SCIENTIFIC AND PSEUDO-SCIENTIFIC REALISM. 795 



bility of the cessation of motion and life, easily finds justification for 

 the exactly contrary course. Kant, in his famous " Theory of the 

 Heavens," declares the end of the world and its reduction to a formless 

 condition to be a necessary consequence of the'causes to which it owes 

 its origin and continuance. And, as to catastrophes of prodigious 

 magnitude and frequent occurrence, they were the favorite asylum 

 ignorantice (asylum of ignorance) of geologists not a quarter of a 

 century ago. If modern geology is becoming more and more disin- 

 clined to call in catastrophes to its aid, it is not because of any a priori 

 difficulty in reconciling the occurrence of such events with the univer- 

 sality of order, but because the a posteriori evidence of the occurrence 

 of events of this character in past times has more or less completely 

 broken down. 



It is, to say the least, highly probable that this earth is a mass of 

 extremely hot matter, invested by a cooled crust, through which the 

 hot interior still continues to cool, though with extreme slowness. It is 

 no less probable that the faults and dislocations, the foldings and fract- 

 ures, everywhere visible in the stratified crust, its large and slow move- 

 ments through miles of elevation and depression, and its small and rapid 

 movements which give rise to the innumerable perceived and unper- 

 ceived earthquakes which are constantly occurring, are due to the 

 shrinkage of the crust on its cooling and contracting nucleus. 



Without going beyond the range of fair scientific analogy, condi- 

 tions are easily conceivable which should render the loss of heat far 

 more rapid than it is at present ; and such an occurrence would be 

 just as much in accordance with ascertained laws of Nature as the 

 more rapid cooling of a red-hot bar, when it is thrust into cold water, 

 than when it remains in the air. But much more rapid cooling might 

 entail a shifting and rearrangement of the parts of the crust of the 

 earth on a scale of unprecedented magnitude, and bring about " catas- 

 trophes " to which the earthquake of Lisbon is but a trifle. It is con- 

 ceivable that man and his works and all the higher forms of animal 

 life should be utterly destroyed ; that mountain-regions should be 

 converted into ocean-depths and the floor of oceans raised into mount- 

 ains ; and the earth become a scene of horror which even the lurid 

 fancy of the writer of the Apocalypse would fail to portray. And 

 yet, to the eye of Science, there would be no more disorder here than 

 in the sabbatical peace of a summer sea. Not a link in the chain of 

 natural causes and effects would be broken, nowhere would there be 

 the slightest indication of the " suspension of alower law by a higher." 

 If a sober scientific thinker is inclined to put little faith in the wild 

 vaticinations of universal ruin which, in a less saintly person than the 

 seer of Patmos, might seem to be dictated by the fury of a revengeful 

 fanatic, rather than by the spirit of Him who bid men love their 

 enemies, it is not on the ground that they contradict scientific princi- 

 ples, but because the evidence of their scientific value does not fulfill 



