Humanity had made a fresh start; science should do likewise. The sanguine spirit of a rejuvenated world animated all forms of human endeavour. It has long since evaporated. The buoyant hopes of a century back have been crushed; the future of civilization looks dim; and its uncertainty compromises the future of knowledge. But we, at any rate, no longer delude ourselves with the idea that he who runs may read the secrets of the universe. We have learned by convincing experience how much, and how variously, 'the subtlety of nature transcends the subtlety of sense and intellect'; we are vividly aware that there is no single and simple recipe for the 'cosmification' of chaos.
That devised by Laplace has ceased to be satisfactory. Its simplicity, at first sight so seductive, leaves it at a disadvantage compared with the intricacy of the effects it was designed to elicit. The relations claiming explanation have multiplied with the progress of research. Those of the dynamical order were alone attended to by the geometers of the eighteenth century, and even they have grown recalcitrant; while those of a physical and chemical kind have proved wholly unmanageable. It has, indeed, become abundantly clear that the series of operations described by Laplace could scarcely, under the most favourable circumstances, have been accomplished, and in a thin nebulous medium would have been entirely impossible. The nebular cosmogony has not, then, stood 'Foursquare to all the winds that blew.'
Its towers and battlements have crumbled before the storms of adverse criticism. It survives only as a wreck, its distinctive features obliterated, although with the old flag still flying on the keep. In the next chapter we shall attempt a survey of the works set on foot for its reconstruction.
FOOTNOTES:
[10] Presidential Address to the British Association, Johannesburg, August 30, 1905.
[11] Comptes Rendus, tom. lii., p. 481.
[12] Astrophysical Journal, vol. xi., p. 103.
[13] Moulton, Astrophysical Journal, vol. xi., p. 110.
[14] Nolan, Nature, vol. xxxiv., p. 287.
[15] Bulletin Astronomique, tom. ii., p. 223.