It may be sufficient to glance shortly at the equally great corresponding changes which this period has witnessed in the practical conditions of life and of society. If astronomy and geology have extended the dominion of the mind over space and time, steamers, railways, and the electric telegraph have gained the mastery over them for practical purposes. Commerce and emigration have assumed international proportions, and India, Australia, and America are nearer to us, and connected with us by closer ties, than Scotland was to England in my schoolboy days. Education and a cheap press have even in a greater degree revolutionised society, and knowledge, reaching the masses, has carried with it power, so that democracy and free-thought are, whether for good or evil, everywhere in the ascendant, and old privileges and traditions are everywhere decaying.
With such a great change of environment it is evident that many of the old creeds, institutions, and other organisms, adapted to old conditions, must have become as obsolete as a schoolboy’s jacket would be as the comfortable habiliment of a grown-up man. But as a lobster which has cast its shell does not feel at ease until it has grown a new one, so thinking men of the present day are driven to devise, to a great extent each for themselves, some larger theory which may serve them as a ‘working hypothesis’ with which to go through life, and bring the ineradicable aspirations and emotions of their nature into some tolerable harmony with existing facts.
To me, as one of those thinking units, this theory, of what for want of a better name I call ‘Zoroastrianism,’ has approved itself as a good working theory, which reconciles more intellectual and moral difficulties, and affords a better guide in conduct and practical life than any other; and, in a word, enables me to reduce my own individual Chaos into some sort of an intelligible and ordered Cosmos. I feel moved, therefore, to preach through the press my little sermon upon it, for the benefit of those whom it may concern, feeling assured that the process of evolution, by which
The old order changes, giving place to new,
can best be assisted by the honest and unbiassed expression of the results of individual thought and experience on the part of any one of those units whose aggregates form the complicated organisms of religions and philosophies, of societies and of humanity.
CHAPTER II.
POLARITY IN MATTER—MOLECULES AND ATOMS.
Matter consists of molecules—Nature of molecules—Laws of their action in gases—Law of Avogadro—Molecules composed of atoms—Proved by composition of water—Combinations of atoms—Elementary substances—Qualities of matter depend on atoms—Dimensions and velocities of molecules and atoms—These are ascertained facts, not theories.
If in building a house that is to stand when the rains fall and the winds blow, it is requisite to go down to the solid rock for a foundation, so much the more is it necessary in building up a theory to begin at the beginning and give it a solid groundwork. Nine-tenths of the fallacies current in the world arise from the haste with which people rush to conclusions on insufficient premises. Take, for instance, any of the political questions of the day, such as the Irish question: how many of those who express confident opinions, and get angry and excited on one side or the other, could answer any of the preliminary questions which are the indispensable conditions of any rational judgment? How many marks would they get for an examination paper which asked what was the population of Ireland; what proportion of that population was agricultural; what proportion of that agricultural population consisted of holders of small tenements; what was the scale of rents compared with that for small holdings in other countries; how much of that rent was levied on them for their own improvements; and other similar questions which lie at the root of the matter? In how many cases would it be found that the whole superstructure of their confident and passionate theories about the Irish difficulty was based on no more solid foundation than their like or dislike of a particular statesman or of a particular party?