The new world and the new thought

Front matter

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THE GIFT OF

Cornell University Library

Contents

CHAP. PAGE

I. The Expansion of the Universe and the Enlargement of Faith 5

II. The Sanction for Morality in Nature 30

Chapter I. The Expansion Of The Universe And The Enlarge- Ment Of Faith

As the traveler visits the old shrines and cathedrals of Europe, or the scholar delves among the mediaeval treatises on astronomy or geography, he is continually meeting with conceptions of the world and its creation of a most curious and childlike simplicity. A frequently recurring group in the sculptures, mosaics, stained-glass or missal paintings of the Middle Ages is that which represents the Almighty in human form, moulding the sun, moon, or stars, and with His own hands hanging them from the solid firmament which supports the upper heaven and its celestial waters and which overarches the great plain of earth ; and when the work of the six days is finished He is represented as sitting, bent and fatigued, in the well-known attitude of the " Weary Mercury " of classical sculpture. As late as the seventeenth century, Milton, in his poetic representation of the popular theology of his day, does not hesitate at the most literal description of how the second person in the Trinity, when the hour for making the universe came

" Took the golden compasses, prepared In God's eternal store, to circumscribe This universe and all created things. One foot He centred, and the other turned Round through the vast profundity obscure, And said, ' Thus far extend ; thus far thy bounds : This be thy just circumference, O world.' "

The two statements in the Genesis myths, that the world was made in six days and also that " God spake and it was done," were both of them accepted in the most literal way by the great ecclesiastical and scientific authorities of Christendom down to the sixteenth century. The contradiction of an instantaneous creation which lasted through six days was usually reconciled by some explanation, like that of St. Thomas Aquinas, which was adopted even by Luther and the earlier Protestant Reformers, viz. : that God created the substance of the world in a single moment but employed the six days in separating, shaping and further adorning it. As to the date of this great event, it was the general verdict of both Catholic and Protestant authorities down to a century or two ago that it could hardly be more than 6,000 years ago.

As to the shape and dimensions of the world, the prevalent ideas during the Middle Ages were marked by a precision and pettiness equally crude. Following unreflectingly the lead of whatever imagery the Scripture presented, they insisted that the earth was at creation vaulted over with a solid dome or ceiling, the firmament of Genesis, above which was the celes-

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tial cistern, containing the waters which are above the firmament. It is through apertures in this vault, " the windows of heaven," that the rains are allowed to fall on the earth by God and His angels ; and above it, in the third heaven, or seventh as others said, is the customary abode of the Almighty and His court. In the curious description of the universe, based upon Scripture, written in the sixth century by Cosmas Indicopleustes, which for a long while was regarded as most authoritative, the ideas of the early Christian theologians were summed up in a complete system. As in the ninth chapter of Hebrews the world is likened to the tabernacle in the desert, it must be oblong in shape. Like the table of shew-bread, the earth is fiat, and twice as long as broad, 400 days' journey one way and 200 the other. It is surrounded by four seas, at the outer edges of which rise massive walls, the pillars of heaven of which Job speaks, on which the vault of heaven rests. The disappearance of the sun at night is caused by its passing behind a great mountain at the north of the earth.

Although by the scholars of subsequent centuries this naive representation of the world was much refined and modified, yet the general conception of the universe as a sort of huge house, with heaven as its upper story and the earth as its lower story, prevailed among the people and a large part of the world of scholars, close down to the modern period.

When the sky-parlor of the heavenly host was so little a way off, legends of saints and prophets caught up to heaven or of angels flying down to earth, of heavenly voices speaking from the upper story to

I

chosen men on the lower, or of frequent special interventions by heavenly powers to rescue the holy or punish the wicked, would most naturally arise. Even when men's conceptions began to enlarge, they still remained comparatively diminutive. Certain Egyptian astronomers, says Flammarion, calculated that the sun was 369 miles distant and Saturn 492. An Italian system, that the same astronomer mentions, was on a somewhat more generous scale. The crystalline sphere in which the moon was set was 107,000 miles distant, Mercury 209,000 and the sun 3,892,000. As late as the sixteenth century, Zwingli and the early Protestant Reformers held to the view of the church fathers that a solid floor or dome separated the heavens from the earth, that above it were the waters and the abode of the angels, and below it the earth and man. And in the cellar of this world-house, not far below the earth's crust, popular superstition, corroborated by the authority of great poets like Virgil, Dante, and Milton, located the caverns of the underworld, from which imp and devil and perturbed spirit came up at times to walk the earth.

To-day, how has science stretched out this baby-house universe of our ancestors ! The astronomer has turned his telescope on that adamantine firmament and it has dissolved into thin air. The glittering points that gemmed its surface have expanded into enormous suns, thousands of times as large as our own globe. The petty heaven of the Book of Revelation 12,000 furlongs or 1,379 English miles each way has spread out, from that one-twentieth part or less q{ the cubic dimensions which we now know our own

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earth to have, into an immensity of space which it is difficult to realize. Let us try by a few facts to give some conception of its grandeur.

Milton, in " Paradise Lost," in accordance with the older ideas of the size of the universe, thought that nine days was an adequate length of time for the rebel archangel, who was thrown out of heaven, to fall down from the top of the universe and the courts of God to the depths of hell. But we now know that if a steamship, moving at the average rate, had started in Columbus' lifetime for the sun, it would not have reached its goal to-day. If a baby were put in an express train, moving at highest locomotive speed, to go to our solar luminary, the baby would die of old age before it could arrive there. If that locomotive went onward towards our nearest fixed star, stopping neither day nor night, it would take it 700,000 centuries to get there.

The speed of a locomotive is evidently too slow a standard to use as a measure among these immense spaces. Let us take, then, for our imaginary courier, the fastest traveler we know of, the wave of sunlight, speeding 186,000 miles a second. How long would it take even a beam of sunlight to reach the nearest sun beyond our own ? Not less than three and one quarter years; for it is no less than 20,000,000,000 miles away. If we should want to go to Sirius and could get the same lightning courier, the waves of the starlight, to take us, it would require twenty-two years. To get to the pole star it would take fifty years ; to pass from one end to the other of the Milky Way, that great star-cluster nearest to us, it would take a ray of light 15,000 years. To reach a star of the fourteenth magnitude would require 100,000 years.

By the naked eye we can see some 6,000 stars, each a sun, all at such immense intervals, from one another. But the telescope discerns 45,000,000 stars and nebulae; the photographic eye, more subtle still, might take the record, it is calculated, of 160,000,000 stars. There are over 1,000 nebulae which the telescope resolves into swarms of stars. These are supposed to be great groups, similar to our Milky Way, dimmed and drawn together, apparently by the immense distance at which they are situated. In that case, how far off are they ? Over 300 times as far as the farthest suns in our Milky Way ; and it would take the nimble messenger of light 4,000,000 years to get there. How huge must these suns be that can send the undulations of their light across such enormous space ! Into what amazing pettiness has astronomy shriveled our proud centre of the universe, and, dislodging it from its former prominent position, sent it whirling on its way as one of the smaller satellites in the train of a central body, the sun, which, though as much larger than the earth as a cart-wheel is larger than a pea, is yet but one of more than 20,000,000 suns contained in its own part of space, and is itself not stationary, but revolving through space, with its fleet of planets, at the rate of 4,000 miles a day, around perhaps some still larger sun.

Verily, these infinities of space set the brain reeling, in the vain effort to realize them. Let us turn, then, to the changes in our estimates of the earth's duration

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and our ideas of time. Here, again, how enormously has science multiplied the numbers ! How utterly inadequate are those dates for man's first appearance on the globe and the beginning of the earth that were generally accepted one hundred years ago and are still printed in the margin of the Bibles issued by our Bible societies ! It was in the year 4004 B. c, according to the great chronological authority and theologian, Archbishop Usher, that the creation of the world took place, a date settled by the authority of the Holy Bible ; and Dr. Lightfoot, Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University, in the seventeenth century, with still finer precision, fixed the day and hour at the 23d of October at nine o'clock in the morning. Luther declared, on the authority of Moses, that longer ago than 6,000 years the world did not exist. Pope Urban VII was anxious to allow a little more time to have elapsed since the creation of man ; but his extreme limit was 5 199 b. c.

To-day these sixty centuries are but a handbreadth of the time that science demands. Sixty millenniums would hardly suffice. Science has mined in caverns and found man's tools and weapons among the bones of mammoths. It has deciphered hieroglyphics and found arts and history already venerable before the date when commentators admitted that Adam had begun to breathe. As far back as 6,000 and 7,000 years before Christ, among the cities and temples of Babylonia and Egypt, man was living a civilized or semicivilized life. For the quarternary age, in the early part of which unmistakable relics of man are found, geology demands a period of at least 10,000 years.

For the tertiary and secondary epochs, and the immensely thick deposits belonging to them, not less than 3,000,000 years will suffice. For the primary and primeval or azoic ages, not less than 17,000,000 years more are needed. Recall what vast beds of chalk and limestone, miles in thickness, have been built up by the microscopic creatures who have lived and died in the primitive oceans ; how from a fiery cloud the globe concentrated to a molten ball, and on the molten ball formed the crust that now suspends us above the still furnace-heated interior. How long a time should we estimate for these seonic changes ? From the experiments of the physicist, Bischoff, with molten basalt and its rate of cooling to a solid state, the scientists infer that for the earth to cool from the 2,000 degrees centigrade of the former molten state down to 200 centigrade, would require at least 350,000,000 years. Then for the condensation of our solar nebula, (originally extending beyond the orbit of Neptune, i. e., 5,000,000,000 miles in diameter), into the sun and planets, and the further cooling down from the heated solid state to the temperature where life could begin, additional millions of years would be required; and when we recall how many thousand times larger than our sun are many of the solar globes, is not the chronology of the heavens carried back into an antiquity, in comparison with whose veritable eternity the age of those hills that of old were dubbed " everlasting " seems but as a single breath of a summer's insect.

Such is the amazing immensity of the universe that modern science has disclosed, an illimitable extension

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and duration before which the wing of imagination grows weary, in the effort to realize even vaguely how vast is its sweep. It is evident that this changed scale of the physical universe must suggest to the reason of man an analogous change in our view of the origin, nature and destiny of man and the methods of God's government.

Can we still hold man to be the aim and end of creation ? Can we still think, many to-day are asking, that the earth and heavens were fitted up specially for his abode? that the animal world was made just for his food, and the trees to shade his head from the heat ? the sun to warm him by day and the moon and stars to supply light to his path by night ?

Is man not shown, by this immense magnitude of the universe, to be but a most ephemeral and infinitesimal insect, the spawn of the primeval slime, a creature altogether too insignificant to be supposed to have been specially created or specially cared for ? What else but fables of man's credulous childhood are those faiths that held man to be a child of God, made in the divine image, or that he has been the recipient of divine revelations, and that the Son of God left His place by God's right hand, and choosing out of all the million solar and planetary systems in space this most insignificant speck, called earth, was here incarnated in a human form, to supply salvation by His blood to those who should enter the church He should found? Science, with its searching instruments, has investigated earth and heaven. No telescope has caught sight in the remotest recesses of any Titan king seated on a celestial throne ; no mi-

14 TEE NEW WOULD AND TEE NEW TEOUGET

croscope has observed any soul within the tissues of the brain ; no mining shaft has found a limbo of departed spirits beneath the earth's crust. The fires are there, but no trace of any imps or devils or ghostly shades. Dust to dust is the law of life. We begin as a chemical composition ; we end, when the machinery runs down, as a chemical decomposition. When thousands of worlds are burning out into lifeless cinders, by inevitable laws of the dissipation of energy and the cooling down of every warmer sphere to the average temperature or, we should better say, refrigeration, of the interstellar space, some 200 degrees, as it is, below zero, why should we fancy this petty biped of a man should escape the general death ?

Such are the questions and dilemmas, sometimes put in very scoffing tones, that in the minds of a large and growing class among us are daily arising, and daily alienating them more and more from the older views of man's origin, nature and destiny.

On the other hand, the champions of the older faith maintain that in spite of this immense expansion of the universe we may still look on man as the chief subject of divine care and our earth as the moral and spiritual centre of the universe. The rank and practical importance of God's creatures, or the orbs He has made, do not depend, they urge, on their physical bigness or littleness, but on higher qualities. Though the telescope and the magnitudes it has disclosed dwarf man to a petty insect, the microscope gives back to man his dignity. To the Almighty and Eternal a thousand years are as one day, a day as is a

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thousand years, a world like Sirius as a drop of dew, and a drop of dew as a starry constellation. Small as man is, he has within him a knowledge, reason, will, consciousness and creative power that put him in a higher realm than any mass, however huge, of insensate matter. No globe of brute matter has its reason of existence in itself. The reason of being in all material things lies outside them, in their serviceableness to the spiritual universe. That which redeems sun, moon and stars from insignificance is simply that they beautify and illuminate the planet in which man dwells. We may even question whether these huge bubbles of matter have any real, independent existence ? Many of the ablest philosophers have held that our very idea of space and time is relative, an extract and product of our conscious experience, and need not imply any outward reality. These solidseeming globes and all their material phenomena are but transitory shows. They are either subjective illusions or shadow pictures of the divine will, projected on to the screen of space, to serve as a theatre for the training of souls and the chastening of man's ambition; or perhaps as mockeries and humiliations, to punish the presumptuous reason of the skeptical scientists.

A theologian of the early part of this century, when the discoveries of geology first threatened the historical accuracy of Genesis, had the boldness and keenness to explain the fossils in the depths of the earth, that seemed to prove that death entered the world before Adam was created, as having been stirred into the fluent substance of the earth on the creation-day, just to puzzle and discomfit the vainglorious geologist. " Who can prove," it may similarly be asked, " that all these double stars and nebulae and apparent magnitudes of the skies that the conceited astronomers use as arguments to undermine the credibility of the first three chapters of Genesis, are not similar divine mockeries and judgments on the too prying curiosity and overconfident reason of modern man ? " Who knows but that, when God has given man his appointed probation on this planet, this theatre of earth and this phantasmal scenery of the skies will roll together like a scroll and vanish, leaving only, to survive the wreck of matter and the crush of worlds, the indestructible realm of the spiritual world and such souls as have accepted God's plan of salvation ?

With such answering questions and assumptions are all inferences from the modern change of front of the universe, that would cast doubt on the validity of the older theologic systems and man's unique importance in the universe, often calmly waved aside.

Which then of these antagonistic groups of inferences, drawn from the notable widening of modern thought, may we the more reasonably accept ?

There is a certain measure of truth in each of them. On the one hand, the radical view of modern materialists as to the transitoriness and insignificance of humanity in our magnified universe, and the atheistic inferences supposed to be demanded by the march of modern science, are altogether too extreme.

If the whole universe be nothing but forms of matter and its motions and functions, then it matters not how

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immense it is. A million million miles of it are as meaningless and empty as a single cubic yard. If the human soul have a real existence and superior nature, then the intrinsic rank and capacities of the human reason and conscience remain the same, no matter how many thousand times the area of the stage on which it plays its parts be stretched out.

One high intuition of eternal truth, one holy impulse of consecration or noble moral choice, is grander than a whole world of clay, more magnificent than the most colossal galaxy of gas and dust. Intricate as are the mechanics of nature and stupendous as is its bulk, the vision of reason comprehends the most complex system. But mechanical nature, on the other hand, is not aware of its own marvels and quite unconscious of its triumphs. The astronomic world has not expanded faster and cannot expand faster than man's mind dilates to embrace it in his thought and reduce it to order. What we lose in relative importance because of the enlargement of the boundaries of the universe, we recover from the new revelation of man's amazing capacities that is given through these transcendent achievements of human science.

The materialist would have us bow our head in despair because Sun and Sirius and the system of the Pleiades are so gigantic. But when we remember that it is " the mind of man that has measured them as with a surveyor's chain and weighed them as if he held them in his hand," is there not in this sweep and mystery of the human intellect something too provocative of awe and reverence to be repressed by any lumps of earth however mammoth in size ? It may be that when, through the telescope of science, we look up at the sky, our human stature seems to shrivel in the most alarming fashion. Yet, when, under the optician's guidance, we look at the realms below us, to what giant size do the dimensions of the human frame again expand ! If the nebulae of the astronomer belittle man, the bacteria and the atoms of the microscopist equally magnify him. A cubic inch of Bilin slate contains over a billion of millions of infusorial shells, whose characteristics are still distinct enough for scientific identification. Compared with one of these diminutive creatures, man's bulk is as large, proportionately, as a stellar system is, measured against man's stature; and each corpuscle that revolves in a drop of blood within our veins may be a planetary system of spheres to which the human frame may be as colossal a galaxy as the Milky Way appears to our astronomers. When we think of the exquisite structure of these infinitesimal creatures and the admirable adjustment of their organs and functions to the needs of their life, (an adaptation which is as perfect in a bacillus or vibrio as in a whale), may we not believe that the power that provides so generously for the million inhabitants of a drop of water will much more take care for man, no matter how huge the constellations may be, under the charge of His infinite wisdom ?

Science has not diminished but multiplied the proofs of the intelligibility and rationality of the universe. It has made plainer than ever the fundamental likeness of the finite spirit that reads the great stonebook and the starry hieroglyphics, with the Infinite

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Spirit that has woven with such intelligence and beneficence this marvelous web of matter and force.

If the expansion of the universe and the immutable reign of cause and effect through it all have undermined the old argument from design, based on the adaptation of special organs to special requirements or conditions, it has given, instead of this " design byretail/' a " design by wholesale " far more majestic. It has presented us with an all-embracing system of planful reason and self-adjusting development which demands for its inception and maintenance nothing less than the constant life and intelligence of an Omnipresent spirit. Modern science itself still puts man at the head of the kingdom of life ; it holds him to be the climax of the ascending evolution, apparently its end and goal. When we look back on the long ages through which the divine hand, by patient process of evolution, was preparing for man's appearance, and slowly moulding him in the womb of nature, till at length the great work received its crown in the emergence of the self-conscious mind, able and willing to join hands and hasten onward, with unprecedented rapidity, the evolutionary processes, lifting them to higher levels of moral and spiritual unfolding than physical nature knows, does not man, then, assume a higher dignity ? Does it not seem more probable than ever before that his Creator did not delve and model in the clay-pits of life for so many long ages merely to complete a marvelous automaton, that he would send back to inanimate dust with the stoppage of his pulse and thus render vain all the long travail of the sons ?

20 TEE NEW WORLD AND TEE NEW TEOUGHT

If it be the great law of science that the fittest survive, that no atom passes into nothing, but only passes on to new forms and fields of activity, what else in all the ascending ranks of life is the best and fittest to survive, if not this truth-seeking mind, this conscience, reverent of the right, this soul-personality which knows itself an inseparable unity, an integer more indivisible than any atom, the centre in which all reasoning, memory, comparison and judgment subsist and by which alone they are possible ? Without a continuance in existence of this conscious spirit which is the most consummate flower and essence of the universe, that universe itself becomes a meaningless chaos and ephemeral force.

The materialistic inferences which have sometimes been drawn from the grand enlargement of the world, effected by modern thought, are not, then, either necessary or credible. The expansion of the universe has no endorsement to give to these melancholy theories or that contempt for humanity which they would foster.

While this is true, there are, on the other hand, very important changes demanded by the recognition of our magnified universe. In the new light supplied by modern scientific discoveries it is impossible that our theological conceptions should remain unchanged. These discoveries require us to modify very considerably the views of God's government and the nature, origin and destiny of man, that were held of old in the larger churches. It is true, of course, that to the divine eye our ideas of small and great, of the momentary and the permanent, may be interchangeable. Nevertheless, this does not dismiss the notions of time

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and space as mere subjective illusions which we need not regard.

Whatever be the standard of measurement, large or small, there is that relative position and contiguity and varied direction that constitutes space ; there is that inescapable fact of a before and an after in conscious experience or successive motions, that constitutes the essence of time. And the comparative magnitudes and durations of these conditions of space and time are not to be ignored in any reasonable interpretation of the laws of the universe and man's relations to the divine government.

Especially should it be remembered that neither these vast spaces nor far prolonged periods that modern science has disclosed are empty things. This is the correlative discovery of science everywhere accompanying every extension of the universe, viz. : that this universe teems with energy and change.

Another thing is equally to be borne in mind — that all these changes are orderly and harmonious. The laws of the transmutation of species, established by Darwin and Wallace, show the unity of life. The revelations of the spectroscope and the majestic laws of the correlation of force that Grove and Joule established, proving that light, heat and magnetism are all variants of one another and manifestations of a common force behind them, all show an essential Unity, running as a scarlet web through the universe. All these systems of suns are under one constitution, and the luminous matter in all is substantially the same. One ether extends through all as the medium of communication. One gravitation guides all in their orbits. One law of birth and growth and hereditypushes the kingdom of life steadily upward. One process of organization, continuous and alike, rules every galaxy and every atom. From the diffused to the compacted, from the lifeless to the living, from the nebula to the man, from lower to higher — such is the eternal rhythm of the cosmic evolution.

Here in these words, the cosmic evolution, we have named the mightiest change which science has made in the last half-century. From the moment Galileo's opera glasses showed the phases of Venus this law was sure to be reached sooner or later. It was from that day a predestined thing that the current belief of Christendom of 200 years ago, in which our earth was regarded as a scene of decay and moral fall and constant supernatural intervention, should suffer change. It seems almost superfluous to recall how every birth or death, every comet or earthquake, every unusual event, was regarded as occurring by the special intervention of some supernatural agent, magician or saint, imp or angel, devil or god, according to the respective smallness or bigness, badness or goodness, of the event. All this has been ejected by science from the belief of enlightened men and women. Everywhere law is found to reign. Lily and solar system are found to unfold according to one and the same grand system. The hallucinations of the senses, even the insane delusions, are found to have their natural sources.