Our knowledge of the vast periods, both geological and astronomical, of which we have spoken, is most slight. It is in fact little more than that such periods exist; that the surface of the earth has, at wide intervals of time, undergone great changes in the disposition of land and water, and in the forms of animal life; and that the motions of the heavenly bodies round the sun are affected, though with inconceivable slowness, by a force which must end by deranging them altogether. It would therefore be rash to endeavour to establish any analogy between the periods thus disclosed; but we may observe that they agree in this, that they reduce all things to the general rule of finite duration. As all the geological states of which we find evidence in the present state of the earth, have had their termination, so also the astronomical conditions under which the revolutions of the earth itself proceed, involve the necessity of a future cessation of these revolutions.
The contemplative person may well be struck by this universal law of the creation. We are in the habit sometimes of contrasting the transient destiny of man with the permanence of the forests, the mountains, the ocean,—with the unwearied circuit of the sun. But this contrast is a delusion of our own imagination; the difference is after all but one of degree. The forest tree endures for its centuries and then decays; the mountains crumble and change, and perhaps subside in some convulsion of nature; the sea retires, and the shore ceases to resound with the “everlasting” voice of the ocean: such reflections have already crowded upon the mind of the geologist; and it now appears that the courses of the heavens themselves are not exempt from the universal law of decay; that not only the rocks and the mountains, but the sun and the moon have the sentence “to end” stamped upon their foreheads. They enjoy no privilege beyond man except a longer respite. The ephemeron perishes in an hour; man endures for his three score years and ten; an empire, a nation, numbers its centuries, it may be its thousands of years; the continents and islands which its dominion includes have perhaps their date, as those which preceded them have had; and the very revolutions of the sky by which centuries are numbered will at last languish and stand still.
To dwell on the moral and religious reflections suggested by this train of thought is not to our present purpose; but we may observe that it introduces a homogeneity, so to speak, into the government of the universe. Perpetual change, perpetual progression, increase and diminution, appear to be the rules of the material world, and to prevail without exception. The smaller portions of matter which we have near us, and the larger, which appear as luminaries at a vast distance, different as they are in our mode of conceiving them, obey the same laws of motion; and these laws produce the same results; in both cases motion is perpetually destroyed, except it be repaired by some living power; in both cases the relative rest of the parts of a material system is the conclusion to which its motion tends.
4. It may perhaps appear to some, that this acknowledgment of the tendency of the system to derangement through the action of a resisting medium is inconsistent with the argument which we have drawn in a previous chapter, from the provisions for its stability. In reality, however, the two views are in perfect agreement, so far as our purpose is concerned. The main point which we had to urge, in the consideration of the stability of the system, was, not that it is constructed to last for ever, but that while it lasts, the deviations from its mean condition are very small. It is this property which fits the world for its uses. To maintain either the past or the future eternity of the world, does not appear consistent with physical principles, as it certainly does not fall in with the convictions of the religious man, in whatever way obtained. We conceive that this state of things has had a beginning; we conceive that it will have an end. But in the mean time we find it fitted, by a number of remarkable arrangements, to be the habitation of living creatures. The conditions which secure the stability, and the smallness of the perturbations of the system, are among these provisions. If the eccentricity of the orbit of Venus, or of Jupiter, were much greater than it is, not only might some of the planets, at the close of ages, fall into the sun or fly off into infinite space, but also, in the intermediate time, the earth’s orbit might become much more eccentric; the course of the seasons and the average of temperature might vary from what they now are, so as to injure or destroy the whole organic creation. By certain original arrangements these destructive oscillations are prevented. So long as the bodies continue to revolve, their orbits will not be much different from what they now are. And this result is not affected by the action of the resisting medium. Such a medium cannot increase the small eccentricities of the orbits. The range of the periodical oscillations of heat and cold will not be extended by the mechanical effect of the medium, nor would be, even if its density were incomparably greater than it is. The resisting medium therefore does not at all counteract that which is most important in the provision for the permanency of the solar system. If the stability of the system had not been secured by the adjustments which we described in a former chapter, the course of the seasons might have been disturbed to an injurious or even destructive extent in the course of a few centuries, or even within the limits of one generation; by the effect of the resisting medium, the order of nature remains unchanged for a period, compared with which the known duration of the human race is insignificant.
But, it may be objected, the effect of the medium must be ultimately to affect, the duration of the earth’s revolution round the sun, and thus to derange those adaptations which depend on the length of the year. And, without question, if we permit ourselves to look forward to that inconceivably distant period at which the effect of the medium will become sensible, this must be allowed to be true, as has been already stated. Millions, and probably millions of millions, of years express inadequately the distance of time at which this cause would produce a serious effect. That the machine of the universe is so constructed that it may answer its purposes for such a period, is surely sufficient proof of the skill of its workmanship, and of the reality of its purpose: and those persons, probably, who are best convinced that it is the work of a wise and good Creator, will be least disposed to consider the system as imperfect, because in its present condition it is not fitted for eternity.
5. The doctrine of a Resisting Medium leads us towards a point which the Nebular Hypothesis assumes;—a beginning of the present order of things. There must have been a commencement of the motions now going on in the solar system. Since these motions, when once begun, would be deranged and destroyed in a period which, however large, is yet finite, it is obvious we cannot carry their origin indefinitely backwards in a range of past duration. There is a period in which these revolutions, whenever they had begun, would have brought the revolving bodies into contact with the central mass; and this period has in our system not yet elapsed. The watch is still going, and therefore it must have been wound up within a limited time.
The solar system, at this its beginning, must have been arranged and put in motion by some cause. If we suppose this cause to operate by means of the configurations and the properties of previously existing matter, these configurations must have resulted from some still previous cause, these properties must have produced some previous effects. We are thus led to a condition still earlier than the assumed beginning;—to an origin of the original state of the universe; and in this manner we are carried perpetually further and further back, through a labyrinth of mechanical causation, without any possibility of finding any thing in which the mind can acquiesce or rest, till we admit “a First Cause which is not mechanical.”
Thus the argument which was before urged against those in particular, who put forwards the Nebular Hypothesis in opposition to the admission of an Intelligent Creator, offers itself again, as cogent in itself, when we adopt the opinion of a resisting medium, for which the physical proofs have been found to be so strong. The argument is indeed forced upon our minds, whatever view we take of the past history of the universe. Some have endeavoured to evade its force by maintaining that the world as it now exists has existed from eternity. They assert that the present order of things, or an order of things in some way resembling the present, produced by the same causes, governed by the same laws, has prevailed through an infinite succession of past ages. We shall not dwell upon any objections to this tenet which might be drawn from our own conceptions, or from what may be called metaphysical sources. Nor shall we refer to the various considerations which history, geology, and astronomical records supply, and which tend to show, not only that the past duration of the present course of things is finite, but that it is short, compared with such periods as we have had to speak of. But we may observe, that the doctrine of a resisting medium once established, makes this imagination untenable; compels us to go back to the origin, not only of the present course of the world, not only of the earth, but of the solar system itself; and thus sets us forth upon that path of research into the series of past causation, where we obtain no answer of which the meaning corresponds to our questions, till we rest in the conclusion of a most provident and most powerful Creating Intelligence.
It is related of Epicurus that when a boy, reading with his preceptor these verses of Hesiod,
Ητοι μεν πρωτιζα Χαος γενετ’, αυταρ επειτα