“This sea of gas, floating lost in the universe, was possessed of two movements: the movement of the atoms buzzing round each other, and a movement of rotation by which the whole sea whirled round its central point. Millions of years went by, and during those years our gaseous sea began to cool and shrink. But it did not shrink evenly. The great outer ring of the sea was left behind, still whirling and cooling and condensing, but it did not remain in the form of a ring. The atoms drew together, sucked toward a common point from every part of the ring, and the result was that a globe began to form like a great tumour on the attenuated ring; and as years went on, the ring gave up more and more atoms to the globe, till at last there was nothing left but the globe whirling along the path once occupied by the ring. This globe was the first and outermost planet, Neptune.
“Meanwhile, the sea of gas was still contracting, and again the same thing happened. The outermost edge of the sea was left behind, in the form of a ring, a globe was formed and that globe was Uranus, the second furthest planet from us. Again the same thing happened, and Saturn was formed: and yet again, and Jupiter was formed: and yet again, and Mars was left behind in the shape of a whirling globe of fire, and then the Earth.
“The sea continued contracting, leaving Venus behind and then Mercury; and still it continued contracting, but now it was too small to throw off any more rings, and it consolidated to form one great central globe, the sun.
“The first great act of creation was accomplished, and on that vast day when, Mercury left definitely behind, the budding of worlds was finished, the sun and the planets around it might have been seen like a golden bee surrounded by its golden children, shining in the night of space.
“The earth was a much brighter place then, for it was simply a globe of incandescent vapour, and yet that glowing vapour held everything. Man and woman, and love and war, beauty and sorrow. Art, poetry, music, hunger, and cruelty.
“That mixture of the abstract and the concrete sounds like rant, but it is not. It is a bald statement of facts. Every thought that man has ever thought, every dream that man has ever dreamed was lying unborn yet in the essence of that globe of incandescent vapour. Every form that ever sketched itself on earth was there, too—from the daisy to the hippopotamus. But as yet there was nothing definite, nothing but the dance of the atoms and the atoms themselves.
“From the first moment of its separate existence this world in posse, consisting as yet of incandescent vapour, began to cool and shrink, and after the first million years or so it began to exhibit the first symptoms of thought and to storm at its own shrinking.”
“Excuse me for a moment, but what do you mean by the first symptoms of thought?”
The Germ of Thought
“The first and only symptom of thought is action, arising from opposing forces, and when the world, now condensed into a liquid form, began to exhibit tides and storms of molten matter, it began to exhibit action arising from opposing forces; and here let me say that the amount of work done by the world before life ever appeared upon it, the amount of work done by what we call senseless matter, and the amount of thought and ingenuity expended on that work put the much trumpeted wonder of life in the shade.