Of the sixteen chapters constituting this little work, thirteen have been published as a series, begun in Knowledge and continued in Knowledge and Illustrated Scientific News, and to the proprietors of those journals, for their courteous permission to reprint them, I offer my sincere thanks. Three additional chapters, equivalent to, though not identical with, those that now appear, formed an integral part of the original plan of the book, now presented to the public in the hope that it will enable general readers to follow, with the profound interest it should inspire, the course of modern inquiries regarding the origin of the world. Their advance is by no means smooth or facile. Many difficulties and perplexities are encountered in the attempt to get back towards the beginning of things. Some of the old tracks, too, have been torn up by the pioneers of twentieth century science, and the process of constructing new ones, which shall lead further into the unknown fore-time, is slow and laborious. But the rail-head in the desert is a peculiarly suggestive place of pilgrimage, and several such outlying posts and temporary halting-places are more or less vaguely localized in the following pages.

London, November, 16, 1905.

CONTENTS

CHAPTERPAGE
[I.]FROM THALES TO KANT[1]
[II.]THE NEBULAR HYPOTHESIS[21]
[III.]CRITICISMS OF THE NEBULAR HYPOTHESIS[39]
[IV.]THE NEBULAR HYPOTHESIS VARIED AND IMPROVED[60]
[V.]TIDAL FRICTION AS AN AGENT IN COSMOGONY[83]
[VI.]THE FISSION OF ROTATING GLOBES[100]
[VII.]WORLD-BUILDING OUT OF METEORITES[118]
[VIII.]COSMOGONY IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY[135]
[IX.]PROTYLE: WHAT IS IT?[150]
[X.]UNIVERSAL FORCES[166]
[XI.]THE INEVITABLE ETHER[183]
[XII.]THE FORMS OF NEBULÆ[199]
[XIII.]THE PROCESSION OF SUNS[216]
[XIV.]OUR OWN SYSTEM[232]
[XV.]REMNANTS AND SURVIVALS[250]
[XVI.]LIFE AS THE OUTCOME[265]
[INDEX][283]

MODERN COSMOGONIES

[CHAPTER I]

FROM THALES TO KANT

Very few even of the most savage tribes are content to take the world just as it is without speculating as to how it came to be. For time has three dimensions—past, present, and future—and we can no more restrict our thoughts within one of them than we can exist corporeally in Flatland. We are, indeed, told that the Abipones and Esquimaux refuse to trouble themselves with questions of origin, on the ground that the hard facts of life leave no room for otiose discussions; but even they feel obliged to justify their incuriosity. In easier circumstances they, too, would claim the entirely human privilege of 'looking before and after,' as their forgotten progenitors may have done. It is, indeed, difficult to think at all about the framework of nature without attempting to divine, were it only by a crude surmise, the process of its construction. We are instinctively convinced that there is no such thing as fixity of condition. So far, Heracleitus was in the right.

Experience tells us of continual change in ourselves and whatever surrounds us. Reason teaches us that its minute momentary effects, if pursued backward for an indefinite time, must sum up to a prodigious total. No limit, that is to say, can be put to the difference between what is and what was. Yet the machinery of modification must somehow have been set going. An initial state is prescribed by logical necessity. And the start was made on certain terms—it was 'conditioned.' But the conditioned implies the absolute; ordinances, an enactive power. The inevitableness of the connection has been more or less obscurely perceived wherever men have tried to establish some kind of accord between phenomena and intuition, with results legible in the wavering outlines of many primitive cosmogonies. Only, however, in the Hebrew Scriptures has the idea of Creation been realized in all its fulness and freedom; elsewhere the gods invoked to bring the world into existence themselves demanded a birth-history, a theogony being the usual and necessary prelude to a cosmogony.