
system and are not by mere accident lying in the same direction. Such are the
Pleiades or Seven Stars wdiich recent astronomy shows to be a connected group, for
to its delicate scrutiny they behave like a single mass. This and a few other inci
dents of the sort introduce the observer to what in telescopic astronomy constitute
the most splendid objects in the sky — the so-called star clusters, —groups of stars
'which at the outside are visibly separate and easily distinguished but which grow
closer toward the centre until they are blended into a blaze of light which the tele
scope fails to resolve and which only begins to yield to the superior sensitiveness
of the photographic plate. ' A grand specimen of star clusters in our skies is the
famous one in the constellation Hercules. If one has access to a great telescope in
a summer month, and has time to see but one thing, let him by all means beg the
astronomer to point the glass to the cluster in Hercules. The first sight of this is
an epoch in one's life. Astronomers like the younger Herschel, who to singular
ability as observers add the rarer gift of being able adequately to describe their
observations, speak of this cluster in glowing terms unusual in the cold pages of
pure science. And surely there is no exaggeration in this, when one remembers that
these stars are suns far removed from one another when closest, and that in scan
ning them he is looking at a subordinate universe. That the units of such a
27

cluster should show a surprising number whose light suffers periodical variation
is what we would naturally expect. In such a system eclipses and occuitations
must be frequent and regular, and accordingly the variables are found. Besides
large clusters, we have double and multiple stars.
It is an interesting fact that the clusters, great and small show also a tendency
to the galactic zone. They are found more frequently near the galactic circle and
more rarely near its poles, and thus they incline us to think that if they are sub
ordinate universes, they are yet parts of a greater one of which the Milky Way is
to us the chief expression. Indeed, the galaxy appears to be but a grander cluster
different in appearance from the rest only because we are inside of it, while we are
outside of them.
There remains in the skies a third class of objects the enumeration of which
exhausts the catalogue of the chief constituents of the heavens so far as they are
revealed to us by their light. We refer to the Nebulae, a multitude of small cloudy
patches or "stains," mostly irregular in form, only a very few of which would be
caught by our observer from the housetop without telescopic aid if he was told
where to look for them. Some which were once called nebulae were found when tel
escopes were improved to be one after another resolved into star clusters. It was
natural to conclude, as many astronomers did conclude that all nebulae were
merely collections of separate stars, some at distances so vast as to defy existing tele
scopes but like the rest, destined to yield to the better glasses to come. Evidently,
therefore, this question could never be settled finally by the telescope while an
unresolved nebula remained. In this condition the New Astronomy, Astrophys
ics, came to the rescue of the old or classic astronomy. In 1866 (Sir) W. Huggins
announced that the light from the great unresolved nebula in the sword handle of
Orion was different from star light. Analysed with a prism , it presented to him
the remarkable and unmistakable features of a glowing gas. No telescope, how
ever powerful, would ever resolve it into stars. In rapid succession other nebulae
were subjected to similar analysis, and the work has so far extended that there has
been sifted out of all these minute stains upon the sky, a host of true nebulae,
shining masses of gas, of such tenuity that they do not darken stars seen through
them. _ Some of them are round like a planet, others are annular, while some are
spiral in shape. Their faintness makes their boundaries uncertain while their
want of uniformity in brightness may often conceal their regularity The spiral
form of the nebulae may h,- far more frequent than many have suspected. Perhaps
their shapes are not more numerous or varied than the possible forms of equili
brium of revolving fluids, lately deduced by Poincare In some of the larger and
more irregular of these nebulae, which like the Orion nebula arc close to 'the
galaxy, the variation in brightness amounts to condensation into luminous centres
and even mto stars. The faithful prism here notes an addition to the gaseous
spectrum of that of a glowing solid or liquid. The nebulae in striking contrast with
the stars and star clusters, which cluster toward the galaxy and desert the galactic
28

poles — crowd toward those poles and leave the Milky Way. The resolvable neb
ulae or star clusters may form one extreme, while the other is occupied by the
purely gaseous forms, and between them may possibly be mixed masses, in all the
different stages of coagulation .
These three grand classes, stars, clusters, and nebulae have been and are now
under constant scrutiny of the New Astronomy. So far as their light allows, they
are subjected to the spectroscope, and all, it may be to the camera. Not only do
the nebulae seem to graduate into the star clusters, but the individual stars, white,
yellow, red and dark suggest most strongly the familiar history of an incandescent
body, cooling in our foundries, which passes from white through yellow and red to
darkness. Perhaps the skies are meant to show us at a glance the entire history of
a star from its origin in the primitive stuff to its extinction as a light giver. So
that instead of waiting an interminable age to watch the growth of a single sun,
we have the history of one in the variety of all,
What is the conclusion of Modern Astronomers as to the arrangement and
form of the visible Universe? No specific answer has been given which obtains
the suffrages of all. Much is known of the stars, but a far greater amount, they
tell us, remains to be known. A question answered leaves several in its place.
Leading astronomers impressed with the vastness of the ground yet to be covered,
appear to be least inclined to state more than conjectures as to the structure of the
heavens. It is only the reporters of the discoveries of others who are apt to use
in these matters an air of certainty unknown to first hand knowledge. Still the
question will not down. What is the shape of the stellar universe? One of the
guesses at it which has in these times attracted much attention and for which
indeed a good deal can be said, is that our sun is an inferior member of a great
cluster including the lucid and the telescopic stars, the density of which increases
toward the plane of the Milky Way. To an eye looking from the galactic pole, it
might appear as an annular cluster, with our sun near its centre. Beyond this,
in the view of some, comes our Milky Way as a more gigantic cluster, which is
also a great ring, the thickness of which may be more than its breadth, so that it
is far from being a mere zone or circular ribbon of stars. To our spectator from
the galactic pole the universe would be mainly a grand double annular cluster,
composed of individual stars, small clusters and nebulae, most of the latter, how
ever, with many separate stars scattered outside the clusters. Instead of the
double annulus, however, we might have a spiral of two convolutions, the outer
one being our galaxy. But it is idle to spend time on fancies that may soon have
to be abandoned. Professor Kapteyn's two drifts of the stars,* may, if confirmed,
have most important meaning in the theory of the universe.
The stellar world, as it has been briefly described exhibits the power of its
Author, first, by its extent and secondly, by the energy it displays.
•Sir David Gill's Presidential Address. Leicester, 190S.
29

As to extent, the most cursory observer cannot fail to conclude that the stars
must be at an immense distance from us. They are hidden at times by, and
hence must be more remote than, moon and planet. Their configuration, the
familiar figures they form — the dipper, the crown, the cross — remaining the
same from hour to hour, from night to night, from year to year, while their con
stituents are known to be relatively moving, can only be explained if they are at
such vast distances from us that their motions produce no sensible displacement of
them. So that though Arcturus, for example, is known to be moving at a rate of
over two hundred miles per second, its apparent place in the heavens has not
altered so much since Job sung of it, to prevent his recognizing the star with its
familiar neighbors, were he to look upon it now.* This will not surprise us when
we learn that it is nearly seven million times as far from us as the sun. Well
may we speak of the stars as fixed. We measure the motions of other moving
bodies by referring them to the stars. They are thus the centres of coordi
nates for the universe. By a strange paradox our search for something without
change is satisfied in the distant heavens by bodies which are in rapid movement.
Removal from us in space, like remoteness in time, seems to cancel what is indi
vidual and special and leave only the great relations between things conspicuous.
The vast interval between us and the nearest star, the radius of a sphere occupied
alone by our Sun and his attendants, is better realized when we find that the
annual swing of the earth in an orbit one hundred and eighty-six millions of miles
in diameter, produces in that next neighbor an apparent displacement equal to the
breadth of a hair seen twenty feet away. Twenty feet is 140,000 times the hair's
breadth — hence the nearest star is 140,000 times the diameter of the earth's orbit,
that is 140,000 x 186,000,000 miles, or more than twenty-six millions of mil
lions of miles away. Displacements have been measured amounting to only one
fortieth of this. Such stars must be forty times as far away, that is in miles more
than one thousand millions of millions. The great body of stars is farther than
this, for when all known displacements have been catalogued, they concern but a
few of the great host. If they were all removed the heavens would remain appar
ently the same. Its many millions of objects, its clusters and nebulae are so dis
tant that the earth's orbit is a point to them and their distances incalculably great.
The distances to the stars and between the stars are so great that the attempt
to measurts them with our terrestrial units, yards or metres or miles, results in
numbers too unwieldy to be handled, and too great to be really comprehended.
The only alternative is to transfer the immensity from the ratio to the unit, and to
select for our measuring rod one of very uncommon length — only to be used when
dealing with the greater universe. Even then the numbers we reach, the ' 'numer
ics" as Professor James Thomson called them, will occasionally amount to millions.
Few of us have an adequate idea of a million —a number which it would take "a
•Canst thou guide Arcturus with his sons? Job 38::>2.
30

man, working steadily ten hours a. day, nine days to count — a banker, a month
to pay out in silver dollars — an express train nearly three years to run in miles.
Yet we have often in astronomy to speak of millions of millions.
The first unit of length suggested to us for astronomical purposes is very nat
urally that fundamental line, the mean distance of the earth from the sun: We
call it 93,000,000 miles. We realize it better perhaps when we say that a cannon
ball flying 2,000 feet a second would take eight years to cross to the sun. This
tremendous unit which serves a valuable purpose and proves quite adequate in our
study of the Solar system, becomes troublesome from minuteness when we deal
with fixed stars, the nearest of which we remember is nearly 2<S(),000 times the
sun's distance from us. In this condition astronomers have resorted to what they
call a light-year: namely, the distance which light travels over in one year. The
speed of light in celestial space is 186,000 miles per second — a swiftness of which
we may get a better idea if we imagine a series of perfect mirrors adjusted around
the earth, each in the horizon of its neighbor. Fancy a flash of light sent from
the spectator looking toward the first mirror. The ray would rebound from each
in turn and finally pass the initial station again on its second round. But if after
first dismissing it, the spectator turns to note its return from the mirror behind
him, it would have darted by his head seven times while he was turning and be
caught by him after its eighth round. Now let such a messenger speed away for a
year and use the distance thus described as the unit in measuring celestial intervals.
Such a method seems natural to a German, who is apt to express distances in
"Stunden." The light-year is about 500,000 cannon ball years. The sun is nearly
8 1-5 light-minutes or oOO light-seconds from us — while the nearest star is not«
less than 4 1-4 light-years away. Professor Newcomb infers that the stars of the
Milky Way lie outside of a sphere, the radius of which is 12H0 light-years and,
considering the evidence of "proper motion," even outside of 3200 light-years.*
If these estimates be accepted (they are by no means unsupported by other author
ities) the dimensions of the starry world may well fill us with awe in the presence
of the Power who made and supports it. Wc can understand Emanuel Kant when
he said that he viewed it with a ''wonder and reverence" which only one other
thing in the whole realm of thought excited in him. Doubtless it was not merely
the greatness of space that impressed him but the obvious reflection that the rays
by which he saw these bodies started from trfcin at different epochs in the past,
and so in studying them, chronology virtually disappeared, the past ages were
made present — and he penetrated not only space but time. He was virtually
made to live thousands of years ago, for he was seeing things coeval with the
patriarchs. But the extent of the greater world consists not only in its linear dimensions,
but also in the numbers, the masses and the light-power of the stars. The most
recent statements are that "the total number of the stars is to be counted by hun-
•The Stars, p. 317. 31

dreds of millions" and yet each star, on the average would have more space than
our sun. Many of them are far more massive, and many are far brighter.
If we consider only those of which we know most, the sun is perhaps below rather
than above the average. Certainly it is inferior in light. Sir David Gill tells us
that if the sun were removed to the mean distance of the nearest stars it would be
nearly a fifth magnitude star and belong to the fainter ones in the sky.* Our first
glance at what appeared to be a canopy of a few thousand luminous points has
thus expanded into a universe of millions of suns, many of them clusters of suns,
varying in composition from a pair to over six thousand in one cluster by actual
count, interspersed with patches of star-stuff apparently in process of evolution into
stars, and doubtless including besides hosts of worn out dark bodies; all these in
motion, and separated by distances measured by light-years. Surely we have here
a universe worthy of Him who in the beginning created the Heavens and the
Earth. But does an infinite God imply an infinite universe? Beyond the station
reached in thirty-two hundred light-years, will a new universe begin? Is Jean
Paul's cry as he carries his hero from star to star, "End there is none", a mere
fiction? The answer of the astronomers at the opening of the twentieth century
is that the visible universe probably is not infinite in extent. If it were, they tell
us that, with uniform diffusion, the whole sky wrould blaze with a splendor, sur
passing that of the sun . For at a double distance we should have four times as many
stars, and at a tenfold distance a hundred times as many, the increasing number
just making up for the decreasing brightness of each one. So that each of the
infinite host about us would shine with equal brightness and, in the aggregate,
amount to an immeasurable resultant. If they were not uniformly distributed,
but were aggregated rather in certain belts, then those belts would be insupport-
ably bright. The conclusion is inevitable, unless light is absorbed in space, or is
interrupted in its transit by opaque matter. As to absorption, that is, transfor
mation of the energy into some other variety than light, no modern astronomer
supports it. The atmosphere may by its viscosity transform sound-energy
into heat but the ether gives no sign of viscosity and wave-energy in it appar
ently remains unchanged in type. Comets, mere ghosts of matter, dart through
it with planetary speed, and are unretarded. Sunshine and starshine do not heat
it, and we are obliged to believe it cfestifcute of the means of absorption. Nor do
we find evidence of dust or large opaque masses in stellar space in any such quan
tity or condition as materially to intercept the light of the stars as a whole.
The light of the sky at night, supposing it to be spread over the vault uni
formly, bears so small a proportion to that of the full moon, that we are forced to
conclude that the visible universe is not infinite in extent. A similar argument
would apply to the invisible radiation from the stars. Doubtless an infinite uni
verse would result in a sky insufferably hot as well as brightf.
•B.A. Address 1908-
tSir Bobe.rt Ball. 32

Again, if the universe were infinite in extent and then necessarily so in mass,
the speed of the stars near its centre would so accumulate in the: vast periods of
time which are demonstrated by geology that our sun instead of having its present
speed of 19 kilos, per second — (say 12 miles per sec.) — would be flying through
space much faster. Indeed Lord Kelvin has calculated that it is safest to conclude
that the entire mass of our universe, including dark as well as bright stars within
a sphere of radius equal to 3200 light years, is not more than ten thousand million
times that of our own sun .
The finite extent of our universe appears also to be indicated by the fact that
after passing a certain magnitude, increasing telescopic power or space-penetration
does not continue to enlarge the number of visible stars, in the same but in a
diminishing ratio. Nor does increased time of exposure of a photographic plate
appear to increase in anything like the same proportion, — in some cases scarcely
at all— -the star images on the plate. it seems as if we, were here approaching the
boundary of the stellar world.
On the whole we seem'forced to conclude that the greater universe — the mac
rocosm — is finite in extent and in the number and total mass of its constituents.
The Energy Manifest in thk Stellar World, Expresses the Power of its
Maker
If the extent, of the universe is fitted to excite in us awe and reverence, much
more do we feel our littleness when we consider the forces which produce its sta
bility and the energies of which these forces are the output. The mere shining
is not an idle pastime. A star must work to shine. The power shown in its
plunging through space, immense as it is, may be not a great many times that
involved in its radiation. Thus the sun's energy due to his motion, is perhaps
not 17 times that represented by his temperature. We may appreciate this bet
ter if we visit the powerhouse of an electric light plant and see the great engine
puffing like a giant, and then think of the silent lights in the rooms around, which
go out when the engine stops. We may not see the engine in the lighted candle
or lamp or star, but it is somewhere and it is at work.
To get at least a faint idea of the great aggregate of energy displayed in the
stellar world, let us consider one of the stars of which we know most from its
being nearest, to us, although, as we have said, it is hardly up to the average of
the lucid stars. Our sun is a sphere so' large that if its centre were here its sur
face would be nearly double the moon's distance from us. It has enough mater
ial in it to make 330,000 planets like the earth— or 700 complete solar systems,
planets, meteors and comets. Were it stripped of all its attendants, it would
lose but a trifle, utterly imperceptible to stellar view. The temperature of the
sun's surface according to the best estimates is near IS, 000 degrees Farhenheit. It
is now losing energy by the radiation which gives light and heat, at the rate
33

of 10,000 horsepower per square foot of its surface. The life history of our
globe as presented in the rocks, shows that this rate has been virtually main
tained for millions of years.
We may get some notion of this outlay if we reflect that our earth is so small
as seen from the sun that it intercepts only 1 -2200,000,000th of it. Yet this frac
tion transmuted here into a thousand forms gives to our earth, the physicists say,
all its life and motion. The solar energy is the Proteus of mythology. Touch
ing the earth, its metamorphoses are so rapid and varied that only science can
seize them. The wind and wave, cloud and storm, the forest and farm, the
countless tribes of animals, man and all his activities, his ship and train, his food
and fuel, his telegraph and telephone owe, as every school boy knows, their possi
bility to the sun, and are really solar energy incorporated. We and our posses
sions are children of the sun, and but a little while ago our energies belonged to
it. No wonder the Persians worshipped the sun. So should we perhaps, if to
us he declared his own glory.
It is astounding to think that all this complex multitude of transformations
reaching back to the early geological ages should have employed only an inconsider
able amount of the energy emitted by our luminary in all directions. What becomes
of the rest? What of that huge store which might have brightened and vivified
2200,000,000 worlds like ours, but which appears to have been spent in vain?
Let us humbly remember that no energy is really lost. It is merely transferred
in place and kind in ceaseless transit. We must know vastly more than we do
of Nature before we can tell what possibly indispensable mission these rays which
miss us may have in the world. In other directions nature seems to be economi
cal, and accomplishes her ends with the least possible expenditure of work, but in
the radiation of these great suns she displays to our partial view a magnificent
prodigality that provides enough for us, and leaves a countless store unappro
priated. How long has the sun been shining as it does? Certainly long enough for
the slowly unfolding generations of plants and animals revealed by Geology, to
have completed their history. This must at least have been long enough for the
earth to have cooled through the restricted range of temperature within which
such life is possible. The geologist may have been too "uniformitarian " when
making ms estimates, while the older physicists left out of view the influence of
radio-activity. A very modest conclusion between the extremes would be that
the sun has been shining with much likehis present power for a hundred million
of years. How long will the sun continue to shine as he does? With no foreign sup
ply, ami regarding the case to be that of a globe of incandescent gas radiating and
contracting, Lord Kelvin tells us that the sun may shine as at present for not
many million years to come. After all the lavish expenditure of the past our star
is still a multi-billionaire. The sun does not need the influx of ' meteors
34

or the shock of another star to renew its power. Helmholtz has taught us that
the mere shrinking of a gaseous sphere by an amount imperceptible to our tele
scopes, would give activity to the locked up energy and even raise its temperature.
Having then reached some estimate of the energy of one of the lesser mem
bers of the great hosts of Heaven, we have only to multiply our results by the pos
sible thousand million of stars, bright and dark, that constitute the heavens to get
at most a minimum value for the working power in the greater universe.
And this is but a glimpse as, in an imperfect mirror, of the Infinite One from
whose hand these orbs first came, and by whose will they are guided.
The Lesser World as Revealing the Power ok its Maker
Turning now from the greater world — the macrocosm — let us look for a short
while at the antithetic world — the universe beneath us, where the immeasurably
small replaces the immeasurably great — the universe of the atoms, instead of the
stars. In it wre measure distances not by light years or the journeys which light
makes while the earth describes one round but by those which it makes while
an atom describes its orbit. Wave lengths of light may replace stellar inter
vals. Here we handle microns (1-25000 in.) and millimicrons, the thousandths
of these, or going still smaller, tenthinetcrs or even fourteenthmeters*, of
which latter there are a hundred million in a micron, with the same familiarity
that the astronomer shows in dealing with his huge units. Indeed we soon
learn, as Lord Kelvin has remindc^d us, that in both universes we are really con
cerned rather with the ratios of numbers than with the numbers themselves. The
ratio may be simple whether the numbers be infinite, finite or infinitesimal. Law
deals with ratios or relations, and we may march confidently in both spheres and
be neither oppressed by the vastness in one nor lose our mental grasp by the little
ness in the other.
But while the things considered are so contrasted in magnitude that it is con
venient to study them separately, it is a great advantage that the fundamental
laws of motion, force and energy which are manifest in the greatei' universe know
no limit as to size, and stretch in equal perfection over the smaller universe.
Law is like the tent of the fairy Paribanou, which could be carried in the prince's
pocket, and yet whe*n unfolded wouJd cover his father's army. In the eye of
law, the two universes are one. We have lost no time therefore by our rapid
study of the greater world. Indeed it is the natural and rational course to study
that first, for the law operates under far simpler conditions among the stars which
we can see, than in the atoms which we cannot see. Astronomy is rightly the
first as well'as the oldest of the sciences.
The order we have pursued is justified also by the belief entertained by many
leading men that the two universes in their grand features are built on the same
•MM. Fabry et Perot. 35

model. The structure of the heavens may be a suggestive picture of the structure
of a molecule. The stellar cluster suggests the molecular cluster. In each the
equilibrium tends to stability greater and greater, and the stability is in both not
static but dynamic — not that of a statue, but that of a moving form.
While there are these remarkable and helpful resemblances between the two
universes, there are some equally striking contrasts. The astro-physicist studies
individual stars. The brightness, composition, distance, mass, and speed of
special stars have been and will continue to be his chief study. With the tele
scope and, in the New Astronomy, its adjuncts, the spectroscope and camera, he
will pursue the inquiry as to each individual in turn. But in the lower world,
the geophysicist funds himself in the presence of bodies, which he calls molecules
and atoms, so minute that no image of them has ever been or can ever be made by
mirror or glass — and this not because magnifying power cannot theoretically be
sumcently increased, but because when the dimensions of an object approach those
of wave-lengths of light, or less, the straight-line propagation of light is no longer
true, and images become impossible, unless we could use ultra-violet waves, and
cause their energy to fluoresce into the range of vision. When we deal with atoms,
therefore, the microscope fails to help us*, and the physicist has to walk by faith,
not by sight. His experiments deal with masses, and from the behavior of great
crowds of atoms he must draw his conclusions as to the existence and properties of
the invisible units that compose them. The evidence is indirect and circumstan
tial . The electroscope or photographic plate or fluorescent screen replaces roughly
the micrometer of the astronomer. The experimental basis of the geophysicist
seems to be much narrower than that of his brother the astro-physicist. Both
appeal to mathematics, but here again the greater world seems to be far less intri
cate than the lesser one. The stars are so widely separate that the perturbations
produced by the most of them in the motion of any one are vanishingly small, and
for the few that cannot be neglected, are easily calculable. Very different is it
with the atom whose perturbation by a host of neighbors, constitute the most
important facts in its motion. The mathematician has never given us the equa
tion of a single atomic orbit in a molecular cluster, for he knows neither the atomic
force-law, nor the interatomic distances. He cannot follow an atom, as New-
comb or Hill follows a planet for the atom, besides, is subject f o countless collisions,
and its motion is unimaginably discontinuous. hi this condition the geometer
has been compelled to create a new mathematical science, that of aggregates as dis
tinguished from individuals. "Statistical mechanics", he names it. Surpris
ingly enough, the behaviour of great clusters of individuals is a far simpler study
than that of the units that make up the swarms. The caprices of the individnals
are in a vast number largely self-destructive, and disappear in the great resultant.
Averages obey more elementary laws, than particulars.
•The new ultra-microscopic vision seems to involve diffraction patterns and not real images.
36

Our molecules arc like unresolved star clusters, which are not really nebulous,
but look so. We must study them as a whole, just as we would have to study
the Milky Way, had we never succeeded in separating it into constituents.
It is interesting to know that the astro- physicist in recent years, seems to be
joining his brother the geophysicist in this method, and to be creating a science
of celestial statistics, though he approaches it from the other side. The most
interesting portion, to many, of Sir David Gill's notable address to the British
Association at Leicester last August*, was that in which he calls attention to Pro
fessor Kapteyn's conclusion regarding great classes of stars; as for example, where
he connects by an empirical formula, strikingly verified by later measures, the
average distance of stars of the same type and magnitude with their average proper
motion. This study of groups, in the hands of Kapteyn, Newcomb and the ris
ing generation of astro-physicists is to the humble student of Physics one of the
most engaging parts of the New Astronomy. Groups and not individuals must
be more and more the factors of scientific discoveries, and the larger the groups
the safer and simpler the conclusions.
The most important contributions to molecular science in recent times are
doubtless the studies of the cathode discharge in high vacua by Crookes, J.J.
Thomson and his followers, and the associated discovery of the radiation due to the
impact of this discharge upon the anticathode by Roentgen; leading up to the
science of radio-activity through the researches of Becquerel, Mine, and M.
Curie. Prof. Rutherford and a large company of workers of different nations.
Among this honorable assembly of distinguished experimenters who are still busily
at work, it is still no more than fair to set forth for special praise the publications
of Madame Sklodowski Curie, now, we understand, Professor in the Sorbonne at
Palis. This lady's articles, detailing her remarkable researches with their con
spicuous results in adding certainly two and perhaps three to the list of chemical
elements, determining the atomic mass of one of them with accuracy and
making tne science of radio-activity possible, were printed in the Annales de
Chemie et de Physique since 1903 and are models of what is best in scientific writ
ing. In them, one knows not whether to admire the most the singular patience
and sagacity of the experimenter, or her skill as an expositor. We ask pardon for
saying that the published photograph of the lady and her children, makes us think
that, like Mrs. Somerville, she has found her science to be not incompatible with
wifely duty. The sad event which struck down last year her honored associ
ate and husband, drew to her the sympathy of a world-wide circle.
In what way does the world of the atom, like the greater world, reveal the
power and Godhead of its Maker?
First, in the surpassing multitude of its constituents. Philosophers have been
led by circumstantial evidence along several con verging lines to sonic definite con
clusions about the size of atoms. Thus Lord Kelvin, then Sir W Thomson, in
i
•Aug. 1908.

his celebrated essay on the size of atoms,* using four lines of argument, theundu-
latory theory of light, contact electricity, capillary attraction, and the kinetic
theory of gases, concluded that if a globe of water of the size of a football were
magnified to the size of the earth and its molecules enlarged in the same propor
tion the magnified structure would be more coarse-grained than a heap of small
shot, but probably less coarse-grained than a heap of footballs.
The conclusions reached by these independent lines are so concordant as to
make their united testimony very convincing. The error in the final result cannot
be in making the atom too small, for the great man seems to have considered the
diameter of the latter to be coincident with the diameter of the spherical space
within which it is paramount. Suppose Kelvin's magnified molecules to be 3
inches in diameter. An easy calculation shows us that a spherical mass of them
as large as the earth would contain more than twenty-eight hundred thousand
millions of such balls. We have seen that the outside estimate of the number of
stars is one thousand million. In other words, the number of water molecules in
such a drop of water is more than twenty-eight hundred times the number of stars
in the greater world. Were each molecule a star, there are enough in a water
drop to make more than twenty-eight hundred such universes as are above us. It
is the same everywhere in the atomic world.
According to the calculations of M. Founder d'Albet when speaking of spores
1-60000 inch in diameter, "no living organism contains less than a hundred mil
lion molecules. "
In the greater world we arc impressed with the splendour of its members and
the magnificence of their intervals. In the lesser world those intervals vanish,
but each mass becomes a universe in itself. The infinitely small is side by side
with the infinitely great, and our lesser world is really a universe of universes.
Both worlds bear witness to the Almightiness of their Maker, the one by the
majesty of its units and their mutual distances, the other by the, overwhelm
ing multitude of its factors and the endless variety of the complexes which
they unite to form.
The voice of the lower world, in this regard, rises to a, loftier key. when we
consider the energies associated with its atoms. The forms of energy in the stel
lar world are chiefly those connected with their force of gravitation and their
speed, and. the important ones associated with the fact of radiation. The force of
gravity as we have seen, is the feeblest of all inter-atomic forces and would be
utterly insensible save for the tremendous masses that exert it. When we descend
to such bodies as we can handle, gravitating attraction becomes so evanescent' that
its detection belongs to the delicacies of physical experimentation. But the
other inter-atomic forces, those exerted at molecular intervals, are giants in com
parison. The law of their variation appears to involve an inverse power of the
distance much higher than the second. The dynamical equilibrium of the mole-
?Nature, 19 July, 1883.
tTwo New Worlds p. 8. 3,S

cule requires or the support of its atoms against these relatively huge forces
circulations of which the periods are millions of millions of periods J second
whereas among the stars, the periods are counted by days, or years, or even cen-
tunes. But it is in the province of Radiant Energy that the superiority of the lower
world becomes most manifest. Radio-activity belongs to the last chapter of
physics, the first pages of which alone have yet been written. It is now the
burning question m many'laboratories and engages the thought and experimental
skill ot a great host, and among them the ablest living physicists.
The molecules of the elementary bodies of chemistry appear to have mostly
reached a state of equilibrium, the stability of which cannot be disturbed by
forces withm the present reach of science. But the last decade has revealed
the Fact that a few of the heaviest and therefore probably the most complex of them,
have not reached this final stability. They seem to be slowly on their way to it|
and possibly may reach it by a transmutation into less complex and lighter forms!
Uranium has prove. 1 to be in this state of transit, so slow, that doubtless many
years may be required to make the loss amount to what may be detected with a
sensitive balance. For it turns out that the radiation is largely and perhaps
wholly one not of wave energy but of matter — lines of projectile corpuscles shot out
with speed comparable to that of light and carrying us back to a similar power
imagined by Newton to be exercised by luminous bodies — a power derided by critics
for a hundred years now at last shown to be in constant action around us. The revel
ation of this remarkable radiating activity of Uranium, led Professor and Madame
Curie to a series of classical researches upon the ore from which Uranium is gotten,
leading quickly to their discovery in A. D. 1900 of an extraordinary new elementary
body of such amazing activity that a few hundred milligrammes of it in the hands of
experimenters throughout the world have really led to the knowledge which has
created the new science of of radio-activity, Rightly did they call the new ele
ment Radium. While no one has ever seen this metal, and while the whole
amount of it in the hands of the physicists of the world is not more than a gramme
or so, its activity does not appear- to be impaired by its combination with other
bodies, like Bromine or Chlorine and its indications with the electroscope are so
constant and regular that the results are plainly not conjectural. The electro
scope is doubtless a million times more sensitive than the spectroscope, which is
nearly a million times more sensitive than the balance. Without the amazing
delicacy of the first named instrument, the new science would never have had more
than its birth.
Radium, which will always recall the names of Madame Curie and her hus
band, was found by them to be incessantly radiating energy in several, forms,
directly and indirectly. It was found to be permanently at a somewhat higher
temperature than its environment, and was determined to be radiating heat eon-

39

stantly at the rate of one hundred calories per hour per gramme. This was due
largely to one part, doubtless the largest part, of its energy-emission.
To bring the two universes into comparison, let us put the Radium side by
side with a star. The sun, as we have seen, is emitting energy at the rate of
ten thousand horsepower per square foot of surface. Taking this over the entire
surface and dividing by the mass of the sun, it easily results that the radiation of
the sun is 1-4800 calories per hour per gramme, whilst that of Radium is one hundred
calories per hour per gramme. In other words, the Radium is emitting energy at
a rate four hundred and eighty thousand times as great as an equal mass of
the sun. Were the sun made of Radium the earth and its population would
quickly be destroyed by heat.
The other atoms of the chemist's list are doubtless centres of energy quite in
the class of Radium. They appear to have reached an equilibrium to which it is
slowly marching. The store of energy remaining after the final state is attained
is less indeed than it was during the process. But if the analogy of other pro
cesses more familiar to us holds here, it cannot be greatly less. The pendulum
at its lowest point is but little inferior in power to that it had at its culmination.
ft is potential and perhaps unavailable but that point is not here in quastion .
The activity of Radium, Thorium and Uranium may safely be taken as an index of
the mighty forces which are balanced in the molecules of other elements. If so
we are confronted in our laboratories, when dealing with atoms, with energies rela
tively more tremendous than those which are revealed in the stars. It is terrible
to know that all about us and in us — in the seemingly innocent air and w-atei 
we are unconsciously in the presence of and very near to power, the random liber
ation of which would mean the destruction of the world. The skilled utilization
of it, were it possible, would enable the same world to support many times its
present population. What these molecular energies may be, we have an example
in the explosive force of dynamite, and in the extraordinary speed given to radi
ated particles from radio-active materials. If we feel constrained to bow in the
presence of the Power which shows itself in Nebulae and Stars, we do not escape
the display of the same Power when we turn to the opposite extreme. If possible
the philosopher acknowledges a Mightier Hand in the atomic than in the stellar
world, and^ teachers of truth seeking to manifest the majesty of the Creator may
well point their hearers below as well as above.
We have adverted to the fact that the study oi' the greater world may profit
ably precede and introduce us to that of the lesser world. Yet in the eye of rea
son the logical process would be the reverse. The atoms are reallv the final units
of both universes. The stars are made of atoms. The stellar forces are the
forces of the same atoms that form the molecules, only at greater distances Both
worlds are thus one, proceeding from the same centres. The atomic world being
the inner, and the starry world the outer region of the same great fields of force
Hence springs their harmony; and whether we go from circumference to centre or
40

from, centre to circumference, we are ever in the sphere of the same fundamental
laws. Contemplating this vast picture a great Englishman, filled with its mystery
when seen from a merely human standpoint, sang
I know there shall dawn a day;
Is it here on homely earth,
Is it yonder world-away.
Where the strange and new have birth
That Power comes full in play?
Is it here with grass about
Under befriending trees,
Where sky and birds venture out
And the air, by mild degrees,
Puts winter's death past doubt ?
Is it up amid whirls and roar
Of the Elemental flame
Which star flecks heaven's dark floor,
That new, yet still the same
Full in play, comes Power once more ?
Somewhere, below, above,
Shall a day dawn — this I know —
When Power, which vainly strove
My weakness to overthrow
Shall triumph. >
Yes, the day hoped for by Browning has to multitudes long ago dawned . May
we not take a higher key and sing with David ?
Whither shall I go from thy spirit,
Or whither shall I flee from thy presence ?
If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there;
If I make my bed in .the deep, behold thou art there ;
If I take the wings of the morning
And dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,.
Even there shall thy hand lead me,
And thy right hand shall hold me.

41

THIRD LECTU R E
Man's Place in the World, as Evincino the Goodness ok His Maker
A contemplation of the material world leads one, very early in life, to an
humbling sense of man 's place in it. Its evident immensity in space, obvious to the
most careless observer, and overwhelming to the serious student, is in striking con
trast to the diminutiveness of his body or the range of his activity. Its immensity
in duration, growing upon us as we penetrate deeper into the lessons of the rocks,
makes man's life in the comparison appear indeed as a vapour, and even the rise
and fall of empires seem scarcely pendulum beats in the presence of the periods
that pass before us in the history of the earth. More striking still is man's little
ness when we consider the mighty energy disclosed in the world above us and the
world beneath us: repositories of power in atom, sun and system, in the light of
which man's power, augmented by all the resources he has captured, vanishes
from the calculation. Man's home is thus a point in space, his stay in it a point
in time, and his power in it less, if less be possible.
The use of this reflection by moralists in all ages, to chasten pride and foster
humility, is undoubtedly legitimate and wise.
But are we to infer that man being little, is also insignificant? Are the bal
ance and the scale and the clock the only instruments by which we are to estimate
his importance in Nature? She warns us that value in her realm does
not always go with size, nor rank with duration. A milligramme of radium
means more with her than many kilogrammes of lead, and a day of the rich life
of the tropics is more than a century around the pole. If it should appear on
closer study that Nature has set striking value on man despite his minuteness, and
that she has, in her arrangements, neglected no part of his being, but has so pro
vided for his growth in all his many-sided eapacity as to warrant us in saying that
in some large sense, the world was made for man, we should not abandon the early
lesson of humility, but expand the teaching, and conclude that his humility should
be that of a prince born to a high estate. Our attitude in the presence of the maj
esty of Nature would not be that of a slave trembling before a cruel master, but
that of a child feeling its weakness, but also sure that the Power behind this won
derful apparatus is a loving one.
If this be true, Ave must count it one of the saddest facts in human history,
that the opposite belief has been held by so many of our own race — the gifted as
42

well as the ignorant-and that it survives to our own time, and may be heard even
m our pulpits lo men like Alexander Pope, speaking doubtless for many in his
own time and in other times, it gave dignity to Nature to declare that 'she saw
with equal eye the fall of a sparrow and the death of a hero. As the music of the
Englishman s line falls upon the ear, it is in strange discord with a higher strain
that Pope had heard when a child, but had forgotten, "Ye are of more value than
many sparrows," X„t many months ago, a highly educated young Japanese of
rank is said to have committed suicide, leaving in his diary a statement that his
outlook on the world had filled him with despair. He saw in the world around
him no friendly hand, but in the adjustment of Nature everywhere malignity and
not benignity . So he chose to end the unavailing straggle, which appeared to him
to be only a movement out of mystery and gloom into deeper mystery and dark
ness. A young preacher, quoting this incident, declared that the Japanese was
right, looking no farther than he looked. Nay, said he, we must go to a different
and higher world to correct his mistake, for "Nature cares no more for man than
for the brute." The preacher came from a section of our land noted for culture
and light. His belief may be a prevalent one among the young. If so, it is start
ling to many sober people, for it sounds like a return to the skepticism of the days
of Queen Anne. His statement, it is true, receives apparent support from a very
common misconception of what is meant by the phrase "the laws of Nature."
Nature, it is said, is inflexibly impartial and penalties for the violations of her
laws are never remitted. The transgressor is instantly and inevitably punished.
There is no difference in the result, whether he be prince or peasant, man or brute.
If he stumbles or leaps over a precipice, the catastrophe is the same for each.
Is there not here a very important fallacy? Nature's laws are not rules of
action addressed to persons who may obey them or not as they choose. They are
merely universal facts, statements to which there is no exception. An asserted
exception tests or "proves" them, and an established exception destroys them.
Therefore they cannot be broken. The man who falls from the cliff, whatever else
he breaks, breaks no law of Nature. He complies with it, or, to speak metaphori
cally, he perfectly obeys it. Did he not fall or did he without interference fall dif
ferently from the brute, there indeed would be an interruption, far more disastrous
than the loss of a single life: for it would destroy the harmony of the world, and
make experience useless and science impossible. In opposition to the pessimism
of the young Japanese, supported by the terse sentence of the preacher, we
hold that Nature cares more for man than for the brute, and that she shows this
care in the wonderful provision she has made for his growth in every part of his
being — body, mind, and soul. Let us briefly recall some reasons for this belief.
(1) Nature shows her peculiar care for man in the vast time she has taken
to prepare for him a proper home. The geological story is more wonderful than
any romance. Beginning with a formlesss chaos, geology tells us of the separation
of the earliest continents and oceans; of the first appearance of life in the form of

43

humble vegetation, when the temperature had been sufficiently lowered; then of
marine forms, rising in the animal scale till the land was ready for its tenants, and
these in shapes so strange that the wildest fancies of the poet seem tame in the
comparison — reptiles giving place to birds, followed by colossal quadrupeds, until
in the long ages for which our years seem inadequate units, the Earth was ready
in climate, soil, and in its denizens for the appearance of its latest crowning crea
tion, "lordly, intellectual" reverential man. His appearance at an earlier time
would have been premature. He could not have lived when the coal plant grew,
for he could not have breathed that atmosphere. He could not have lived when
the Deinosaurs abounded. They would have been his masters.
(2) Nature shows her unique care for man in the multitude of her adapta
tions for his welfare.
(a) .The size and mass of the Earth are duly proportioned to his needs.
Whatever i's astronomical importance or insignificance, it is the only one of all the
starry host, so far as we know, upon which he could live and flourish.* If the
Earth's size and mass were those of the Sun, we would never take more than our
first step, for we would be crushed to the surface. Were they those of the Moon,
we would be insufficiently restrained, our steps would be too high and too few; all
our bodily adjustments of muscles, limbs, fluids would be disordered in the new
gravity field, and life as we know it would become impossible.
(b) The proportions of land and water are those best suited to man.
He needs the solid land with its topographical variety, — mountain, plateau and
lowlands. But he needs a vaster expanse of ocean to equalize climates, support a
proper circulation, separate and yet unite the nations, and be a defense to the
weak, and a highway to the merchant and traveller.
(c) This adjustment of land and water prepares man to live in all zones.
Other forms of life, also high, are more or less restricted in their habitat. The
tropics give us the palm'and lion — we may only see them in cages and conserva
tories. Man is of all'zones. His maximum is not a. function of his latitude.
The Earth is so contrived that all her areas are opened to him. Not only the sur
face of the continent and ocean in his territory, but the depths of the sea are
becoming his realm by the improvements in diving-armour and the submarine
boat, while the atmosphere seems likely at no distant day to be to him a familiar
thorough fare. (d) One of the most striking of Nature's adaptations to man is seen in
the atmosphere. We take it for granted for its transparency and tenacity offer so
little obstruction to movement, whether of of light or of ordinary masses, that our
attention is not forcibly arrested by its presence. Yet how manifold are its rela
tions to us: how numerous the points at which it beneficently touches our lives.
*Upon this point and upon others which follow, consult "Man's place in Nature" by
Sir A. E. Wallace, a book which, however questionable in some details, exhibits wonderful
industry and masterly ability. 44

Its exquisite lightness and spring render it responsive to every movement, whether
of solid or liquid, that touches it. It is stirred by the motion of our bodies, of our
machines and trains, while the incessant surface movements of the ocean are faith
fully copied by, or themselves copy the agitation in the invisible fluid above them.
Still more wonderful are the interlacing streams of different speeds in the body of
the atmosphere itself and the flocculent constitution and mottled density of it,
revealed by the scintillation of the stars.
But this is only a small part of the wonder. The air, in its lower regions,
contains particles from many of the bodies it rests upon, and it may be, in view of
the radiant activity of some bodies revealed by recent Physics, and possibly of all,
that its composition is far more complex than we have dreamed. Tt contains in
gaseous form water enough to make a respectable ocean, and it may hold enough of
the effluvia of the Earth to enable a philosopher of adequate skill and patience to
discover in it traces of everything that goes to form the Earth's surface, were that
surface to disappear. Whether that dream is true or not, our air is not a thing of
yesterday, but one of the old constituents of the Earth, which has reached its pres
ent state through long ages os preparation, and doubtless retains, to an observer of
sufficient insight, traces of its history.
Note, too, the fact so important to human life, that the permanent constitu
ents of the atmosphere Lire the same in kind and proportion, alow and aloft, at the
pole and at the equator. Its life-supporting ingredient is so equally distributed
that it appears to invite man to universal penetration . He has then all latitudes
for his own, and a wide range beside above the Earth's surface.
The atmosphere is also beautifully adapted to man's need in respect of light.
It is transparent enough to enlarge our circle of knowledge on the earth till it
reaches the horizon, and above we, through its depths, become neighbors of the
distant stars. How much less we should know of the earth itself were we envel
oped in a cloud screen through which we could not see the heavens. Yet the
atmosphere is not quite transparent. A measurable part of the stellar and solar
radiation is arrested in the air. To this arrest we owe the blue sky and doubtless
the electrical condition of the upper strata, which is the source both of beauty
and comfort to the dwellers below, in making clouds and rain possible.
The atmosphere is also strikingly adapted to human needs in the propagation
of sound. It is so delicately adjusted that it can take and transmit all the music
the human ear is capable of receiving. At the same time this music and human
speech also are only propagated to a limited distance. To hear another one speak
or sing, we must come near him. The air thus promotes society. It furnishes a
help to' the forces that draw people together; while the same property renders it
easy to withdraw from the sphere of disagreeable sounds. A short removal relieves
us of a tiresome lecture. What a different world we would have were sound as
penetrating and far-reaching as light! If voices could be heard around the Earth,
the resulting Babel would be intolerable. We would envy the deaf and long for a
silent heaven. 45

a

Our atmosphere has without doubt other beautiful relations, known or as yet
perhaps undiscovered, to the well-being of man, but we must not omit in closing to
notice the surprising part it plays as a shield. Taat a fluid so thin .and mobile
should discharge the office of an impenetrable barrier as well, is one of the para
doxes of Physics. It is inexpressibly mobile and yielding to slow and protracted
pressures, and with these it is commonly concerned. We move about, in it and arc
not made aware of its existence by any conscious resistance. But to sudden and
short-lived attacks it may offer the immobility of a rock. The Earth is exposed
only very rarely to the impact of celestial masses of even moderate size, but it is
incessantly rained upon by a host of minute particles, amounting according to
some meteorologists to many millions per day. These are insignificant mostly in
mass, but their mean planetary speed .of (say) thirty miles per second, invests
them with an energy that would soon destroy every living thing on the Earth were.
they not arrested. They are arrested, not by a solid shield but by one equally
effective, the thin upper air, and instead of riddling us by their stroke, they glorify
our skies as falling stars which never reach us. The energy that would destroy us
is turned inward and destroys them.
{c) Nature cares more for man than For the brute in that she stored
away long ages before man's appearance, vast reservoirs of energy in coal and oil
and gas. These are now indispensable supplies in his homes and work shops; in
commerce and travel; in peace and war. No brute needs them, nor can he use
them; man does use and need them. By their aid man, weaker than a lion, slow
er than a deer, less acute in hearing and smelling than a dog, has in strength,
swiftness, insight and hearing, far surpassed them all. So that he whom Lord
Bacon called the Servant of Nature may in some real respects be termed her Mas
ter. To Bacon's modest word "Minister", we may, without paradox, humbly
and truly add "Magister."
(/) Finally we notice that our world is a beautiful world. It might be
ugly and still supply its living population with food and shelter. Beauty is not
needed for the mere existence of life. Yet Nature is lavish in forms of symmetry
and systems of harmonious colour — in the music of the grove, the waterfall and
the ocean; with enough of irregularity in each to heighten the effect of these.
The snow storm fills the air with crystal shapes of endless variety, all modelled on
a single type., A fluid cannot turn to a solid without displaying Nature's univer
sal effort toward perfection of form. The undulating outline and varied hues of
mountain, the blue sky with the infinite variety of shape and colour in the clouds
that come and go in it, tell us the same story with the flowers of the field. Nature
has made man's home beautiful and he is the only occupant of it who is prepared
to appreciate it. The brute does not delight in the landscape. He uses his eyes to
find his food or avoid his enemy. The flower has no sense of its own loveliness,
nor the gazelle of his graceful form and motion. Virgil long ago said that birds
did not nest, nor bees gather honey for themselves Neither do they sing nor
46

show the flashing colour of feather or scale for themselves. Thev all unconscious
ly move, and pose and sing for man.
But is not the world in some things apparently unadapted to man? What
shall we say of Storm, Earthquake, Lightning, Volcanoes? What of pestilence
and famine? What of pain and death'? To reconcile these things with benefi
cence in Nature has troubled the reverent thinkers of our race from the days of
Job to our own. It becomes us to tread cautiously in places where the great have
moved doubtfully. May we humbly suggest a few thoughts which may help others
like ourselves? Let us remember that we are daily learning more and more of the world we
live in, and that what we now know is doubtless but a small amount in compari
son with what remains to be known. We are like children, and perhaps very lit
tle children in a great school, whose sessions are very long. What would be the
value of the opinion of pupils in a kindergarten as to some of the arrangements
and the discipline of the school? The child thinks the tasks and the penalties
signs of anything but benevolence. He can appreciate and does, with his little
breast, return the many signs of love he receives. Ought he not to believe that
t these, which he understands, are the proofs of his teachers' real feeling, and that
the things he does not understand, — the tasks — may, when he knows
more, be reconciled and found consistent with the rest? Admitting our limited
knowledge of Nature, is it not illogical to allow mysteries to keep us from a con
clusion, to which thousands of plain facts force us, as to her benevolence?
This view seems to be strongly supported by noting that improved knowledge
of the world has already altered the old time view of Evil in Nature, and has trans
ferred some things, once considered baneful, to the opposite category, so that they
are now considered blessings. In our boyhood the world appeared to be an un
friendly one, because in it our every movement was resisted; we could not
advance or climb without opposition. Nature seemed to veto our attempts to rise
and to make toil the inevitable condition of progress. We groan along life's path
way and sigh for a realm where wings will no longer have weights. Modern
science has reversed the notion that work is a curse. On the contrary, she reveals
to us that without it, communication of energy would be impossible* Salvation
must be worked out in the visible, as well as in the higher world, and work is
impossible where there is no resistance. Nature would die if movement were unre
sisted and work therefore impossible. Without weights, wings would be worthless.
What seems to be an imperfection, turns out to be a necessity and a blessing.
So, too, lightning and tempest and earthquake are seen by modern science to
be Nature's way of restoring a lost equilibrium and securing in the end the well-
being of the race. What is formidable to individuals promotes the happiness of
communities, and the suffering of one becomes the salvation of many.

e

Pain is nature's signal that something is wrong and needs repair. At th
same time it is Nature's stimulus urging the sufferer to seek a remedy. Pain
seems to be a beneficent provision for the perpetuation of the species.
Death, the terror of our race, regarded of old as the greatest evil in. the world,
wears in these days of larger light, not a wholly forbidding and awful aspect.
In its widest meaning it is found to be in this world inseparable from and indis
pensable to life. We have long known that death is followed by life in the history
of successive generations. It has also been understood that, taking account of two
worlds, death in one may be birth in another. But it is only in comparatively
recent time that it has been realized that in the daily life of the individual the two
processes of degeneration and regeneration are exhibited throughout the frame in
the highly complex act we call "living." Some parts are always dying that their
neighbors may live more abundantly. The descent of one tissue is coupled with
and may be the means of the rise of a better one to a nobler level. Death often
wears a friendly face and passes out of the category of evils.
Indeed the progress of knowledge may not only readjust our catalogue of evils,
but it may change our definition of evil itself. We may largely eliminate the sel
fish side of it, and forget, or cancel the element of disagreeableness in the contem
plation of larger moral relations. What is wrong or false may be after all the only
evil left. Such considerations as these, and doubtless others which have occurred to
wiser men, may serve to make ns tranquil in the presence of facts yet dark and
unexplained in Nature's treatment of her favourite; being persuaded that the mul
titude of gracious provisions for man's well-being indicate a kindliness, not to be
doubted though some other facts are not yet understood .
A great king erects a spendid palace for his son. It was begun before the
heir was born. Many years are spent in fitting it suitably for him. It is stored
with all needed supplies. Its walls are hung with costly paintings and its halls
are filled with beautiful statues. Last of all the prince enters upon possession.
Can he doubt the love which made all this provision? Can he for a moment sup
pose that it was meant for any of the labourers who have in turn contributed to
the result ? , Shall he ignore all the obvious arrangements for his comfort, because
there are some fixtures which he does not understand and which he thinks had
better been omitted ? No, for that would be irrational as well as ungrateful.
Nature does care more for man than for the brute, even as an animal merely.
She has picked him out for her special notice. The points we have made have refer
ence mainly to his bodily life. Were this life all, we are justified in calling him
her favorite. Inexpressibly stronger is our statement when we leave the lower ground we
have been occupying and rise to a realm into which no brute can enter. Man is
more than an animal. He is a rational creature, able to perceive truth, to pur
sue, attain to and use it. The desire and struggle for it is a slow, nay, an endless
4S

process. It involves discipline, training, education; for discipline is restraint,
training is practice, and education is evolution. The regimen begins with his life
and perhaps by inherited values reaches back to the lives of his ancestors; it goes
slowly on from infancy to adult life. ft does not culminate with his bodily
powers, but in the afternoon of life, while these are declining, the mind may be
growing richer and stronger. When the body at last, like a worn out case, is
about to fall away, the mind may be still on the upward flight as if it were com
mencing a new life, which does not end here. The life of the body, like that of
all things earthly, is periodic. The higher life, that of the mind, appears to be
aperiodic. Does Nature show no adaptation to or consciousness of the higher life'.' If
she cared no more for man than for the brute, she would neglect this, realm into
which no brute can enter. Vet, upon closer study, it seems that we have just
entered upon her adaptation to man, when we reach the sphere of the intellect.
The wonderful provisions for his body upon which we have dwelt, fade into insig
nificance when we consider the inexhaustible richness of her provisions for his
mental development. The earth is no longer merely his home. It is his school-
house — his training plact — which would be unintelligible were this life all. All
the marvelous adjustments we have noticed — the long preparation through geo
logical ages with its history lithographed in the result — the long procession of
ascending life — the storing of energy through long eras — the genesis of the atmos
phere — the marvels of sound and light — the splendor of the sun and stellar
hosts — the vast knowledge to come, now gradually hinted at, as time rolls on —
all these things, infinite in detail and variety, are not unmeaning mechanical
facts, but glorious lessons, exercises, problems, calculated, and we believe intended
to awaken man's interest, incite him to intellectual activity, and reward his efforts
by conscious additions to his knowledge. The world would have been as well
suited to man's body, had it been made in a moment, but as it has been made
through growth during unmeasured ages it serves as well his animal needs, and
at the same time, fills the loftier needs of his better nature.
Nor must we leave out of our catalogue of Nature's arrangements the great
body of lessons which have arisen from man's stay on the earth for centuries.
To the multiplied provisions in the inanimate world, which seem to have been
made for man's mental progress, we may reasonably add the many problems which
pertain to his social and political relations, his history, languages, letters, and
laws. Then too, stretching beyond his school-boy days and running parallel to
the whole of his mature life, comes the educational process of the business world,
to which our ordinary school studies furnish merely an elementary introduction.
Let us observe as well, that in her arrangement of the universe, as a school
for man, Nature might well be taken as a model by our leaders in educational
matters.' Nature, too, sets easy lessons for the child, larger ones for the youth
and still expanding questions for the mature mind — her problems to
49

the end of life being always beyond our previous attainments — with enough diffi
culty to stimulate us, and yet not so much as to make one despair. In the nur
sery, the child soon learns the difference between the picture of a flame and the
reality. When he can toddle around he is a walking interrogation mark.
Everything at first seems a puzzle to him. He wants to know "why the wheels
go wound", and asks until he is satisfied. His sphere is that immediately about
him. Growing a little older, he begins to look farther, and strangely enough,
when he ceases to go to bed with the larks, he passes from what is next to him to
the moon and stars. Astronomy, the oldest of the sciences, beginning in the
childhood of our race, appeals to us irresistibly in our early years, attracting our
study long before things nearer to us on the earth, receive our attention. So the
curriculum goes on. Ocean, air, land, and sky are full of meaning. Their
richness is inexhaustible. The solution of one problem introduces us to a score
yet unsolved . The higher we climb in our knowledge of nature the wider appears
the horizon of the yet unexplored. As we advance, the larger seems the task yet
to be done, and the smaller what of it we have already accomplished. The hum
blest men in science are not the beginners but the oldest and wisest savants.
Thus Nature's school includes all the apparatus of education from the lowest
primary to the highest university. The beginner is cared for. So is the most
advanced student. There is one difference. There is no graduation in Nature's
schools. Her courses stretch on and on. If the death of the body is not the end
of man's personal existence: if he continues to think and grow, and keep up rela
tions to the world, there are still endless lessons for him to solve, mysteries to
unravel, wonderful truth to enjoy. Some have dreamed that Nature's inexhaust
ible fertility may supply opportunity for intellectual employment to beings who
have never been denizens of the earth. For them, perhaps, the poet's unseen.
flowers and gems in ocean's unfathomed caves may be meant. What seems to be
wasted for us, may be surrounded by throngs of students, invisible to man. There
in a sphere where mental operations may be no longer clogged with earthly bur
dens, where the fogs incident to mortality vanish and the sky is clear, and the air
pure, the reason free, it may well be that mysteries puzzling here may lose their
darkness, and meanings unsuspected, harmonies before unheard, may fill the ran
somed spirit with joy and worship. At any rate, man leaves his lessons unfinished
here. He rfas penetrated at the the close of life a little way only into the vast
realm of truth. Shall Newton never know more of the treasures of the great
oceans before him, than the few pebbles he humbly saw at the close of life that he
had gathered on the strand ? Or may he not already in that superior sphere,
have pursued his study of the universe until the nature of gravity and of light is
no longer a riddle to him and advanced problems, undreamed of here, fill his
exalted soul ? Teachers have been known to urge their dilatory pupils to greater
industry, as an old teacher of mine once did, by assuring them that if they did
not get their lessons here, they would only have harder work up there, for "Some-
50

where", he said with solemnity, "somewhere, my boys, in frhis world or the next,
these lessons have to be gotten". It may be that in some deeper sense, the
dear old man was right. Continuity is the admitted law of the visible life: why
should it not be that oj the higher life ? Why should this tremendous train of
educational apparatus end with what after all are only the kindergarten students ?
The world appears to be a school for man's mind, not only in the intermina
ble amount of the problems presented, and their graded character from the sim
plest to the most complex, but like all good schools it seems to be for discipline
and hence is one in which mistakes may be made. A large part of a teacher's
work appears to be the correction of blunders. If pupils were inerrant and if
they never forgot anything that is true, the educator's task would be brief and
easy and his occupation largely gone. It is a matter for congratulation and grat
itude that we live in a world where mistakes may be made and indeed are con
stantly made. Nature hides her truths as she hides her gold and diamonds.
Long and painful toil is required to find them, and after all the metal often proves
to be "fool's gold" and the fancied diamond to be quartz. Nature makes no pro
vision for indolence, or carelessness, or haste. If these were safe and profitable,
the world might be a pleasant and beautifal one. It would be no school.
Among the numberless lines of Nature Study, which have enriched the intel
lectual history of our race, beginning with the simplest guesses at truth and fluc
tuating between error and knowledge as the centuries have rolled on, perhaps no
one is more simple and instructive than the science of light. Its historical devel
opment has been almost that which a teacher might judiciously follow in expound
ing its truths to a pupil. The first observers were naturally engrossed with the
magnificent spectacle which daylight reveals, and only afterward with its splendid
source, the sun; while at night the landscape fades, and attention is riveted on the
light-givers themselves. As Whately says, "By day we exclaim how beautiful is
the world, but by night how lovely is the moon." The image of moon and stars
in a quiet pool would soon give the fact and law of reflection. This can hardly be
handled without some hypothesis as to the nature of light. Accordingly the earli
est philosophers entered into speculations as to its nature. Pythagoras antici
pated Newton partially in likening it to the discharge of projectiles, while Aris
totle foreshadowed Huyghens and Fresnel in declaring that it was energy propa
gated through a transparent medium." The world was not quite ready for these
astonishing guesses. Ages rolled on and refraction, single and multiple became
known. The phenomena of diffraction and polarization were appearing in the
horizon of Science, when, twenty centuries after Pythagoras and Aristotle, Huy
ghens and Newton, also nearly contemporaries, revived and amplified, the one the
wave theory, the other, a few years later, the projectile theory. Newton's celebrity as
a discoverer gave to his views a weight which he was far from giving to them him
self for he seems to have used them only as a scaffold to be rejected for a better
one' when it got too far away from the building. Largely by the partisan zeal of
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his followers, his hypothesis held exclusive possession of the scientific world for a
century, keeping the truer theory in the background. Although Newton's
hypothesis in now in its turn remanded to oblivion, it is interesting to note that
the incredible speed he was obliged to attribute to his projectiles, — a speed far
beyond any at that time observed on the earth or in the heavens and cited by his
opponents as a serious objection to his postulate — has been recently found to be nearly
approached in the discharge of matter from a particle of radium. So that we can
no longer say that such speeds do not belong to the domain of physics. More
singular still is the fact that Newton held that the impact of his luminiferous pro
jectiles on the surfaces of solids produced waves in the ether, having important
offices in his theory. Now the cathode particles by their stroke on the solid anti-
cathode do this very thing. They produce shocks or interrupted waves in the
ether which are revealed in the N rays. The surmises of great minds are often
the subsequent slow, labored conclusions of lesser men.
But there were other more vital difficulties in the way of Newton's speculation.
These were brought into clear view by Young and Fresnel in showing the trium
phant simplicity and completeness with which the wave theory explained
phenomena which the other theory only clumsily accounted for, and finally Arago
and Foucault proved that Newton's hypothesis led necessarily to a conclusion in
direct contradiction of an established fact, and was thus demonstrably untrue.
Fresnel 's wave theory took its place and seemed to be secure on its throne. But
the pendulum has swung again, and not this time from Fresnel back to Newton, but
from Fresnel to Maxwell, giving us a new wave theory which makes the waves of
light only a special limited case of the undulations which are also the vehicle of elec
trical and thermal energy. Thus each successive oscillation of theory7 is doubtless
reducing the distance from the resting point of truth, which may finally be reached
only after a great number of diminishing vibrations.
Other lines in which Nature has led her votaries — that of electrical science or
chemical or biological science or psychology, or indeed any branch of human
knowledge, for all are included in her curriculum— might have furnished us with
examples of the suitability of her courses to the needs of the human mind, but
the one we have taken must suffice for example.
To sum up; the world, we have seen, is more than a mere home for our race.
Its complex adjustments for his bodily well-being have a far higher value in
that they furnish opportunities and incitement to mental activity and
growth. Some of the grandest of them indeed have no obvious reference to his
animal life, but appear to appeal solely to him as a thinking being. The benefi
cence of Nature is thus immeasurably exalted when we preceive in her constitution
regard for the higher part of him. She cares for his mind, and therefore more for
him than for the brute. The air, the water, the land, the warmth and light are
for all living things, but chiefly for him. But the provision for the intellect
seems to be for man alone. 52

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If we were to stop at this point we should not have touched the sphe.,
which Nature's provision and preparation for man reaches its culmination. Man
is spiritual as well as intellectual and corporeal. The animal life does not, and
the intellectual life noble as it is, may not bring him consciously into the presence
of his Maker. The feeling of duty and sense of obligation, the ideas of right and
wrong lift him to a higher plane, and rational man becomes religious man. We
shall fall short of a complete estimate of the adaptation of Nature to his needs, if
we neglect her provision for the culture of his highest faculty, Tt would be
strange indeed if taking such extended and minute ..arc of his body and mind,
she should be found to have ignored his most excellent powers and his greatest
need. On the contrary, it appears that the world is so constituted as to cultivate
the virtues which go to makeup, morally, the perfect man. In considering the
richness of material in Nature as a moral teacher, we may be asked whether we
consider her to lie a sufficient one. We hasten to say No— a thousand times No.
By her light alone, and her regimen alone, history and observation alike teach us
that savages are not trained to be civilized men. An energy from another sphere
is 'needed for that. But Nature may humbly and usefully harmonize with and
help the higher ministration. She cannot replace it. She con not revitalize a
fallen soul. Her most lovely scenes and beneficent features, so helpful to a rever
ent spirit, have no more power to make a savage merciful or clean, than to soften
the tiger in an adjoining jungle. Mrs. Paton, wife of the heroic missionary to the
New Hebrides, in her letters exults in the surpassing beauties of those tropical
islands, making even her sweet Scottish burns seem poor and mean, and in the
next line she may not find words adequate to describe the sin and squalor of~tn"e
of the naked barbarians who owned the paradise.
The revelation in Natnre is then no substitute for a higher one, but it accords
with and reinforces it, in promoting the same fundamental attributes of a lofty
moral character.
(l). Nature teaches man to be humble. We have before cited the immeasur
able extent of the universe in space and time, and more tl lan this the inconceivably
mightjT forces and energies in constant play throughout its depths, as calculated to
enforce upon us the littleness of man in the vast array. How can he, if he knows
these things, strut forth under the lofty sky and the quiet pitying stars and the
unfathomable heaven ?
There are minds indeed which are not greatly impressed with mere magnitude
in size or distance or time*. But these must bow too in lowly frame, when out of
these great facts emerge the grand and simple laws, which connect the boundless
array and form it into a system. The homage they cannot pay to the stones of
the temple, they promptly render to the altar for which the temple is built.
Nature teaches us to be humble by setting us, besides the simple problems
that are soluble, others which baffle our utmost efforts. We sometimes glorify
the human intellect and dilate upon its transcendent powers. This is true when

we look below us, but in the presence of the great book of Nature, our faculties
often seem feeble indeed . We soon find that to get any solution at all of the
simplest problems, we must ignore all but one or two of the causes cooperating in
it, and in the end be content with what after all is but an approximation. If the
errors of our answer, admittedly real and numerous, in the aggregate do not amount
to what is capable of detection by our instruments, we accept it as true, since in
the existing condition we can not distinguish it from the actual truth. Yet the
steady improvement in our apparatus will make our values of today seem intoler
ably rough presently, and require new calculations. Our science is never a
finished thing, but one tending toward its goal, the truth, by perpetual approxi
mation more and more slow, as the hyperbola does toward its asymptote. There
is no room in this for pride. "Humility is the badge of all our tribe," the
Scientist may say. We are little children in the World School, and should be
humble as children.
(2) . But Nature also teaches us to be Simple. . She tolerates no confusion of
thought in her votaries, but rewards the single eye. Truth and Sincerity do not
of necessity flow from perspicacity, but they are closely akin to it. The world
appears to be so made that duplicity sooner or later goes astray. The quality that
strikes the beginner in the works of great men — say the Mecanique Celeste of
LaPlace or the Tonempfindungen of Helmholtz — contrasted with essays of less
able authors, is the simplicity of the master, who seizes the vital thing and ignores
the rest — and then the amazing fruits of his simplicity. Surely the man of single
eys shall reach the goal.
(3). Besides, her successful pupils must be lovers of truth. Great philoso
phers have usually been poor men. The truth they have sought with painful
steps, with toil and self-denial — with watchings and fastings, and even in the
presence of the threatened stake or prison has been, when reached, their only
reward, but it has been a sufficient one, for they knew that it not only enlarged
their own souls, but would live and grow and bless the world. Only a love of
truth stronger than a love of ease or pleasure, could have supported them.
Riches, and what riches can buy, often await the sharp men who can use these
truths in business, but these returns are not for the great discoverers. There are
martyrs in science as well as in church history, and they, like the others, loved
the truth m®re than they loved themselves.
(4). To crown all, Nature cultivates in her school as an essential to success
faith in the invisible. Natural Science in its most important fields may be termed
the science of the invisible. Inquiries in any department of Nature are sure to
lead sooner or later to the unseen. The atom and the electron are the units which
are concerned in all we see, and are indeed the sources of all activity. Yet no one
will ever see the atom or electron. Long before we descend to their scale of
minuteness we pass the limit of microscopic vision. To see in this new atomic
universe, we need a finer sort of light and a far finer sort of eye. In this region
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the eye of reason is our only instrument. He who believes only as far as he can
see with his bodily eye, must part with the physicist at almost the entrance to his
science. Yet m this universe or infra-world, where our bodily senses do not help
us, the modern philosopher, who walks by faith and not by sight, treads with a
step more confident to results far richer, than in the sphere of the microscope and
the balance. Faith in the universality of law, and in the certainty of mathematics
leads to the conviction that the things which are unseen are alone immutable,
while the things which are seen are in constant change.
Faith is thns indispensable to the scientific worker. It is also equally
necessary to the scientific learner. The most industrious and long-lived worker
can hope to acquaint himself by actual research with but a small section of the
knowledge of Nature which he must have. For the larger part, he must accept the
results of others, purely upon faith in their ability and honesty. Thus in all the
¦work of her school Nature cultivates in her pupils a fundamental moral quality.
She prepares them to believe in the unseen upon sufficient evidence, and to act
upon that belief.
We might enlarge this view of the visible world as a moral gymnastic. Love
of order, or ethical beauty, patience in protracted labor, courage under repeated
disappointments, are familiar exercises in the history of searchers after truth in
Nature as in higher spheres : but perhaps the four qualities we have dwelt upon
may be regarded as the essentials of a complete moral character.
The material universe appears then to be admirably fitted for its denizen,
man, the occupant of one of its lesser units. So admirably indeed, that we might
conclude that it was made for him alone. When we consider the sweep of his
reason, ranging through all space and time, and the possible enlargement of his
spiritual nature in the great future, we may well believe that it were no waste,
even if a universe were made solely for his training place. But this adaptation of
the world to man's needs, is not inconsistent with its serving other purposes in the
great programme. It is a beautiful fact in harmony that one note in the orchestra is
unchanged by the association with it of a thousand others, and to the attentive
ear is as pure and perfect as though it were alone. The material world is not less
for man, if it should prove to be for other and higher beings as well. We only
declare that it is so far more for him than for a brute, that it might be supposed to
be for him alone.
But an objector may say that he does not deny that Nature is fitted to man's
needs in all his being, but he may contend that such adjustments have come about
in the conflict of ages, in which the best fitted alone survives. This opens up a dis
cussion as old as the race — newly revived and amplified in our times. Without
controversy we may say that to the large majority of those to whom we resort for
instruction, the element of time does not seem to enter essentially into the concep
tion of purpose. Granted an agent, the results of his action are judged of
^without necessarily bringing in their duration. If there be a God, and that there
55

is we do not need to go to Nature for evidence, He may bring things about
immediately or by slow process of secondary causes — 'and His wisdom and power
may be equally evident in either case. His revelation in the sacred books tells us
that matter and energy and man's spiritual part were immediate creations, but
that animal and plant life and inan himself as an animal came from pre-existing
things through almighty power, In all cases the Creator is manifest. He is no
less present in the slow growth to a determined culmination, than in the instan
taneous appearance in completeness of what before was not. The fittings of Nature
for man through countless eras of preparation, reveal power, wisdom and goodness
as clearly as an instantaneous act could do, while, as we have seen, they serve an
educational purpose beside for which it is difficult to conceive of a substitute. •
Nature by her endless care and provision for man, thus elevates him to a place
unique in her kingdom. In this her voice is in complete tune with the voice from
on high which makes him the object of infinite solicitude in a loftier sphere.
The thought was clearly expressed by a poet, three thousand years ago, who
declared that when he considered the heavens, the moon and the stars in their
grandeur, his first feeling was of the insignificance of man. But this was momen
tary. An instant later some of the wonderful provisions we have noticed came to
his mind and he exclaimed, "Thou hast made him a little lower than the angels"
and has crowned bim with glory and honour and mad est him to have dominion
over the works of thy hands. Thou has put all things under his feet — all sheep
and oxen — yea, and the beasts of the field, the fowls of the air and the fish of the
sea and whatsoever passeth through the paths of the sea." He closes with the
sublime exclamation, "0 Lord, our Lord, how excellent is Thy name in all the
earth!" Surely the noblest conclusion of our study of Nature and man is to
believe that the Author of Nature is our Lord: that we are of concern to Him, and
that His name is in all the earth. Science should be His "unspotted mirror", as
the son of Sirach long ago said . Lord Byron said ' 'God glasses himself in tempests' ' ,
and that partial view suited the wrecked life of a fallen genius. Far more fully
does He glass Himself in the flower and sunshine, in the music of the birds and
the finer harmonies of the stars. We may see Him, if we will, in these as surely
as He may be discovered in the spiritual world, in every gentle word and loving
act. The two realms are from the same hand and they are harmonious because the
Performer is^pne.
In these discourses I have spoken of Nature as a, person and have done so
purposely, for Nature is only a name for a Power behind the visible scene, "work
ing for righteousness" Our first lesson was that the Power is one, next that He is
almighty, and lastly that He is good. My inspiration was from St. Paul who
declared that the Romans might discern his godhead and power clearly by the things
which He made, and who pointed the men of Lystrato the rain and fruitful season
as abundant witnesses of His goodness.

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