478 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



main the conviction, apparently implanted at the origin of things, of 

 some real 'First Cause/ of some necessary beginning of our time, space 

 and life, and a conviction that what we call eternity affords time and 

 the universe space for all the evolution of higher life that imperfect 

 human nature aspires to. It will be admitted that, as Goethe says: 



'By eternal laws of Iron Eules, 



Must all fulfil the cycle of their destiny/ 



All can see that 



'The times are changed, old systems fall, 

 And new life o'er their ruins dawns;' 



yet, as in all past times, new interpretations and adjustments of the be- 

 liefs and the creeds of the fathers will be found to reconcile funda- 

 mental principles in religion and in morals with the older inspirations 

 and the newer readings of the Book of Nature, and we may unquestion- 

 ably hope that, in the future as in the past, the newer readings will tend 

 toward evolution of higher thought, nobler life, more perfectly ideal and 

 spiritual philosophy. We may all go with Haeckel and the greatest in- 

 terpreters of the laws of Nature, and yet may find it possible to look be- 

 yond the limits of things seen into 'The Unseen Universe' with no loss 

 of the spiritual. 



Haeckel is one of the few, even among scientific men, who accept the 

 necessary, or apparently necessary, conclusions coming of his logic to the 

 very extremity and, in this case, he finds them carrying him to the de- 

 duction that there can be no immortal life of the individual soul. 

 Whether this conclusion must follow or not, he is more far-reaching in 

 his deductions relating to physical phenomena, as consequences of the 

 'Law of Substance,' than any among his predecessors; for he accepts the 

 conclusion that there cannot be a dead eternity and that there must be 

 some return from that swing of the pendulum which, with Sir William 

 Thomson (now Lord Kelvin), left a cold and still universe to eternal 

 death. This he finds absurd and admits the probability that the back- 

 ward swing will come, during the eternities, through the occasional col- 

 lision of suns, suns and planets, planet with planet, of binary systems 

 and meteoric masses and star-dust, such as have been actually, not infre- 

 quently, seen during our own historic period, by the astronomer at his 

 telescope, and by his ancestor, the astrologer, and even occasionally by 

 the unobservant people of all times. Such a collision is sufficient in its 

 development of thermal energy to reduce the colliding bodies into vapor 

 and to disperse it throughout space in nebula and meteoric matter, and 

 to renew the cycle. 



As Haeckel says: The law of the persistence of force proves, also, 

 that the idea of a 'perpetuum mobile' is just as applicable to, and as sig- 

 nificant for, the cosmos as a whole, as it is impossible for the isolated ac- 

 tion of any part of it. Hence the theory of 'entropy' is likewise unten- 



