My story is told, but I fain would take my leave with words less sorrowful. If a man has no better legacy to bequeath than bid his fellow-beings despair, he had better take it with him to his grave.
We know all this, we know!
But it is in what we do not know that our hope and our religion lies. Thrice blessed are we in the certainty that here our range is infinite. This infinite that makes our brains reel, that begets the feeling that makes us 'shrink,' is perhaps the most portentous argument in the logic of the sceptic. Since the days of Laplace, we have been haunted in some form or other with the ghost of the MECANIQUE CELESTE.
Take one or two commonplaces from the text-books of astronomy:
Every half-hour we are about ten thousand miles nearer to the constellation of Lyra. 'The sun and his system must travel at his present rate for far more than a million years (divide this into half-hours) before we have crossed 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?'
