FullReads

As far as the visible universe is concerned, we do not find in it any evidence of immortality or of permanence of any sort, unless it be in the sum of potential and kinetic energies on the persistency of which depends our principle of continuity. In ordinary language “the stars in their courses” serve as symbols of permanence, yet we have found reason to regard them as but temporary phenomena. So, in the language of our authors, “if we take the individual man, we find that he lives his short tale of years, and that then the visible machinery which connects him with the past, as well as that which enables him to act in the present, falls into ruin and is brought to an end. If any germ or potentiality remains, it is certainly not connected with the visible order of things.” In like manner our race is pretty sure to come to an end long before the destruction of the planet from which it now gets its sustenance. And in our authors opinion even the universe will by and by become “old and effete, no less truly than the individual: it is a glorious garment this visible universe, but not an immortal one; we must look elsewhere if we are to be clothed with immortality as with a garment.”

It is at this point that our authors call attention to “the apparently wasteful character of the arrangements of the visible universe.” The fact is one which we have already sufficiently described, but we shall do well to quote the words in which our authors recur to it: “All but a very small portion of the sun’s heat goes day by day into what we call empty space, and it is only this very small remainder that is made use of by the various planets for purposes of their own. Can anything be more perplexing than this seemingly frightful expenditure of the very life and essence of the system? That this vast store of high-class energy should be doing nothing but travelling outwards in space at the rate of 188,000 miles per second is hardly conceivable, especially when the result of it is the inevitable destruction of the visible universe.”

Pursuing this teleological argument, it is suggested that perhaps this apparent waste of energy is “only an arrangement in virtue of which our universe keeps up a memory of the past at the expense of the present, inasmuch as all memory consists in an investiture of present resources in order to keep a hold upon the past.” Recourse is had to the ingenious argument in which Mr. Babbage showed that “if we had power to follow and detect the minutest effects of any disturbance, each particle of existing matter must be a register of all that has happened. The track of every canoe, of every vessel that has yet disturbed the surface of the ocean, whether impelled by manual force or elemental power, remains forever registered in the future movement of all succeeding particles which may occupy its place. The furrow which is left is, indeed, instantly filled up by the closing waters; but they draw after them other and larger portions of the surrounding element, and these again, once moved, communicate motion to others in endless succession.” In like manner, “the air itself is one vast library, on whose pages are forever written all that man has ever said or even whispered. There in their mutable but unerring characters, mixed with the earliest as well as the latest sighs of mortality, stand forever recorded vows unredeemed, promises unfulfilled, perpetuating in the united movements of each particle the testimony of man’s changeful will.” [6] In some such way as this, records of every movement that takes place in the world are each moment transmitted, with the speed of light, through the invisible ocean of ether with which the world is surrounded. Even the molecular displacements which occur in our brains when we feel and think are thus propagated in their effects into the unseen world. The world of ether is thus regarded by our authors as in some sort the obverse or complement of the world of sensible matter, so that whatever energy is dissipated in the one is by the same act accumulated in the other. It is like the negative plate in photography, where light answers to shadow and shadow to light. Or, still better, it is like the case of an equation in which whatever quantity you take from one side is added to the other with a contrary sign, while the relation of equality remains undisturbed. Thus, it will be noticed, from the ingenious and subtle, but quite defensible suggestion of Mr. Babbage, a leap is made to an assumption which cannot be defended scientifically, but only teleologically. It is one thing to say that every movement in the visible world transmits a record of itself to the surrounding ether, in such a way that from the undulation of the ether a sufficiently powerful intelligence might infer the character of the generating movement in the visible world. It is quite another thing to say that the ether is organized in such a complex and delicate way as to be like a negative image or counterpart of the world of sensible matter. The latter view is no doubt ingenious, but it is gratuitous. It is sustained not by scientific analogy, but by the desire to find some assignable use for the energy which is constantly escaping from visible matter into invisible ether. The moment we ask how do we know that this energy is not really wasted, or that it is not put to some use wholly undiscoverable by human intelligence, this assumption of an organized ether is at once seen to be groundless. It belongs not to the region of science, but to that of pure mythology.