Tracks of a Rolling Stone [146]
the abyss between our present position and the frontiers of Lyra' (Ball's 'Story of the Heavens').
'Sirius is about one million times as far from us as the sun. If we take the distance of Sirius from the earth and subdivide it into one million equal parts, each of these parts would be long enough to span the great distance of 92,700,000 miles from the earth to the sun,' yet Sirius is one of the NEAREST of the stars to us.
The velocity with which light traverses space is 186,300 miles a second, at which rate it has taken the rays from Sirius which we may see to-night, nine years to reach us. The proper motion of Sirius through space is about one thousand miles a minute. Yet 'careful alignment of the eye would hardly detect that Sirius was moving, in . . . even three or four centuries.'
'There may be, and probably are, stars from which Noah might be seen stepping into the Ark, Eve listening to the temptation of the serpent, or that older race, eating the oysters and leaving the shell-heaps behind them, when the Baltic was an open sea' (Froude's 'Science of History').
Facts and figures such as these simply stupefy us. They vaguely convey the idea of something immeasurably great, but nothing further. They have no more effect upon us than words addressed to some poor 'bewildered creature, stunned and paralysed by awe; no more than the sentence of death to the terror-stricken wretch at the bar. Indeed, it is in this sense that the sceptic uses them for our warning.
'Seit Kopernikus,' says Schopenhauer, 'kommen die Theologen mit dem lieben Gott in Verlegenheit.' 'No one,' he adds, 'has so damaged Theism as Copernicus.' As if limitation and imperfection in the celestial mechanism would make for the belief in God; or, as if immortality were incompatible with dependence. Des Cartes, for one, (and he counts for many,) held just the opposite opinion.
Our sun and all the millions upon millions of suns whose light will never reach us are but the aggregation of atoms drawn together by the same force that governs their orbit, and which makes the apple fall. When their heat, however generated, is expended, they die to frozen cinders; possibly to be again diffused as nebulae, to begin again the eternal round of change.
What is life amidst this change? 'When I consider the work of Thy fingers, the moon and the stars which Thou hast ordained, what is man that Thou art mindful of him?'
But is He mindful of us? That is what the sceptic asks. Is He mindful of life here or anywhere in all this boundless space? We have no ground for supposing (so we are told) that life, if it exists at all elsewhere, in the solar system at least, is any better than it is here? 'Analogy compels us to think,' says M. France, one of the most thoughtful of living writers, 'that our entire solar system is a gehenna where the animal is born for suffering. . . . This alone would suffice to disgust me with the universe.' But M. France is too deep a thinker to abide by such a verdict. There must be something 'behind the veil.' 'Je sens que ces immensites ne sont rien, et qu'enfin, s'il y a quelque chose, ce quelque chose n'est pas ce que nous voyons.' That is it. All these immensities are not 'rien,' but they are assuredly not what we take them to be. They are the veil of the Infinite, behind which we are not permitted to see.
It were the seeing Him, no flesh shall dare.
The very greatness proves our impotence to grasp it, proves the futility of our speculations, and should help us best of all though outwardly so appalling, to stand calm while the snake of unbelief writhes beneath our feet. The unutterable insignificance of man and his little world connotes the infinity which leaves his possibilities as limitless as itself.
Spectrology informs us that the chemical elements of matter are everywhere the same; and in a boundless universe where such unity is manifested there must be conditions similar to those which support life here. It is impossible to doubt,
'Sirius is about one million times as far from us as the sun. If we take the distance of Sirius from the earth and subdivide it into one million equal parts, each of these parts would be long enough to span the great distance of 92,700,000 miles from the earth to the sun,' yet Sirius is one of the NEAREST of the stars to us.
The velocity with which light traverses space is 186,300 miles a second, at which rate it has taken the rays from Sirius which we may see to-night, nine years to reach us. The proper motion of Sirius through space is about one thousand miles a minute. Yet 'careful alignment of the eye would hardly detect that Sirius was moving, in . . . even three or four centuries.'
'There may be, and probably are, stars from which Noah might be seen stepping into the Ark, Eve listening to the temptation of the serpent, or that older race, eating the oysters and leaving the shell-heaps behind them, when the Baltic was an open sea' (Froude's 'Science of History').
Facts and figures such as these simply stupefy us. They vaguely convey the idea of something immeasurably great, but nothing further. They have no more effect upon us than words addressed to some poor 'bewildered creature, stunned and paralysed by awe; no more than the sentence of death to the terror-stricken wretch at the bar. Indeed, it is in this sense that the sceptic uses them for our warning.
'Seit Kopernikus,' says Schopenhauer, 'kommen die Theologen mit dem lieben Gott in Verlegenheit.' 'No one,' he adds, 'has so damaged Theism as Copernicus.' As if limitation and imperfection in the celestial mechanism would make for the belief in God; or, as if immortality were incompatible with dependence. Des Cartes, for one, (and he counts for many,) held just the opposite opinion.
Our sun and all the millions upon millions of suns whose light will never reach us are but the aggregation of atoms drawn together by the same force that governs their orbit, and which makes the apple fall. When their heat, however generated, is expended, they die to frozen cinders; possibly to be again diffused as nebulae, to begin again the eternal round of change.
What is life amidst this change? 'When I consider the work of Thy fingers, the moon and the stars which Thou hast ordained, what is man that Thou art mindful of him?'
But is He mindful of us? That is what the sceptic asks. Is He mindful of life here or anywhere in all this boundless space? We have no ground for supposing (so we are told) that life, if it exists at all elsewhere, in the solar system at least, is any better than it is here? 'Analogy compels us to think,' says M. France, one of the most thoughtful of living writers, 'that our entire solar system is a gehenna where the animal is born for suffering. . . . This alone would suffice to disgust me with the universe.' But M. France is too deep a thinker to abide by such a verdict. There must be something 'behind the veil.' 'Je sens que ces immensites ne sont rien, et qu'enfin, s'il y a quelque chose, ce quelque chose n'est pas ce que nous voyons.' That is it. All these immensities are not 'rien,' but they are assuredly not what we take them to be. They are the veil of the Infinite, behind which we are not permitted to see.
It were the seeing Him, no flesh shall dare.
The very greatness proves our impotence to grasp it, proves the futility of our speculations, and should help us best of all though outwardly so appalling, to stand calm while the snake of unbelief writhes beneath our feet. The unutterable insignificance of man and his little world connotes the infinity which leaves his possibilities as limitless as itself.
Spectrology informs us that the chemical elements of matter are everywhere the same; and in a boundless universe where such unity is manifested there must be conditions similar to those which support life here. It is impossible to doubt,