History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume II (of 2) / Revised Edition

by John William Draper

Summary as respects the world in time.Thus, as respects the age of the earth and her relations in time, we approach the doctrine of Orientals, who long ago ascertained that the scales of time and of space correspond to each other. More fortunate than we, they had but one point of resistance to encounter, but that resistance they met with dissimulation, and not in an open way. They attempted to conceal the tendency of their doctrine by allying or affiliating it with detected errors. According to their national superstition, the earth is supported on the back of an elephant, and this on a succession of animals, the last of which is a tortoise. It is not to be supposed that the Brahmans, who wrote commentaries on the Surya Siddhanta, should for a moment have accepted these preposterous delusions—that was impossible for such great geometers; yet led, perhaps, by a wish to do nothing that might disturb public feeling, they engaged in the hopeless task of showing that their profound philosophical discoveries were not inconsistent with the ancient traditions; that a globular and revolving earth might be sustained on a descending succession of supporting beasts. But they had the signal advantage over us that those popular traditions conceded to them that limitless time for which we have had to struggle.

The life of the universe.The progression of life on the surface of our planet is under the guidance of pre-ordained and resistless law—it is affiliated with material and correspondingly changing conditions. It suggests that the succession of organic forms which, in a due series, the earth's surface in the long lapse of time has presented, is the counterpart of a like progress which other planets in the solar system exhibit in myriads of years, and leads us to the conception of the rise, development, and extinction of a multiplicity of such living forms in other systems—a march of life through the universe, and its passing away.

Multiplicity of worlds implies succession of worlds.Magnitudes and times, therefore, go parallel with one another. With the abandonment of the geocentric theory, and of the doctrine of the human destiny of the universe, have vanished the unworthy hypotheses of the recent date [336] of creation and the approaching end of all things. In their stead are substituted more noble ideas. The multiplicity of worlds in infinite space leads to the conception of a succession of worlds in infinite time. This existing universe, with all its splendours, had a beginning, and will have an end; it had its predecessors, and will have its successors; but its march through all its transformations is under the control of laws as unchangeable as destiny. As a cloud, which is composed of myriads of separate and isolated spherules of water, so minute as to be individually invisible, on a summer's afternoon changes its aspect and form, disappearing from the sky, and being replaced in succeeding hours by other clouds of a different aspect and shape, so the universe, which is a cloud of suns and worlds, changes in the immensity of time its form and fashion, and that which is contemporary with us is only an example of countless combinations of a like kind, which in ancient times have one after another vanished away. In periods yet to come the endless succession of metamorphoses will still go on, a series of universes to which there is no end.

CHAPTER X. THE EUROPEAN AGE OF REASON—(Continued). THE NATURE AND RELATIONS OF MAN.

Position of Man according to the Heliocentric and Geocentric Theories.

Of Animal Life.—The transitory Nature of living Forms.—Relations of Plants and Animals.—Animals are Aggregates of Matter expending Force originally derived from the Sun.

The Organic Series.—Man a Member of it.—His Position determined by Anatomical and Physiological Investigation of his Nervous System.—Its triple Forms: Automatic, Instinctive, Intellectual.

The same progressive Development is seen in individual Man, in the entire animal Series, and in the Life of the Globe.—They are all under the Control of an eternal, universal, irresistible Law.

The Aim of Nature is intellectual Development, and human Institutions must conform thereto.

Summary of the Investigation of the Position of Man.—Production of Inorganic and Organic Forms by the Sun.—Nature of Animals and their Series.—Analogies and Differences between them and Man.—The Soul.—The World.