THE WORLD MACHINE

(A toi)

CHAPTER I

IMAGO MUNDI

SOME morning afield, when you seem peculiarly alive, a mind all open to the clamour of sensations, impressions, ideas, let your eye range the sky-it is taciturn; the hills-they are cryptic ; the sea, if it be there-its murmuring voice is confused. Reflect then a little on what could be our ideas of creation, what sort of a "world image" we could form, if we had found no supplements or aids to the primitive senses with which we are born, if we had no miracle-working lenses and prisms, no angle measures, no strange magnetic needles, no Euclid, no long line. before us of explorers and discoverers to write that ample page of knowledge which the pressed types make now the universal heritage of the race. As it would be to us, so it was to men and minds like yours and mine, ten, twenty thousand years ago.

In ten or twenty thousand years, we may imagine, the face of the earth has changed but little. The sky, the monotonous wash of the sea, the hills, the plains, the yellow wastes of the desert, must have looked very much to the cave-dwellers as they do to us. The human animal, too, has not varied greatly -his dress, his speech, his social relations, a little; the main activities of his daily life, his pleasures, his moral and economic problems, the struggle for existence, the ceaseless round of birth and death, remain much the same. What has so wonderfully changed in these ten or twenty thousand years is the human mind and its outlook on the world.

The transformation has been immense-how immense we have learned but recently, through the larger development of anthropology, to know. The earlier ideas of mankind were almost pure fancy. The earth rested serenely upon the back of

a turtle, and the sun with Chesterfieldian urbanity stood still at the voice of the prophet. The imagination was unfettered and untrained. The coming of the spring, the yield of the harvest, the fate of battles, were conceived as in control of the gods. In the storm there were demons, in the fields there were fairies, in the woods the hamadryads played. There were omens and signs; the conditions of a chicken's entrails might forecast the destiny of empires. In the antique world there was a universal belief in the intervention of the preternatural in the affairs of men.

Little by little these beliefs fell away. In apparent chaos was found an order, and instead of caprice a scheme of nature in some sense understandable and in some sense predictable.

The change was slow, the path obscure and difficult. Probably the hardest thing the human race has had put before it to learn was the idea of fixity and consequence; the certitude that one event follows inevitably from another-the notion, as we say, of cause and effect; in Hume's phrase, of invariable sequence; what we have come in latter days to style the reign of law.

Even now it has penetrated but a very little way. It is the keynote of every rational work now written; it adorns the pages of amiable efforts at the conciliation of science and religion. The phrase has a sort of literary vogue. Yet, at each new extension of this idea of fixity and law into our daily lives and thoughts, the generality cries out, just as it did at the motion of the earth, at the law of gravitation, at the scheme of evolution, and all the rest.

The emotional side of the race has not changed. Law and fixity it will recognise now, after a painful effort, in the march of the heavens, in the course of the seasons, in the succession of geological epochs, of genera and species; even in a vague way, in human development. But find this same fixity and law in the rise and fall of nations, of human institutions, of human beliefs, its creeds, its political doctrines; to find this in the present primacy of America and the decadence of Spain; to view history as a tableau of destiny; our daily lives, down to the minutest detail of actions "good" or "evil," of thoughts "noble" or vile," as the necessary and unescapable consequence of our surroundings which were created for us, our characters and bodily constitutions which were given to us :

to view the world so-no, we are as yet very far from that; for all practical consequences, scarce nearer than the barbarians who trembled before the thunder and offered human sacrifices to calm an infuriate Being above.

It seems a formidable theorem to grasp. It might be called the pons asinorum of intellectual development, alike of the individual and of the race.

But, if yet far from spiritual clarity, we have come some way. We no longer think the earth is flat, as was probably true, for example, of Socrates or of Solomon. We no longer believe that the sun is a god; nor do we regard it as an object two feet in width, as Epicurus taught. Nowadays frogs are not born from the mud, as Aristotle believed. The alchemist who offers us a receipt for transmuting base metal into noble gold we receive with a benevolent smile; the man with a new scheme for perpetual motion we know to be a crook or a fool; and if a priestess of spooks may still befuddle many seeming sane and clever men, at least presidents and premiers no longer consult an oracle before they go to war. How has all this come about?

In a way we may answer: Through the growth of calculation and experiment, and the invention of mechanical devices which have almost infinitely widened, corrected, and supplemented our primitive five senses; in a larger way, we may say: From an inherent impulse to know-the effort of "the restless cause-seeking animal" to probe the eternal riddle that surrounds and envelops him. Born into a world the mystery of whose phenomena fascinates even as it baffles, he has sought, undaunted by failure, undismayed by time, to find the elusive thread which binds events. It is the working of that instinct, not wholly absent in animals, which Renan calls the noblest craving of our nature: curiosity. It is the instinct of the child, whose incessant question is "Why ?-Why?" It is the interrogation which must have troubled the childhood of the world: "What am I?" Where am I?" Whence? and O heavens, whither ? ”

"

"

From the infancy of the race there have been minds which, turning aside from the ordinary pursuits and passions of men, from the prizes of trade, from the clamour of war, from the pluckings of fame, have given over their lives to the search. Argonauts in quest of the golden fleece of knowledge and of

truth, their voyages have penetrated to the remotest corners of the earth and reached out among the stars. Magicians and sorcerers to tribal man; philosophers, the lovers of wisdom, when Hellenism rose; discoverers and men of science-Galileos, Newtons now-civilisation is their work; the modern world is in some sense their creation. Amid the destruction and decay that attends all else from human hands, their achievements remain. The fabrics of the kingdoms melt away; where Accad and where Carthage stood, no broken pillar lifts its lonely form to mark the spot amid the desert silences. The dust and dreams of Cæsar mingle with the forgotten ashes of his slaves. But Archimedes' lever and Thales' magic stone, the theorems of Euclid and Hipparchus' starry sphere, the magnetic compass of the dynasty of Tsin, and the black powder of Berthold Schwartz and his forerunners, the pendulum of Ibn-Junis and Hans Lippershey's far-reaching, near-drawing tubes, the presses of Gutenberg and Coster, the balance and retorts of Lavoisier, James Watt's labouring giants of steam, Volta's pile, and Faraday's whirling magnets, are possessions imperishable while civilisation, their fruit, survives.

Thanks to five or ten thousand years, perhaps a still greater period, of tolerably connected and consecutive effort, there has been built up a considerable stock of knowledge which, deftly fitted together in an orderly way, has become our one sure guide in this weird journey through the wilderness. Supported by this slowly wrought fabric of fact and logical theory, it is possible now to give at least a partial answer to some of the primitive human problems. Relative to the rest of the cosmos, we know to some extent what we are, we know to some extent where we are, we have some slight idea as to whence we have come, we are beginning to perceive dimly whither we are going.

Much of this is very new. In nature there is a certain tendency to the dramatic, some little also in the progress of knowledge. In some sense, it seems as if we had attained to a sort of climax. This may be but an illusion, born of the natural inability of the mind to see beyond its own day and time. It may be that the astonishing advance of the last three hundred years will continue without check, and perhaps with accelerated pace. Yet we know that such a dramatic moment came at the opening of the seventeenth century, with the establishment of our ideas of the solar system. So it may

be that some future historian, chronicling the stages of human development, will write :

"It was at about the beginning of the twentieth century that man attained at last a true picture of the world-came to know, in brief, the cosmos as it is. It was at about this time that he came to perceive the eternal round of matter in the universe-the coalescence of vague and formless nebular masses into suns and satellites, their slow refrigeration into dark bodies, with the transient appearance of life, their dissipation again into primitive nebula through the incessant collisions to which they are subject.

"It was then that he came definitely to conceive the whole scheme of world formation as a mechanical process, following simple and well-understood laws; likewise that the incessant destruction of worlds is the result of a larger but still purely mechanical process.

"It was at about the same time that he came to recognise that the germs of life are being driven each whither from one planet and one world system to another, under the pressure of light-that it is in this manner that sterile planets are fertilised; that the varied life of these vast globes springs up under appropriate material conditions and in response to simple physical or chemical stimuli; that the races of intelligent beings, with all their attendant creations of civilisation, their art, literatures, sciences, institutions, are part and parcel of this same mechanical or physical process, and like the hills or the suns, like worlds or atoms, are the fleeting and mysterious manifestations of that eternal we-know-not-what, that underlying reality which is back of all phenomena, whose nature it is not given to the conscious intelligence, part and product of it like the rest, to know.

"In larger phrase, it was at this period that the more instructed among men came definitively to regard the universe as a cyclic process-that is to say, as an unceasing machine, with no beginning and without an end.

"This result came as the culmination of a period of unparalleled intellectual activity, dating from the discovery of the New World and the appearance of a work by a Polish astronomer, wherein the true character of our immediate solar system was first adequately set forth. The accidental discovery of the telescope following shortly after placed in the hands of the

f