Recreations in Astronomy / With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work

by Henry White Warren

Rise above the earth, and you find the worlds tossed like playthings, and hurled seventy times as fast as a rifle-ball, never an inch out of place or a second out of time. But this is only the C in the alphabet of power.

Rise to the sun. It is a quenchless reservoir of high-class energy. Our tornadoes move sixty miles an hour, those of the sun twenty thousand miles an hour. A forest on fire sends its spires of flame one hundred feet in air, the sun sends its spires of flame two hundred thousand miles. All our fires exhaust the fuel and burn out. If the sun were pure coal, it would burn out in five thousand years; and yet this sea of unquenchable flame seethes and burns, and rolls and vivifies a dozen worlds, and flashes life along the starry spaces for a million years without any apparent diminution. It sends out its power to every planet, in the vast circle in which it lies. It fills with light not merely a whole circle, but a dome; not merely a dome above, but one below, and on every side. At our distance of ninety-two and a half millions of miles, the great earth feels that power in gravitation, tides, rains, winds, and all possible life—every part is full of power. Fill the earth's orbit with a circle of such receptive worlds—seventy thousand instead of one—everyone would be as fully supplied with power from this central source. More. Fill the whole dome, the entire extent of the surrounding sphere, bottom, sides, top, a sphere one hundred and eighty-five million miles in diameter, and everyone of these uncountable worlds would be touched with the same power as one; each would thrill with life. This is only the D of the alphabet of power. And glancing up to the other suns, one hundred, five hundred, twelve hundred times as large, double, triple, septuple, multiple suns, we shall find power enough to go through the whole alphabet in geometrical ratio; and then in the clustered suns, galaxies, and nebulæ, power enough still unrepresented by single letters to require all combinations of the alphabet of power. What is the significance of this single element of power? The answer of science to-day is "correlation," the constant evolution of one force from another. Heat is a mode of motion, motion a result of heat. So far so good. But are we mere reasoners in a circle? Then we would be lost men, treading our round of death in a limitless forest. What is the ultimate? Reason out in a straight line. No definition of matter allows it to originate force; only mind can do that. Hence the ultimate force is always mind. Carry your correlation as far as you please—through planets, suns, nebulæ, concretionary vortices, and revolving fire-mist—there must always be mind and will beyond. Some of that willpower that works without exhaustion must take its own force and render it static, apparent. It may do this in such correlated relation that that force shall go on year after year to a thousand changing forms; but that force must originate in mind.

Go out in the falling rain, stand under the thunderous Niagara, feel the immeasurable rush of life, see the hanging worlds, and trace all this—the carried rain, the terrific thunder with God's bow of peace upon it, and the unfailing planets hung upon nothing—trace all this to the orb of day blazing in perpetual strength, but stop not there. Who made the sun? Contrivance fills all thought. Who made the sun? Nature says there is a mind, and that mind is Almighty. Then you have read the first syllables, viz., being and power.

What is the continuous relation of the universe to the mind from which it derived its power? Some say that it is the relation of a wound-up watch to the winder. It was dowered with sufficient power to revolve its ceaseless changes, and its maker is henceforth an absentee God. Is it? Let us have courage to see. For twenty years one devotes ten seconds every night to putting a little force into a watch. It is so arranged that it distributes that force over twenty-four hours. In that twenty years more power has been put into that watch than a horse could exert at once. But suppose one had tried to put all that force into the watch at once: it would have pulverized it to atoms. But supposing the universe had been dowered with power at first to run its enormous rounds for twenty millions of years. It is inconceivable; steel would be as friable as sand, and strengthless as smoke, in such strain.

We have discovered some of the laws of the force we call gravitation. But what do we know of its essence? How it appears to act we know a little, what it is we are profoundly ignorant. Few men ever discuss this question. All theories are sublimely ridiculous, and fail to pass the most primary tests. How matter can act where it is not, and on that with which it has no connection, is inconceivable.

Newton said that anyone who has in philosophical matters a competent faculty of thinking, could not admit for a moment the possibility of a sun reaching through millions of miles, and exercising there an attractive power. A watch may run if wound up, but how the watch-spring in one pocket can run the watch in another is hard to see. A watch is a contrivance for distributing a force outside of itself, and if the universe runs at all on that principle, it distributes some force outside of itself.

Le Sage's theory of gravitation by the infinitive hail of atoms cannot stand a minute, hence we come back as a necessity of thought to Herschel's statement. "It is but reasonable to regard gravity as a result of a consciousness and a will existent somewhere." Where? I read an old book speaking of these matters, and it says of God, He hangeth the earth upon nothing; he upholdeth constantly all things by the word of his power. By him all things consist or hold together. It teaches an imminent mind; an almighty, constantly exerted power. Proof of this starts up on every side. There is a recognized tendency in all high-class energy to deteriorate to a lower class. There is steam in the boiler, but it wastes without fuel. There is electricity in the jar, but every particle of air steals away a little, unless our conscious force is exerted to regather it. There is light in the sun, but infinite space waits to receive it, and takes it swift as light can leap. We said that if the sun were pure coal, it would burn out in five thousand years, but it blazes undimmed by the million. How can it? There have been various theories: chemical combustion, it has failed; meteoric impact, it is insufficient; condensation, it is not proved; and if it were, it is an intermediate step back to the original cause of condensation. The far-seeing eyes see in the sun the present active power of Him who first said, "Let there be light," and who at any moment can meet a Saul in the way to Damascus with a light above the brightness of the sun—another noon arisen on mid-day; and of whom it shall be said in the eternal state of unclouded brightness, where sun and moon are no more, "The glory of the Lord shall lighten it, and the Lamb is the light thereof."

But suppose matter could be dowered, that worlds could have a gravitation, one of two things must follow: It must have conscious knowledge of the position, exact weight, and distance of every atom, mass, and world, in order to proportion the exact amount of gravity, or it must fill infinity with an omnipresent attractive power, pulling in myriads of places at nothing; in a few places at worlds. Every world must exert an infinitely extended power, but myriads of infinities cannot be in the same space. The solution is, one infinite power and conscious will.

To see the impossibility of every other solution, join in the long and microscopic hunt for the ultimate particle, the atom; and if found, or if not found, to a consideration of its remarkable powers. Bring telescopes and microscopes, use all strategy, for that atom is difficult to catch. Make the first search with the microscope: we can count 112,000 lines ruled on a glass plate inside of an inch. But we are here looking at mountain ridges and valleys, not atoms. Gold can be beaten to the 1/340000 of an inch. It can be drawn as the coating of a wire a thousand times thinner, to the 1/340000000 of an inch. But the atoms are still heaped one upon another.

Take some of the infusorial animals. Alonzo Gray says millions of them would not equal in bulk a grain of sand. Yet each of them performs the functions of respiration, circulation, digestion, and locomotion. Some of our blood-vessels are not a millionth of our size. What must be the size of the ultimate particles that freely move about to nourish an animal whose totality is too small to estimate? A grain of musk gives off atoms enough to scent every part of the air of a room. You detect it above, below, on every side. Then let the zephyrs of summer and the blasts of winter sweep through that room for forty years, bearing out into the wide world miles on miles of air, all perfumed from the atoms of that grain of musk, and at the end of the forty years the weight of musk has not appreciably diminished. Yet uncountable myriads on myriads of atoms have gone.